Carnival of the Mobilists #73

Be sure to check out the latest Carnival of the Mobilists over at Xen's Xelluar Identity website. She's done a fantastic job of outlining some of the best articles in the blogosphere on mobile telecoms!

Carnival of the Mobilists #72 is up and online!

Be sure to checkout the latest from the industry's best and brightest ( or at least most opinionated! ) talking about all things mobile!

This week you can find the Carnival hosted at Steve Litchfields, 3-Lib Blog. Read the carnival here!

Mobile Video Insider � 3G-v-wifi Orange flat rate data

Mobile Video Insider � 3G-v-wifi Orange flat rate data

Will asks - Why are people thinking that WiFi will kill 3G?

Here's my answer...

WiFi offers mobile data users a far superior experience for their latops than the 3G cards - in both speed and cost. Some people with WiFi in their PDA/Phones are enjoying the WiFi around the house as well as in coffee shops to read mail and check basic Internet services.

People with 3G enabled mobile phones are currently still cautions in regards to mobile data charges and really only use the devices for occasional sports scores, news, maps/directions and some personalized content downloads.

It's a matter of using the right tool for the job. 3G is great for small amount of occasional data from your mobile phone. WiFi is best for using Internet applications such as web, email etc.

And if WiFi really takes off and device manufacturers start putting WiFi in all devices, the end game becomes VoIP of WiFi -- At which point it's not 3G that the operators need to be worried about.

Vodafone starts charging customers for browsing Live! - MoneySavingExpert.com Forums

Vodafone starts charging customers for browsing Live! - MoneySavingExpert.com Forums
Vodafone's 'flat-rate' data - huh?!?!
Vodafone's new pricing model excludes VoIP and P2P - and so does T-Mobile's

I don't have to say much other than - It looks like Vodafone will be having a pricing review sometime in August - once their consumers get their first mobile data bill and realise that the game has changed...

Other operators try flat-rate data

Orange introduces flat rate mobile data charges! £1.50 daily MAX and £8/month unlimited
Mobile network operator "3" has been offering unlimited data for £5 / month

And a very thorough discussion about flat rate mobile data -- but I'm not sure I agree with it all...
P.S.

Oh yes - did you notice that Vodafone and Orange are ordering devices with VoIP turned off?

Read more... and more...

MMS Hat Trick - but still no MMS rabbit...

Mobile Marketing Magazine reports on the new service offerings from Airwide (Airwide's MMS Hat-trick) but I'm not really sure that I buy this today any more than I bought the idea of MMS when it first came to market back in 2001.

Over the years I've worked for 2 different MMS Relay companies and I've seen a lot of hype in the market about the potential for MMS. Heck - I've even contributed to some of the hype along the way. But seriously - after 5 years of effort you'd think that people would start to get the hint.

Barriers to MMS being successful

There are lots of reasons why MMS never achieved the level of success that operators and analysts were hoping for ( and in some cases counting on! ). These include:

• MMS Consumer Price


• MMS User Experience


• 3rd Party MMS Gateways


• MMS Social Behaviour

Let's take a very quick look at each of these.

MMS Consumer Price

The price to send an MMS is still set at a point where consumers are unwilling to send photo messages in a volume that is anywhere near SMS. Is there progress on this front, yes. Reluctantly the operators are lowering the price but it is unlikely that it will ever come down to the price being the same as for sending an SMS message.

In the early days of MMS it was thought that MMS would eventually replace SMS altogether and thus the SMS volumes would be seen in the MMS world. This was clearly wishful thinking - even if a bit delusional. I should use the present tense and not the past - This "is" wishful thinking. There are still a few people who are ringing the death knell for SMS.

MMS User Experience

The User Experience for MMS is really a 2 part issue. 1) Sending an MMS and 2) Receiving an MMS.

Sending an MMS

You can give just about any GSM phone to a consumer and ask them to send a text message and they'll have the message sent before your done dictating. Ask them to send an MMS and it will take longer. Every phone has a slightly different interface for sending an MMS leaving the consumer somewhat confused. Ask the consumer to add text and audio to the MMS and many of them will say, "You can do that?" - the other half will spend the next 30 minutes trying to figure it out. And when it comes to addressing the message you have to think about a mobile number, but did you know that many times you can also send an MMS to an e-mail address? - That's right. But which is cheaper? Ok - now there is more confusion from the consumer.

The MMS standard is very robust and offers support for a wide variety of features and functions. At it's core is the same standard as an e-mail. You can compose an e-mail and then add pictures and audio clips as attachments. The same is true for MMS. And with MMS you can do even more fancy things like add a bit of scripting to play the MMS as a slideshow! (Of course Nokia has their own way of doing that which won't work on a non-Nokia phone...)

Receiving an MMS

One of the biggest reasons people don't bother sending an MMS is the experience they have had when they have "received" an MMS from someone else. Unless the sending phone and the receiving phone are identical - their is likely to be a considerably negative difference between the image sent and the image received. Many mobile phones have different size displays with different ability to display images of different types. All of this product-differentiation makes for a lousy consumer experience.

There is a very expensive piece of kit that sits between the sender and the receiver - besides the MMS Relay - and it is called a transcoder. The transcoder's job is to take the message sent, interrogate the network for recipients device type and then to transcode the MMS to the optimal format. In my experience you can substitute the word "mangle" for "transcode". The result is usually not very good. It's great considering it is fully automated. It is not always so good from the eyes of the consumer who receives the message.

And - if you are talking about a major brand using MMS. How would you like it if your bright yellow arches came out scrunched to 1/2 size and transcoded from yellow to green? You get the idea.

But back to my point... If it looks like crap when I receive an MMS from someone else, why do I want to spend money sending an MMS to someone else?

3rd Party MMS Gateways

Ok - so we've established some of the reasons why Person-to-Person (P2P) MMS isn't taking off. Maybe it is the 3rd parties and advertisers who can make the most of MMS? In actual fact, this is where I believed that there was a real opportunity. But again, there seems to be no major uptake here. Why is that? There are a few reasons - and some of them are improving - but many aren't.

Consumer Experience: The "transcoder" problem I talked about above is a problem whether it is P2P or 3rd party MMS messages. The result isn't very good. ( BTW - I have a solution for this problem that I'm absolutely happy to talk with some smart MMS software company about ... )

Cost: There we go again. Operators are still charging more to send an MMS than an SMS. Fair enough - the technology is still immature and the operator has to make some amount more than an SMS considering it requires not only MMS hardware - but also mobile data costs to send and receive every MMS.

Interoperability: There are very few places you can go to run an MMS campaign across all of the major networks. And what major brand wants to speak to only a single network. Interoperability for P2P is just about sorted within the same country. But clearly not so when it comes to 3rd party MMS messages.

Lack of Volume: There just aren't very many consumers who are willing to sign up to MMS services, alerts and/or advertising. Maybe those numbers are changing - but for the most part the numbers are still relatively small. I remember one company selling operators on the idea of bulk MMS relays to handle thousands and thousands of simultaneous MMS messages showing a 30 second video clip of the winning football goal. In reality - the marketing of the service, including the price of the service, meant that there were only a few hundred subscribers who even signed up.

Technology Pricing: One of the other interesting facets to this discussion, is the cost of the operator to deliver MMS messages. Here are a few facts that you may not know.

When their was a huge battle for picture messaging gateways there were a number of key software providers in the game. Nokia, Ericsson, Openwave, LogicaCMG and Comverse. But 2 of these players had a distinct advantage. Nokia and Ericsson were also providing operators with major network infrastructure. The MMS Relay might be worth €250,000 -- But the network infratructure could be worth 10 times that amount. So - guess what? If you bought your network architecture from Nokia or Ericsson - they would throw an MMS Relay into the deal FOR FREE!

Aside: The fact that these FREE pieces of kit were not standards compliant, were unstable and generally failed to perform for up to 18 months after they were initially installed was irrelevant - becuase it was FREE. Now - compare this with the other software vendors who were actually trying to deliver standards compliant solutions that were productized and you can see why competition was stiff, but MMS uptake was slow.

And if the FREE offering from the competition wasn't enough - many of the other software vendors were trying to price their solutions based on the same model as for the software and infrastructure necessary for SMS text messages. Without boring you with the model details, let's just say that it was not reflective of the business - but it sure sounded good to the operators!

In short - many mobile network operators got into the MMS picture messaging
business for next to nothing.

Social Behaviour

It seems that there is this idea that if a trend takes off in Japan, it must take off everywhere else.

In late 1999 and 2000, at the height of the Internet bubble, Japan's J-Phone, KDDI and NTT DoCoMo were launching Sha-mail. The service was growing very successfully and consumer uptake was good. Everyone believed that the same would be true across GSM networks and thus MMS was born. But there were a few things that just didn't translate.

1) Obsession with photography. I know it is a terrible Japanese stereotype - but we must admit that the Japanese love their cameras and take pictures of just about everything! The same is not necessarily true of the French, the Bavarian Germans, the Southern Italians - you get the idea.

2) Sha-mail is called Sha-mail because it is based on E-Mail. Japan's mobile consumers have been using mobile e-mail all along. Rather than inventing an entirely new standard - MMS - the Japanese took an existing e-mail standard and extended to the mobile phone. Specifically, they implemented Mobile IMAP. This made the service intuitive and fully-interoperable with their regular e-mail access.

Aside: Openwave was very active with J-Phone, KDDI and DoCoMo and
understood Mobile IMAP very well especially considering Openwave was formed from software.com with a carrier grade e-mail solution... and of course
phone.com. Openwave was so convinced that the MMS standard was just a
passing fad and that everyone would see the path of truth and light ( Mobile
IMAP ) that they ignored 3GPP standards for too long and then were left in a
terminal game of playing catch-up.

The major flaw that was made in forecasting the wild success of MMS have been repeated before and will likely be repeated again.

The culture of Japan is that of a single nation living in very
compressed conditions with their own societal norms and likes and
dislikes. Europe is a collection of some 50 countries with their own
unique societies... and sometimes unique regions within countries. And
very few of these are a good parallel to Japan. Because something is popular in Japan is a poor indicator of whether or not it will be successful elsewhere!

Where's the MMS rabbit?

So - Airwide announces 3 new services to help mobile network operators cope with the growth in MMS traffic as forecasted by yet another industry analyst. As far as I can tell there are a lot of outstanding factors that will have to be addressed before MMS takes off -- And it will really take an excellent magician to find an MMS Rabbit in the Airwide hat.

Carnival of the Mobilists #71 is up and online!

Be sure to check out the very latest and greatest in mobile blogging! This week's carnival host is Dorian Porter over at Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition. Read it all here!