October 7, 2008

Creating Content for the Mobile Platform

From Mobile Content & Marketing Expo

San Jose, CA—Assaf Tarnopolsky, vp of mobile programming & digital product development at Sony Pictures Television International, gave the afternoon’s keynote address. SPTI is heavily involved in creating and distributing original mobile content, from the immensely popular “After World” to the new “Gemini Division.”

Assaf Tarnopolsky, just before keynote

Assaf Tarnopolsky, just before keynote

Tarnopolsky recalls when he entered the industry in 2005; when he told his friends that he was going to be putting TV on the phone, he remembers getting a lot of very strange looks and comments as to why anyone would want to do that. “Luckily, it seems to be working out,” he said. “People do want and need that, and you’re here because you believe that.”

“Media services–music, movies, TV–will become ubiquitous on mobile devices the way that mobile devices themselves have become ubiquitous and features like cameras have become ubiquitous on those devices,” he said.

Tarnopolosky tried to give attendees the studio’s view of creating mobile and digital content creation. “We’re experimenting, we’re trying new things and in the process learning,” he said. “We’re trying to be in the vanguard as models and new consumption patterns emerge.”

The good news is that metrics are moving up, said Tarnopolsky. “Telcos are making massive investments in new networks like 3G, the new standard. The overall growth rate of subscriptions is slowing due to saturation, 3G subscriptions are expected to double in the next couple of years.” He also pointed to the advent of 4G and its promise of broadcast video, and new handsets enabling companies like Sony Pictures Television International to deploy rich media.

The biggest game changer now is the iPhone, he said, adding to the chorus of others saying just this today. “There’s been a fundamental shift in the public’s understanding of media-on-the-go,” he said. “Even my mother and mother-in-law see people using mobile media and understand the utility.”

Since SPTI is an international company, Tarnopolsky has a view to what’s going on with mobile TV in places like France with telecom provider Orange. “In South Korea, there’s a ton of usage and a lot of money being made,” he said. “They’re to be 20 percent more business with one-sixth the population. It’s big business and moving in the right direction. Twenty-two percent of their population watch mobile TV on a regular basis and for over an hour today, versus our more snack-sized mobile content.”

Looking into the future for the commercialization of mobile content, Tarnopolsky suggested looking at fast-growing markets in India, China, and Brazil or even at the youth in the USA. “These are kids who probably watch broadcast TV, but few have laptops of DSL connections but a whole lot of them have mobile devices,” he said. “With 1.2 billion mobile devices will be sold over the world this year, it’s easy to see that mobile devices will be the connective tissue of modern communications.”

Content is king, goes the adage in Hollywood. “It is a critical link in the chain of getting people to want to get involved,” he said. “Time saving and productivity applications will be the killer apps for some time to come.” But, as mobile devices become more ingrained in our lives–lifeware, so to speak–everything we’re used to doing on the Internet we’ll also be doing on mobile devices.

Tarnopolsky said that content that has done well so far on the mobile platform is generally live or almost-live and short. “Current events, sports and finance are the kinds of things that drive trial and adoption of mobile media today,” he said. “It’s that perishable information, and that’s totally logical.” Brands also drive adoption, he noted. “When you go to CNN Mobile and know Wolf Blitzer is going to be on, and you know and trust him, you’ll feel good.” Short content from music videos to stand-up comedy also does well because it’s consumable in snack-sized pieces. “Personal and relevant will be the two kinds of content that will succeed moving forward–and those are the two words that describe the mobile phone itself.”

The studio’s challenge is to make that content that’s personal, relevant and, of course, good. It has to be easy to find and use, and we’re not really there as an industry. Wouldn’t it be nice if it had DVR functionality like my Tivo at home? And even better if it were free. “It’s clear that the mobile version of “The Godfather” has arrived, unless you think “Chocolate Rain” is as good as it gets, which I don’t,” he added. “At Sony we have boots on the ground around the world so we can try things in different markets.”

The four pillars of what SPTI is doing is original digital content, games, networks and catalog extensions. Catalog extensions is the attempt to mine the existing content sitting in the archive. Minisode Network is “the shows you love, only shorter.” SPTI takes classic shows like “Charley’s Angels,” “The Facts of Life,” “Starsky & Hutch,” all the classic shows, and edit them down to 5-minute minisodes. “They’re eminently consumable on the mobile phone.”

With current TV programming, SPTI is looking for ways to extend the programming onto the mobile phone, with shows like “Rescue Me,” “The Tudors” and others. “What kind of mobile programming could we deploy that people would watch?” he asked. “We’re spending time thinking about that.”

Outside the U.S., in 50 countries, SPTI runs three principal network brands: Animax, AXN and Sony Entertainment Television. SPTI is deploying the mobile version of these linear channels. “These brands are composed largely of U.S. content,” he said. “And we typically don’t have the mobile broadcasting rights, so we acquire those rights or do new deals for new content, or programming our own original programming.”

That project started 18 months ago and they’re in 20 countries, primarily with Animax, with shows anime and other animation content to the 13 to 24 demographic, the ones least likely to have control of the remote control at night and also the ones most likely to feel comfortable using the mobile phone to watch content.

“Mobile games are a no-brainer,” said Tarnopolsky who said they’ve created games for Hancock, Spider-Man and other properties. “This is an obvious way for us to extend our brands and make money in one of the most established areas of mobile.”

Last but not least is original digital productions, what he calls “the forward looking” part of the strategy. They’re trying to create properties with story-driven features that engage audiences and work across multiple platforms. Audiences interact with media in different ways; the native-mobile and digital audiences feel at ease watching a TV show and texting or IMing their friends while they watch. “We’re trying to bring a modern sensibility to what they watch,” he said, “And have what we’ve learned inform the production process. It’s also to do our part to push along our clients and their clients, the advertisers, to attach themselves to new media knowing it’s been produced by a top professional entertainment company.” He noted that big companies like Proctor & Gamble will have a hard time buying against YouTube, “because they don’t know what they’re buying. A new media environment from a company like SPTI is a more likely match.”

“Afterworld” was SPTI’s first mobile product, with 130 episodes telling a hero’s journey in a post -apocalyptic world. The protagonist tracks Russell Shoemaker’s progress home from New York in a world in which people and technology have vanished. The animation was created with mobile distribution in mind, so the shots are tight and the movement is slow, to accommodate the networks and phones of two or three years ago. “And it came with cool stuff on the web, with deep engagement story complements,” he said. “It hadn’t really been done before, and the challenges in producing it and deploying it were many. We made some money, our client made some money and we learned quite a bit.” “Afterworld” was also sold to broadcasters, telcos and other platforms.

The first licensee was TV One in Australia. They operate the SciFi channel and an online sci-fi website. “As the episode was being played, new story elements were posted to the website, to watch consumer patterns,” he said. “As we hoped, when the episode was done, audiences flocked to the website and page views spiked and view times were 50 percent longer than before. The next day, catch-up episodes were available, and people were downloading those episodes, so many that it was just behind “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy”.”

The next original mobile series is “Gemini Division,” exclusively on CBS.com in the U.S., and co-produced by SPTI which is distributing it everywhere outside the U.S. “This takes the lessons of “Afterworld” and makes a better story,” he said. “We started with a great story - a sci-fi story set 5 ninutes into the future,” he said, noting that the lead is played by Rosario Dawson, “a bona fide movie star.” “She’s a NY City cop who falls in love with a mysterious stranger. “Then things get weird,” said Tarnopolsky who urged viewers to go to CBS.com and find out more. “We discovered with “Afterworld” that 130 episodes was just too long,” he said, “Consumer attachment waned at the half-way point.” For “Gemini Division,” they added more casual games and a graphic novel, ancillary story elements that consumers can interact with.

“And we took it a step further,” he said. “If you’re a registered member, you’ll receive text messages from characters in the story that are clues. If you’re into sci-fi and conspiracies, you can follow the clues down the rabbit hole into an alternative world where you can try to discover what’s going on and help solve the mystery.”

Next up is tackling the funny: “Woke Up Dead,” a modern vampire tale, following a young man who wakes up and discovers he’s dying. He and his intrepid band of friends try to piece him back together.

“Coming full circle on the mobile media industry and why it’s taking so much longer to blow up than we hoped,” he said. “Why is that? It would seem all the pieces are in place for the industry. I think there’s a vicious cycle of mis-aligned objectives among the stakeholders. Consumers don’t want to pay more for content that they feel they can get free, carriers don’t want to risk their networks, and content owners want to get paid every time they distribute a piece of content on any platform. So the advertisers are left out of an industry segment they should be licking their chops over, one where the connection to the consumer is relevant, personal and constant. New technology allows advertisers to know exactly what their consumers are doing. To me, it’s mind-boggling that advertising hasn’t come in sooner.”

“Subscription costs are still high, discovery of content and how to use it is behind, consumers aren’t flocking to the content because of this, and advertisers naturally stay out because the business is small and there isn’t a critical mass of users. That has got to change. Studios always want to make premium content. The networks and cable systems rely on advertising as a core piece of their business. I’d argue that this TV/cable that we’re so used to will, in some shape or form, come to exist in the mobile eco-system, and as advertisers come in, it’ll be the rising tide that lifts all of us.”

“I can imagine a carrier, a studio, a handset manufacturer working together to try to blow the business open,” he concluded. “It could look like pricing data services lower, a studio taking less up front or handset manufacturers providing video-enabled devices at cheaper prices. As consumer interest spikes, advertisers will come running as fast as they can, and then the advertisers will be in this business as well. As JupiterResearch perfects reporting and metrics, advertisers will benefit from that. And the whole industry will move up.”

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October 6, 2008

How to Make Money from Mobile Content

From the Mobile Content & Marketing Expo

San Jose, CA—How can you miss with a panel on making money? This session, with Joe Laszlo, director of advertising at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), moderating a panel made up of mobile video executives, was packed. Each executive spoke about his or her company’s business model. Susan Cashen, vp of marketing at mywaves described the company as a handset agnostic mobile video service that delivers video around the world. “Because we’re free, we’re dependent on advertising,” she said. “We’ve also recently launched commerce with entertainment. When a consumer is immersed in an entertainment experience like watching a free Beyonce video, it’s a natural for them to be able to buy Beyonce content, both virtual and real goods.”

Transpera CEO Frank Barbieri described his company as “building the largest premium ad-supported mobile video network.” Networks in Motion is an applications and platform provider for the mobile phone, focused on search and navigation, with a subscription-based model. “Navigation and search is alive and well on the paid platform,” said CEO Doug Antone. Bytemobile CMO Adrian Hall said his company provides services to the carrier as an enabler to the end-user. “We basically enable the mobile Internet for the end-user,” he said. “And we see user-profile information which is useful for contextual and behavioral targeted advertising.”

On the advertising front, asked Laszlo, are advertisers are willing to pay a premium for mobile? Bytemobile’s Hall said the one thing that appears obvious is that the more targeted the ad, the more valuable. Barbieri said that mobile has far more focus of attention than the PC, where the screen could be displaying several windows and other distractions simultaneously. “For brand advertisers, that increased attention leads to better numbers,” he said. “I think the news is fairly good in these early days.” Cashen said about 6.5 million unique come to mywaves every month; they come twice a week and spend 20 minutes, watching 2 or 3 minute segments. “A 30-second pre-roll just won’t cut it,” she said. “In the short term, there are big opportunities to connect with consumers via direct marketing. There’s genius to leverage the video entertainment on the handset from the point of view of a brand. Taking what works on the web on mobile is taking baby steps,. You have this incredible storefront on the handset. Click-to-call, click-to-buy: there’s no better measurement. Leveraging the entertainment to create action is where we feel good.”

Cashen said that transcoding video for the consumer gives her company information on the consumers. “We have the ability to target by DMA, time of day, and type of handset,” she reported.

Everyone is trying to drive personalization and the consistency of brand across multiple devices, noted Hall and more personalized advertising based on user needs will create a dramatically stronger click-through rate. The mobile marketing campaign has to have ways to interact with the user, said Barbieri. “We work with our brand advertisers to brainstorm the mobile marketing campaign and how to target the audience.”

Antone observed that his company’s business model is different in that the user pays $10/month to navigate. “It’s no longer how you get from Point A to Point B,” he said. “We want someone to turn it on in the morning for real-time traffic information. Not just where’s the local movie theater but what’s playing and when. It’s all available on your client-server application on your handset. See us as a publisher that’s getting your content out to people. Our customers are the carriers, who sell to their customers. That’s our strategy. All of them have this $10 price point. At some point it’ll be $5 and beyond that it will be zero, a free application. The relevance of this is that when someone is mobile, they’re also motivated. When you’re in a browsing application and looking for a restaurant, you’re motivated to go. Targeted, pertinent advertising that can happen during that search is what we’re focused on.”

But to get the numbers, the only way the carriers can make that work is to draw in big percentages of their users. To get 50 to 60 percent, they’ll have to change the pricing model. “We’re betting on the idea that they’re going to try to do that and not roll over,” said Antone

Focusing on how the Networks in Motion product will one day be free, Antone talked about the challenge. “It depends how good we all are at creating the economics on the back end,” he said. “That listing of Italian restaurants in your neighborhood, for example. Would you find it offensive to get a manipulated search, where the restaurant that’s farther away pays to be listed first? When do consumers say, Forget it - you’re giving me something I don’t want. We have to do this in a way that there’s enough economics but the consumer still likes it.”

Finally, panelists spoke about the role of the carrier, between the extremes of a dumb pipe and a walled garden. “There is a smart pipe concept where there’s a tremendous amount of marketing and merchandising power that any one would be a fool to ignore, because they have a connection to the user with billing inserts, with product marketing on the deck,” said Barbieri. “There’s a relationship that can be used to promote content well. We have to move from a programming-type mentality of carriers to more of a merchandising, marketing and retail type of relationship. And that’s good for us and for the consumer as well. We have yet to get to the point where there are tremendous marketing and retailing competencies at some of the carriers, but that’ll change.

The carriers could move faster,” added Hall. “They are desperately trying to be smart pipes and it’s incumbent on us to work with them to become smarter. While they’re starting to recognize they’re sitting in a unique place and make smarter use of the user profiles they see. By doing that effectively, they’ll continue to be smart pipes or, in some cases become smarter pipes.”

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October 6, 2008

Social Networking: Money Maker or a Collection of Address Books?

I think it’s pretty obvious at this point in the game that social networking is likely to be a component of much if not most of mobile content. This panel on social networking was made up of Keith Katz, whose Cellufun company creates games with a strong social component; John Poisson is president of Tiny Pictures that allows users to share photos and videos among friends; Mikael Vinding at JYGY.com, which allows the user to create interactive mobile campaigns, and Christopher Ngyun at Bluepulse, a mobile messaging service dedicated to the mobile web. All the companies are ad-supported except for Bluepulse which is transaction-supported and JYGY.com which offers a mixed model.

Moderator Julie Ask at JupiterResearch noted that most people think of Facebook or MySpace when they think of social networking. She asked how social networking played into what each company is doing. Poisson says it’s defined as going into a community space, whether it’s a MySpace or Facebook type of model. Tiny Pictures is a much smaller version: your real social network, the ones you’ve called recently on your mobile phone. Vinding says he feels that what they does competes with Facebook in terms of an application, although they’ll never beat them at their game; but what his company does is built around the mobile platform rather than the “add-on” that Facebook is doing, said Vinding. “Everyone can create personal clubs online and free,” he said. “Through our service via mobile messaging, you can find a list of people from your torn, for example, and in a safe and anonymous way get to know them.”

Social networks are nothing more than a collection of address books, said Bluepulse’s Nguyen. But when you add mobile into it, the game changes. “Mobile is with you all the time and connections are much more likely to be interactive and maintained,” he said. “Add the 4 billion subscriptions we’re at today, and the really interesting opportunity is the mobile social networking space.”

Vinding disagreed with Nguyen’s belief that social networking is nothing more than a collection of address books. “You can update your status, which is stored and logged and can be data-mined,” he noted. “It’s a whole knowledge compendium of what a person is and what they like.”

Nguyen asked to respond. “Behavioral targeting is already proven as something that can make money, but is no where near as effective as [you think].   The value of looking at your yahoo mail traffic is a hundred-fold more important. The time aspect, not the relationship aspect is what people want, and mobile gives you that.”

Cellufun’s Katz said it boils down to the definition of social networking. “Social networking can be a group that has an interest in something and come together in large groups to pursue that,” he said. “We have millions of people into playing casual games on their phones and have learned it can be  more fun doing it with a group with similar interests.” It would be hard to describe any part of a group that gets together with similar interests as not being social networking, added Tiny Pictures’ Poisson.

How do you monetize social networking? asked Ask. “You have to have a lot of folks doing it to make it work,” agreed Katz. “We have a pretty simple way of making money which is through display ads. We also do things that we can do because we’re more than a portal. We have a virtual economy, to play games or buy various goods. We’re now incorporating real brands into that mall. So you have to have a lot of people and find other ways of advertising aside from banner ads.”

Most of the growth of his business has been word-of-mouth, said Katz. “There’s also the stickiness factor and that becomes a more compelling message to advertisers.”  “The nature of our business is based on the intimate nature of the phone, and it’s naturally viral because you have to get your friends to sign up,” said Poisson. “But you’re much more likely to come back because if I don’t send photos or comment on my friends photos, people will wonder where you are. It’s built into the nature of what we do. People get into the habit of checking every few hours. We’re a totally free, advertising-supported site.”

Tiny Pictures' Poisson talks; Cellufun's Katz looks on

Tiny Pictures' Poisson; Cellufun's Katz looks on

The most interesting revenue-creation model in his world is to be able to deliver sponsored content into the stream; the user could opt into a “Tropic Thunder” channel, which gave them behind-the-scenes footage of the movie in addition to their friends’ photos. Then consumers had a conversation around that comment. “That speaks to what these media-rich devices can do,” he said.

Social networking is like a big distribution channel, said Vinding. The vast majority of revenue on a Facebook is advertising.  Yes, advertising is an immediate thing that can be done now, he said, but don’t just look at this as a social networking site on a PC, because the mobile is also a payment device, especially with premium text services that exists in every country. The third prong they’re looking at is media polling or surveys.

“You make money from the verbs not the nouns,” said Nguyen. “Facebook is a big noun, not a verb; it’s in the action that people express an intent and that’s where the money is to be  made. We’re perfectly happy not to have our own social network. I fail to see the significance of social networks as a major money maker; it’s a collection of powerful address books.”

Will social networking on the cell phone be an extension of what goes on on the PC, or something quite different. “I think it’s a very different experience, with the always with you factor, the constant connection,” said Poisson. “Sharing bits of information with your friends all day long, engaging on the go is very different than what’s on the computer.”

Ask noted that teenagers and young adults want that constant checking-in. Will this kind of social networking be limited to youth, or to vertical communities? “I think it feels most relevant to the youth market: they’re comfortable with the technology and comfortable sharing,” said Poisson. “I would never have told my parents what I was doing every day, but my 25 year old sister is constantly texting, calling, sharing. And my mom is now sharing what she’s doing. It spreads from that.” Vinding said he’s seen vertical applications of that, from automotive to medical. “It’s around a specific interest or condition and it expands from there, incorporating all ages,” he said.

Why is the immediacy of the cell phone important for this kind of vertical content? “You can stay in touch, if you’re going someplace,” said Vinding. “The method of access is also important. Not everyone has a PC. Everybody has a mobile phone. If you were doing something where people needed an easy way to update everyday, it’s easy and it’s in your hand. It’s not just immediacy–it’s accessibility.”

“Immediacy is the one thing that’s different with the mobile phone and not on the PC,” agreed Nguyen. “It’s something that you just don’t want but because everyone else has it, you have to.” Do we really need things immediately? “Let’s not conflate immediacy with urgency,” said Poisson. “There is something about immediacy that strikes us all as wasteful or ridiculous. The best example with the younger generation is text-messaging which seems like a stupid, stupid way to communicate. But it has by all measures supplanted every other form of communication for this generation. It doesn’t interrupt you (although you can argue that) but a big part of its value is its immediacy. It’s not about urgency, it’s about now.”

Nguyen said “I think people will die without this stuff.” “I agree with John but I’d push the point further. Immediacy does mean urgency. Let’s say we need to know the population of Zimbabwe. A few years ago, it was reasonable to come back with an answer in a few days. Today, if you can’t come up with an answer in 5 minutes, you’re gone. In the future, if you can’t come up with the answer in 5 seconds, you’re gone. Immediacy is fundamentally transforming media.”

“What the iPhone does is - the UI is completely different which encourages more usage, people who use it are more likely to use gmail mobile and the WiFi platform: all those things conspire to say that we’re at an interesting shift,” said Nguyen. “I don’t think that in a few years we’ll dispute whether you need that piece of information in 5 minutes. You’ll need it.”

Ask asked the panelists if location play a role in social networking services. “We’re trying to figure that out,” admitted Katz. “We’re creating a world travel game, and what we’re doing is implementing a guide system so that if you live near that city you can be a guide and earn extra points for doing that. We think that will create more of a bond. We already see that people with sub-interests beyond gaming are forming their own groups on the site. For example, on their own, hundreds of people are participating in a site on mobile pets, virtual pets, that people are feeding. We’re trying to find ways that can help our users forge alliances based on geography which we think will increase the stickiness of the site.”

Vinding said that location is fun and interesting but in terms of social networking, one of the great benefits is that you can talk to people around the world. “I don’t necessarily want to talk to someone near me unless it’s dating or meeting local people to have beers,” he said. “We don’t see a lot of demand for location-based demands.” The scale and scope issues of location often aren’t discussed, said Poisson. “Location has the potential to be industry and experience changing but there’s a big difference between regionality and sitting in Conference Room 1 at the Marriott. Even with my closest friend, that’s a tough value proposition to get. People don’t even want their close friends to know where they are.”

One-quarter of teens want to track where their friends are, said Ask. They don’t want to be tracked, but they want to be able to track. “If I have taken 10 pictures in a restaurant in San Francisco and Ian and ten of my friends also take those pictures, maybe we’re at the same birthday party and put those pictures together,” said Poisson “I think that’s a lot more interesting than Where’s Ian right now?”

It’s not new to know where you are, said Nguyen. “If you’re late for a meeting, you’ll be able to give a status update,” he said. “Occasionally information about time will be useful but won’t add much to the transactional basis.”

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October 6, 2008

Streaming Video to the Mobile Consumer

San Jose, CA—Moderated by Keynote Systems’ senior director Manny Gonzalez, the panel included Babak Jafarian, co-founder/chief strategy officer of Ortiva Wireless, Daren Gill, vp/gm of Veveo and Andrew McFarlane, co-founder/CEO of Buzzwire.

Jafarian, whose company optimizes content for the mobile platform, talked about some of the challenges in an environment in which the price of streaming video doesn’t justify the revenues generated–but also stressed the iPhone as a game-changer for video on the phone. “We’re burning more of the resources are being burned for video, which isn’t our cash cow,” he says. “We’ve seen the phenomenon of iPhone which brings the nice idea of the off-deck attitude. Let other people create content and consider the wireless operator as the pipe.”

Video quality is another issue, since content distributors often optimize the video for the lowest-common denominator handset. “With a device as small and unreliable as a phone, you have problems,” he said. “Video is the first time mobile carriers are moving from a real-time service into a packet data network, which is challenging.”

He suggested that rather seeing the mobile platform as the third screen, that we might think of it as its own unique environment. “We should define the type of quality in a proper manner and allocate the most important thing with the least resources,” he said. “This isn’t as straight forward as creating video for TV and the web and then streaming it through the mobile handset.”

Gill, whose company is all about content discovery, pointed out how web video is the most discoverable video; TV and mobile are both difficult platforms for finding video. The fact that most mobile phones don’t play video also cuts down on the viral nature. “Transcoding for delivery is a “necessary evil” of the day,” he admitted. “It’s not something that we like to do so more and more we’re finding the content available in mobile-ready form. This is definitely one of the challenges.

One of the realities of web video is that it is all about choice, said Gill who reported that there are 220 million videos on the web, from 150,000 sources, whereas both TV and mobile are limited to 10,000 to 50,000 titles from 200 sources. “Consumers aren’t about walled gardens,” he said. “You have to deliver them choice. The things that people want to watch don’t exist in one silo.Does popularity equal relevance? Yes, to start off with. But you need to put a structure on top of that.” He described Veveo’s structure for finding media, which was based not simply on the UGC world but a variety of other sources. “So you can leverage an existing taxonomy, leverage the social graph on UGC sites and make it easier to find what you want on new platforms,” he said about the application, vtap, which is available on the mobile browser at m.vtap.com or with vtap clients for Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian and J2ME.

Buzzwire’s McFarlane talked about the fact that ultimately the users will decide what the most interesting content is, as carriers break down the wall. Users will decide what’s most interesting. “Content players will have to respond to that. We offer the ability to customize the experience.”

Killing time or saving times are the two “needs” that people turn to the mobile phone to fulfill, agreed Gill, who noted that the use of smart phones–particularly iPhone and Blackberry, will shake things up. But what will really tip the video market on the mobile phone is unlimited data plans. “If you get a situation where someone has the phone and an unlimited data plan, it’ll work,” he said. “Getting to that point is the trick. The content will follow.”

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October 6, 2008

Mobile Advertising Models: What Works, What Doesn’t

From the Mobile Content & Marketing Expo

San Jose, CA—Moderated by JupiterResearch vp/research director Julie Ask, the panel on mobile advertising models includes AdInfuse vp of marketing David Staas, Zumobi vp of market development Ken Willner and AdMob vp of marketing Jason Spero.

The panel discussed some of the more obvious topics about what is working, including how to define that (answer: depends on the advertiser), what the campaign has to be (answer: consistent, repeatable) and if cross-platform will become a more integrated fact of the future (answer: yes).

Perhaps more interesting was the question of what doesn’t work. “As Jupiter Research we talk to agencies and ask them why they’re not doing mobile,” said Ask. “They’ll say it’s not appropriate to their brand or their target audience…and then they’ll say they don’t have the bandwidth or the time to understand.”

AdMob’s Spero noted that click-to-call isn’t yet working the way it should, and that a lot of companies need a lot of hand-holding to launch the first mobile campaigns. “Companies like AdMob and AdInfuse are getting called into the agency role,” he said. “We’re in the early stages.”

AdMob's Jason Spera

AdMob's Jason Spera

In response to a query from Ask as to whether they’ve ever stopped a company from pursuing a mobile campaign because of its inappropriateness to their brand, Zumobi’s Willner said they hadn’t had that problem. “We’re talking about longer-term, on-going sponsorships,” he said. “That’s what we do, rather than serving the banner ads to that user on a mobile website, who didn’t have the intention of being in front of that brand.”

Spero said that “there still has to be a lot of education about the level of granularity we can really get to…or we’ll dramatically under-deliver.” Across the industry, the off-deck publishers are doing a lot to build up information for targeting, said Staas who noted that publishers are starting to build their own databases which include zip code and age…not behavioral data yet. I

With regard to local advertising, the panelists saw that it is more likely to happen as a large national brand advertising on a local basis “They have the skills and the dollars,” said Spero, who said that AdMob served 200 million ads the day before.

The GPS app of the iPhone is also opening up the door to location-based advertising. “We’re doing that right now,” said Spero. “We don’t that so granularly that you’re on the corner of Market and First.” But he pointed out that, even with the number of iPhones out there, it’s not near the scale that an advertiser needs. “When we get to the Symbian, Android world, we’ll start to get to those numbers that will be interesting,” he said.

Challenges for the future? “One of the biggest things is to get mobile to be a line item on the budget instead of an after-thought,” said Staas. “We see that not yet as a priority. when we start to get to that level, it’ll open up the market. The other part that’s challenging from a technology standpoint - we have to get more devices into the market that are true follow-ups to the iPhone. Touchscreen, very intuitive media - that opens up the market on a huge level.”

From Willner’s perspective, what Apple did with the app store is the big game-changer. “Believe everything you read: it’s astonishing,” he said. “It levels the playing field for brands that want to get in front of end users. With a carrier, you spent months working with them to trying to find common ground. With iTunes, it takes 5 days. It is a challenge for small companies and brands to rise to the top, but a huge opportunity.”

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October 6, 2008

The Future of News is Mobile

San Jose, CA—I’m at the Mobile Content & Marketing Expo here for the new two days, publishing live reports. First up is a keynote by Associated Press GM of mobile and emerging products Jeffrey Litvack, someone we interviewed in the pages of MobilizedTV six months ago.

Litvack started by speaking about what mobile means to newspapers, which he said is the next-generation revenue producer for publishers. But sorting through how to do it and figure out the parameters as well as how to market it to potential readers and make sure advertisers are getting the return they need are just some of the problems facing newspapers.

Jeff Litvack, Associated Press

Jeff Litvack, Associated Press

He focused on the iPhone as a seminal event, with the size of the screen, the touchscreen and the use of icons as well as the browser. “We’re moving away from WAP,” he says. “Mobile web is simpler and easier to understand. It’s a similar experience to the Internet.”

A study showed that most mobile users want news…but there’s no icon on the iPhone for news. The Mobile News Network from AP was created to address this gap in the mobile environment. First goal was to make it a good user experience.

Working on a GUI that was customizable and easy to share for users was the first order of business. Then Associated Press built a comprehensive news network; they currently handle news for 80 percent of the U.S. newspapers, including smaller local newspapers. iPhone users have been able to rate applications, says Litvack, and one reviewer said “it’s like a newspaper in your phone.” “As far as we’re concerned mobile is the killer app,” he says. “We’ve had more than 400,000 unique visitors in August–and this is just on the iPhone.” He reported that they’re planning to roll out more and more versions for different phones. Page views have grown dramatically from May (2.1 million) to September (26 million).

With regard to how they’re making money, Litvack noted that news should be delivered free. “We made a conscious decision that news on the iphone had to be complete,” he says. “Not just a headline where you’d click and go to someone else’s website. The user had to have a complete experience, without getting confused.” AP invested millions into ingesting and displaying content into one unified solution for the end user at was complete and consistent. “We’ll give them the whole story and then let them decide how much of it they wanted,” he says.

Most important categories are top stories (29 percent), local news (18 percent), sports (12 percent) and entertainment (9 percent). Other top categories are photos, wacky news (a popular click-through category) and world news.

How AP begins to monetize this is the next big challenge. Display advertising is projected to grow from $54 million to $1.1 billion by 2012 (Yankee Group). The ads have a recall rate similar to TV, he also reported (IAG May 2008). “It’s definitely working, for brand awareness and aiding purchasing as a whole,” he says. “We see a higher ROI for the advertiser.” It also allows interactive marketing opportunities, he notes. Message to mobile users can also be targeted [see MobilizedTV article on mobile targeting advertising.]

AP will be adding new categories including movie reviews, restaurant guides, event listings, weather and traffic. Future features include a news ticker, multi-lingual versions and international partnerships.

“A lot of what we’re talking about is the smart phone,” he says. “AP made a big bet on the smart phone. People asked us why we did that, and we did it because it’s going to grow. In 5 years, it’s expected that smart phones will be 75 to 80 percent of the market. This is where the market is going.”

Litvack says AP has also reached out to a variety of handset manufacturers to create more optimized versions. “Our goal, simply put, is to become the news button on every next-generation phone,” he says.

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October 2, 2008

Adult Content and the Mobile Phone

It’s a truism that all new media is driven first by pornography. If you remember 16mm stag films or have seen “Boogie Nights,” you might agree.

The carriers’ grip on mobile content has prevented that from happening on the mobile phone in the U.S. (even as Playboy Mobile’s Ed Lang reported the XXX content streaming on European phones).

But, from my vantage point (and I worked for a post production company that was a hub of the San Fernando Valley-based porn industry–another story for another time), it has always been just a matter of time before the world of porn and the mobile phone got together. It’s worth noting how the porn industry has changed: the advent of cheap digital cameras moved the industry from an insular, some would say mob-controlled, domain to amateur night.

Now, a news item in Advertising Age reports the rude shock that CBS got when the network’s iPhone app, Eyemobile for iPhone was used to provide visuals of much more than local news stories (apparently the risque images/ads have been removed). The article goes on to talk about what led to the slip-up, which is of much less interest to me than the fact that it happened at all. Garden walls or not, as the potential revenues from mobile video content soars, those sneaky porn-meisters are going to find a way to go mobile.

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September 23, 2008

Adobe’s New Tools for Mobile Creators

You have no doubt read the press releases from Adobe Systems about its CS4 software for mobile content creators and you’ve probably heard of Adobe’s Open Screen project. If you’re a mobile content creator, should you care? MobilizedTV says Yes and explains why below.

Adobe’s Open Screen launched in May, the result of five years of work to get Flash onto devices of all types, from mobile phones to ATM machines, says Anup Murarka, Adobe’s director of technical marketing for Mobile and Device. “What we’ve seen across over 800 million deployments are two industry goals or common challenges that the Open Screen project is trying to address: the first is enabling web browsing and rich internet applications across a broad range of devices and desktops,” he says. “The second–and one we hear most clearly from our developers–has been to give them opportunities to enable them to publish and deliver content and applications across screens more easily than they can today.”

“It’s almost trivial to publish content on the web today,” he notes. “We’d like to bring some of that ease of publishing and distribution to the device industry.”

Murarka spoke about “two use cases” for Flash. the first for stand-alone applications and the second for web browsing. Stand-alone applications relies on AIR, the technology Adobe launched on the desktop for building desktop applications. “If you want to build an application that uses all the same web technologies you’re used to but deliver it outside the browser, AIR enables this,” he says. “An application installer allows developers to ship a binary that installs exactly the same way on Mac, Windows and the beta of Linux as well. We’re going to take that same packaging format and work with different device partners to enable that as well, so you’ll have the same application binaries installable on devices, not just desktops.”

“One of the biggest gaps we have between Flash on the desktop and on a mobile devices is a difference in the scripting language,” he continues. “On the desktop, we support Active Script 3 and in mobile, we’re only at Active Script 2. We’re working with Mozilla on an open source project to get that script working well for devices, essentially bringing the scripting language up-to-date.”

The second element to the standalone application is support for hardware acceleration. “Clearly mobile devices don’t have the same processing power,” he says. “There’s often a ten times difference, and for the high end of those categories. a lot more has to be done. A lot of our energy has been focused on taking advantage of all hardware features to accelerate the graphics capabilities of Flash. We believe we can support AIR on a fairly wide range of phones, from high-end smart phones all the way to mass market feature phones.”

What will this mean for the content creator? “It gets back to the idea that developers/designers used to using web technologies can use the same skillsets and deliver applications not dependent on a browser to a wider range of devices than they’ve been able to.”

The second use case–which builds off the first–is web browsing. “Mobile browsers have become more powerful and capable,” says Murarka. “We’re working to enable a complete web experience on high-end mobile devices. We still won’t see web compatibility on low-end devices, but we do believe, based on several months of engineering work, that we can get desktop-compatible browsers working on smart phones. We’ll need the same hardware acceleration and script browser, but it would live inside the browser. We’re working with partners so that all those browsers will be updated to support Flash.”

A great example of this is our work with Nokia on the Nokia E71 with a browser that actually had a Flash plug-in and could browse existing web content. “The E71 is a first attempt between our two companies to get that web compatibility working well,” he says. “We’re going to continue to work on it. With Open Screen, we hope to release something that’s 100 percent compatible with web content. It’ll take a lot of effort and it’ll take a while and it won’t be on all phones, but we believe we can do it with the high-end smart phone.”

Adobe has also been successful at creating a suite of well-known software tools for content creators, including Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. Creative Suite 4 (CS4) focuses on the broader workflow, from planning through management of assets and metadata all the way through delivery.

Carol Linburn, Adobe group product manager, for mobile authoring, describes how CS4’s Device Central helps mobile content creators. “Particularly relevant for mobile is the explosion of new devices and the number of screens people are targeting,” she says. “The major brands are thinking how they can move content across these screens. RIght now, there is a lot of additional testing and complexity with piping out content in all these different ways and formats. There’s a lot of versioning of content, and it’s more complex and harder to get started.” To keep content developers abreast of where their content might be headed, every time you open CS4, it will show a window of newly shipped devices.

Testing and optimizing is a “huge time sink,” says Lindburn, and Device Central is aimed at shrinking that. “We’re doing some interesting things around automating the testing process,” she says. “Instead of a developer going device by device, they can set up a test script and set it up for 50 to 100 devices. Then they can see the 10 phones where their content isn’t running correctly, go in and diagnose the problem.”

“Automated testing is moving from a world where you have to test everything individually, to a position where you can create a test script to interact with the content and capture keystroke interactions, which can be shared with different developers,” says Lindburn. “You can use that as a way to batch test and not have to test sequentially. You can test simultaneously and you get visual output [snapshots] and error messages that might occur for different devices. We can also adjust latency and so on to give the developer a chance to see what the content looks like on a slower or faster network.”

Another challenge addressed by the new Adobe software focuses on how to showcase content for clients. “If you’re in LA and your client is in NY, and you’re targeting a Nokia N95, but the client doesn’t have one, you have to FedEx one across the country,” she says. “This isn’t conducive to the design process, which is iterative.”

To showcase content to clients, Adobe has added two things: Device Central will spit out a quick storyboard that can be saved to an HTML file that’s easy to share. Likewise, the content creator can capture a video recording and save it as a Quicktime file for people to view. “The person viewing the content doesn’t even need CS4 installed, so it’s a much easier way to share content with a broader audience,” says Lindburn.

She also states that Adobe looked at how to get Flash designers used to building for the web to bridge to the mobile platform. That problem is addressed by Device Central, which is already integrated with the toolset those Flash animators are already using. “It allows them to preview their work on a variety of devices and a range of media types within the same environment,” she says.

“The other piece to get people started is an easier way to manage mobile projects,” says Lindburn. “There is complexity with keeping all the assets together and CS4 offers project management capability. How do I get my files to a phone? You might have different publishing routines or “output tasks” and I can set them up and do it with a single click.” Adobe has also built an SDK (software development kit) for partners to plug into Device Central directly with their different packaging routines.

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September 18, 2008

Miss Playboy Mobile: First Step in a Global Mobile Strategy

In April this year at CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas, Playboy Mobile announced Miss Playboy Mobile 2008, sponsored by THQ Wireless and Viva! Vision.

With carriers in control of content, adult content has been largely shut out of the mobile content game in the most obvious way. Yet, without fanfare, Playboy has expanded its reach in mobile, in 50+ countries and well over 80 carriers.

Playboy Mobile took a much higher profile here with the April announcement about Miss Playboy Mobile. I spoke with Ed Lang, SVP and GM, Mobile and International Online, Playboy Enterprises and a veteran in the wireless industry, to find out how Playboy can both maintain its brand and meet the PG-13 requirements of the mobile platform.

MobilizedTV: How do you stay true to the Playboy brand in a mobile environment that restricts adult content?

LANG: We do have an interesting split in how we distribute our content. International strategy is different than U.S. strategy. Some countries are more conservative, the U.S. being one of the most conservative countries. Here, they only allow PG-13 content, which disallows even models modeling clothing in a particular way, anything at all sexually suggestive. A lot of territories in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are also conservative. Europe is the most receptive to that content. They allow streaming XXX content in those territories. The bulk of adult business is in Europe.

How do you promote the Playboy brand in the U.S.?

We knew we needed to focus the brand into its more traditional and aspirational areas, which is the lifestyle side it’s been over the last 50 years, the lifestyle associated with someone who’d buy the Playboy magazine. We created a Playboy experience, with fashion and design elements.

That decision was made a couple of years ago and we initially weren’t leveraging the full breadth of the brand in our digital media. The company realized there were other areas to be competitive in in the mobile space, rather than being pigeon-holed. I realized the editorial voice of Playboy is so strong and we demonstrated the depth and breadth of the brand in the U.S., not just to consumers but to carriers. We felt we didn’t necessarily have to fall in the stereotype; there was no reason why we should accept the brand positioning being set by other people.

How did that position evolve?

About one year into my job we made the decision to go out to the direct-to-consumer market and prove that theory. Rather than direct carrier deals, we launched initiatives relating to consumers. Really, the greatest effort to demonstrate the lifestyle was to launch our model search. Other people had done similar things, so we had the benefit of looking at that and thinking of how we could differentiate ourselves. Last year, we launched an ambitious project around Miss Playboy Mobile, to find a non-nude contestant who would the crown winner.

Amber - contestant and ultimate winner

Amber - contestant and ultimate winner

We crowned her at the April CTIA Wireless conference. It was well attended and we demonstrated the ability to pull off a gender-friendly event with a viral component. It also went cross-platform, starting as mobile initiative and moving into social media on the computer.

Miss Playboy Mobile contestants

Miss Playboy Mobile contestants

Miss Playboy Mobile - the winner!

Miss Playboy Mobile - the winner!

That led to a partnership with mywaves. We’re expanding the strategy of syndicating our content with social media on the phone, so you’ll hear about more deals in this space. Mywaves is Playboy’s first ad-supported, mobile-content distribution deal to handle syndication of a content channel.

I understand you also came out with an iPhone version of your WAP site?

Yes, when the iPhone came out earlier this year, we launched a WAP site optimized for the iPhone that will leverage the 3G version of the phone. That will stay a one-off decision. I’m not interested in optimizing for multiple handsets. But there’s a “thing” happening around the iPhone and we didn’t want to be on the sidelines.

The iPhone site features an immersive experience including “Playboy-on-the-Scene” footage from lifestyle-based projects. iPlayboy contains mobile-specific features such as “Battle of the Sexiest,” “Playboy Radio,” and “Scout,” a blog on sex, dating, and other lifestyle topics. iPlayboy is an ad-supported site which will be upgraded continuously to include social/community involvement, a content storefront, and other feature introductions, integrating the iPhone experience with Playboy Mobile’s PC experience.

What have you learned from the Miss Playboy Mobile experience?

Our three-pronged approach is our mobile internet site; syndicating our content out to mobile social networks, and a yet-to-be-announced comprehensive messaging strategy. Basically, we’ve done enough deals with enough depth to do both free, ad-supported content and premium content, with every type of messaging solution you can have. This will be a big deal for us, because previously we’d only done short code. We’ll integrate messaging between how we syndicate our content out, our mobile site, and how we interact with it online and with social media. The idea being that every one of those places that people can interact with the brand, they’ll be one click away from our messaging strategy, which will lead you to discover everything in the network.

When do you expect to be able to monetize the mobile portion of the strategy?

We’re already making revenue from ad sales on the mobile site. When you monetize what we’re doing across product offerings, we think this will work from an ad-generating place alone. Each one of these three prongs will eventually have a premium area with an up-sale for more premium service or content. What Playboy is aspiring to do is deliver value. We’re in the process of coming up with unique content offerings that people haven’t seen before. We are trying to push the envelope by bringing out things that we believe haven’t been done in the past.

One example is that we recently decided to go into the mobile original content area and we have our first series we’re going to put out. The way we approached it is very different. We figured out how to integrate the divisions of the company, ranging from TV to the magazine and our sponsor ad partners. How we’re releasing it is also unique. We thought about integrated marketing. It won’t be video with a pre-roll or post-roll. We said, Let’s go for integrated marketing, product placement, just like TV, and that’s the elements we did.

To finish it off, we just announced that we’re in the planning stages of taking the Miss Playboy Mobile competition global. I have no less aspiration than attempting to pull off something that’s never been done before. We’re ambitious in the number of territories, the interactions, to integrate sponsors into the competition and the abilty to run it on online and mobile with a heavy social media element. We set our sights on the bigger campaigns and want to improve on it. We have localized partners that produce products and content for us: 26 local magazine publishers that publish local editions, TV stations that add to our broadcasts, digital partners who represent us in certain regions. Leveraging those partnerships allows us to customize and localize for the global Miss Playboy Mobile. Localized competitions feed into the regionalized and then ultimately global competition. There are sponsorship opportunities at each level and we continue to target both men and women. We look at top social media networks in all the different global regions and we’ll try to extend a widget or application to those, in the native language. It’s an ambitious project and the targeted time frame will be Q1 2009 with target party at CTIA Wireless in April.

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September 12, 2008

CTIA 2008: The Walls Are Crumbling…

In fairytales, things usually happen in threes. At CTIA 2008, I espied three trends that promise, if not a fairy tale ending, at least a major game change in the future of mobile usage in the U.S. The evidence was everywhere that the garden walls surrounding the carriers’ pick of content for mobile users is still there, but crumbling. Hastening the inevitable, broadband mobile Internet made a strong showing at CTIA, proving its inevitability. Lastly, the number of companies pitching easy ways for Internet content creators to “mobilize” their content was amazing. Since I’ve been a big proponent of all three of these directions for the mobile content market, I had a happy time at the show.

Let me just draw attention to a handful of the companies I met with and a few of the items that caught my attention. First, one of the stars of the show was RIM’s new clam-shell Blackberry Pearl 8220.

new Blackberry Pearl

new Blackberry Pearl 8220

I’m perfectly happy with my Blackberry 8830 World Edition, but if a clam-shell Blackberry rocks your world, more power to you. And the new Blackberry does have quad-band support so it’s a world edition too.

I also had a fun time in the Yahoo booth where I got their new voice search application downloaded to my Blackbery. It’s a lot of fun to play around with, although it can’t always make sense of what I say (and that’s probably not the application’s fault), I can easily correct what appears in the browser. For the free download, go here.

QuickPlay Media is all about trying to make the mobile internet experience successful, says vp of marketing Mark Hyland. “Our CEO Wayne Purboo’s vision was that networking speeds were going to get faster and that broadband wireless would be big,” he says. “We believe that you can’t take a PC web browsing experience and cram it on to a mobile device. Mobile is very location and context specific. It makes a difference where you’re using it.”

At CTIA 2008, the company began beta-testing a brand new service for media and entertainment customers to cheaply, quickly and easily publish video to the iPhone. “And ultimately to all video-enabled devices, but we’re focusing on iPhone first because of the interest,” says Hyland. “In 5 minutes you can take existing videos in any format and create a full video site for iPhone.” This new product is expected to be released by Q4 2008; the price is not yet set.

I checked in with Nokia’s Kamar Shah with regard to Ovi, the company’s entertainment and media sharing service, as well as the company’s future plans in the entertainment space.Once again, the mobile Internet came to the fore. “From my perspective, in the area I work in, I want to show relevance of Nokia within this market in the Internet world,” he says. “I would justify that two-fold: we’re not taking the Internet and putting it on the mobile device. We’re redefining and evolving the Internet experience. That is based on what the consumer wants. Social networking makes up 20 percent of user time – after search and mail. It’s a phenomenon. We want to take that further and make it relevant to the consumer. We also have to make the advertising relevant, we have to get it right. There’s a very low tolerance for spam on the mobile phone.”

Referring to filmmaker L.M. Kit Carson’s “Africa Diary,” which he is shooting with his N95 camera, Shah also noted that this year Nokia partnered with MTV to supply N95s to the network’s journalists for Super Tuesday; content was streamed to MTV sites. Stay tuned to MobilizedTV for more news about Nokia and the entertainment world.

UIEvolution is an answer to the cacophony of mobile’s competing operating systems, devices and networks.”Mobile phones are so fragmented in terms of operating systems,” saysKeith O’Neill, vp, business development. “The thin client technology puts a layer of frosting that gives a seamless system so you can develop on top of that without worrying that it won’t work. We can work with PCs, STBs, consumer electronics devices , and automotive audio systems.”

UIEvolution's Keith O'Neill

UIEvolution's Keith O'Neill

Fragmentation prohibits growth and innovation because it becomes cost prohibitive for content creators without deep pockets, says O’Neill, and to that end, UIEvolution is rolling out Blender, a new web developer tool and service that takes web content–text, graphics and video–and mobilizes it. The business model is based on a revenue-sharing model. The web content creator pays a set-up fee, and then splits revenue with UIEvolution, the percentage of the split depending on volume. “For all that, we host and cover all the on-going device support.”

DeviceAnywhere was another interesting destination. Any content developer worried about making the video playable on the hundreds of devices out there can do so…remotely. DeviceAnywhere is an online service that provides access to hundreds of real handsets, on live worldwide networks, remotely over the Internet for developing, testing and porting. Once again, a great solution for web creatives who want to mobilize their content without becoming computer/wireless geeks.

Thumbplay launched Thumbplay Open, says president/CEO Are Traasdahl. “It gives the ability for any content creator to sell their content to 250 million wireless users across every carrier, operating system and handset,” he says. “It’s been hard for anyone creating content to get distribution because it’s beeen very carrier controlled. “The wall is down. Now it is one big happy garden.” The challenge has bee to build a platform that works not just across handsets and operating systems but across all billing systems and video codecs. “Our system is built so it automatically detects what handsest is trying to access the content and it converts on the fly to whatever the handset requires. Our system will convert to 2,500 different handsets and it’s all seamless.”

So far, the system is launched for visual artists and musicians, but will expand to video. Click here to try it yourself.

Once the content is uploaded into Thumbplay’s system, the content creator can distribute and sell the content (the system only accepts uncopyrighted material). The system allows you to create a widget which you post to your MySpace, Facebook pages. Or you can get your own URL and sell your content from that site. “You pay nothing to put your images or music up there, although we are evaluating if there should be a fee,” says Traasdahl. “You have to pay to consume the content, either per download, which costs $1 – 3, out of which the artist gets $.50. Or you join the Thumbplay service which is $9.99 a month. Any time someone signs up for the service through the artist’s page, that artist gets $5 to 8.” (Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain fame made $10,000 in three months but, says Traasdahl, “he’s a very smart marketer.”)

Also new from Thumbplay was the announcement of a partnership with Comcast to provide the cable MSO with mobile entertainment services include ringtones, games, video, and music.

Last but not least, I met with David Danon of SonicBoom Media, a company that launched “Name That Tune,” a mobile music game in 2003 (which has a great back-story too long for this report). The company, says Danon, is now a leader in creating “the bridge between Web 2.0 and mobile.”

“We reach out to people in their social networks, so they feel comfortable upgrading their web experience to the phone,” he says. “It’s more profound to share an experience on the mobile that your friend has sent you from the web.”

Danon is also a big believer in the future of user-generated video content on the mobile platform: and he isn’t just talking about YouTube. Speaking to that belief is the company’s product Videomaker, due out the end of the year, which allows the user to make long-form movies from 15- to 20-second clips taken with the mobile phone’s video camera. The clips are arranged along a timeline and then connected via transition effects. The result can be sent to a mobile phone as an MMS or to a website as Flash. Also on SonicBoom Media’s agenda is the Hot America mobile beauty pageant completely on cell phones. Each state will have a competition and send its winner to the national contest. This launches in late November and the first winners will be declared in Summer 2009

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