Livewire

It seems that we are constantly hearing about the promise of mobile data, applications or mobile internet. In fairness, there have been a number of factors conspiring against progress including handset capability, competing standards, user interface issues and even complexity in billing plans. However, there have been a few positive steps that will hopefully continue to push the market in the right direction.

First off, the announcement of Symbian going open source along with an alliance with Android to create a common open source platform should help coalesce the developer community in addition to removing operating system (OS) variety. Kudos to Nokia’s and Google’s foresight in regards to this issue. At the last Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I heard the then CEO of Vodafone, Arun Sarin, call for mobile OS consolidation in the marketplace during his keynote. A fragmented marketplace does not benefit content owners who must incur increased development and testing expense to support the various OS configurations, which in turn does not benefit the mobile operator. To illustrate the point, I had a conversation with the European Mobile Head of a leading games publisher who mentioned that for each game title, his team supports a matrixed spreadsheet by phone type and by mobile operator to track development build or test certification. This consolidation will help all content owners or application developers spend more time making compelling experiences for the end customer.  

The second big achievement for mobile is the rise of the handset which is interestingly being led by Apple. While this is in contradiction to open OS, the iPhone clearly demonstrates the value of device driven experiences to encourage consumption. It has been well documented that 95% iPhone users regularly surf the mobile internet which is multiple times higher penetration than other phone models. Additionally, the Apple App store has recorded 60 million users downloading applications in the first month of being launched. The point is not to further applaud Apple, but to highlight that mobile devices can be game changers and that the “iPhone killers” are already being launched by the competition which will bring a new wave of innovation into the market place. This will only help drive usage of mobile internet services.

The last trend has been the mobile operators providing more attractive mobile data plans to remove the complexity from the end user. Most consumers struggle to understand the number of bytes required for a download which leads to confusion or a surprise when the bills come due. In the US at least, the major operators have all announced new plan options from Sprint’s “Simply Everything” to similar options from ATT or Verizon that promote mobile data usage by enabling experimentation, and hopefully adoption as well, by the end user who would not be constrained by download limits.

Results announced by Chetan Sharma Consulting for the wireless mobile data market have been very positive. In the last quarter, data related average revenue per user grew $.50 to help offset declining voice revenues. That put Verizon and ATT at $2.6B and $2.5B in data services revenues respectively. The interesting caveat to those numbers is that non-messaging revenues accounted for 50-60% of those totals which implies a strong uptake of mobile content or internet services. Actions by the operators, platform providers and handset manufacturers seems to be finally in alignment which should only benefit the end customers and allow mobile services to reach its market potential. What are your thoughts?