Thanks for a good 2009 and what to expect from 2010

I always feel I want more to be developed, delivered, sold etc but at the end of the year I always try to stop for a few seconds to think about the year that just passed and the coming year.

Looking back at 2009
This year Mobispine turned 5 years old and considering we were consolidating some acquisitions we have made at the same time as we were closing deals in new markets and reducing our overall cost structure 2009 was an OK year. Looking at some key metrics - that I can share - this is the progress:

- Going from being a company dealing only with RSS-technology (the RSS reader) into being a mobile messaging player with 25+ mobile operator customers in EMEA and APAC.
- Winning deals with new customers (mobile operators) in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and India.
- From loosing lots of money to almost breaking even
- Having established a solid delivery organization which makes it straightforward for us to deliver most kinds of projects to our customers
- Having established a strong product management function which will be even stronger next year

What to expect from 2010
Next year we will continue our investments into product development & sales. We will for example:
- Execute our product roadmap going from delivering only desktop messaging solutions to also delivering multimedia and volume messaging solutions.
- Hire experienced sales people with great experience from software sales
- Expand sales into a handful key mobile operator groups where we already have a presence.

I want with this short blog post say thank you to all fantastic people who are involved in this journey such as
- our employees
- our shareholders
- our customers

Happy New Year!
Joakim Hilj
CEO, Mobispine AB

How shall operators package, price and offer desktop messaging to their customers in order to be successful?

Operators often ask as the above question.

The answer is clear to us. Thanks to the knowledge gained from all current deployments world wide we can see a clear pattern for achieving high usage, penetration and profitability as well as the usual mistakes when operators miss out on this.


1. Target the product to both business and consumer users
Desktop messaging is equally important for both business and consumers but need to be positioned a bit different for each segment. Business users use the product as a mass communication-, information- and marketing tool while consumers see it as a natural extension to their person-to-person communication.

A business user could therefore be a storeowner wanting to inform a large number of customers that the sale is on from tomorrow, or the company manager wanting to communicate an important message to the entire staff. More and more professionals offering services where you have to book an appointment also use desktop messaging to remind their customer about the scheduled appointment. Dentists are a good example of professionals that have managed to reduce the number missed appointment with such a feature.

To simplify for business users Mobispine provides bulk features and import of contact list to enable smooth sending’s to many.

2. Include the product in existing messaging price plans with no additional monthly fee.
Desktop messaging is by users considered a natural extension of the traditional person-to-person SMS on the mobile. A monthly fee reduces the usage dramatically and should be avoided. The users have a hard time understanding why they should pay more to send more SMS, which is fully understandable. The more messages you send as a user the better price you should get right, instead of being “punished” with a monthly fee?

3. Charge the same price for SMS as when sent from the mobile.
To charge the same price for desktop SMS as for regular SMS have two major advantages and operators that do not pursue this will suffer considerably on both usage and revenue compared with operator that embrace the same pricing.

How come?

Customers have a hard time understanding why they should be punished for sending more SMS, regardless if it’s from the PC. We all know that usage creates more usage and that users who on top of the normal SMS behaviour also send more and longer SMS when sitting in front on the PC will most likely also get more replies (replies are mainly delivered to the mobile device) and the wheel of sending and receiving is on.
Why should customers pay a higher price for SMS for sending even more SMS? This is a very valid question and the main reason to avoid a higher price.

Another reason is simplicity; It’s simply easier for the user to remember the price if it’s equal to the existing price plan for SMS. If the pricing differs the customers may hesitate to use the service due to of lack of knowledge of the new price that they might fear could be expensive.

So, be fair to you customers about pricing and they will be fair to you.

Pandelis Eliopoulos
Vice President Marketing
Mobispine AB

Feedback from my trip to UK

Hi all,

I just came back from a business trip where I met some customers and some of our distribution partners in the infrastructure area. I asked these folks,
- why do you like Mobispine?
- What is exciting with what we do for you?

The feedback I got was interesting and relating to the fact we are in the middle of Telco & Internet businesses which is quite unique.

There is a Telco world out there with huge mobile operators we work with. Telco Groups such as Vodafone Group, Telenor, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, MTS, Telefonica, Orange all have subscriber bases between 100-600 Million subscribers each and of course huge revenue streams thanks to voice, messaging and other services.

On the other hand side there is the Internet world with all the Internet players, very fast-moving, disruptive, sometimes lower requirements on quality than Telcos (compare the term carrier grade systems).

What is really exciting and interesting with Mobispine is that we deliver Internet services to Telcos in a way that not many players are capable of doing on a global basis. Already today our backend systems are integrated in some 30 mobile operator environments talking to their billing, provisioning and messaging platforms. We are also experts in user interfaces, front-end systems and in our DNA we breathe Internet every day.

If you have any ideas of how Mobispine can further improve the way we do business - let us know here!

/ Joakim Hilj
CEO Mobispine

Sending SMS from Windows 7

As we know, today Microsoft has possibly the biggest product launch of its history with the roll out of Windows 7. Corporations are expected to adopt the new Operating System far more than the previous Vista OS. Windows 7 is also targeting Mobile Broadband users.

Mobispine is here to help ensure that your mobile subscribers and customers can send SMS from Windows 7 and that you can place your operator brand on the Desktop of Windows 7 users.

Mobispine is providing Desktop applications for Windows 7 and Microsoft Outlook plug-ins. We can also help you notify all the existing registered users of our PC-to-SMS services about the new client.

Contact Mobispine today about SMS for Windows 7.

Will desktop messaging cannibalise on my existing SMS traffic?

We sometimes get the question whether the introduction of desktop messaging service (which enables users to send messages from their PC) will cannibalise on the existing SMS mobile to mobile traffic, when introduced to the customer base.

Actually our experience and insights show the opposite. The overall SMS traffic will actually increase.

Here are some reasons to why the traffic does not cannibalise but actually increase according to our experience:

1) We know by history that services that further improve an established behaviour increase the overall usage. Compare voice with voice mail, voice with SMS or SMS with MMS.

The fear of cannibalisation is always present when introducing services but glancing in the rear mirror we should know that when you are improving an existing behaviour the fear is false.

2) The users that can access Desktop Messaging, will more easily be able to send SMS and MMS when sitting in front of the computer. This will generate more replies that will generate even more messages. Since the replies will be received on the mobile, and obviously, users do not sit in front of the computer 24/7 the mobile-to-mobile SMS and MMS traffic will actually increase. On top, desktop messaging enables users to easily send pictures stored on the PC and other content provided by the application in a user friendly way.

3) More than 30 % of all messages sent with the desktop messaging application tend to be longer than 160 characters, which is equivalent to one (1) SMS. This means that 30 % of all the messages being sent will actually generate two (2) or more messages. 

How come? When users are being exposed to the simplicity of the Mobispine Desktop service combined with access to the PC keyboard and the bigger PC screen they tend to write SMS as they write their emails, with more words, compared to the minimal character communication typically for mobile-to mobile messaging.

4) SMS is sticky. Once the users are introduced to the simplicity of sending SMS from their PC the snowball effect has started. How many of us can honestly resist getting an SMS without reading it or replying to it.

5) Last but not least, the Mobispine Desktop service enables users to easily import, manage and send messages to many at the same time. More and more are discovering the advantages using SMS as a mass communication, reminder and marketing tool.

This is a key advantage especially for business users.
Imagine the storeowner communicating to 10 000 VIP customers that the sale is on.
Now imagine doing the same from your mobile phone.

We see this happen every day and as a result some users reach up to 6 digit numbers of sent messages per month.

So, don’t be afraid of cannibalisation on SMS when introducing desktop messaging. Let your customers embrace the service and you will most likely end up with more loyal customers than you had before.

Thanks for reading!

Pandelis Eliopoulos
VP Marketing, Mobispine

Happy birthday Per!

Happy birthday today to Per Lundberg, one of our lead developers in Mobispine. Per has now been with us for 3,5 years which is a long time in such a dynamic environment as Mobispine.

We have all followed his development of key pieces both in old and new Mobispine doing stuff around iPhone, Android and RSS. As I understand from our CTO he will now more and more focus on content and Fun Text to make that content platform work on all our platforms together w the Fun Text team.

Our demos in Prague next week

Next week Mobispine will be exhibiting in Prague at the Future of Mobile messaging conference. We will be demonstrating some exciting messaging services and products that we believe make a lot of sense for mobile operators.
- Desktop messaging from different kinds of clients (Outlook, leading browsers, standalone client, Gadgets..)
- Web based Messaging solutions where also Fun Text is integrated into the website. This makes it possible sending cool content from web to mobile phones with MMS
- Mediabox, photo & video storage and sharing

See you there!

The Future of Mobile Messaging

Mobispine will be attending and exhibiting at The Future of Mobile Messaging event 23rd-24th September in Prague. We will be talking about and demonstrating all of our products - SMS and MMS, web and desktop, Fun Text and MediaBox. Some great speakers and topics covering converged messaging, social networking, IM, RCS, new SMS and MMS VAS services and mobile advertising. If you are going or if members of your organisation are going email me (james.pycock - at - mobispine.com) and lets fix a meeting!

New product - Web Messaging Centre

Today we launched our new Web Messaging Centre. Great features (phone book synch, conversational history, MMS, lists of recipients). And a great target market (the overlap between 3 billion SMS users and 1.4 billion internet users). The product brings all of Mobispine's expertise in PC-to-SMS and moves it to the web. This will be a strong platform for us for the future. We are also really excited about the roadmap for this product - features to boost MMS and also features to truely make this app the centre of the user's mobile messaging activity.

We see that new communication tools such as Twitter, Facebook and Skype are all becoming multi-client - with web, mobile and PC apps - and our mission is to bring this capability to SMS and MMS.

As ever, we love feedback so let us know what you think and contact us to try it out.

Mobispine appoints VP Product Management

Mobispine, the mobile messaging company, today announced the appointment of Dr. James Pycock as VP Product Management. He joins the management team alongside Joakim Hilj, Joacim Boivie and Andrew Boddy.

Dr. Pycock joins the company from Fun Text, a company he founded and which was acquired by Mobispine last month. He brings seven years of experience in mobile messaging, delivering products to Mobile Operators in the USA as well as Europe.

Prior to Fun Text, Dr.Pycock was at Xerox Corporation where he was responsible for R&D in software applications, including teams at the Xerox PARC research centre in Silicon Valley. He holds numerous software patents and has published widely in the area of User Interface Design.

”Mobispine will be a company to watch as we deliver on our product pipeline and deepen our leadership in key areas of mobile messaging”, said James Pycock. ”We will move quickly on our vision backed up by a significant program of product development investment in innovation.”

"James has already proven that he has the skills to take the company to the next level. We will shortly see some of his product management efforts materialize into new products and also revenue", says Joakim Hilj, CEO of Mobispine.

We all welcome James to Mobispine!

CEO update - My thoughts

One week has passed since I started my new job as CEO for Mobispine. Things have been busy of course but the feedback from customers, partners and co-workers has been overwhelmingly positive. That feels good and I have so many ideas that I want to make happen in Mobispine.

We now need to work hard and also do the right things within the company. This will help us become the world leading messaging company.

Our desktop messaging products are for sure world-leading if you count number of customers, transactions, desktop clients etc. I also believe we have a strong (leading!?) position in the emotional messaging (Fun Text) space. The fact that leading mobile operators in UK, USA, Germany etc use the Fun Text platform gives us good confidence.

We need to make sure we as a company do the following
- Continue develop innovative and simple to use messaging products
- Increase quallity in all activities we are doing
- Be professional & aggressive within sales

Quality is something for everyone in the company not only QA but Project Management, devs, sales etc...

We want our customers and prospects to feel that we are passionate about our products/solutions, the business case we give them and the end-user value.

I want Mobispine to focus on closing more deals the coming months. We have great opportunities in Scandinavia, Europe and LATAM where we are getting closer to crunch time and decisions.

Thanks for your attention!
Joakim Hilj
CEO, Mobispine AB

Fun Text team settles in and products begin to flow

So it is nearly August and the UK team from Fun Text have been part of Mobispine for only a few weeks but already the two teams are working together as one. The product pipeline is looking really exciting. We'll be annoucing great new web services next month and a Facebook product that is just great! We'll be very keen to get your feedback on that one. I'm heading up product management so any ideas, comments or feedback just send them to james.pycock@mobispine.com or post them here.

Web-apps versus Downloaded apps on PC?

Hi all!

Most people I know of is nowadays having a Facebook account for personal usage and more and more people also do use Twitter for status updates. Obviously it takes time to
a) update your status in one or multiple locations
b) read the updates of your friends/followers etc..

I think everyone shall try out Seesmic. From my point of view it is a great app for both reading status updates and doing status updates to Facebook and Twitter. As it is built on Air it works on both Mac and PC and best of all, they also have a pretty good webapp available to use.

So, I suggest you to use Seesmic in one or more ways and please let us know what you prefer - A downloaded client on your computer or a webapp. Also let us know why.

I guess you all can see how this relates to our clients/web-clients for Mobispine and Desktop Messaging..

Cheers!

/ Joakim

Mobispine Customer Survey - here is some feedback!

Thanks for all the good feedback we have got from customers/prospects and partners!

We have so far got 15+ responses from people in the mobile industry about our "customer survey" where +50% of respondents are existing customers to Mobispine and another 30% are partners to Mobispine so everyone is very familiar to what we deliver today.

What people like with our products
- Most people were referring our products to our "desktop messaging" products and some were talking about our RSS-reader as well
- People like the simplicity of our messaging products and also the integration to Outlook clients and its perfect fit into enterprises and small businesses. Respondent were also commenting positiveley about our RSS-reader and the fact it is pre-loaded with content and very simple to use.

What can Mobispine do to develop even better products?
- Give users less choice
- More enterprise functions
- Make sure all products are quality assured in general and towards Microsoft in particular.
- Some people were also talking about finding creative ways of bundling our softwares with mobile broadband dongles and similar.. Mobile broadband is a key growth area for many these days.

Towards who shall we target the products?
Desktop Messaging seem to be very much an enterprise product while the RSS-reader is definiteley a consumer product.

What features are customers asking for?
- access to phone boook and contacts
- Distribution lists and bulk messaging
- business intelligence and statistics both for mobile operators and enterprises

How do you see Mobispine as a company?
- Agile
- Great, innovative, perception is good, easy to deal with
- Aggressive in sales, focused, technically astute
- Energetic, fast
- slightly disorganized, quite diversified

How do you see Mobispine people?
- Technically solid
- Result oriented
- Easy to work with and responsive
- Motivated people, lacks some structure
- Great personal skills, very good

All in all we are happy that so many people answered our survey and we will definiteley try to become stronger in the areas you are pointing out.

Rgds Joakim Hilj

Telenor will launch eSMS/MMS for Mac users

Mobispine has signed an agreement with Telenor and delivered desktop messaging for Mac users as well as for PC users.

The service makes it possible for Telenor customers in Sweden to now also send SMS/MMS from Mac's as well.

- ”Mobispine is very happy that Telenor has chosen to enable desktop messaging for Mac users as well”, says Mobispine VP Sales Joakim Hilj. ”Mac users are very much early adopters and of course SMS/MMS from the laptop is a necessity nowadays”, continues Joakim Hilj.

Thanks Telenor for this opportunity and we look forward making this service succesful.

The Mobispine Team

Communicasia, Come & meet Mobispine in Singapore!

We are starting to get some good traction in APAC region and we want to be even stronger in this area. That's why we spend a week in Singapore to try to meet as many people as possible from the industry such as Telcos, developers, potential partners and other network enablers.
We are in Hall 4, Swedish Pavillon. Come and see us. We look forward to that!

Also we do invite you to a networking event between Swedish, Singaporean, ASEAN companies on Wednesday 17 June between, 3pm and 5pm.

See ya!

Netcom launces MMS from PC with Mobispine

Mobispine has signed an agreement with Netcom and delivered MMS functionality to ”NetCom pcSMS” service which is now available to Norweigan customers.

The service makes it possible for Netcom customers in Norway to now also send MMS and not only SMS from the PC.

- ”Mobispine is very proud that Netcom has chosen Mobispine as a technology provider within the desktop messaging space and we can extend the functionality to MMS”, says Mobispine CEO Dusyant Patel. ”All mobile operators look at MMS as the next revenue generator after SMS”, continues Dusyant Patel.

Netcom customers can download the software to the PC and try the servcie on this website

Thanks Netcom for this opportunity and we look forward making this service succesful in Norway with you!

The Mobispine Team

A new UI for Desktop Messaging

Mobispine is right now in the middle of implementing the next generation of Desktop Messaging. We're now looking on new ways of presenting the main window layout and we need some user feedback. What do you think about the following three cases? Which one is best, and why?

Alternative 1 (above): The existing layout from current client.

Alternative 2(above): New proposal

Alternative 3(above): New proposal

Mobispine goes to Singapore 16-19 June

Mobispine will be in Singapore for the big Communicasia event on June 15-19. Last year the exhibition attracted more than 47,000 trade attendees and more than 1,500 exhibiting companies.

We go to Singapore with the ambition of doing Asian business with mobile operators and also other key players in the mobile Industry. We are looking for as many scheduled and non-scheduled meetings as possible from operators, handset makers, ISP's, VAR's, System Intergators.

We offer Desktop Messaging solutions and other value added services which all increase the ARPU.

We will be located in the Swedish Pavilion together with some other Swedish tech companies. If you are around and want to see more of our solutions and how they can increase revenue for you asa parter drop as an email at SALES AT MOBISPINE.COM

See ya!

Sales Manager wanted

We look to strenghen our sales team with more people. If you either have extensive networks in the mobile industry, mobile operators or you consider yourself being extremely motivated and passionate about creating success and deals you should definitely look into the job profile we have at LinkedIn.

Happy Easter to all our customers, colleagues and investors.

Desktop Messaging - around 40% growth last month

SMS traffic from computers continue to grow! March figures compared with February figures is 40% up.

More and more Mobile Network Operators (MNO's) deploy and launch desktop messaging solutions towards their subscribers nowadays. Mobispine has currently more than 25 MNO's using our technology for desktop messaging and we are steadily growing with a few new MNO's per quarter.

Another finding we see when comparing data from these MNO's is that active users send between 20 and 200 SMS per user and month.

We know March has 10% more days than Feb and that would explain part of the growth but not the major part of course. Anyone with theories? People message more when ecenomy is down?

The data in this blog post come from 10 European Mobile Operators currently offering Mobispine desktop Messaging to its subscribers.

/ Joakim

What is Desktop Messaging?

Some people I meet ask me some of the following questions: What are you doing? What is the need? I have e-mail, IM etc on my computer and some people have e-mail/twitter in their mobile phones as well. What is the need?

The answer is pretty straightforward

1. Instant Messaging is great sending direct messages from one PC to another PC
2. Standard SMS/MMS are great sending messages from one mobile phone to another mobile phone
3. Desktop Messaging (from Mobispine for example) is great when users in front of their PC want to reach people directly (within seconds, minutes, hours). As of today most people carry a cell phone 24/7 but do not sit in front of a computer or in front of their e-mail 24/7.

Other benefits with desktop messaging is the ability to get replies back in your computer. This simplifies the administration and handling of incoming messages as well.

Our goal is to be a strong player in between computers and mobile phones as is the case of Desktop Messaging.

If you want to test our desktop messaging solution simply send as an email to sales AT mobispine.com and we will send you a version to test.

iSendMMS release schedule

Our tech team is now working hard to fix bugs in iSendMMS that was published on AppStore on Thursday last week, allowing Swedes to send MMS from their iPhone.

Here is our current release schedule:

v1.0.1: (Submitted to Apple for approval)
BUG DESCRIPTION: The "Send" button is not disabled when the MMS is sent. If the user hits "Send" again, multiple MMS may be sent. (However these are already filtered on server side, so MMS won't be published/charged more than once)
BUG RESOLVED: When pressing "Send" button the UI now disables the button after submitting, to avoid multiple submits being sent.

BUG DESCRIPTION: Status indication not always displayed to user after sending MMS.
BUG RESOLVED: The user is now informed in the status field if the message was sent OK or not. If a MMS fails for any reason, the user can resubmit it. This also helps partly to cure the EDGE sending failure problem fixed in next release, since now the user get the failure notification and can try a resubmit.

BUG DESCRIPTION: Screen flickers while showing progress bar.
BUG RESOLVED: This is now resolved

v1.0.2: (Under development)
BUG DESCRIPTION: EDGE phones sometimes rejecting MMSs.
BUG RESOLVED: Under development...

BUG DESCRIPTION: Bug when replacing an existing image while composing MMS.
BUG RESOLVED: Bug fixed.

BUG DESCRIPTION: Some special characters in text can cause problems sending MMS.
BUG RESOLVED: Under development...

BUG DESCRIPTION: Default text remains in text/subject field if not edited.
BUG RESOLVED: Bug fixed.

On the list of features to be added in future releases:
NEW FEATURE: MMS "Sent" box
NEW FEATURE: Multiple receiptients
NEW FEATURE: SMIL support
... and more

MMS for iPhone available for Swedish users

We are glad to mention to you that our iPhone app for sending MMS is now available in the Apple App Store. So far it only works in Sweden and more specifically it works for users with a Telia SIM card.

Our ambition is to make this service available in more countries and for more operators as quickly as possible. We also want to implement the functionality of receiving MMS in iPhone + some other cool features into the app.

Supporting more operators + more countries
In order to support more operators we are willing to strike deals with operators and quickly launch the MMS for iPhone app. If you know some operators who needs this service or you are working for an operator yourself please contact us (sales AT mobispine.com) and we will help you out.

Support for incoming MMS in iPhones
To receive MMS in the iPhone seamlessly we need the mobile operator to do some configuration on their side and it would also make lots of sense to use the Apple notification API when released. Before that API comes we can always notify the users with SMS to start with.

I know our techies work right now on fixing some bugs/issues that have been reported by kind early adopters. Here are the bugs/issues we have noticed so far:

• Some users reckoned that multiple MMS were delivered to a user when sending one MMS. This bug IS FIXED NOW as I write this blog post. Thx @marko_salonen
• Only one receiver for the MMS can be selected, not multiple.
• Sometimes when EDGE connection is used, an error message is displayed and the MMS is not sent.
• (Workaround - hit Send again)
• One user reported some problems registering the app up-front but it worked for him second time.
• Sometimes when sending MMS, the toolbar flickers (cosmetical bug)

Thx a lot for this initial feedback! We just want to let you know that we are onto it and we will fix the above bugs straight away. Any other feedback is well appreciated (both positive and negative feedback of course)

Thx!

Mobispine: Breathing new life into MMS

This is a summary of an article published on Acision's website about the Mobispine desktop messaging services. For full article click here.

Mobispine is challenging many of the preconceptions about MMS messaging- and building a powerful business for mobile operators.

Two things that you might assume about MMS are that it's always sent from a phone and that it's strictly person to person. That's two things you've got wrong. Mobispine provides tools to allow both SMS and MMS messages to be sent from a PC to one or multiple users.

The Desktop Messaging system consists of both PC client software and a server architecture which sits alongside the network's existing infrastructure.

Why PC-to-phone?

For the user it's the missing link between phone and PC messaging. For the operator it's a great way to drive up the usage of MMS.

One of the long-standing problems with MMS has been the generation of content. Of course it's possible: phones have cameras and some allow a bit of editing; but it's nothing like as flexible as a PC. Research has shown that if rich content isn't sent within 50 seconds of generation, it tends not to be sent at all.
If you want to Photoshop a third eye into your colleague's forehead, it's a job for a PC. What's more a PC has the whole internet-worth of content which can be pasted into an MMS and sent.

In keeping with this view of being able to send what used to be mobile messages from your computer, Mobispine offers huge flexibility in how you can do it from the computer. There is of course a dedicated client, but there is also the option to send messages from inside both your web browser and Outlook. For Vista and Mac users there is a desktop widget. It supports contacts lists from both Outlook and Vista.

Integration with other applications plays to the 50 second rule. Get an email or find something on a web page and well within the 50 seconds you can have it sent onwards to a phone. You can ask for replies to be sent to your phone or directly back to your email. Mobispine desktop messaging acts as a bridge between viral jokes in email and by SMS; and "viral" of course has marketing applications as well as fun ones.

Mobispine in action

A Swedish company, Mobispine has been providing desktop messaging since 2000. It has 25 operators using the platform including TeliaSonera, O2 and Vodafone. One small operator, a Norwegian MVNO, has just 100 employees. The smallest networks have 100,000 subscribers and the biggest has 20 million subscribers. It's very scalable; and that makes it very saleable.

It's easy for an operator to install Desktop messaging on the server side (the server does smart things before sending the message to the SMSC/MMSC) and it's a natural add-on for the operator's existing SMSC/MMSC. And for the operator it's profitable. Typically, operators see an ARPU lift of $3/$4 for the typical user; the equivalent to sending an additional 50 SMS per month.

About the Author

Simon Rockman is Head of Requirements and Applications at Sony Ericsson. This means he looks at what people and networks want, and tries to match them up. Previously he was Creative Experience Director at Motorola, and founder of What Mobile magazine. His particular areas of interest are consumer trends, user interface and gaming.

App store secrets

Just saw a very good presentation from a company called Pinchmedia about iPhone applications that I wanted to share with you. I think most mobile developers have seen similar experiences even though not that structured as in this presentation.

iPhone AppStore Secrets - Pinch Media

View more presentations from pinchmedia. (tags: pinch smartphone)

Our products & what we are up to now!

Hey there!

We have the following products available for mobile operators and other players in the mobile/internet industry
- Desktop messaging including outlook plugins, toolbars, widgets/gadgets etc, web-based messaging
- iMMS, MMS for iPhone solutions
- MyScoop Mediabox, online photo & video albums
- RSS-reader with mobile content directory

Our great tech team is currently very busy doing...
- some large customer deployments of desktop messaging - new ones & upgrades of existing systems
- some software development projects (GPS apps, synch/backup solutions..)
- improvement of the MyScoop Mediabox solution - soon available for beta testing...
- Final touch of Mac Widget (let us know if you'd like to beta test it)

What is Next?
- Simplified download procedure for desktop messaging -> more happy users
- Public launch of Mac Widget for Desktop Messaging
- Mediabox demo system up and running for international users with more and more functionality available
- Desktop Messaging available in more countries

Any other ideas of what is important for making mobile operators and mobile users happy in our field?

Happy Valentine all!

2009: Mobile Messaging Predictions

I ran into some pretty interesting mobile messaging predictions written by Chris Lennartz from Mobile Messaging 2.0. I have taken the freedom to publish some of the most exciting content from his predictions here on our Mobispine blog.

- Mobile messaging to defy economic downturn - Mobile messaging will continue to grow despite the current downturn in the global economy. As mobile data revenues increase and voice revenues are under pressure, mobile messaging will be seen as the lifeline to the mobile industry, as especially mobile youth regards it as cheap, fast, private, easy and silent. It will fuel the growth in mobile data services and will in turn steer mobile operators, device OEMs and content providers through the tricky times ahead.

Our predictions support recent figures from M:Metrics which state that the number of people using SMS has increased 3.3% year on year across mature markets like the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. This supports recent figures from ABI research which state that revenues from mobile messaging will grow from $127 billion in 2008 to $212 billion by 2013.

- Less developed regions to fuel peaks in SMS activity - Most new subscribers to mobile services will come from less economically developed and newly industrialised regions, many of whom have a low disposable income. Most of the phones shipped to these markets have little more than voice and text capabilities so the growth potential for SMS in these markets will be significant. According to ABI the number of messaging users will grow with a rate of over 10% per year in countries in Asia, South America and Africa

- China fuels MMS uptake - The use of MMS will continue to grow especially in China where MMS is booming. Its growth will be helped by ever improving handsets and the demand for user generated content, blogging, social networking and mobile marketing. Juniper Research predicts revenues from MMS to top $16 billion in 2009. However, for this to happen mobile operators must ensure that their infrastructure and marketing is equipped to target MMS. The application-to-person MMS traffic in China makes up for 70% of all MMS traffic (source: ZTE)

- Personalisation comes of age - In the Western world, we expect much of the growth in mobile messaging to come from personalised services, as in the Fast Moving Consumer Good market that telecoms has become, differentiating on user experience is key. Customers will demand more from their operators in terms of ease of use, convenience, status, fashion, security, safety, privacy and control, so differentiating the services an operator can offer through added features such as productivity and security-based SMS applications, like out-of-office, auto-forward, storage/back-up capabilities and messaging firewalls will be key to not only enhancing the mobile experience but also increasing messaging ARPU and offsetting generic price decline on SMS and MMS.

- Mobile internet overtakes PC based internet use - The use of the mobile internet will increase significantly by the end of 2009. According to IBM more than 50 per cent of consumers would substitute their PC based internet connection for their mobile. As the majority of new phones come with internet access as standard we predict that more people will access the internet from their mobile than their PC by the end of 2009. According to T-Mobile Germany, browsing on iPhones was 30 times more than on other handsets, and at Vodafone Germany 45% of data ARPU already is mobile internet, due to partnerships with Google, YouTube and MySpace and using widgets.

- The digital youth drives changes in communication - The rise of social networks will continue and this will impact upon mobile messaging traffic as more and more people use their mobile phones to update their profiles remotely and blog on the move. It will be interesting to see what the behaviour of the digital youth will lead to as they have proven that they prefer social networking, blogging and text messaging over voice. Will this lead to the end of the voicemail as we know it? According to Nielsen Mobile, the 13-17 age group in the US sends around 1800 SMS per month, that is 60 SMS per day…

What do you think? Do you agree? Or not?