metarand

iPhone Flickrs To The Top

Snapshot photography via the iPhone’s diminutive 2 megapixel camera has outperformed the Nokia N95 as the most used cameraphone for uploading photos to Flickr.

As Jacqui Cheng explains, it’s the ease of use factor that gives the iPhone the edge. Despite the quality of the pictures being far inferior usability wins out, yet again!

Metarand Unplugged: Ross Dawson, Future Exploration Network On Media’s Future

In this session of Metarand Unplugged we talk with Ross Dawson, Chairman of the Future Exploration Network. Ross is a bestselling author, global futurist and the convenor of the cross continental Future of Media Summit.

We talk with Ross about the future of media, the upcoming Summit and its place as a crystal ball for the media industry. We also talk about the futurist business as a whole and where the iPhone fits on his roadmap for the future.

The biggest takeout: he uses frameworks to synthesize his pattern recognition and as a communication tool for exploring trends and the potential paths we will follow in the future.

I hope to see you at the Summit.

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here

Stream the Session as an mp3:

here

UPDATE: Ross has released two frameworks in the lead up to the Future of Media Summit:

• Future of the Media Lifecycle
• Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media

Check them out and let me know your thoughts.

Is Nokia’s Symbian Acquisition A Dinosaurian Shudder?

Why would a mobile handset maker acquire a decade old mobile operating system developer and then let it go open source? We need but look for two pointers as to why Nokia would try to shore up its position in the market by acquiring Symbian: the iPhone and Android.

Om Malik does a great job of analysing the situation. It’s time the phone industry realized there is a ‘new mobile reality’ at hand.

VentureWrap: Seesmic Raises $6M Series B From Omidyar

No wonder Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO, was so excited on the call I did with him earlier in the week.

He was in the final stages of closing a $6M Series B round from Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

UPDATE: You can watch Loic explaining the rationale here.

[via TechCrunch]

PhoneTag: The Customer Comes First, Voicemail Second

James Siminoff ‘s professor at Babson College was Steve Spinelli, a co-founder of Jiffy Lube, which pioneered the quick lube industry. Steve drummed it into James that “it’s always about the customer”.

After college, James became a co-founder of Noble, the largest online phone card company in the US and he grew this to over $100m in sales before selling out. At Noble he honed the low cost, zero middlemen approach and when deciding on the model for his next business he infused his key learnings about margins and customer control into the mix.

In 2003 he co-founded PhoneTag, a provider of voicemail to text services and visual voicemail applications. The two initial founders each put in $100k and then, after being covered by the New York Times, raised $3.5m from angel investors. They have since raised a further $2m from private investors and are now almost at break even.

They launched their private beta in late 2005. At that stage it wasn’t more than a hobby. The public beta opened up in 2006 and they started charging for their service in January 2007.

They currently have 10 full time staff and around $5m in sales in the US. Globally the market is about $10-15m in size and James believes it will grow exponentially.

PhoneTag is totally focused on the voicemail to text niche and they have not tried to expand into the wider voice recognition arena. Their take is that broad voice recognition is between 50-60% solved, whereas for a specific task, like the one they are taking on it is 100% solved.

His reasoning for tilting at this windmill. James hated the inefficiency of voicemail. James believes they are solving a problem, without creating disruption. They are tapping into the scanning nature of our modern approach to media. With a long voicemail you need to stop and listen, whereas with text you can see and scan through the data.

PhoneTag’s business model is to charge a subscription for the service. This ranges from $30 per month for unlimited, $10pm for 40 messages, with 25c a message thereafter or 35c a message on an a la carte plan.

They decided to launch in Australia as their first international market. Their reasoning is that it is an English speaking country with lots of travelling professionals and it is a well contained market. They recently appointed a Director of Sales and have now signed up 95% of Australia’s carriers.

Their core product is voicemail transcription. They are also expanding into the broader unification area by giving their subscribers convenience for example by including contact integration so that when someone calls they have the same feeling as getting an email.

PhoneTag is a consumer product and as such is carrier agnostic. Their service enables a subscriber to stop listening to voicemail and save both time and money by being able to read these messages instead. PhoneTag converts voice messages to text and send them to a subscriber as an email or SMS. Just in case a user wants to actually hear the voicemail, the original audio file is either attached to the message or can be accessed via PhoneTag’s website.

From a marketing point of view they’ve focused on virality by creating fanatical customers who they have found to be their best sales agents.

They have also spread by tapping into business and especially Blackberry users who treat email with immediacy. They’ve done some corporate seeding with CEOs and have focused heavily on the real estate niche. High profile customers include Donald Trump’s lawyer.

From a viral point of view the service includes a message that says, “Please speak clearly, your voicemail is being transcribed by Phonetag”. This is a smart move and reminiscent of how Hotmail spread so rapidly, by including a tagline on every email.

His lesson for entrepreneurs is that business is simple: don’t blow your focus apart. Keep the military precision and always, always focus on the customer.

5th Finger Taps $7M In Venture Funding

Mobile marketing veterans, 5th Finger, have closed a $7M round of funding from Australian VC firm, Starfish Ventures.

It has been an interesting journey for the guys - I remember discovering them through their regular appearances at the Wireless Wednesday events I ran back 2000. Back them they were pioneers on the edge - WAP was the new shiny thing and mobile marketing wasn’t even a glimmer in the ad agencies collective eye.

Besides their vision, the team exuded passion and I decided to take a punt. My venture firm made the first investment into 5th and we steered them through various rounds of angel funding and positioned them as thought leaders in the space.

We tried to interest other Aussie VCs in the company, particularly as their early trials with Macdonalds and others panned out to totally exceed expectations, but to no avail.

Fast forward a few years and mobile marketing became an established industry. In 2006, the company sold off the Australian and New Zealand rights to NineMSN.

Since then, most of the team has moved to San Francisco to pursue their original global vision and has been winning accolades by the fistful.

It is especially sweet that an Australian venture firm has backed them as it not only demonstrates that we were on the right track in funding them eight years ago, but also gives me fresh hope that there are venture guys down under who get it. It is in fact the third company I’ve had an association with that Starfish has backed recently - thanks guys!

Reinvigorated with a fresh round of capital I expect great things from 5th Finger.

Mobile Content World: Deer In The iPhone Headlights

This morning I attended the first day of Mobile Content World in Sydney.

It’s an interesting time to have the mobile industry talking about content in Australia, given the pending arrival of the Apple iPhone, especially since it will be supported by no less than three carriers.

The first panel session, after the usual keynotes, was a cacaphony of carrier reps. I couldn’t help feeling, that as much as they tried to stay off the path, they were deer in the iPhone’s headlights. The full browser experience is going to shake their businesses to their foundations.

As Google’s Nick Heller pointed out to me in the break, they are experiencing 10x the amount of search queries via the iPhone compared to any other mobile browser. That is a significant difference and one that will radically shape the user experience and concomitant ARPU for all of the players moving forward. Walled gardens, however much players like Telstra try to argue that they are open gardens, remain… well, …walled gardens and consumers will leave them in droves for the open web.

The mobile browser situation, however, is far from settled. A case in point is the $13M in Series B funding SkyFire has picked up in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to develop a downloadable browser to work across all mobile-device platforms.

This Mountain View company aims to replicate the PC experience on mobile handsets with an everything works mantra - Flash content, Web 2.0, Ajax etc.

Kleiner Perkins-iFund backed Pelago has also raised a $15M Series B to continue developing Whrrl, its mobile social network. MocoNews describes Whrrl as:

a mix between Facebook, City Search and Loopt. The social networking element is that you can share this information with friends, the directory part is that there’s a list of restaurants and events that your friends can rate and say whether they are going to or not, and the Loopt part is you can see what your friends are up to.

Clearly there is much afoot in this space. I’ll watch closely to see how the Australian carriers and mobile players shape up over the coming months as the iPhone permeates their ecosystem. Stay tuned…

[Picture courtesy of heritagefuture]

Are The Odds Stacked Against The Mobile Internet Being A Success?

There is a lot of buzz these days around the mobile Internet. Kleiner Perkins has set up an iPhone venture fund and Metarand itself has included two mobile ventures in its top three Australian social media startups for 2008.

But there are caveats and traps waiting for the uninitiated in this arena. Joi Ito explains:

I don’t think there is anything wrong with mobile or with some of the great new mobile applications and devices, but we have to be careful to remember that most mobile networks that actually work are built on infrastructure that is operated by a small number of mobile operators who use a lot of regulated and closed technology.

Joi compares the open innovation culture that exists within the broader Internet arena with the telco landscape which conists of overregulated, giant vendor ecologies.

He makes a very good point. Countries that have a small number of dominant telcos are littered with the remains of former bright-eyed startups who thought they could feed off the giants.  Only to find that they were not able to get their product onto the carrier any time under an 18 month lead time. And when they finally do get on-deck they are squeezed on price and the carrier’s sales staff do not push them to their customers.

The odds are stacked big time, but for companies who are able to work their way around a reliance on carriers there is loads of upside.

[via Boing Boing, picture courtesy of Mixmaster]

Australian iPhone Set To Fire On All Cylinders

Great news for Australians, many of whom have patiently waited and salivated over the iPhone phenomenon.

Their version will deliver a blistering 42 mbs via 3G. And it will be in stock from early June.

What’s more it will be available on three different networks and not be locked into a carrier walled garden. This has caused a bit of scurrying amongst the telcos who are quickly realizing that their lock and load approach has become redundant.

[via ChannelNews]

Mobile Virtual Worlds: Android Takes Over Second Life

Tokyo-based Eitarosoft has developed a 3D virtual world service running on Google’s mobile platform Android.

Called Lamity, this virtual world can be accessed via any Android-mounted mobile device. In addition, up to 400 users can simultaneously access the same space on Lamity. This is more than ten times the number who can hang out together in the same place in Second Life.

Eitarosoft’s shareholders include tier one Japanese investment groups such as Japan Asia Investment, JAFCO, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and Nomura Securities.

They have a strong background in mobile 3D, having developed the first i-mode application to display 3D graphics in 2002.

Lamity includes multiple and dual chat features. It also allows for web pages to be viewed simultaneously and stream video through a built-in movie function. A trailer for the movie “Vantage Point” was distributed through this feature ahead of its February premier.