Am I right or what?!

I’ve been blogging about the Mobile internet since Jan of this year and the theme has been that of not going down the route of the Internet where all services are free and monetized through advertising.

I’m not saying that there is no role for ad supported services on the mobile...there might be, but not at present.

The trouble with giving away free mobile internet services is that we are destroying a perfectly great economic model that is prevalent in the mobile phone services industry. Subscribers are willing and quite used to paying for services available on their mobile devices which would be available for free on the internet. Millions of subscribers across the world pay sms subscription fees for sports scores, horoscopes and even news. They download Games, ringtones, wallpapers from Carrier decks. However, there’s a new breed of content services companies who are trying to replicate and extend their FREE SERVICES model straight from the internet on to the mobile. So they give away scores, news, astro, and other web services for free on the mobile internet hoping to translate them into page views and thus monetize through advertising. Unfortunately, this has not really been successful till now.

Carriers are too unaware or turning a blind eye to these free services on the mobile internet (since it helps them sell data plans!). In the long run however, a great foundation laid will have been destroyed- where carriers end up being Wireless ISP ‘dumb pipes’ with no control over content/services and content companies that will worryingly kill the golden goose of paying subscribers.

Here is a similar opinion in an article published in the NYT on April 5. Very interesting.…wonder If they’ve been reading my blog? :)

Now everyone can Game...

It doesn’t take a Mckinsey/KPMG report to tell you that Gaming is exploding...

Every household has a kid/youngster whose wishlist is a gaming console for his or her birthday/diwali/[insert any random occasion where gifts are exchanged]. Heck, I know of many who have a number of Gaming devices- a Ps2, a psp and of course the mobile phone.

Yes, you read right- I called the mobile phone a gaming device...

For years, people have been dreaming of the day when gaming is accessible to all and we can all be happily twiddling our thumbs away killing monsters in distant lands or racing our fantasy cars on the winding roads of Monaco. Dream no more, the mobile phone has made that possible.

A few years ago, the mobile gaming experience was quite inferior- a poor man’s gaming console, due to the handset capabilities and inexperience on the part of mobile gaming developers on how to utilize the restricted environment to offer quality gaming experience. However, that has changed and how!

All the latest handsets support gaming experiences to rival the Nintendo DS and even the PSP! Mobile device makers have, to their credit, pushed the limits of hardware capabilities and game developers have exploited this fully. The Apple Iphone has to some extent shown the other device makers of how a mobile phone can be a great gaming console. Sure, Nokia had a great device called the NGage with some really good titles but the device had a love it or hate it ‘sidetalking’ feature and a bad game discovery process. The iphone with its superlative hardware and a great app store coupled with great low prices and top of the line titles has really infused new energy to the once-flaccid mobile gaming market. Gaming for the iphone is very profitable business line- evident by the number of games available in the app store- Games lead all iPhone categories with 6,276 titles, or 23.1 percent of total App Store applications.

Unfortunately, most carriers are still mostly grappling in the dark when it comes to Mobile Gaming. It all starts with the Carrier’s deck- most carrier decks are cluttered with too many inferior games selling at mostly inflated prices. Gaming for many in India begins with the Mobile phone (since consoles and high end PCs are still out of reach for the average Indian) and the first few experiences that they have with it will determine on whether they would purchase more games from the carrier or stick to their embedded ‘Snake’ Game for the rest of their lives (Read the Video Game Crash of 1983 for more). It is imperative that Carriers get quality titles that are reasonably or at least creatively priced with pricing options like Try N Buy, Micro-payments etc to get people to get their first taste of gaming. A large opportunity stands before the carriers in the country- they can quickly get an entire generation hooked onto mobile gaming and lead this initiative or watch the device makers, with their fantastic app stores, to snatch them away.

This is one real-world game that has a lot at stake for the mobile operators.

Telecom Operator as Dumb Pipe?

In the heady early days of the Mobile Web, telecom operators proudly proclaimed that they would not go down the path of their wired ISP brethren and become “dumb pipes”. They would control the media and services built around the mobile web unlike the AOLs of the world. So they built what they called, a “walled garden”- an operator controlled portal to be accessed by subscribers. The operators in their desire for total control decided to build services and products on their own and limit access to the open internet. Subscribers, on the other hand, resisted and wanted more from their wireless internet services. So operators instead of partnering with the popular service companies and building customized monetisable services for their subscribers decided to do what they resisted in the first place- open the floodgates and replicate the ISP model of allowing unrestricted access to the web.

So now you have telecom operators peddling unrestricted FREE internet services on their phones in their desire to get the subscriber on to their data plans. This has lead to subscribers accessing FREE Sports scores and News on the mobile Web. You know that the business model of the mobile web is all wrong when the most profitable services on SMS-Sports scores and News, are being made available for FREE on the mobile web. The content companies that provide these services for free on the mobile web, in their quest for eyeballs have, for lack of a better word, foolishly replicated their business model of the internet where services are ‘ad supported’. There are already murmurs of discontent brewing about how this ad supported model of offering free services on the INTERNET too is a business model that doesn’t make sense.

As mentioned in my previous post, the mobile web allows for great exciting possibilities of revenue generation and these must be exploited by content companies as well as the operators. The subscriber is accustomed to paying for services like news, sport scores, astrology on the mobile sms/web till now but with growing access to free services, he will expect these services to be free- that expectation will be death knell for the operators and the content companies.

With the specter of recession looming large and mobile advertising hard to come by, it is more important now more than ever that Content companies and telecom operators go back to the drawing board and chart out a new saner business model where both parties thrive and subscriber interests are protected too. Telecom operators must take charge of this before they become irrelevant commodities in the brave new world.