Services Mobiles

Question to Paul Bowen Director European Offerpal Media (monétisation)

 Can you tell us about your product Offerpal Media? 

Offerpal Media was founded on monetising social games on Facebook. Since we started in 2007 we’ve grown to a turnover of $100m by allowing players of social games to take 3rd party marketing offers in exchange for virtual currency. In April 2010 Offerpal acquired a company called Tapjoy who offered a very similar service within iPhone and Android games. Offerpal Medias’ mobile proposition allows players of iPhone games to download 3rd party iPhone / Android apps as well as take mobile enabled offers in exchange for virtual currency. 

This capability now means Offerpal generate over 100,000 iPhone app downloads on their platform every day, by far the single largest source of app downloads. For iPhone app developers this is a great way of enhancing the discoverability of their iPhone app as not only do they benefit from the app downloads they buy from Offerpal but also the organic downloads they receive as a result of having a better app listing. Offerpal have tracked and increased 20% in organic downloads as a result of campaigns on their platform. 

How did you get the idea? 

The mobile proposition is an evolution of the web proposition which was borne out of the need to offer app developers a way of monetising their applications above any beyond the standard banner. 

What your business model? 

Offerpal are paid on a cost per installation by the app developer wishing to buy downloads of their app.Offerpal work on a 70:30 rev share to the developer of the application on which the conversion is made. 

How do you see the future of virtual goods ? 

Both on mobile and web virtual goods are going to continue their explosive growth as more games are made for the masses. Although Offerpal were founded as a web company we believe our growth over the next year will be monetisation of virtual goods on mobile as more app developers seek to monetise their apps in a more efficient manner. More games will be developed incorporating virtual goods and the monetisation of these virtual goods will depend less on mobile payments and more on alternative methods.

Questions to Noam Bardin, CEO Waze (Géolocalisation)

 Can you tell us about Waze? 

Waze is a driving community of drivers who help each other improve our daily commute. Wazers help build the map itself, add names and keep it up to date, they help mark traffic, automatically by driving with the app and they manually mark other hazards, such as speed cams, policemen, construction, hazards and others. We make our app fun and social to help make the commutte more interesting with a variety of geo-games and automatic interfaces with twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. 

How did you get the innovative idea? 

Ehud Shabttai, one of the founders, started the company as a way of building a navigable map without having to buy it from the incumbent map providers. This way the map can be updated daily, by the community and can be distributed for free. Ehud had tried to build such a community on one of the incumbent maps but they threatened to sue him claiming he was infringing on their IP, in-spite of the innovation and value to the consumers - so he deleted it and began building it from scratch. 

How many users do you have? 

We have close to 900,000 users globally, building driving communities and maps in over 100 countries. 

What is your business model? 

Today we sell the data we collect to third parties needing real time data.

How do you see the future of GPS applications ? 

The next waze of GPS applications is moving away from pure navigation (10-20% of our drives when we don't know where we are going) to daily driving (the other 80-90% of the everyday drives) - imagine that every time you get into your car you turn on your GPS system (on your phone) and you have a virtual helicopter over you, warning you about hazards, speed cams and traffic, finding the best route, showing you where your friends are, where there are discounts in stores, finding and displaying your facebook friends and helping make your everyday drives better.

Questions to Steve Subar, CEO Ok Labs (mobile virtualisation)

Can you explain what mobile virtualisation is? 

Mobile Virtualization is technology that enables handset suppliers, operators and end-users get the most out of existing and emerging mobile hardware. It decouples mobile OSes and applications from the hardware they run on, enabling more secure, robust and flexible applications and services on less expensive devices today and deployment on advanced hardware tomorrow. 

Why are you currently focused on the mobile industry for this?

Today's mobile phones boast computing capabilities once found in mainframe computers and workstations. Mobile CPU clocks run hundreds of MHz, and mobile 32 bit processors access gigabytes of memory. Additionally, mobile network connections stream data at broadband speeds, and mobile versions of enterprise platforms such as Linux and Windows run shrink-wrap applications. So it should surprise no one that today's mobile phones can also host mobile virtualization platforms with a range of accompanying benefits. As it does on servers and desktop computers, mobile virtualization offers handset OEMs, mobile network operators (MNOs), and semiconductor suppliers enhanced security, portability, reliability, license IP isolation and hardware consolidation. 

Mobile phones are no longer stand-alone devices - increasingly, they play the role of enterprise application endpoints. This new, always-on, always-character provides new opportunities across the mobile ecosystem, but also challenges handset OEMs to bring feature-rich, enterprise mobile phones to market, quickly and cost-effectively. OK Labs embraces these challenges and provides a rich set of products and solutions to OEMs, MNOs, and semiconductor suppliers

Please can you provide some examples of your clients and how mobile virtualisation is being used? 

Our clients include ST-Ericsson, with whom OK Labs has partnered as their mobile virtualization partner for joint projects featuring ST-Ericsson 3G multimedia chipsets and open OS platforms. ST-Ericsson will be the first mobile multimedia chipset manufacturer to bring mobile virtualization to ARM Cortex A9 multi-core technology. In enabling mobile virtualization together with OK Labs, ST-Ericsson will lead the market in supporting virtualization solutions for SMP-capable open mobile operating systems (OSes). A continued relationship with Motorola recently led to the release of the World's First Virtualized Smartphone, the Motorola Evoke QA4. 

Accomplished for the first time in a commercially available phone, OKL4’s mobile virtualization solution enabled Linux and an RTOS to run side by side on a single ARM processor, offering decreased bill-of-materials (BOM) costs and separation of GPL and proprietary software code as required by companies’ IP policies. This was accomplished while meeting necessary performance requirements and reducing development effort through extensive reuse of existing software. OK Labs also has a more than five-year relationship with Qualcomm, shipping on several chipsets, with continued development around SMP, SMT and Application OS Development. 

What are your current projects? 

We have recently released, in partnership with Citrix, the Nirvana Phone reference design, as well as the Mass-Market Smartphone strategy. As always, we have more exciting news on the way.

Question to Jeremy Stoppelman, PDG et co-fondateur de Yelp

 Can you tell us about Yelp? Yelp is a website that connects people with great local businesses - anything from restaurants, bars and spas to hair stylists, dog groomers, even dentists. The site was launched in 2004 in San Francisco, CA and since then, you can now find Yelp in 5 countries including most recently, France. Last month, more than 31 million people leveraged Yelp to help them make a spending decision. 

The market of local search for cell phones has big and small players - how can you differentiate yourself to get people’s attention? What Yelp has that no one else does is our rich and useful content. With our Yelp Mobile apps http://www.yelp.fr/yelpmobile, we're able to give users the utility of Yelp.com at their fingertips wherever they might be. Not only do users have the ability to take advantage of the over 10 million reviews on Yelp, but by leveraging smart phone features such as GPS, we're also able to show you great local businesses around you, as well as directions, maps and more. For many, it's proven to be an incredibly indispensable app whether in your hometown or in a new city. 

What is your strategy for cell phones? What is your target? We set out to make the experience that you have on Yelp Mobile, as rich as the one you would have on Yelp.com. This started when we launched Yelp for iPhone with Apple's iTunes in July 2008, and since then have you can find Yelp apps for Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre and WAP. While mobile development still remains a huge focus for Yelp and one that we will continue to innovate against, we've been able to tell by usage and traffic that our original goal of providing a rich offline experience with Yelp, has already started to come to fruition. 

For example, we had 31 million people visit Yelp.com last month to find a great local business. As you'd imagine, we see traffic for the website spike during the weekdays because people are likely at their desks or at home researching restaurants or plans for the weekend. As such, mobile traffic is understandably a little bit lower. However, our weekend traffic for Yelp.com is more or less a mirror image of what we see on the weekday for mobile. Meaning: mobile traffic spikes and Yelp.com traffic dips. But that also gives us a really good idea that people are using their mobile device to find a business on the go. In fact, in the past 30 days we had 1.6 million unique visitors to Yelp mobile. We hope to continue to iterate on our existing platforms, as well as bring Yelp Mobile to other devices. 

 How can you make profit out of local search on cell phones? We currently don't monetize any of our Yelp Mobile applications. For us, location-based ads are definitely something we're looking at, but not in the near-term road map. We're currently focusing on getting other platforms like Android and Blackberry up to parity with where we're at on the iPhone, and improving the features of our existing apps. 

Do you have figures on cell phone usage in the countries you are present in? Over 1.6 million unique visitors leveraged Yelp Mobile last month. 

How do you see the future of local searches on cell phones? No doubt location and mobile have already proved to be popular topics for 2010, and people continue to buy GPS-enabled phones en masse. For us in particular, we were really excited by the response we saw to our AR feature: Monocle and think that we're just starting to see the possibilities that this technology represents. AR definitely has that "fun factor" but where I also envision it being incredibly useful from a local search perspective is determining instantaneously the information about a business by just holding your phone up in front of it.

The Conquest of Mobile, the Conquest of Space

Our conquest of space has profoundly transformed the development of telecommunications and the dissemination of information. It initiated new areas of competition as well as cooperation in original ways. It is also a tremendous engine for innovation in many domains: electronics, information technology, energy, and mechanical engineering. In many ways the developments in the mobile industry resemble the 50 year period that passed between the space flight of a monkey to the development of international space station ISS. In a time frame of just 7 years mobile gained an overall global penetration of 65 percent. This is the strongest and fastest adoption of the twentieth century, ahead of television (50 years for 92% penetration) and even the PC (25 years to reach 45% penetration). 

In 1979 the first generation mobile telecommunications network was created in Japan. In late 2009 many operators opened 4th generation networks with the commercial launch of LTE, Long Term Evolution, the successor to UMTS. In 30 years we have moved from an era of voice calls and SMS messaging into the era of real-time information, TV, and video on our mobile screens.

Question to Shashi Fernando, CEO of Saffron Digital.

 What is the strategy ? “T-Mobile's VOD+ service has really struck a chord with consumers since it was launched in July last year. What distinguishes VOD+ is that the customer can watch movies on the device that suits them. When they’re out and about they can watch on the mobile or they can resume on PC for a larger screen for longer viewing times. This plays into T-Mobile's strategy of connecting the consumer wherever they are – through dongles/mobile and home – they are able to access/watch their film and TV anywhere, anytime. 

The fact that you can pause and resume across both devices makes the experience much easier for consumers to manage."“In this promotion with HTC and T-Mobile, HTC is able to differentiate its device and can offer T-Mobile an innovative tool to use in their partnership. For T-Mobile, the HTC promotion highlights the value of the VOD+ service on a new device with great video capability.” 

Why use mobile? “Mobile is an excellent mechanic for purchasing digital content, because customers can pay directly and securely on their phone bill. The value of this particular VOD+ service is that it enables users to view their movies across mobile and PC: mobile while they’re on the move, and on PC when they’re at home or they just want to switch to a bigger screen.” 

How does this work? “In-store and poster promotions have displayed the mechanic by which customers can activate the service: T-Mobile users, having bought their HTC Desire, can simply text DESIRE to 3030. This generates a message back with a link to the complimentary Warner Bros movie service." “Customer who do not use the SMS to activate the promotion will automatically be targeted by SMS from T-Mobile – again inviting them to link to the mobile internet destination where the promotion is hosted.”

Is this available on all smartphone devices? “This specific promotion offering Warner Bros movies is only available on the HTC Desire. However, Saffron Digital’s VOD+ service is available on T-Mobile for most of the smartphones available in the UK.”

Question to Frederic Dumeny VP business development AdFonic (mobile advertising)

What can you tell about Adfonic?
Adfonic is a self service global mobile advertising exchange. Advertisers and their agencies can bid for advertising on mobile sites and apps, creating a new revenue stream for mobile publishers. Adfonic’s self-service mobile advertising marketplace addresses the advertising community’s increased demands for sophisticated campaign management and maximises the earning potential for a new generation of mobile internet sites and applications worldwide.

What's your recent news?
Adfonic will be launching on Wednesday 1st July 2009 offering existing and new advertisers and publishers a better mobile advertising service. With Adfonic, advertisers and publishers alike will benefit from the most advanced targeting capabilities in the market, detailed web-based real-time reporting and analytics, and an intuitive user experience.

How can you differentiate in a very competitive market?
First and foremost, Adfonic has developed a new world class next generation mobile advertising platform, built to meet the challenges of tomorrow. The platform was designed and developed by some of the leading product marketing and technology people in Europe and USA.

Secondly, we are the first home grown European self-service mobile advertising marketplace. That's good news for publishers and advertisers. The market intelligence we've  gathered indicates that the competition has not done a very good job here.  We will be launching with the most comprehensive  mobile advertising platform. We believe that in order to succeed,  you must give advertisers and publishers control and flexibility. We've achieved this by giving users lots of tools and features.

Overview of our comprehensive service:

Real time reporting and analytics
Most comprehensive targeting
Payment options for advertisers and publishers
Flexible approach to support multi ad units
Integration with publishers to pass across behavioural data

An experienced management team with advertising, marketing, technology backgrounds in mobile, online and blue chip. We our confident our innovative roadmap will deliver features and capabilities that advertisers and publishers are looking for. We believe in a customer led approach backed up by a quality service and attention to detail.

How do you see the next 12 months evolving ?
There are some key themes :

The mobile ad networks will be forced to open up and behave more like their web counterparts. This will be the shift from blind to transparent networks. First browser based location ads will be launched using the iPhone 3.0. Local information providers get ready !

Boom in ad formats. MMA will be forced to update their Mobile Marketing Advertising Guideines doc in line with market demands. Apps still king. Trend for ad funded apps will continue to grow as 1) more iphones are sold ( and resold on ebay!) 2) more apps stores launched ( blackberry, nokia, operators ...) 3) average number of apps per device increases.

Google's official entry into the mobile ad space will drive mobile search ad advertising. We will see a play for the mobile search space from the few remaining mobile search businesses and new emerging ( mainly vertical ) ones. Increased allocation of marketing budgets towards mobile advertising and mobile advertising showing up more and more in the agency planner's media mix.

Mobile advertising will be fully accountable with the introduction of CPA. This means that mobile will be the most personal item coupled with the most accurate to measure for marketeers. Surely, that must trigger a shift in thinking?. First moves towards consolidation : Some of the early mobile ad start-ups from 2006 -07 will be looking at exit strategies. So M&A activity will be clearly on the radar.

Questions to Dominik Faber CEO My Bonuz

Can you describe My Bonuz ?
mybonuz is a mobile application (first available for iPhone soon) for your final bonus card. If you go to a store (i.e. starbucks) you can grab a bonus points with mybonuz. You just have to be there (GPS/location based). If you have collected enough points you get a gift (i.e. a coffee for free; depends on the store). You can share your points with your friends on facebook.

What are your plans ?
We are starting the pilot phase with a bakery chain in germany soon. Until this happens we are running the mybonuz #adventure game. You can set locations where you can grab points for yourself using twitter. It's described on our blog. The winners get iTunes gift cards.

What is your business model ?
Social Couponing Services and Social Media Marketing for realworld stores. We connect Stores to the social media stream.

What do you think about the mobile ecosystem ?
It's getting big as soon as the devices are ready and people use them :)

Questions for Alcatel-Lucent : Touchatag

What is touchatag?
Touchatag is an Alcatel-Lucent Venture based in Antwerp, Belgium. It is the outcome of innovations within Bell Labs. Touchatag provides contactless payment, loyalty and communication solutions to operators and enterprises/verticals as well as a catalogue of contactless readers, tags and applications. Using RFID/NFC technology, one contactless tag can be used to invoke various applications. Today there are billions of contactless tags as fidelity cards, commuter cards, badges and Alcatel-Lucent touchatag takes an unique approach to bundle multiple applications to one card. This way we can easily serve contactless card issuers and holders our application enablers

Touchatag also provides the touchatag developer network and APIs for application developers via its developer website. Via the touchatag website and the touchatag starter package, anyone can link real world items to the online world and start to create an “internet of things”. Touchatag’s functionalities can also be used with Near Field Communication enabled mobile phones.

                                                                     

How do you see the development of NFC mobile within 12 months?
Alcatel-Lucent does not create NFC phones itself. We are aware that multiple handset vendors are creating NFC phones to become available end of this year or beginning of next year, and this according to the specification and the request of the GSM Association of November 2008. The goal is having the NFC chip embedded in the phone, meanwhile contactless payment stickers linked to prepaid accounts are a good solution until NFC mobile phones are available.

 
What are your mobile project ?
In June 2008 Accor Services teamed with Alcatel-Lucent touchatag to pilot a contactless payment service in Antwerp and Namur, Belgium. PingPing is providing the payment service. Currently 250 Alcatel-Lucent employees are using touchatag to pay for lunch at five local merchants.  The trial will extend to 400 employees in the coming months.  The touchatag technology replaces the paper meal vouchers Accor Services issues each month.

For the pilot, touchatag is providing the application correlation service (ACS), a catalogue of contactless readers, tags and applications. The ACS is an on-line service that selects and initiates the right application whenever a contactless event is triggered.

Questions to Christopher DeGrace CEO One Pin

Can you describe ONEPINE ?
 OnePIN provides Social Address Book solutions to mobile operators that enable subscribers to transform an initial contact with a friend (typically a voice call or SMS) into a relationship by automatically enabling contact exchange information and friending to social networks. CallerXchange, OnePIN’s flagship product, is a person-to-person contact exchange service that connects people and enhances social networks by enabling subscribers to easily share and update contact information – all with a click of a button.  CallerXchange is currently being shipped to over 20 Million subscribers and has achieved significant market uptake. With headquarters in Boston and offices and customers around the world, OnePIN is setting the global standard for mobile social address book solutions. For more information, visit www.onepin.com .

What are your plans ?
Our CallerXchange service is currently being shipped to over 20 Million subscribers and has achieved a significant uptake of over 40% in a number of markets.  Our primary markets of focus include: Africa, Europe, India and Latin America.  We are currently engaged in commercial deployments and trials with a number of operators worldwide, including: Orange, America Movil (Claro), Cable & Wireless, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and Oger Telecom. 

What is your business model?
OnePIN sells its solutions to Mobile Operators.  The typical business model is for OnePIN to charge a transaction free (or revenue share) for each transaction.  This is a preferred model for mobile operators as there is not a large capital investment required to deploy the solution or a long budgeting process – especially in these difficult economic times.  With this “friction-less” business model and basic implementation requirements (no systems integration), mobile operators can deploy OnePIN solutions very rapidly and start generating revenue immediately.

Mobile operators make money with our services by enriching their subscribers’ phonebooks – the more contacts and the more information per contact, the more ARPU that is generated from subscribers.  Secondly, an enriched phonebook (stored on the SIM card or a Network Address Book) is the ultimate subscriber retention tool.  If subscribers store their life-long connections with one operator, and have the ability to easily make new connection and keep old connections up-to-date, they will be less likely to switch to another operator.

What do you think about the mobile ecosystem ?
We believe that Mobile Operators are in the prime position to create the ecosystem’s largest, and most compelling social graph.  This position is based on people’s dependence on the mobile phone (the most social device that people have) and the convenience and importance of communicating with life-long friends with one-click of a button.

Mobile subscribers consider the phonebook to be the most important application on the phone, however, mobile operators have failed to leverage the phonebook as a revenue generator and a retention tool.  As the Personal Information management (PIM) world is now converging with the Social Networking space, mobile operators have a limited opportunity to leverage their position to enrich and monetize the mobile phonebook.