Last week I visited one of the leading recording studios in Santa Monica and I was introduced to one of the founders. It struck me that a music industry professional like him, nose glued into the mixing table, was intimately aware of the ring tone business opportunity. We have seemingly come a long way making mobile entertainment production mainstream.Yesterday I attended the newly launched MobileMediaMonday event in New York. Among the close to one hundred industry executives listening to the always inspiring and sobering presentation of Thomas Gewecke of Sony/BMG there was a growing optimism about the business potential we are all facing, Carrier willing! In the previous newsletter I wrote about the US market turning into an import market for mobile innovation. In the MoMeMo meeting French was indeed widely spoken and curiously so by representatives of Japanese mobile content conglomerates.
The new phenomenon of this ‘import market’ are venture-funded startups created as launch platforms for foreign entities with turn-key carrier relationships and a ’starter kit’ of content and customer base. If you are one of those who labored through the grey and arduous task of understanding how to work with the US mobile operators - now it’s time to roll your own startup and retire!
Warmest regards,
- Tapio Anttila
- www.anttila.net
MACROMEDIA FLASH IN MOBILE - THE SLEEPING GIANT?
Macromedia put itself up on the market and got acquired by Adobe - little did we know! Now it is easier to understand that the recent downsizing of their mobile division was more like window-dressing for the acquisition than a fit of rage by the infamous ‘Canadian economy version of Larry Ellison’ as their former CEO was recently affectionately referred to as. With their head of developer services having left the company and nobody from the company’s mobile division admittedly attending the upcoming E3 one may ask whether one should calm down and wait before starting to develop for FlashLite. As great a company as Macromedia is - my advice to all of those asking for an introduction to the company is: I am your friend, I don’t want to do this to you - please wait for another six months so that they will be able to give you some reasonable attention.
And frankly, Macromedia does not have to hurry too much - the attractiveness of Flash as a technology is not going to disappear anytime soon and even though the company’s developer program on the mobile side is perhaps more power-point than anything else the competition such as Ikivo have a long way to have anything to put on the table to compare.
What comes to the future direction of the combined Adobe/Macromedia entity, industry insiders speculate that Adobe may actually push for the proprietary Flash platform at the expense of the OMA standard SVG-T they were earlier promoting - the new entity has probably more market momentum to bring a proprietary technology to the market.
Another thing the combined entity needs to correct is Macromedia’s historical lack of focus for the consumer market and for the entertainment industry vertical - the company is essentially an enterprise software player with a sweet spot in verticals such as government and health care where rich Internet applications and data visualization thrive and find optimal value. This does not play well with developing an early success on the consumer-driven mobile data market.
THE MOROROLA ITUNES PHONE STORY - WHAT CAN WE LEARN?
Here is an anecdote on how I am told the Motorola iTunes phone got delayed - from pretty reliable sources. Steve Jobs was in a meeting with Motorola executives (without the protective presence of Ed Zander, the CEO of Motorola). He listens to the Verizon executives go off and suddenly says: “Guys, have you finished? I am done, I’m outta here.”
The interesting lesson from this whole Apple - Motorola partnership is that personal relationships matter - with Ed Zander in the lead Motorola has suddenly adopted the Silicon Valley culture (and relationships), both in good and bad. It amazes me that Motorola still (or prematurely) attempts to launch products that go against the carriers’ fixation to ‘own’ the end user: Ericsson learned to avoid the conflict sometime in 1999, Nokia cleaned up its act with the introduction of Preminet earlier this year. Motorola goes off creating conflicts as if the company just entered the market.
SOME COOL COMPANIES
Rodger Desai is building a new company, Rave Wireless, based out of New York. His focus is on the college market and he seems to have an intriguing and advanced understanding on something that could be called ’social work flows’ of a community or a consumer market demographic. I am not really allowed to say more - please check with him if the college market is in your sweet spot. Rodger’s mobile: (917) 279-9380.
One of the Hollywood talent agencies - I am not yet allowed to say which one - is building a mobile publishing company that will offer its services to all its clients - an interesting new twist the other talent agengies might follow. Yes, it is the one where Doug Dyer (formerly VP Wireless at THQ and Warner Brothers) found a new home.
Agile TV is developing a new way to navigate through mobile content on a server: the solution is based on push-to-talk and speech-enabled server-side search with results returned with extremely low latency. www.agile.tv
MediaLive, a French DRM solution provider, just got $4.2m round A funding with Nextel (!) leading the round. The company is founded by a telecom industry and multimedia veteran Daniel Lecomte. Check out Daniel’s LinkedIn profile for more info. Nextel is apparently moving into new directions I was not aware of… and the Nextel CTO was quoted in the press release so this apparently was relative important announcement. www.linkedin.com - search for Daniel Lecomte.
GREAT GUYS & GALS OF THE INDUSTRY
Ed Lang has started as VP Wireless at Sony Connect. With a both entrepreneurial (Diggit) and large company (AOL) background he is perhaps perfectly suited to succeed in what I would call the most fragile new job in the industry (Sony is preparing for a major overhaul of its strategy, major cost-cuttings but perhaps a prioritization of Sony Connect, reportedly the ‘pet project’ of its new CEO). Happy to make an intro.
Marc Brown was the longtime head of New Media for Playboy and he is currently looking for a job, mostly focusing on mobile opportunities. Here’s a great opportunity for foreign entities establishing their presence in Los Angeles to tap into some solid experience and a large rolodex. In the American business environment moving from adult entertainment into mainstream corporate world is not fully unproblematic but that should not deter Asians and Europeans. mabconsulting@earthlink.net
Miten Mehta, SVP of Content Acquisition at MobileMedia just launched a major ‘offensive’ on Linkedin and beat me in the number of connections - from near-zero to 1,200+ in a few days. A well-connected guy indeed. Please check out his profile and JOIN LinkedIn, it is a must tool for sales & bizdev and I am not paid to say this. www.mobilemedia.com www.linkedin.com
Reno Marioni cut a deal with Digital Media Wire to take the news service into mobile publishing, podcasting etc. - very cool! http://www.tangentmobile.com/index.php www.digitalmediawire.com
READERS’ WISH LIST
One of my readers has plenty of carrier distribution as a large mobile content company and seeks to expand into mobile game publishing by acquiring a number of small game development companies, typically in the pre-funding stage. Please forward to me any ideas you might have.
Brian Ring at ComChoice is looking for mobile video developers for his new initiative. brianr@comchoice.com
Juha Christensen’s new company Sonopia, focusing on mobile branded communities is looking to recruit product management resources at various levels, please contact Juha at juha@sonopia.com
EVENTS, BLOGS & SOURCES
June 6 (New York): MoMeMo NYC meeting at SoHo House. Senior-level monthly mobile networking event in New York. For details, send email to Ashley Heather at info@momemo.org.
June 1-2 (Miami): Mobile Messaging Americas by IBC. As always warmly recommended - see you there!
Talking about good blogs: see the http://www.imodestrategy.com/ of Walter Adamson. You don’t need to go further to learn everything about i-Mode.
My favorite news sources: I have only time for two these days: www.moconews.net and www.digitalmediawire.com. That will get you covered.
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Disclaimer: Opinions presented herein are those of the undersigned and do not represent the position or message of any company I might be affiliated with.
