Nathaniel's Blog

A random collection of ideas, insights, and inspiration.

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Location: New York, New York, United States

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

MVNO opportunity following Cingular - ATT Wireless Deal

Consolidation in the wireless space continues. Today the Cingular-AT&T deal went through.
Details over here.

One of the interesting potential developments that could follow is AT&T (the long distance carrier, not AT&T Wireless) could launch an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) similar in nature to what Virgin has done through their Virgin Mobile service. Given the strong brand recogniztion of AT&T and the inherent customer loyalty of former AT&T Wireless customers, this could help AT&T long distance diversify their offering and bottom line.

Sprint PCS has been the leading provider of MVNO services, aiding Virgin Mobile in their role out with the use of their network. I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T Long Distance calls them today.

Monday, October 25, 2004

Why mobile content is important to mobile phone operators

In light of a recent announcement about Nokia's announcement to launch a wireless content solution I thought it might be worthwhile to comment on the state and future of mobile content.

Mobile Operators have experimented with mobile content since at least 1998 as a means to bump their ARPU numbers. ARPU stands for Average Revenue Per User and is used as a measure of financial strength. ARPU numbers have been battered down as carriers compete to provide customers with a commodity of voice minutes. In order to buoy revenues and combat earnings erosion most mobile operators have turned to mobile content as a solution.

In the early days, carriers introduced "walled gardens" which would limit the content that a customer could view to a carrier defined menu, and tried to elicit slotting fees from content providers to garner access to that menu. Due to limited mobile traffic and the desire to maintain key content providers in tehir walled garden, most slotting fees were dropped.

Looking internationally for guidance, some US carriers followed in the footsteps of successful overseas carriers. AT&T established a direction which reflected the strategy of DoCoMo (the largest Japanese carrier), aiming to provide a platform to allow content providers to plug into their platform and allowing customers to pay for mobile services via their mobile phone bill. It appears as if integration challenges and limited traction slowed that effort considerably.

Another avenue that mobile operators have explored is in the realm of mobile commerce, such as Amazon on a phone. With limited customer interest and relatively high development costs, most carriers have moved away from this strategy in favor of soft goods, which can be delivered via the phone instead of via UPS.

To explore this route, mobile operators started to turn to the J2ME and BREW standards, providing games and other applications that customers could esily pay for over their phone. The biggest initial success of this area was in the area of ringtones, with $1 ringtones flying off the virtual shelf for many carriers.

Unfortunately, even when 1 million ringtones are sold, they still have limited impact on the top line revenue numbers of any of the top carriers. Ringtone downloads has passed the one million mark by far, but they have leveled off recently.

So, what is a mobile operator to do?

Well, we should look at what operators have control over and what drives the use of mobile content. I have always believed that there are three things that are needed for a mobile content plan to work: content, connection speed, and hardware. Operators have been busy trying to improve their networks, but still speeds are rarely above that of a 56k modem. Continued improvement will come, but it will take time and a great deal of money. Hardware is an area where carriers have limited impact. And last the content itself. How do carriers develop the content portion of their mobile phone customers?

The most successful way has been to provide an single open standard (such as the one DoCoMo has implemented) which has a low barrier to entry for content providers to plug into. The reality is that there are many different attempts at creating a standard, leaving content providers to choose sides.

So while the opportunity is large and the need is crucial to combat eroding revenues, the pieces needed to complete the puzzle are not in place at this time. With competing standards, such as the one introduced in the link above, operators and content providers will have a standards war to wage. Despite this gloomy read on the current state of the market, the bright side is that there is consolidation occuring among content providers, carriers continue to invest (albeit at a much slower pace than the late 90's/early 00's) in their networks, and handset developers continue to innovate as well.

Once these areas have been addressed, the growth of this market will make a sharper turn upwards and allow carriers to begin to offset their revenue degradation. As more developments occur, I will likely comment on them as well.

Entrpreneurship and Reverse the Curse!

This morning I decided that even if the Yankees lost to the Red Sox, I could potentially make a little money on the frenzy attached to the World Series. I may try this with a few different key current events if this test pilot proves successul. Take a look at Reverse the Curse! | CafePress.

Friday, October 22, 2004

Terra Nova: A Riot

A virtual riot broke out in A Tale in the Desert, a MMORPG, recently according to Terra Nova. Evidently, a character named Malaki was trading valuable, rare items with characters, but refused to trade with female characters, asking incendiary questions, such as, "Who is your master?" and "I don't trade with slaves."

This has caused a fair amount of discussion on the rules that shoul/shouldn't be applied to virtual worlds and the role of sociological experimentation in these worlds. More thoughts can be seen at Terra Nova.

One commented believes this might be the first virtual riot. I have to disagree as I recall the naked, drunk riot that occurred when the ultima online economy was being figured out in its early days. The original call to arms can be found thanks to google groups.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

sneaker culture

Interested in the latest design trends in sneaker wear? Chck out Flytip.com, a regularly updated blog related to sneaker culture, design, and mobility. It has a great collection of news bits and some original content.

Passport in a coma

Microsoft's Passport is limiting its single sign on to its own properties and close partners, according to a Microsoft representative.

Perhaps that's for the best.

Passport had a grand plan of being the defacto method of signing in to dozens of websites, in order to streamline the sharing of personal information with trusted third parties. The plan had some merit. When Passport was released, back in 1999 Hotmail had accumulated over 300+MM users and was intended to be the backbone of the system. The concept of being an infomediary, or trusted holder of personal information, had been made popular by John Hagel in his book Net Gain, and traction was growing to serve a very fragmented commercial landscape with hundreds of different online merchants.

Microsoft even had some traction getting a few merchants signed up and onboarding all of their online properties over the next year.

So what happened? well, a few things occurred that stymied Microsoft's plan (this is be conjecturing here...). First, 300+MM hotmail accounts does not equal 300M+ people; only a moderate (I am guessing here) percentage were loyal hotmail users. Many people didn't shop online or feel the need for quick login via passport. Online commerce became less fragmented with Amazon and ebay reaping the majority of the benefits. Merchants weren't a big fan of Microsoft knowing information about their customer and customer behavior, so merchant signups slowed. I also got the feeling that people didn't have enough comfort (with Microsoft or anyone else for that matter) to provide their personal information (including CC#, etc.) for a service that promoted the idea of information sharing, even if people knew that it was to be used for a specific purpose.

So, now they have scaled back the service and limited it to their own sites and a few close partners. My guess is that eventually the close partners will discontinue the service as well. For the few number of people who are active users, signing up directly with the merchant for continued service will be a small hiccup in their online lives. If you agree or disagree, please do let me know.

SI.com - MLB - Red Sox stun Yankees 10-3 to reach World Series - Thursday October 21, 2004 1:39AM

It hurts. It really hurts. The Sox have beat my beloved Yanks.

I do indeed wish Bosox the best of luck in the World Series, and thank them for a hard fight.

Read more about how the Red Sox stunned the Yankees 10-3 to reach World Series.

Even though I rooted for the Yanks up until 12:01, my hats off the the sox. My favorite quote from the above article was, "This was for Williams, Doerr and Pesky, for Yastrzemski and Yawkey, for Fisk and Rice and even Buckner and Nomar, just a few of the hundreds who suffered the pain inflicted by their New York neighbors in a rivalry that has become baseball's best." Indeed, it is among baseball's best.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Linking to people profiles within blogs

Steve Hall has a great post about Eliyon, a company which provides consolidated profie's of people's backgrounds, as aggregated from websites, press releases, and news articles.

I have used Eliyon dozens of times when trying to learn more about someone. It's a very helpful tool and I am happy to say that they even have a little background on me.

In Steve's post, he talks about having Eliyon linking to people profiles within blogs to help provide some context on the people the blog author is talking about. Kudos to Steve for a great idea. Hopefuly, Eliyon CEO, Jonathan Stern will be able to figure out a way to make this happen.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Jon Stewart kicks ass...

How should the media respond to the ongiong debate to help decide our next President? Jon Stewart has an answer and he delivers it with gusto on the CNN show, Crossfire. Watch the clip via BitTorrent.

In my mind, the clip is notable for two reasons:
1. He makes some interesting (and valid) points about the emphasis news programs put on theatrics at the expense of journalistic integrity.
2. He calls Tucker Carlson a dick on national TV. Good for him!

Whittling down host of choices

I am watching the Late Late Show (formerly with Craig Kilborn) as they go through an on-air interview process of sorts to determine the new host. An article on this process is available thanks to the Daily News. Personally, the guy who is on right now kinda sucks. I just had to say it somewhere.

Monday, October 18, 2004

PodCasting.. 100,000 links and growing...

Last Wednesday, guru Doc Searls asked the question, when will Google have more than 100,000 results for PodCasting. Last Wednesday it was sitting at 53,200. Today it is at 100,700. Talk about amazing growth. One question that still comes up in my mind is how RIAA and others will react if their music is shared via this method without compensation.

Check out Doc Searl's website here.

And a definition of Podcasting here.

4.6 posts per second

Sifry points out the rapid growth of posting in the blogosphere. the most interesting this is to see when spikes in posting occurred: Dean's Scream, Nick Berg beheading, conventions, and the kryptonite lock controversy to name a few. Check it out here:

Sifry's Alerts: Oct 2004 State of the Blogosphere: 4.6 posts per second

Star Wars figures getting bigger

I still prefer the original. Is it me or do Lando and Han just look too big? See the Action Figures here from Star Wars, as made in the 1970's and 1990's.

Bin Laden is in China?

I can't tell if the following story is real or not. The article has a number of typos, the story isn't covered in "mainstream" press, and the assertion that Bin Laden is in China seems somewhat farfetched. Just the same, who knows, maybe Bin Laden is in China.

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Get your facts right

FactCheck.org provides insight into the claims that politicians make. Take a look at the response to the VP Debate.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Very addictive game

An engineer at heart, I enjoyed this Bridge Building game very much. Enjoy.

Respect for Dangerfield

Rodney Dangerfield passed away today. R.I.P.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Charge it to my Kitty

I never thought I would see a Hello Kitty Debit Mastercard! But alas, the good folks at MasterCard have delivered. I am not the right demographic for this card, but it does say something about the niche markets and affinity groups the card issuers are entering.

Caffeinated Beer

I am in the midst of seeking out entrepreneurial ideas for a class. A classmate of mine humorously suggested I consider going after the holy grail of the alcohol industry: Caffeinated beer. I chuckled at the thought, but apparently, Budweiser has developed the product for real. Here is an article from CNN on the announcment.

It will be in slightly smaller 10 oz. cans and will be targeted at the 21 to 35 year olds who have started to try more types of drinks and have been slowly switching to liquor as their preferred beverage. Should be interesting if this goes the way of new coke or if it takes Budweiser in a new promising direction.