Usemime - Market Developments

“It’s the recreation of the Internet, it’s the recreation of the PC story and it is before us—and it is very likely it will happen in the next year.”  Eric Schmidt (Davos 2008)

While the growth of Mobile Internet services has been slow to evolve it seems clear that the key enablers to growth are now in place. Networks are of sufficient quality, devices are delivering an enhanced browsing experience and operators are offering transparent fixed rate data plans. Equally important are the efforts by key consumer brands to migrate their services to mobile. While mobile content services have provided a profitable if niche revenue stream for the last five years, future growth will be delivered by Mobile Internet services.

The challenge for operators in this environment is to deliver a service that makes it easy for their customers to access what will be an ever-increasing range of services. Maintaining a “walled-garden” of operator defined services while limiting access to off-portal services (either through prohibitive pricing or restrictive access) will simply inhibit mobile internet usage and the associated revenue. Instead operators should seek to build a service that will become the mobile internet access point of choice for users. To achieve this, operators must implement a flexible portal framework that provides for the creation and promotion of operator sponsored services and that provides ease of access to the ever increasing number of independent mobile internet services. The deployment of a portal that can deliver this will ensure that operators can maintain a direct relationship with users accessing the mobile internet while simultaneously facilitating use of a broader range of services.

Key content and brand suppliers can continue to work closely with the operator to deliver on-portal applications that deliver incremental revenues. Separately, revenue growth from increased data usage will be delivered as users access their own favourite mobile internet services. These services may be completely independent of the operator and their content partners, yet ideally users will access them directly from the operator portal home page.

Inevitably the choice of available services and the usage patterns of users will change over time. Services that are popular today are likely to be replaced quickly as new innovation translates into service delivery. Therefore the key requirement for operators is to have a portal platform in place that can leverage these new innovations quickly. In developing UseMime, Trust5 has recognised that it is impossible for one company to deliver the breadth of services that users demand. Therefore the focus of development has been on a core application that can meet these dynamic market needs on an ongoing basis.