TORONTO – Wireless technology customers are ready to move beyond voice and text messaging applications to an increasingly more sophisticated mobile user experience. That was a key message delivered by several speakers at the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) “Work.Live.Play.” conference, held this week in Toronto.
Whereas text messaging was viewed as the lowest common denominator, from a technology perspective, to attract mobile consumers two to three years ago, today’s wireless customers desire a much richer user experience, said Dean Tseretopoulos, vice-president of interactive mobile solutions at MyThum Interactive during a panel discussion.
Toronto-based MyThum Interactive is a mobile technology enabler for media companies and marketing agencies, with a portfolio of clients ranging from Molson to MuchMusic. Tseretopoulos explained that a television broadcaster, for example, has information and content that it can drive to mobile consumers, in the form of video downloads.
“So [clients] are trying to find ways to repurpose the content they’re producing for consumers. There’s a desire to really push the envelope and to add more and more to the consumer experience,” he said. “A lot of companies have put themselves in a position now to actually start harvesting the mobile communities they’ve established.”
Speaking on the same panel was Kerstin Lack, director of product management at Rogers Wireless. She explained that her company’s current focus is primarily the youth and young adult markets, which continue to be the fastest growing segments in wireless.
“If you look at the youth segment in particular, they’ve already moved well beyond voice,” Lack said. “And if you look at what’s driving youth revenue growth, it’s data. We have forecasts that show the youth wireless spend on data will be doubling over the next two years.”
The youth-relevant opportunity encompasses a variety of wireless applications such as music, messaging, imaging, gaming, information access, and converged products and content, Lack said. She added that the idea is to package together the best data applications, content and device to ensure that everything speaks together.
According to Jason Offet, client director at Nokia Canada, the converged mobile device market is growing “big time”. However, to enable mobile customers to do more than voice, “we have to start making the mobile experience much more like the Internet experience that we’ve all become accustomed to,” Offet added.
Offet admitted that there has been a lot of lip service about bringing the Internet to mobile devices, but he stressed that Nokia is building technology into its handsets to handle Internet applications. Furthermore, Nokia’s approach with its N80 mobile computing device, as an example, was to incorporate capabilities from dedicated devices into one converged mobile device.
"IT'S NOT A GREAT BOAT AND DOESN'T LOOK GOOD ON THE HIGHWAY"
The building blocks are in place for delivering a converged mobile experience to consumers today, but work is still needed to bring all of the wireless applications, services and technology pieces seamlessly together. That was a key point made by Tejas Rao, Nokia Canada’s director of product and technology sales, during another panel discussion, titled “The Handset Battlefield: Building the Swiss Army Knife?”
Network interoperability is a major prerequisite for adding mobility to converged communications platforms, Rao explained. IP technology and digitization of services are driving the foundation of mobile convergence, and the next step involves access control and multi-rate capabilities of devices, according to Rao.
“What you have today is cellular technology driving a lot of your high-speed access for voice and data, but we also see the likes of wireless LAN and Bluetooth converging their radio capability in the devices. In the future evolution, we see things like broadcast TV being supported and driving multi-rate capabilities not only in the devices but also in the networks,” Rao said. “So to support that, we need to work with the industry to drive a set of standards to make sure there’s interoperability across all of these different networks.”
At the end of the day, wireless device suppliers need to make the mobile experience fairly simple for the end user. “If it isn’t simple, intuitive and ease to use, it will be harder for the end user to actually make that end-to-end experience something they want to do every day,” Rao said.
Another speaker on the “Handset Battlefield” panel disagreed with that session’s premise that mobile device manufacturers should be taking a Swiss army knife approach to handset development. Stephen Orr, director of national carrier sales for Motorola Canada, argued that consumers will not accept a one-device-fits-all approach.
“Trying to equate a handset or a mobile device to a Swiss army knife is kind of like saying you’re going to build an amphibious car — it’s not a great boat and it doesn’t look good on the highway,” Orr said.
His vision of the mobile communications industry is one of multiple devices and form factors that, together with the right applications, software and services, will provide a variety of users with a variety of user experiences. “Everybody has different experiences, different wants and needs”, Orr said, adding that Motorola’s portfolio of mobile devices, from its ultra-thin RAZR wireless phone to its PDA-type MotoQ device, is designed to cater to customers’ individual needs.
In Orr’s view, the next three to five years will see the mobile industry providing products and services to more sophisticated users with more sophisticated needs and very specific activities that they want to do with mobile devices.
From a content provider perspective, however, there are many challenges associated with delivering content to a fragmented market with many mobile device environments to support.
The gaming industry is an example of a market where device fragmentation presents a major challenge, said Gary Toste, senior vice-president, product and customer delivery, for Tira Wireless, a Toronto-based provider of mobile content deployment technology solutions. Toste spoke during a mobile entertainment workshop that focused on multimedia, text messaging, gaming and television applications.
The application porting costs alone for a major game launch can range between $50,000 and $250,000, according to Tira Wireless research. Toste added that market fragmentation is a concern for wireless application development in general.
“You can start with one application, and then you want to go to a hundred devices, so that’s a hundred different versions of that application. Then you add four languages. Then, if you want to take 20 applications out to the market place, you’re talking about thousands of (application) builds that you have to manage, to be able to deploy effectively in the market place,” Toste said.
Despite that, successful content publishers will be the ones who support all of a mobile operator’s devices in the early stages of a product launch in order to secure a top-deck position on those devices, according to Toste.
Linda Stuart is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
