October 28, 2009
By Michael Gurau - president of CEI Community Ventures
It is not news that smartphones have been the fastest growing segment of the mobile device industry.
The iPhone and its equivalents have dazzled both consume and industry alike with graphics, video and Web functionality simply not possible with their low-end brethren, the basic flip phones.
While smartphones will almost certainly live up to the hype and excitement, they only account today for 13 percent of the 270 million phones in the U.S. mobile device market.
And while it would be exciting to think that one day everyone will have a smart phone with Web access and all that this promises, it seems more likely that "dumb" phones will always have a place in the market, whether for those on limited budgets such as students, seniors who are not interested in Web functionality or ordinary mainstreamers who just do not want or need to make their portable phone a Web device.
Smart tone on dumb phone
So, apart from calling functionality, what can be done for the tens of millions of consumers who will stick with their not-so-smart phones?
Well, SMS is clearly already a big business today whether on smart or dumb phones, though text messages are limited to information search and communicating with friends or colleagues.
Presidential candidate Barack Obama's use of SMS to announce his vice president pick got quite a bit of attention, with the campaign crowing about getting some 700,000 mobile phone numbers. So is that it? Ordinary mobile phone as solely and separately a voice communication device and a text communication device?
How about marrying voice and text? Recently, a handful of companies – Foneshow, Cellecast and Sticher – have decided to combine text and voice into an integrated, interactive audio service.
The idea is this: audio is recorded, users invited to sign up usually by providing their mobile number, SMS delivers an alert to new programming, then audio plays.
There are two important markets for this type of service – group voice messaging and interactive audio broadcasting.
Group voice messaging can be thought of just like email or SMS – i.e., it is a one-to-many messaging system for voice. Want to send a voice message to 10 or 1 million of your friends? Group voice messaging can do it – record once, send many times.
Also, you have the possibilities of interactivity. It works like this. Record your message, create a group – like you would with email – to send your SMS alert, and send an SMS to alert the group to the message.
The SMS alert carries an embedded number which the recipients, whether dumb or smartphone users, click on and bingo – mobile phone as listening device.
The nine keys on the phone serves as playback and interactivity functionality keys: play, pause, rewind, forward to friend, reply and click to connect. It can be a consumer tool – for example, college students sending voice messages to friends and family – and a business too – for example, messages from the president, sales and marketing initiatives and service messaging. SMS and email can do this, but sometimes voice, especially tone and urgency, matters.
This same technology may be used for audio content broadcasters. Think television and talk radio personalities, musicians, comedians, sports announcers and news blasts.
Instead of broadcasting to an unknown audience that cannot accurately be measured, you broadcast to a specifically identified group of phones. You know who is listening, when they are listening and for how long they listen.
The same measurable performance that the Web and search offers is now available to a broadcast industry that is struggling to repurpose itself for the Web.
Best of all, you have the interactivity and virality described for group voice messaging.
Can you hear me?
Mobile phones have their constraint: fixed-minute plans may necessitate that audio publishers to develop short-form programming for one to three minutes so that consumers do not burn all their minutes listening to their favorite talk radio host's 30-minute program.
Also, while consumers can use their earplugs or Bluetooth to their car speakers just as they do with their MP3 players, they may resist long-form programming simply to avoid having to hold the phone to their ear for that long.
Still, there is plenty of opportunity for "content snacks" in the world of both group voice messaging and audio broadcasting.
A two- minute post game show, a minute-long radio show synopsis, a two-minute music clip or a 30-second joke of the day are all examples of great applications for short-form audio that works on any phone.
The excitement over smartphones is entirely justified. But let us not forget that there are some meaningful market opportunities that have yet to be exploited in the marriage of voice and text.
http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/4506.html
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