I attended the Big Hopes For Off Portal Panel as I think the move of mobile content off the carriers portal is going to be a significant part of the industry in the next few years or so. The panelists were Ian Blaine from thePlatform, Kelly Egan from Best Buy, Moira Jacobs from Xringer, Tim Saarela from WapOneLine, Are Traasdahl from Thumbplay and the moderator was Yuval Kossovsky, a journalist with Computerworld. That being said, Tim expressed what many people were probably thinking: “The off-portal name is a little misleading, because what we all want to and what we’re all trying to do is create a portal that is better than the carriers’.”
There was some disagreement as to the main problem of running a non-carrier portal…suggestions included:
–Education: According to Kelly the majority of US consumers don’t have a clue what mobile content is, let alone why they should want it or how they could get it.
–Billing Technology: Are said most people are using premium SMS as the billing mechanism, and a major problem with that is the billing leakage. “If you’re lucky you can bill 70% of them,” he said. “If you’re running seven figure advertising, you do want to bill for all your subscribers so you can get that money and put it back in education.” Tim put it slightly differently, saying that portals should have a more direct relationship with their customers, but that depended on the carriers. Using the carrot approach, he said that the portal’s customer relationship shouldn’t bother the carriers’ help desk.
–User Experience: Although it was pointed out that this isn’t an on portal or off portal problem, but a mobile problem.
When asked why off-portal could do a better job of selling content than the carriers, Kelly responded by claiming the revenue from the content would not justify the current marketing spend of the carriers. “The consumer knows that when they want some type of content to play on some type of device they go to some type of store to get this,” he said. “That’s the sweet spot. From there there is a halo effect that bleeds into online.”
Considering all the problems the carriers seem to be raising the panel was asked why don’t other portals try to bypass them completely? Tim responded: “There’s always the possibilty that the carrier will block you.”
Finally, I asked about .mobi. Did the panel think it would benefit the off-portal world or have no effect? “I believe that .com is the best for everything,” said Tim, and the others nodded in aggreement.
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