The mobile web has attracted a fair bit of major media attention… Fortune view it as “a clash of industries so momentous it threatens to make those other feuds look positively tame” (although, since the other fueds cited were along the lines of Paris Hilton vs Nicole Richie I’m not sure how big that claim is). The feud is supposed to be between carriers and internet companies such as Google and eBay: “Internet companies would like telecom networks, wireless networks in particular, to be more “Internet-like,” meaning they’ll begin to migrate away from a so-called walled garden approach on their wireless networks, and use the mobile Web as freely as they do on a PC.” The biggest protaganist appears to be Google, which is not only (reportedly) developing its own handset but will (probably) bid on spectrum to roll out its own service. Of course, the telcos and content/service companies don’t just clash, they often cooperate — although some partnerships are better than others.
The International Herald Tribune has an article on the burgeoning mobile internet as an opportunity, starting with recent moves by Apple and Google. But it then goes through an impressive list of start-ups moving into the mobile space, most of which we’ve reported on here but seeing them listed one after the other drives home just how much interest there is in the mobile marketplace.
The Chicago Tribune on the battle of web content providers to get onto the carrier deck. Despite the increasing access to the wider web, 4INFO sums up its situation: “If we had an application in the ‘What’s Hot’ section [a popular category on a carrier’s deck], we’d get tons of downloads on a given day. If not, there was virtually no traffic”. More interesting are the carrier attitudes: “We’re presented with a lot of content choices,” said Ted Woodbury, AT&T’s executive director of consumer data. “It’s fiercely competitive. At the end of the day, we have to evaluate if another sports provider is more appealing than ESPN. There are some brand elements that make it easy for us to pick them as a strategic partner.” He said that while a “sizable minority” of users go off-deck, customers mostly stay on-deck. AT&T has about 75 official content providers on its MediaNet platform, and the figure remains stable. And from Robin Chan with Verizon: “We aggressively track churn…How many times and how often on a given day is a clip viewed? If it’s popular we invest against that content; if not we move on.”
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