Motricity is hard at work churning out smartphone offerings that their carrier customers may potentially like to adopt. The latest announced today is called MobileCast, which enables carriers to send offers, coupons and other deals to customers under the guise of a helpful widget or application.
The carriers are in an sweet position because they still have the ability to influence which services a consumer adopts — by preloading it on to the phone, or recommending it in advertisements. So, discovering it won’t be the issue, but ultimately, it will face stiff competition from the thousands of applications available on the various smartphone platforms that offer similar services.
Motricity likes to think of the MobileCast as a helpful service for consumers to discover new content, applications, goods and services, without having to search to hard. Depending on the smartphone platform, it could be an Android widget that sits on the phone’s homescreen, showing the time and the weather, and a recommendation for Pandora. On the iPhone, a user would receive push notifications. On Windows Phone 7, the application would be represented as a tile, listing the most-recent offer, and on BlackBerry, it would appear as an alert on the homescreen. Motricity’s Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Jim Ryan described another scenario in which the application would help the carrier sell content, or provide highly targeted marketing and promotional messages. For instance, if you download a chess game, it could recommend a new book released on the subject for 25 percent off. If you click on the book, it would show that you are highly interested in chess, and then may recommend buying tickets to see the chess championships. The book and the tickets could be bundled together for a total of 30 percent off.
Motricity provides all the back-end technology to the carrier for the service to work, but it will be up to the carriers to come up with the promotions or discounts. Internationally, Motricity may play a slightly different role, by providing a full-service, including aggregating the content deals, Ryan said.
AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon Wireless are Motricity’s two largest customers, however, no customers have signed up for the service. Ryan says it will be the company’s practice going forward to first launch a product, and then to sign up customers as the Bellevue, Wash.-based company completes its transition from a professional services-driven organization to a products-based company.

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