Celebrating 1000 Pearls: Real Services Making Money on Mobile

I was invited to deliver a presentation on the future of mobile services for the 3G LTE (Long Term Evolution) conference in London last week. As a wonderful coincidence, that conference marked the unveiling of my 1,000th Pearl. My Pearls are real mobile services, making money somewhere, each described on one Powerpoint Slide. I use the Pearls to illustrate various theories and concepts in the business of mobile telecoms, as well as the human sides of what becomes popular. From the very first Pearl shown in Vienna in September 2000, to this, my 1000th Pearl shown in London, I’ve averaged 164 Pearls per year, or almost 14 new Pearls every month. I think this is a good point to stop and take stock and remember.

It all started in June 2000. I was heading the 3G Business Consultancy Department for Nokia. We had a lot of network engineering consulting skill, and of business modelling skill amongst my consultants. But I felt that our stories were too dry. I wanted us to “spice up” the stories. To make them more “real” and relevant to the audience. I asked my department to collect real, live, commerically launched mobile services for all in the department to use in our various presentations and business modelling workshops.

By the time I left Nokia 1 October 2001, I had shown 154 Pearls in my various Nokia presentations to public audiences at conferences worldwide. Something big had started. Those first Pearls were collected by members of my department, a group effort, and unfortunately I did not record who found what, so I only am able to recall a few of the actual consultants who discovered them. Since I left Nokia, the next 846 Pearls were all discovered by me alone. But lets start from the beginning.

Started with Ringing Tone Chart

The first Pearl shown in public was the world’s first Ringing Tone chart – a weekly Top 5 at the time, on a radio station in Finland. That Pearl was first shown in Vienna in September 2000. What almost all laughed at, and thought was only a silly Finnish idea – is now a mainstay of the music recording industry and for example in Britain ringing tones are permanently calculated into the music sales charts. How wrong we were. Ringing tones kept on surprising all experts, and by 2005 generated 5.1 billion dollars worth of worldwide sales, 12 times more than iTunes. I am pretty sure this “first Pearl” was actually discovered by Merja Kaarre, one of Nokia’s most senior 3G consultants, who was very good at spotting them.

At that same conference in Vienna, I also showed a Pearl on the world’s first advertising-sponsored free mobile news service. Funny that we’ve had advertising almost as long as ringing tones, and mobile advertising is worth much less than a billion dollars while ringing tones are worth five. You’d have thought it was the other way round.

Tomi and his Dating Services

The two favourite Pearls from 2000 were definitely the “Pickup at the Traffic Light” and the “Attraction Server”. The Traffic Light idea was this. In Finland all car owners are in a public record, based on their car license plate number. That service was automated for SMS queries in 2000. So you could sit in a traffic light, see a pretty woman stopped next to you. Look at the license plate number of her car, send that via SMS to the licence bureau, and receive the name of the owner of the car. Check that it is a woman’s name – you don’t want to accidentially flirt with the husband – and then send that name to the phone number directory inquiries, still via SMS. You would receive the phone number of the girl in the car next to you! Then put on your best charm and send her that romantic text message…

A funny story that I enjoyed telling. But a more bizarre follow-up came from a trip to Singapore in 2004. The local newspaper, Straits Times, reported on a similar service about to launch in Asia, by an UK based provider, SMS Messaging Link. This required car owners to register their cars for the service, after which drivers could send text messages by typing in the license plate number. Cool. The newspaper said that in the UK they had tens of thousands of cars signed up for this kind of service – where the owner of the car registered his/her car license for short code SMS messaging, and that they generated over a million SMS text messages per month. You never know!

And the most favoured Pearl from 2000 and into 2001 was the Attraction Server. This was my first “Top Hit” that was actually requested by members in my audiences. The Attraction Server is a simple dating service. I need to have the number of the girl I’m attracted to. I don’t send her a message directly, rather I send a message with her phone number to the Attraction Server. She gets an anonymous message saying “a man is in love with you. If you would like to know if that is the man you are also in love with, send the mobile phone number of the man you love to our server and we’ll arrange the match”. If that was me, we’d get the match. But if she’s in love with another man – then that other man would get a message that “someone is in love with you…” The ultimate chain mail message.

In 2000 our department discovered many more fascinating Pearls. One – the payment of parking by SMS text messages in Norway – generated years of follow-ups as ever more sophisticated solutions were rolled out from Croatia to Austria to Finland, the UK, and back to Norway, and now to South Korea where they are designing intelligent parking places to guide drivers to the nearest place. I faced arguments in some Scandinavian conferences on whether the mobile parking solution was actually invented in Norway, or in Sweden, or by a Finnish company trialing it in Sweden, etc.

But the funniest story around the Mobile Parking Pearl was in Singapore in 2004. I ran a full-day mobile service creation workshop for the IDA and the wireless services industry for the region, and I ended my morning session with my “best success story” and a longer case study around that Pearl of the mobile parking with remarkably successful usage stats from Croatia to Estonia. After I finished one person lifted his hand and asked what I thought of the Singapore mobile parking trial. He told me that as of that very morning the Singapore mobile parking service had shut down. Talk about being in the wrong place at the right time! Of course I quickly seeked guidance from various colleagues and experts in Singapore, and found that since in Singapore most parking is parking garages, rather than at metered parking on the street, the SMS-to-parking meter type of success of congested European cities had not taken off in Singapore. Since 2004 I’ve used this as a good case study
of how there are no guarantees in the mobile services industry.

2001 The Start of Something Very Big Indeed

In 2001 we started to see the first elements of TV-mobile convergence. MTV launched its pioneering Videoclash show, where viewers were given the chance to vote for the next video, by SMS. Who knew. Today that concept powers dozens of TV stations around the world – some earning as much as 70% of their revenues from premium-SMS, and by 2005 SMS-to-TV revenues were over 1.2 billion dollars. I do remember this Pearl was found by Stephan Gerrits – one of our younger party-going 3G consultants, and had that MTV attitude to the Pearl. It was definitely one of my favourites for 2001. Yet honestly at the time, I did not think SMS voting would ever grow to be big.

And 2001 saw the first of my many pets-oriented Pearls. In Japan, Bowlingual released its dog language-to-human translator, via mobile phone and cellular dog collar. As the joke went, what does the dog say? “I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry”

2002 from cows to tamagotchis

March of 2002 saw the next of my Best Hits. Bessie the Cow. My good friend Mark Weisleder of Bell Canada actually told this story at the Customer Retention Conference in London in February, and of course I stole the story. And I really put myself into the story, acting out Bessie. You see, Bessie had become the first cow in Canada to be a cellular subscriber. Not quite intelligent enough to use a mobile phone, but Bessie had a beeper around her neck. When she heard the beeping, she knew it was time to go home to be milked. And cows being the herd animals that they are, as Bessie was the lead cow, the other cows would follow. The farmer never had to go calling for the cows to come home. He only beeped Bessie. And yes, I did the Mooooo with this Pearl

And April 2002 brought the story of the 5 second video clips. I told of J-Phone in Japan and its bizarre Sha-Mail video clips on mobile. I really didn’t think this would catch on. Of course as phones grew more powerful in memory and processor and battery, the clips grew longer. But yes, this was the very beginning of all that we now know as video blogging, SeeMeTV, user generated TV, citizen journalism, etc. It had started in Japan in 2001.

In October 2002 I discussed the virtual girl friend/boy friend for the first time. I pointed out this was the rebirth of the Tamagotchi. The girl friend needed loving messages every day else it would not be happy, just like a Tamagotchi.. Other virtual friend Pearls in 2002 included the virtual dance tutor from South Korea and the Dinosaur game from France and UK.

2003 a more money-oriented focus

In 2003 I started to notice MVNOs often with very surprising areas of focus. The first was Twins Mobile the fan club of the Twins teen pop duo in Hong Kong. A pop music band as an MVNO? That made me think. But also there was Super Stable the horse breeding videogame also from Hong Kong as an MVNO. I also reported on Virgin Mobile failing in Singapore, MTV launching in Sweden, and Finnish hamburger restaurant chain, Hesburger also launching as MVNO

In May 2003 in London I first discussed the lottery on mobile from Finland. This ended up being the first instance where someone from an audience came to see me later to thank me. When I presented in Tel Aviv at the IMIF event, and showed this Pearl, someone in the audience went and developed this service for the Israel Lottery. And when I returned to speak at Telecom Israel the next year, that person came to shake my hand and thank me in person. That really made this Pearls business seem real and valuable. If you guys can make money from these ideas, then it really does make it worthwhile.

In May 2003 I found one of my “big ideas” – Waiting Tones, ie Ringback Tones from South Korea. For at least the next year, I told everybody to get these waiting tones launched, and that it would generate more revenues for the industry than MMS. And I was proven right. I awarded Waiting Tones my Pearl of the Year award for 2003.

There were more weird stories among Pearls of course. In May of 2003 in Calgary, I told of the Haunted House finder, location-based, that had been launched in Japan. Meanwhile in South Korea a fly-repellent sound had been introduced to the mobile phone. In 2003 we had alcohol meters, love meters and horoscopes on Pearls.

In November 2003 I told of the surprising innovation from South Korea – that Ricky Martin had released six tracks of his upcoming album – and offered them to Koreans as MP3 files for download to 3G phones. That is what started the snowball that now in 2006 is crushing the iPod and iTunes. Full-track music sold to mobiles? Yes, it was only three years ago, invented in Korea.

Then there is the first true killer app for 3G. Another of my all-time best requested Pearls. Yes, a true killer application. Drei/Hutchison in Austria, launched “3 Visuel” as a bundle of SMS text messages, MMS and video calls but no voice. What use is a videocall without voice? How can this be a killer app? Ha, but consider its target audience: the hearing impaired. If you can’t hear or speak, you have no use whatsoever for a 2G phone. But a videophone? Sure, now it becomes a REASON to buy the phone. In fact, you’ll need two, as for every hearing impaired, there is a friend or relative who can hear but knows sign language. Understandibly this was my Christmas Pearl for 2003

2004 from Alpha Users to Communities

By 2004 I had started to monitor the developing world more closely, and reported for example about the Phone Ladies in Bangladesh. Another big hit was the story of the tree in Senegal. In one village where there was no cellular network coverage, a farmer noticed that he could get phone coverage if you climbed to the tree in his yard. The enterprising farmer set up a “phone booth” with a ladder. Villagers would come and climb into the tree, pay cash to the farmer, and make their calls. These kinds of stories really make me happy to be able to talk about our industry, and how much a simple service may be able to change lives. Phone Ladies were first explained in Stockholm, while the Senegal Tree was first discussed in Hong Kong.

And at the Marketing event in London in April, 2004, I first discussed Alpha Users in public. A year later this would become such a huge marketing story in telecoms, that I was invited to deliver the Strategy Keynote to the world’s biggest telecoms event, 3GSM World Congress, about Alpha Users. Since then Alpha Users have become the single most important target customer group in all of telecoms – with literally dozens of operators deploying Alpha User analysis and launch marketing managers insisting this is the best innovation in marketing of all time, that there is no going back to the marketing stone age of “early adopters” etc.

In July of 2004, at Oxford, I first discussed Habbo Hotel, the virtual playground and online internet social networking site, which collects payments via premium SMS. A true precursor of things to come, in so many ways – as now in 2006 these kinds of mobile social networking services earn 3.45 billion dollars worldwide. Funny. Digital community services would eventually turn into my fourth book, Communities Dominate Brands with Alan Moore; we made Habbo one of its case studies.

2005 selected highlights

February of 2005 saw the next evolution from SMS-to-TV chat, and SMS-to-TV dating and SMS-to-TV gaming. I selected SMS-to-TV Rap from Finland as my Pearl of the Month. This is for all the young poets and Eminen/50 cent wannabes, who wanted to send rap to TV via premium SMS. Paying a premium of 18 times more than person-to-person SMS prices in Finland. Sad but true

In May of 2005 in Singapore, I first discussed the most entertaining statistic to date – that 60% of mobile phone owners take their phones physically to bed with them. This invariably brings giggles from the audiences. I’ve discussed this stat at every presentation for the past year and a half.

The most recent Pearls are too fresh to really separate which are the true diamonds. But we do have the 1,000th Pearl which deserves special mention. The 1000th Pearl was Danseband Jukebox from Norway. A most unlikely candidate, yet this broadcast TV show has set the world record for highest viewer participation via SMS voting, with over 56% of its total viewership sending votes. What is so strange about a music show gaining viewer participation? Well, this TV show is targeting only the retired viewers in Norway, it has no viewers under the age of 55. Yes, more than half of these viewers have sent their requests of what that kind of Tango or Cha-Cha or Waltz, that live dance orchestra should play next. So who says SMS is only for teenagers.

1000 Pearls. By now there have been many a speech organizer who has requested a “Pearls” presentation, from the Symbian service developers in London to the Vodacom Wireless Application Service Developer community in Johannesburg. If you ever think that you enjoy seeing me discussing these Pearls, I can honestly tell you, it is more my pleasure to share them with you. I love this industry and thoroughly enjoy sharing our success stories. And now I look forward to sharing the next thousand Pearls with the industry.

Source- http://www.the3gportal.com