Orange UK: Mobile Broadband Roars!

Orange UK, one of the large carriers in the country with 15.8m mobile subscribers, has released its "Fifth Digital Media Index", containing a set of interesting numbers on the data uptake on their network, and it makes for intriguing reading!

The carrier recorded a whopping 4,125% (!) increase in data use over dongles using their mobile network in the last 12 months with dongle subscriptions growing by 504%. Data use from handset increased by 108% and that, I might add, without the help of the iPhone (which is exclusive to O2 in the UK). The increase from dongles will be connected to a big push this offering has seen in the UK (as in other countries) over the past period. Carriers have been and are promoting these aggressively, helping uptake of mobile broadband significantly.

Here are some highlights from the report:

• Music and video downloads increased both by 38%.
• Games only grew by 8% (but at least they grew; anecdotally, some other carriers recorded sometimes dramatic drops in take-up) to a total of 770,000 downloaded games, which equates to a market share of 23% of all UK games downloads (the total UK games market would hence be 3.35m downloads for the year with Orange claiming top spot). From the top 10 downloaded games in 2008, 8 were part of the carrier's embed programme, which shows - again - that users appear more comfortable if they can try it out before (embedded games normally are trial versions).
• Social network use over mobile increased by 129% in page impressions per month and 48% in unique users. The monthly average number of pages per user was 397. In terms of popularity of social networks, Orange's Mark Watt-Jones (@MWJ) fed us additional bits via the Twittersphere: Facebook dominates, Bebo is significant, MySpace less so and Twitter grows very quickly (what was the Oprah moment in the UK?)
• An average of 386,000 GB of data have been transferred via dongles and handsets per month.
• Mobile search grew by 120% with 45% of the results being "off-portal", i.e. outside Orange's domains.
• Good old SMS still looking good, too: 19% growth with 1.7bn sent every month.

Another key point Mark brought us via Twitter: 99% of access to social network sites came from non-smartphones. This is quite noteworthy indeed as it arguably shows that mobile data usage now transcends beyond the power users on sophisticated handsets and also that content leads the uptake: give people compelling content, and they'll use it. Mobile data for the masses seems to have arrived!

Mobile Games on Twitter

Birds (sic!) do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, and now even Oprah (have you been there before her? Check here)... so: what about mobile games companies tweeting? Now, there's many of them already out there (see list below) but how much sense does it make (that it makes sense for your business I demonstrated recently)?

Looking at a few of them, you'll find anything from very 20th-century in-your-face selling (probably not so efficient) to enlisting (or trying to) followers to help in everything from game design, logo colours to community components that should go into the next iteration of the website. And it is in the crowdsourcing where I see a bit of potential: most mobile games companies are fairly small, and money to spend on sophisticated research, focus groups and what not is scarce or AWOL. If one can draw on the opinions and insights of friendly followers to learn about their (the consumers') preferences, this is surely all good. Since Oprah is on there now, too, there is even a chance that your followers will not only be fellow industry professionals...

Although, even to the industry, Twitter is as powerful a tool to the mobile games people as to anything else (maybe with the exception of the global car-wash industry - everyone who's been to CTIA Wireless will understand the reference): it is a great channel to get the message out to people who matter to you (and who actually show that they care by following you), which puts trade marketing (even if not in the strict sense of the word) onto the list on why you should do it.

So here's a (surely incomplete - please excuse and feel free to add!) list of mobile games companies who tweet:

EA: @eamobile

Gameloft: @gameloft

Connect 2 Media (yes, that's us): @connect2media

Glu: @glumobile

Oasys Mobile: @oasysmobile

Hands-On Mobile: @handsonmobile

Digital Chocolate: @dchocgames

I-Play: @iplaymobile

Namco: @namconetworks

Tag Games: @taggames

Fishlabs: @fishlabs

Gamevil: @gamevil

Distinctive Developments: @distinctivegame

Lemonquest: @lemonquest

Kiloo: @jacob_kiloo

Oh, and I'm out there as @vhirsch...

Twitter Can Save Your Business or How Virgin Media uses Modern Customer Service Tools (off-topic)

This is not strictly within the realms of topics I normally cover in this blog but it certainly deserves wider notice.

We run a game development, publishing and distribution business and, just before Christmas, moved offices. Our ISP is Virgin Media, part of the Branson empire that bought erstwhile ISP NTL a while ago. Virgin was quite forthcoming to accommodate our move and were, I'd say, happy that we would stay with them. They needed - or so they said - 6 weeks to make the full switch but told us to accommodate us with a DSL line in the interim. Whilst this is stretching for the HQ of a digital company, it was only for a short time so, hey, roll with the punches...

Then we were told that all would actually take "a little" longer. A little became end of May 2009; this would have been nearly 6 months from our office move. Impossible! Software engineers, deployment teams, sales force, marketing, project management all over a DSL line? Our worst nightmare!

That Friday night, after I had heard this - fairly solemnly delivered - verdict of the Virgin customer service, I vented my frustration on Twitter, namely by addressing a tweet to Sir Richard Branson, entrepreneur extraordinaire, customer service evangelist and face of Virgin. Sir Richard was at the time, I believe, on an around-the-world trip with his various Virgin airlines...

Then the power of Twitter, ordinarily available only to the digital and real-life celebrities with North of 25,000 followers, also showed its might to me: inside 12 hours, I had direct messages via Twitter from the MD of Virgin Media and their Sales Director for the business division of which Manchester is part. By Sunday I had their mobile numbers and arranged for a call with the MD on Monday morning. By Tuesday, we had a tentative date (20 March), which was then bettered to 17 March. And as of 1pm of that day, our business was, well, back in business (the engineer delivering the router et al was actually a full half hour early). Within 15 minutes our IT manager, sys admin and my good self were peppered with careful inquiries from various sources within Virgin asking if all was in order. Wow!

Besides this being a nice war story, it does show what Twitter can be used for: Virgin Media will have identified a need to address the - anecdotally very poor - customer service levels of the NTL business they acquired. Now, one could of course (and rightfully) claim that I should not have needed to go to one of Britain's most successful entrepreneurs to get a response from somewhere in the bowels of this organization. On the other hand did they manage to demonstrate in exemplary fashion the passion and dedication they have: I mean, an MD of a large ISP twittering you on a weekend? Impressive.

Whilst this does not solve the root of any general customer service issues Virgin Media may (or may not) have, it does allow their management to manage change from the top, and it does - whilst not replicable (at least not through MD treatment) - allow them to accelerate sensitivity and awareness for such issues within the organization whilst displaying (and in a convincing fashion) their will to improve (and don't we all happily fall for a show of good will and effort!).

The only question that remains is whether Sir Richard has a Twitter Manager or if he actually forwarded my tweet to his lieutenants himself... I do thoroughly thank everyone involved there; a great example of how it can work, a great showcase on what Twitter can do to help your business, faith restored!

Twitter Raises More Cash

I and many others had been speculating if they did or did not need new money (founder Biz Stone says they didn't) and amidst people scraping together money, fearing long, cold winters of recession, Twitter raised a more than respectable third round of $35m led by tier-1 VCs Benchmark and IVP. This can, according to some sources, still grow as existing investors want to protect their dilution (which would make sense, I suppose). Congrats, folks!

According to Stone's blog, they do not need the money. However, they felt the offer was so good that they could not say "no"... As they would say...

What is it for then? And, ah yes, they want to use some of the capital to "help build their revenue-generating projects". And that's about time, too! On the other hand, let's not be too derogative: they have been growing at an amazing speed (the numbers I had were 780% last year; Biz Stone now ups them to more than 900%) and with the media making the right noises and even secondary Twitter businesses being funded (which often do have at least the hint of a "how-to-make-money" set-up though), there certainly is something in this. That Twitter has its uses for businesses is a tale that you can read about from hundreds, including the traffic kings Guy Kawasaki and Peter Cashmore (Mashable); the Twittersphere is full of "top-20-business-uses" style how-to guides. 

How will Twitter itself monetize on this? Rumours are flying as always and they range from paid-for corporate accounts to advertising to, presumably, big-media tie-ins. There is so much room to look when you are commanding this big and active a user base that there a plenty of angles; the Twitterati may be younger and poorer than the average (there's recently been a "Twitter census")but they are at home in the new social media and they are ultra-mobile with a higher proportion on laptop and mobile usage. Welcome to the future then! I had suggested a few possible avenues previously; and if even I can do it, I am sure they can do it... ;-)

Oh, and if you wish, follow me on Twitter here.

Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg

With the conference season upon us, I shall be trekking to my former hometown of Hamburg on Monday to join the good folks from the Casual Games Association for their European iteration of Casual Connect. It looks like a pretty cool show with lots of interesting stuff going on, in particular also on social gaming and cross-platform initiatives: they have numerous panels and keynotes on both and a whole strand on mobile. Interesting speakers, too: Rob Unsworth (Digital Chocolate), Ami Ben-David (Oberon/I-Play), Philippe Dao (Gameloft) are there plus an interesting panel with Fishlabs' Michael Schade and Handy Games' Christopher Kassulke on the same panel (their two companies had a little bit of a tiff recently). I'll be there to elaborate a bit more on mobile social gaming... Fingers crossed.

If you are there or close, drop me a line, a tweet (vhirsch) or whatever else. I'll try to post my impressions in between but it might need to wait (day jobs turn into night jobs during conference seasons, you see...).

Twitter on the Money Trail again...

Twitter is this phenomenon of which some people say it is the business that never was. Not that Twitter never was but that it never was a business... which is why they apparently need fresh money, or more specifically $20m, or so it is said (see also here) The valuation? A cool $250m. A lot, you say? Well, they allegedly recently turned down a $500m acquisition offer from Facebook, so it's a bargain!

Now, one of the issues they are facing is (never mind the unresolved business model) that a) they need to bulk up on infrastructure to cater for the 750%+ growth in 2008 and b) (OK, there are probably more reasons) they are trying to bring back SMS notifications to the UK (which it stopped last summer claiming it cost them up to $1,000 per user p.a.). And on the latter I wonder why: does anyone still uses this? I am using Twitterberry, cooler users use any one of a plethora of iPhone clients, and there are enough clients for "other" phones out there, too. It is more convenient, more powerful, a better interface and - for Twitter - much, much cheaper. If they are not satisfied with it, shouldn't they perhaps invest some $100k to build a Twitter client for all phones? I mean, it's not THAT complex...

As to business model, I am fairly confident that they will be able to translate this staggering amount of traffic into $$$. Their recent acquisition of Summize, which provides a newly introduced search option for Twitter, is one step. My hunch would be that they will utilize some of the momentum their growth afforded them will allow them to acquire some of the value-adding services (GigaOM names Twitpic and Stockwits) as well as ad-funded clients (e.g. Twitterific serves you - on the free version - an ad per hour of use).

Oh, and yes, I am a fan and Twitterer. Follow me here (vhirsch). And, no, if you're an investor, Stephen Fry's account on why this is so great will not necessarily convince you it makes sense (although he is VERY enthusiastic about it) ;-)

Twitter's pains & (chance of) gains

I have been dealing with Jaiku and Twitter, the micro-blogging machines, a lot recently (see here, here and here). Today though, I stumbled across an article that put a rather different twist to it, and it makes you wonder... The piece is written by a mother of 3 daughters who tries to use Twitter as a mass communication tool (broadcast SMS) only to be utterly frustrated as none of her "super-communicating" daughters takes it up - too complicated, too onerous, too cumbersome, too - as one academic has it - surveillance-style.

Now, is that so? It would counter my (borrowed) argument of the intrinsic attraction of objects to social circles around such objects. It doesn't seem to work with daughters though... Well, I wonder: The mom, a tech-savvy NY Times journalist, tries to put Twitter to a use, namely to shorten communication with her 3 daughters (no need to having to tell each of them - separately - that she is on the way to XYZ). However, the object of interest to each of the daughters is very different to the ones of the others (cardigan, pizza, shopping, ...). So, no stumbling block after all: Twitter, et al are for people who group around a common object, which must be of common interest (e.g. the status and availability of black cardigans in the NY youth scene), not around one that only seems to be common (mom). Mom only happens to be at a point of interlinking circles, different objects that all touch her; she is not - at least not in the examples elaborated upon in the article - the central object herself.

Adoption-wise, this does of course not make things easier as the Twitters of this world need to migrate user behaviour: fans of Cheshire golf clubs or the NY indie music scene, Parisian vernissage goers and Seattle jazz fans will all have had ways to communicate prior to Twitter's entry on stage; they need to be convinced that this is a superior tool to keep the community buzzing. And because there is slightly less vanity space involved (Twitter doesn't allow you nearly as much room to put your wares on display), the communication bit must be utterly compelling to pull people across. It is the only USP the concept has. And this explains why the take-up is not as quick as for other social media: this is the raw core of it, and the simple truth is - as we know never simple.

I am hopeful though that they'll find a way: object-centered sociality is the way!

Micro-Blogging et al... Are they Really There Yet?

I've been a fan of those "bloggers on speed" of the likes of Jaiku, Twitter, etc for a while but I am not entirely happy with the interfaces yet: the services live of proximity and timeliness in that is then that they unfold their true power. Otherwise, the old-fashioned web accessed from an old-fashioned computer with 10x more bandwidth and a proper keyboard might actually be superior. Mobile blogging however is relatively clunky so far. There are a few guys out there who offer mobile little J2ME apps, (mobile) browser plug-ins, widgets, you name it (see for some solutions here) but, let's face it, they're not really as slick and seamless as they could (and should?!) be. Tellingly therefore, both Twitter and (now Google-owned) Jaiku use SMS as the prevailing interface to communicate with the world through their networks via your mobile phone. Is that really it? Look at the Facebook Blackberry app: so slick in comparison!

UI, accessability and discovery are the key drivers for mass user adoption - and this what all social media lives of (apart, perhaps of the institution of marriage, which seemingly works best in micro-communities of 2), so why do they not tackle this bit more aggressively? The answer might be that, whilst they realize that mobile is a major contributor to their value-add when compared to other web apps, they are not actually mobile companies; they are web companies.

The idea of utilising the power of web 2.0 and its wealth of widgets and applets contributed by a gazillion of independent developers and fan boys might all be very well but it slows adoption: Facebook apps only became successful after Facebook itself was such a huge community, they did not drive that growth (although they now arguably contribute significantly). Therefore, it would seem to me, it would be required that the originators/owners of those networks contribute more energy and resource into optimizing the user interfaces to use the actual service before falling back on third-party add-ons. Alas, it is impossible to find a Google widget (for iGoogle or Google Desktop) even for Jaiku, which Google acquired. Tellingly, the only available widget was produced by fans... There's quite a bit to be done, I think...

Location, location, location: The future of mobile social networks

What a title, huh? Following the hype on the Internet with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and all the others, social networks started to see traction on mobile, too. Jaiku (acquired by Google) showed the way. Twitter's next move is waiting to happen. Plazes is waiting in the wings. And then there are all the others still flying under the radar (or, in Silicon Valley speak, operating in stealth mode). These would include people like French Mobiluck and German student-come-entrepreneurs from aka-aki. There is also Finnish venture Ironstar Helsinki whose MoiPal combines mobile, social networks and games.

Most of these companies attempt a rather wonderful thing, namely to bring the networks back into the real world by combining it with location-based (or should one better say: location-sensitive) components. Mobiluck scored early successes with a Bluetooth application that scans the immediate vicinity for other users; think Saudi girls quite literally under wraps having the opportunity to contact that OMG guy on the other side of the club... Mobiluck tells us they scored more than 750,000 downloads of their application, and all with the most basic of seed funding and without marketing. Impressive!

Unfortunately, very little is being published about the actual success of these initiatives. Facebook got some coverage over the release of their Blackberry client, Jaiku more or less went silent since the acquisition by Google (probably working hard to integrate with other Google goodies), Mobiluck and aka-aki is in closed betas, MoiPal continues to grow its proposition but doesn't engage in much PR so far either (some coverage here though). Twitter seems to get their heads down and work (a brief evangelizing piece in the Guardian was about it). Plazes holds a "camp" in Berlin later this month to develop its propositions further but doesn't tell us much more either...

On a strategic level, it may be expected that a couple of online and other media players without a footprint in the space might feel inclined to gobble up some of these guys: if Google leads the way (as they do with Jaiku), others may feel compelled to follow. So where's the big thing?

Social networks are about interaction. Facebook started to gain traction because US college students had an opportunity to organize their social lives. In the US, the relative penetration of broadband is high, whilst advanced mobile use may have to catch up with some European (and Asian) countries. However, the links always are somewhere in the real world, and mobile phones offer the opportunity to actually link back to some real-world beacons, a simple yet incredibly powerful one being location (isn't it so much more exciting to liaise with that hot someone if you know that he/she is within a couple of hundred yards from where you are?). Your mobile is always in your pocket (yes, check now), and it carries the inherent possibility to identify your geographical location right now. Simple, huh? However, simplicity requires that speed, ease of use and reliability of the service are a given. They are the match points - next to absolute reach of course.

The integration of currently existing tools, most prominently IM, is a given here, and most of the companies mentioned above provide for integration of MSN Messenger (or Windows Live Messenger as it is now known) already. And this makes a lot of sense as it is a convenient and now incredibly established way of communication between friends. The integration of IM into mobile social networks also promotes the convergence of the Internet as it is (or was?) known and mobile devices. People who use IM are normally always online whenever they are on their computers. Extending it to mobile is quite literally a no-brainer and moreover the easiest gate of entry: it is nothing new to users, and it adds a lot of convenience to mobile users.

Technically, triangulation (using signal strength with base stations) seemed to have been the game initially. However, as this was too tough to do (deep integration with every carrier, and for rather sensitive data), everyone from early leaders (remember ZagMe?) all the way to Jaiku, Twitter, etc relied and relies on the crudest of things, namely SMS. Facebook has a rudimentary WAP site and a rather cool Blackberry app but then? Mobiluck uses a combination: WAP site, web access plus Bluetooth (a downloadable app using the handsets' Bluetooth functionality). This is promising as it utilizes handset-based features, which does away with long-winding negotiations with every carrier and a much easier available dataset of location data. Now, does it also experiment with a deeper integration with everyone's new favourite feature, namely GPS (see here for the latest on the hype)? Let's hope so! And let's also hope that this will be only step 1 of many to make social networks truly social again -- by interacting with real people in real life contexts.

Google goes "livestreaming", acquires Jaiku

Now, this is not strictly mobile BUT then it is considering that the target of which I report here today is heavily using mobile as a tool to feed its community, namely SMS (plus web and IM). It morphs online and offline worlds (nicknamed "bothline"; see here), and mobile is a huge component of this.

Anyway, Google, it was announced, has acquired the good folks from Jaiku. For those not that familiar with the radically new web 2.0 applications: Jaiku is a Twitter competitor where you basically "speed-blog" or "live-stream". Jaiku adds proximity settings: users in the same area can/will be able to get in touch with each other and interact.

At PICNIC'07, I recently had the pleasure of listening to Jaiku's co-founder, Jyri Engestrom (plus the good guys from Twitter, Plazes, Dopplr and Hyves), talking about the relevance of applications such as Jaiku. There is a video of the session available here.

It is (still) all about relevance and context. Jyri observed that context evolves around objects (such as office, Manchester United, kite-surfing, babies, red Bordeaux, and, yes, location...). The object defines the (social) context: you might be interested in the capability of webservers in your professional environment and discuss this wholeheartedly with someone else with who you would not have a single point of mutual interest outside of work. Change the object, change the context. Jyri (in his rather interesting blog) calls this object-centered sociality (yes, he is a sociologist).

Jaiku supposedly helps making focus on any object easier as it provides quick and universally accessible tools to see the activity streams of your contacts. The mobile version does this by getting those streams directly into your phone's contacts. Cool stuff.

However, why would Google buy them (apart from it being cool and Google being cash-rich)? Relevance and context, again. These are the core pieces around which Google's core business evolves: put ads in a relevant context and you improve click-through. Jyri characterized this by drawing the history of content discovery from catalogue (Yahoo!) via pagerank (Google) to what he termed "facerank", combining the power of the search algorithms from Google with the power of the social network from Facebook. The latter is e.g. a search result that would take the social context of the, say, search string (the object). Friends, people close to you, colleagues, other fans of your club, etc are more likely to have come across something that is relevant to you than someone who has no touch-point with you whatsoever. You don't have to know them personally: connoisseurs of Bordeaux wines might only have "met" in the virtual world. Still, since the context evolved around a common object (Bordeaux wine), it is more likely that you will hit a relevant spot through them. The higher the socially-enhanced rank of a search result, the more relevant it is likely to be... Compelling and rather inspiring!

So this is what Google may have in mind: bring the context to the people -- again! Well done, guys!