Oberon plays iTV now, too: Pixelplay joins the family

Our recently very acquisitive friends from Oberon Media struck again to create one of the first truly focussed triple-play gaming houses. They now acquired Pixelplay, one of the giants on the interactive TV (iTV) sector. This together with their own online activities (Oberon powers e.g. MSN Games) and their recent acquisitions of Blaze and I-Play creates a rather explosive mix.

It will be interesting to see how they will manage to consolidate the whole thing with a view to the - at this time - still somewhat disparate portfolio: Pixelplay boasts the iTV licenses for the likes of Monopoly, Luxor, the World Poker Tour, etc, whilst I-Play excelled inter alia with "The Fast and the Furious". Oberon's ability to exploit titles now across three platforms may well give it some edge in the market, which - arguably - all the single parts urgently needed.

The move shows an impressively stringent move on the part of Oberon into building a casual-games-focussed powerhouse that extends its strengths across the three main consumer screens of today, i.e. the computer, the TV and the mobile phone.

Only Jamba does the Simpsons

Jamba struck a remarkable deal, we read: in the US, content for Fox's cult TV series "The Simpsons" will be exclusively available via Jamba (or Jamster as it is known there). This will mean that consumers will NOT be able to download it from carrier decks. A major push for the D2C business (and only a day after we mused the consolidation of the sector). They introduce a new subscription plan ("Yellow Plan") for $9.99 a month, which offers credit for six downloads from a selection of The Simpsons content, including the Simpsons' mobile game which is produced by EA. No word if EA is prohibited from selling the game elsewhere; I doubt it.

The really interesting point is however the way Jamba positions itself with this: the company had been struggling and was indeed hit by lawsuits (class actions and all; there are even dedicated hate websites for it) over what many people found questionable business conduct, namely by allegedly luring people into relatively costly subscriptions (e.g. in the UK £4.50 per week; for games even £6.00) by offering - at first sight - free content.

Whether or not a consumer feels ripped off depends on the perceived value they receive. When I want to purchase a ringtone and end up paying £22.00 in the first month because I did not realise that I was entering a subscription, then the perceived value does not add up. If, on the other hand, I enter into a $9.99 per month subscription to obtain free access to my favourite TV show, then that might well be a different story: perceived value adequate equals happy consumers equals return customers equals a very successful and - more importantly - sustainable business.

Despite the bumpy ride through the courts, Jamba has always been very innovative and also quick to react to successes and failures, so it is somewhat unsurprising that they should have come up with this concept now. That they did this with so prominent a license deserves respect. Given that Fox (the owner of the Simpsons brand) owner News Corp holds the majority of Jamba, the deal will not even have been very expensive but be more of an act of cross-leveraging company divisions. It would arguably have been a worthwhile strategic investment geared to driving consumers to off-deck propositions in any event: this is an area where the US somewhat limp behind. This could now well be about to change.

On a sideline, this will also likely benefit the likes of Buongiorno: besides yesterday's announcement of their acquisition of I-Touch, they had previously acquired US firm Rocket Mobile, giving them a substantial footing in this market.

The trophy for deal of the week goes to Jamba though! Hats off!

Closer to telecoms: Google acquires Grand Central

Google has just announced the acquisition of communications service GrandCentral. TechCrunch broke the news about the acquisition last week and now has the price tag at about $50 m.

According to Google's official blog, GrandCentral is "an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users." It is bascially the evolution of the one-number concept which people like Accessline and others have been in for 10 years and more.

However, Google can possibly connect this somewhat more sensibly: Gmail and Google Talk fit smoothly and it will also ramp up the increasing interweave between the different media. In the voice area, Google was rather under-represented and Grand Central's very feature-rich product will be most welcome as it could give Google a bit of an edge here. Also, Google is arguably better suited than some others who tried to reach out directly to mainstream consumers (the likes of Accessline are mainly addressing the enterprise market) as it has a much better grip on alternative business models.

They of course have to quickly address capacity constraints: Grand Central has now moved to an "by invitation only" model because of shortages. Google will be able to help out there, I suppose.

Interesting move anyway...

D2C consolidates: Buongiorno buys I-Touch

eSo following LaNetroZed's acquisition of the majority of Monstermob earlier in the year, Buongiorno now played its part in consolidating the face of mobile D2C by acquiring I-Touch, the previously London-listed player (PDF press release here).

Of course, I-Touch had gone through an M&A spree of its own a couple of years back (it bought Spanish Movilisto and Finnish Jippii [meanwhile split up and perished]) before being gobbled up by Japanese giant For-side.com. Then of course all seemed to have gone a bit pair-shaped: when For-Side bought it, it cost a sweet £ 184m. Earlier this year, the management bought it out from its owner for allegedly $100m. Now, Buongiorno only had to pay about half that, namely €141m (incl. €12m in debt), which equals c. £ 95m or $190m. Someone did make money after all...

After the acquisition, the combined company apparently boasts more than 1,100 people in 20 countries and business in more than 40 countries.

What will this mean for the D2C sector? That with LaNetro and Buongiorno, there are now two more multi-national giants to compete with Jamba/Jamster? I wonder... All of these three had territories where they were/are strong and others where they weren't/aren't. The consolidation basically means that the offering will be less scattered and the players involved will stand a better chance to be recognised in the market, reducing volatility of their business.

Buongiorno is said to have been doing reasonably well in the more recent past: as per their last available quarterly report, revenues, EBITDA and profits were all up and rather healthily. But whilst they are amongst the big spenders in e.g. Italy or the US D2C markets, they were more or less absent from some other markets (the UK for instance). I-Touch and the markets it brings to the deal will help to strengthen their market position and they will be able to push their D2C model even harder now. The added footprint will allow them to get a better grip on pricing (which is something their board was sensitive about).

And here I was thinking that they were balancing it out with B2B, namely platform provision, master aggregation and, more recently marketing (Mitsui JV and acquisitions of Flytxt and HotSMS). But Buongiorno clearly has evolved with two equal columns to stand on. Congrats!

Update: Buongiorno CEO Andrea Casalini is certainly not shy: He said in the FT that they "had looked at other targets, including Jamba [...] and [...] LaNetro Zed, too.

EA times 4

Gaming behemoth Electronic Arts announced it would be splitting the company into 4, namely EA Games, EA Sports, EA Sims and EA Casual. The first two cater for the classic console and specific sports properties respectively and - rather remarkably - the 3rd creates a whole division for one single property, namely the ludicrously successful Sims. It would seem that this is a sign for more to come, that is after Sims packs some of which 3rd party-sponsored/endorsed/branded. So we are probably here to see the first moves towards an MMO, an online community, etc, etc.

EA Mobile will become part of EA Casual (this piece had been announced a few days earlier). Reuters interestingly speaks of casual games as "games, which are usually played online or on mobile phones, are a small but rapidly growing part of the industry." So now mobile games are already part of the "usual" - great news!

EA Mobile will surely continue to serve as the mobile extension for EA's other divisions' properties and licenses, such as Tiger Woods, FIFA, Need for Speed, Madden NFL etc. The division's new President, Kathy Vrabeck formerly of Activision, at least mentioned something along those lines, so no big news here.

R.I.P. Tao Group

Tao Group has apparently perished. According to reports, the group is in administration. Their IP portfolio was apparently sold off to Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, a VC that lists Tao Media Ltd as a portfolio company. No further news though...

This marks the demise of a remarkable company: their Intent platform presented an opportunity to run console-quality 3D games on existing chip sets that would blow you away (at 3GSM 2006, I saw a demo of an FPS on a Motorola V3x chipset that was simply awesome!). Besides whatever internal issues there might have been, their trouble might just have been the chicken-and-egg-thing: developers shied away from developing heavy native 3D games whilst the platform was not installed anywhere. Carriers hesitated to commit for similar reasons and the OEM waited until content was available and carriers in place to distribute it (which was important due to existing data thresholds for games.

My favourite piece of technology of theirs was, however, the BAFTA-winning, fantastic miniMIXA, which you can learn about a little here. The website for the product itself is down as of today but there is a good article here... Some rather cool videos showing samples of the software in real-life action can be seen here and here. They also ran the music for their party at 3GSM 2007 entirely through a miniMIXA-equipped Windows Mobile handheld. Awesome!

Make sure to also visit the blog of Tim Cole, miniMIXA's daddy and a very fine man indeed.

Mobile YouTube lukewarm

YouTube appears to have put its mobile site live: under http://m.youtube.com/ you now get a slimmed-down version of the YouTube service. However, that's about it. The site starts with a warning: "YouTube Mobile is a data intensive application. We highly recommend that you upgrade to an unlimited data plan with your mobile service provider to avoid additional charges." I see, OK, well, why didn't you adapt this more appropriately then? Isn't this somewhat scary???

What follows is clips varying in length (tonight, there were 2 with more than 4 minutes length in the top 10). A couple of categories (highest rated, newly added, etc - in short: the usual suspects) but absolutely nothing that would suggest a specifically mobile offering. I find this rather disappointing. Shouldn't we be able to expect more when "two kings have gotten together"?

So what is this? Don't they understand mobile? Didn't they have enough time to study this during their Verizon exclusive that now expired? Do they not have the resource to design their mobile service so as to provide more than a simple extension of their existing site into mobile (but without the functionalities the online version has)? The WAP offering lacks the very features and navigation, etc that arguably contributed so much to YouTube's success. They'll have to up the ante drastically to get going on the small screen, too. This doesn't cut it!

iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, anything else?

Now, I wonder if this is damaging to the readership of this blog: this must be the 3rd time or so in the very young age of this that I have been drawn into the debate about the device that reinvents telecommunications, interaction on the go, human interaction and also orders you a coffee at Starbucks. Holy Jobs, what have you done? However: there have been a couple of interesting pieces written on this wonderous affair, so I'll have another crack:

The WSJ has a piece about the iPhone and its "answers", which are, alas, no answers. They compare the HTC Touch, the LG Prada (of which you could read here, too), the Samsung UpStage and the Nokia N95 (reported on here). It steers the debate to the probably most important aspect of the not so secret secret of Apple's success, namely the combination of smart technology with very smart marketing. It is not my words (or thoughts) but the ones of very, very smart Yankee analyst John Jackson who said "Any handset maker is more than capable of making clever devices. But it's really about business models. That's where Apple maintains its business advantage."

However, the hype has been less in Europe and Nokia's market position is stronger in Europe and because the N95 has everything the iPhone has (except for brand and the looks) and some more (namely 3G although that might well come in the iPhone's European iteration) AND because the N95 is out in the market and kicking some substantial rearsides, this might well work (remarks another smart analyst, namely Mr Greengart.

Anyway, Cellular News published some information on the average potential iPhone user (courtesy of Solutions Research Group), which is this:


If they can sell the 10m devices to this user base, then AT&T (I still prefer Cingular) and all other Apple partner will be happy chappies indeed.

And the beat goes on... but what would you say if the one, the only, the incredible Hummer phone would take all the glory? Doh!

Amp'd files for Chapter 11 - Revisiting MVNO's

One down... Amp'd files for Chapter 11, citing the need for more time to ramp up its systems for demand. I wonder: shouldn't $360m in VC monies be enough to build systems that can cater for 200,000 customers? Given that Verizon provides the network and Motorola the handsets, that would mean that they took $1,800 per customer on all the rest; a bit stiff. Verizon is the biggest creditor with some $33m in receivables. So their wonderful ARPU wasn't that great after all, huh?

It's a bit of a bleak outlook, and whilst the offloading of debt might work this time, it puts some serious question marks behind the model of MVNO Amp'd tried to implement, namely one that tries to build a full infrastructure other than the actual base stations. Now, the question is old: is this really necessary? It has failed often: they are not the first to stop. ESPN did it. Has anyone ever heard of Extreme Mobile again? To remind you: they had announced a Vodafone-powered MVNO in the UK... and the site still says "coming soon".

Might perhaps be the call for a network provider that possesses some smart backend infrastructure allowing printing of customised invoices, sending of customised messages and provision of customised content be the way out? It would arguably be dramatically cheaper to have a network that rides on the back of a) a brand, b) retail distribution through the likes of Carphone Warehouse, BestBuy, MediaMarkt, FNAC, El Corte Ingles (depending on where you live) and c) "soft" customisation (i.e. through packaging rather than retail channel, etc).

What would be in it for the Vodafones and Verizons of this world? Lower churn! It is hard to get to real numbers but lore has it that the cost of one Mannesmann D2 customer when Vodafone bought them was a whopping $7,800 and that with - allegedly - 30% or so churn p.a. Surely no customer can use their phones enough to make that money back, me thinks... If churn could be reduced by, say, half if customers would stick with the brand due to higher loyalty, then the supporting carriers would make a killing! Customers are way more loyal to the football club they support, their politicial party of choice, the National Trust, U2, their Almer Mater, their home town - you call it affinity marketing, a concept that has been a great success for years e.g. for credit cards. Wouldn't a combination of this make a lot of sense? The thing that killed the market so far is greed: everyone wanted to own the customer front to end - when all the customer really wanted was good service, etc and this fuzzy warm feeling.

Get onto it. I believe it would work. Anyone here to try?

Prince-ly Guitar on Verizon

One I've been waiting for for a long time: an opportunity to post something on one of my all-time heroes (strictly music-wise!) , the man who plays at least 167 instruments, the only one who can walk on 19'' stilettos, the artist with the infallible fashion sense, namely the incredible Prince. We read that Verizon and Prince entered into a collaboration which they claim is an industry-first "direct-to-mobile relationship". Prince will release new single "Guitar" exclusively via Verizon. This leads a promotional campaign up to the new album "Planet Earth" which will be released in July.

Verizon will promote artist, song and - incidentally - its V Cast service via print, TV, radio and cinema. This strikes me as rather traditional really... However, Verizon and the artist have tied up a rather need package featuring nearly every sexy must-have service around these days: V Cast customers can hold their handset up to the TV set to identify and download the song - IF their phone as Song ID, that is. They can also simply go to Verizon's website and download it there. Upon release, the video will also be available on "licensed sites" YouTube, MySpace, Revver and Veoh.

As Prince isn't signed to a label, this will be the main piece of promotion for the album, and that is certainly a rather revolutionary affair, at least one never tried by people who weren't signed because they couldn't find a label (as had happened to the Arctic Monkeys a while ago who, having started off on MySpace, have since grown to become an established acts signed to Domino). This together with a hole bouquet of recent activity of the artist (everything ranging from new website, concerts in Minneapolis [7/7/7] and London [21 Nights, selling 140,000 tickets in 20 minutes] to a new perfume and cosmetics range [not sure if I'll try that one]) suggests a serious assault on the classic set-up of the music industry and the labels' stranglehold onto it. This had been weakened by the arrival of digital media but never broken.

If it pans out? I sincerely hope so - less for revolutionary zeal, more for one of the greatest artists of recent decades. But in any event is this one of the more exciting music promotions of recent times. Well done!

Although, I don't want to hide the bad: the world there is again defined as being North of Mexico and between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean only... Or are we non-Americans not worthy of some Prince-ly mobile musical delights?

Oberon plays mobile with I-Play

Finally... I-Play and Oberon today announced that the former would be acquired by the latter, allegedly for $110-120m. A deal involving I-Play had been rumoured to happen for quite some time, so good for Gosen and his team that they found a suitor. And not a bad one either: Oberon is an online gaming powerhouse, so a move across to mobile makes sense (and they had probably realised that their acquisition of Blaze (which itself was the combination of Synergenix and Kayak Interactive) last year wasn't getting them anywhere close to where they need to be). I-Play with its CEO David Gosen certainly showed stamina. They published some pretty cool titles (including Gamevil's critically acclaimed "Skipping Stone" and hit series "The Fast & The Furious") and in spite of oft rumoured shortage of cash just hung in there.

Oberon also raised some fresh money from investors Goldman Sachs, Oak Investments and Lehman Brothers, so all looks good for them, I suppose.

UPDATE: Today (12 Sept 2007) I-Play announced 11 new games all drawn from Oberon's back catalogue. They are Hexic and Mozaki Blocks (apparently from the creator of Tetris), Flowerz, Slinky, Fish Tycoon, Spin & Win, Bricks of Egypt, Bricks of Atlantis, Magic Match, Bubble Town and Saints & Sinners Bingo. It will be interesting to see what will win in the current battle of big brands and casual games; both are frequently cited as two of the key components of breaking into the mass market.

Verizon strikes back (or does it?): Prada phone vs. iPhone

It does remain interesting, doesn’t it? Days after AT&T was confirmed to have the iPhone for a minimum of 5 years exclusively, Verizon comes back to announce the launch of the ultimate fashion device (in a rather literal sense), namely the Prada phone (or LG KE 850). Verizon was keen to stress that this will not be the only music phone they will offer but this seems to being the current main contender of the iPhone: it has similarly sleek looks, both have a touch screen and even the LG UI is somewhat Apple-esque (See review here).

One of the interesting things is to see how a phone that – in Europe – runs on the trusted MIDP 2.0 platform (and will, for Verizon, presumably run on the no less trusted BREW platform) will perform against the first one utilising Apple’s OS X. If Apple manages to have their OS run as smoothly and matter-of-factly as it does on their computers, we will all be up for a ride: whilst phones may not be as buggy as some of Microsoft’s earlier (or indeed current?) operating systems, Apple’s OS X is one hell of an elegant OS and supposedly superior to anything I have seen on the currently available systems. However, OS X requires quite a bit more in computing power than these, and this poses (at least) two challenges, namely a) battery life and b) speed.

LG’s Prada phone on the other hand has shown in the UK that it is a proper everyday device that works well (and looks good). It also comes with 3G (other than the iPhone) although of course it lacks WiFi. LG has recently shown that it has a nifty hand for great look-and-feel: the Chocolate, the Shine and the Prada phone all show a fantastically slick approach to handset design. Since LG phones run on a “usual” OS, all applications and games, etc that run on “normal” phones, also work for them. And Apple? Nothing I heard of. Even the iPod games have already been cracked (see here).

If one would assume that the iPhone performs well, it would however be sad if that was only for one operator/carrier. Will Apple make the same mistake it made on its superior Mac OS in the mid-80s, i.e. kill its market prospects by being to exclusive? One would hope that they have learned but perhaps their more recent success with a similar approach for the iPod has overshadowed the no doubt painful learnings they must have taken from being erased by Micrsosoft and the inferior DOS on the computer OS front. Let’s see…

Cingular or American Telephone & Telegraph Company? My 2p

It get's boring, I know. But after the flurry over AT&T's announcement that they will now step up their re-branding another notch in order to be eye-level to the uber-spin doctors from Apple for the launch of the iPhone, I cannot keep myself from making yet another comment on the branding debate: which one is better, AT&T or Cingular?

A lot has been argued and said about it (see e.g. here, here and here) but let's stick to one simple fact (OK, there'll be another one later): Millward Brown, the brand gurus who publish the annual "Brandz" ranking, something like the Forbes List (or the Times Rich List when you live in the UK) for brands showed that "Cingular" gained 39% year-on-year and slotted in at #70 with a brand value of $9.2bn. AT&T, well, didn't make the top 100. Even if it was on #101, it would mean that its value would be at least $4bn less than Cingular's.

What is REALLY concerning though is that the brand they abandon actually gained value to the tune the Cingular brand did (3rd biggest climber overall). The fact that the Cingular brand is younger, more dynamic, does not conjure up memories of the old wretched monopoly the old AT&T once was - well, I leave that to the real marketing freaks but you really cannot argue with that, huh?

To end it: here's what GigaOM's readers think:

ESPN Mobile 2.0

So ESPN Mobile is being reborn, this time as EPSN MVP and exclusive to Verizon V-Cast. To remind you: ESPN Mobile 1.0 was an MVNO that was mothballed 9 months after launch with an undisclosed but presumably low number of subscribers. The new ESPN Mobile is an application available on a couple of Motorola and LG phones (including all the very fashionable ones) and is apparently a pimped up version of the original application that had come pre-installed on the former MVNO's phones. Apparently BREW and some more dev makes it faster and sexier than the original Java app did.

The new MVP application is available for free to VZW’s high-end data subscribers, which are those who subscribe to the V-Cast service and buy its $15-monthly VPak subscription.

Learnings anyone?

Games shine on Orange

Mobile games outsell other types of content, including ringtones and wallpapers on Orange UK, we read. Orange published its first digital media index which also showed that Orange customers send 872m text messages a month, with most sent between 4pm and 8pm as people plan a night out.

In Q1/2007, almost 750,000 games were downloaded. This compares to only 65,000 and 250,000 tracks, ringtones and music video. This is rather noteworthy. So why is it?

Games are the only category of the above that is tied to the commercial ecosphere of today (be it via carrier deck or from a D2C portal, etc): I can download a picture from the web and bluetooth it or sideload it to my phone and it will work. Phones understand jpeg. I can do the same with a music track. Phones understand mp3. I cannot do the same with a Java game. Phones do understand Java but it is an executable, so you need an installer file, etc. Higher complexity. Too complicated to do it for me, buy it then...

Games have an additional particularity and that is that they need to be thoroughly adapted to the small screen. A song sounds the same (assuming you have a good pair of headphones), a picture will be, well, smaller on a small screen but otherwise undistorted. A game requires interaction, and this is being done very differently on a phone. So we may well see the above numbers drifting further apart...