What's Square mean to you?

Image Attribute: Square

In the past few days there's been a lot of buzz about Square, the new mobile-phone credit card swiping solution. Point of Sale to the people, so-to-speak. Few peeps asked me of my thoughts, and how does it affect Adva Mobile, so here it is.
I think Square is a terrific little gadget that, more than it's own independent value to the world, the buzz it brings with it drives more awareness to the things one could do using their mobile phone. The more we can see from that, the better, IMO.
I admire their approach: I think that of the mobile payment solutions, they win on simplicity (to the end user) and reach. (almost) all other mobile payment solutions require pre-registration, which is a killer for the ad-hoc shoppers.
On it's own, I have my healthy skepticism how many people will end up owning and using the device. Requiring extra hardware? We've seen what happened to Zeemote. It will be interesting to find the payout rates, the installation process and other factors. Of those long-tail merchants, you need to find people with the right phone and plan, willing to pay for the gadget, and share their revenues with another party. For those people, Square complements the cash-only sales with cash and credit. I'm trying to think who those people are: Street artist selling paintings? Active musician next to the merch table? Do they really need this? time will tell.
Now if you contrast paying using Square and on a mobile website (with, say, PayPal), then I'd say it's hard to determine how many of the fans would rather use one or the other. Square wins in the consumer side, Paypal (I think) wins on the merchant side.

As far as Adva Mobile is concerned, again, the buzz that Square brings is a blessing. We'd like to see less and less "I didn't know I could do that". As mentioned, Square complements well the financial processing for products that entertainers would like to sell, say, on their merch table. It is important to note, Adva Mobile is a Mobile Marketing Service for entertainers. There are mobile sales tools that come with it, that entertainers can leverage, but our focus has always been helping entertainers acquire new fans and keep them engaged, coming to shows and participating in the "community" you're building.

Overall, Square is certainly an interesting solution that will stir things up for a while. It certainly brings a lot of buzz with it, which is great. I'm looking forward to see what will happen with it as time goes by.

Real World Connection: Finally in the US?

For the longest time I've been a fan of, working in, and following various attempts at Real World Location technologies. Whether Mobile Barcode Scanning (Nextcode, NeoMedia, Scanbuy and others), real 'things' picture analyzed (mobot, Pongr and others), there were many attempts at getting it right.
No doubt, with the current possibilities through image recognition technologies, a lot can be achieved.

The question, IMO, has always been one of two:

• Who has enough power in the marketplace (exp. in the US) to bring together all the players, commercial and customers, to agree on one "Standard" or "Scanning Form" that translates from a real-world "Thing" to digital content, AND
• Who has enough images and sufficient search, image recognition power to beef up an end-user acceptable performance

The answer, of course, is Google. For a long time I've been anticipating it, and now it's here: Google Goggles. Watch and enjoy. Good luck to all other players in this market, I think the market just got swept away from under your feet.

"Tell A Friend", Mobile web version OR reverse mobile carrier lookup

One of the key components to enable word-of-mouth spreading of a good service, is the ability for one user to share the experience with their friend. Duh.
In mobile, how can you enable that? SMS your friend, Email your friend, Twitter, maybe others. Facebook connect has been anticipated for ages on mobile web, but they seem to like only iphone apps, for now.
Trying not to force a behavior change or forcing someone to type in a full email address on their phone, I was looking for a simple, and free way for users to "tell their friends" over SMS.
If you have a service that uses SMS, then you're working with an SMS aggregation, and, for the most part, they need to know the carrier as well as the phone number you're sending the SMS to. But, what if you don't know the carrier?? I mean, the user of the service may know the phone number of their friend, but is it realistic to expect them to know the carrier? No, it's not.
So, you turn to the aggregation and ask them about reverse carrier lookup.
News flash: On top of the $.03 the resulting SMS will cost, the lookup will be additional $.02-$.03 and some 2-3 digit monthly minimum. Right, the US carriers are starving and need to make more money.
Alright, Google search takes you into this terrific FREE White pages feature. You can reverse lookup mobile carriers by phone numbers, and, from my experiments, they have it right!
Next step: sign up for their API. But: the API returns completely different, incorrect results!

I asked their API people for their thoughts on this, and here's what I got back:
"The carrier information available through our free, developer API is the same information we display in our search results on WhitePages. So, in terms of search results for a reverse phone query, the information is the same. However, on WhitePages, we offer an exclusive “Mobile Carrier Lookup” feature. We do not plan on including the mobile carrier information available through the “Mobile Carrier Lookup” feature on WhitePages via the free, developer API."

I'm speechless. This is really valuable information that's available one place and not in the API. Easily fixable, but they don't seem to see the value. ugh.

To DYI or not DYI. That is the question!

Yesterday at MusicHackDay, I was listening to the "Starting a Music Business" panel, and two topics ran in my head:

• DYI vs. centralized management service for artists: A discussion started about the value, and load that new 'DYI' tools provide for entertainers. Derek Sivers (whose truly an awesome dude) had a really great way of putting it: "DYI? great! and now there's this tool? oh great, and now 'more information'? oh boy...". He's spot-on, I think.
  We at Adva Mobile definitely see how artists check us out and some stay, some move on. There's just so many tools. That's why integrated serices like ArtistData are the right way to go, IMO.
  There's just way too many different offerings for artists right now, and consolidation of the really good ones is bound to happen, hopefully soon (Hopefully Adva Mobile will be one of them). The flip side, though, is that many artists who would never get heard or make any money (to make art) would never have been heard by anyone without those DYI tools. So definitely the DYI tools is not for those who aren't prepared to invest in the promotion bit to be successful, and it also depends on how big you are. Hopefully, those issues are handed over to a band manager of sorts when you grow big enough.
• The other topic in my head (that was not discussed) was triggered by the inevitable "Now's a great time to start a business in the music space". Sure, Duh. But seriously, without going pessimistic about it, what do you make of the recent iLike and iMeem fire sales? Or Spiral frog shutdown or Qtrax needing add'l $50MM? I mean, these are all players who've been alive for sometime and have been trying to figure "it" out. If iMeem is worth $1MM, I'm asking myself what are we worth? A Grand latte? 

Reblogged: Music as the ideal virtual good

This weekend I was fortunate to attend MusicHackDay organized at Microsoft NERD. I was even more fortunate to ask Nabeel Hyatt about recruiting talent in the music space who will help us geeks find that moonlight on the bridge between technology and entertainment. Anyway..
Nabeels' post "Music as the ideal virtual good" is one to pay attention to, whatever your involvement in the entertainment space is. His illustration of the "music business state of affairs", if you will. is excellent. I recommend walking through his deck. I think the point is, for the creative community as well as the technology, there is a place to make money. It just needs to be found in places it wasn't there before. For Nabeel, it's music inside social games:
"While virtual goods are usually confined to conversations about pixelated clothing and weapons, music is by far the highest grossing digital good. A look at what makes music sell as a virtual good."

My take? If you're an artist, think through your revenue stream. Some of it always will come from straight music sales, no doubt. But people today are much more about the live experience in shows followed by the memorabilia that comes with the experience (that's another way to name your CDs or T-shirt). Of course music creation is the driver for all of it, but on it's own, perhaps is not what's going to get you money.

Chart Courtesy: Nabeel Hyatt

Geeky wishes...

I wish...

• There was a free way to do mobile carrier lookup from a mobile number. That way I could enable people on mobile web pages to share their favorite sites with their friends in a rifle mode (the shotgun approach is easily supported via Twitter). It cost way too much to do a carrier lookup and then send the SMS. Operators should want this more than me, because when I'll send that SMS, I will pay to send it, and the receiver will pay ~$.10 to receive it.
• There was a way to find location on mobile web pages for all phone types, not restricted to whether those devices have GPS or not (cellid or wifi router mac address is better than nothing). OEMs should want this more than me, because it opens a sea of marketing opportunities for them.
• There was a simple, easy way to bill people off-deck, from an app or mobile web pages. The current on and off-deck billing solutions in the US are unusable. Every time I hear news from the UK about PayForIt I become green with envy. If there's such a successful model, why can't the US replicate it?! *everyone* in the mobile space should want this. This morning GoPayforit announced that it lets vendors set up a payment service for their site by inserting one line of code.

If I got any of the above wrong, feel free to educate me!

Can Freemium Content Model Survive?

Image Courtesy: HypebotFollowing last weeks' rumors about MySpace starting to charge for streaming and this weeks'MySpace-iMeem possible acquisition rumors, there's a lot of (repeating) talk about the business model of free content. Of particular interest is Wireds' post "Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive".

Here's some of my thoughts, and what led me to start Adva Mobile

1. Licensing Music from the majors is a difficult financial commitment to recover. If you're small and nimble, prove your bus model with the long tail, or at least the smaller players before paying the huge upfront fees. Sure, you gain (if you're lucky) the major's marketing wind behind your back, but when the honeymoon is over, you start paying. Another Wired writer's comment is almost (but not) funny: "In the world of online music, you're nobody until somebody sues you"
2. "Advertising was supposed to be music’s magic bullet". Not. In all metrics, advertising payouts are dropping fast. Even on mobile, even when you can provide pretty accurate fan profiles, the payouts are way below your operating costs or licensing costs (if you have any).
3. "Fans don't pay/Expect free". Not (again). As Debbie Chachra explained in her insightful post, fans will pay for relationships with the artists they follow in a number of levels. From tickets, hard goods to funding artist recordings, fans will pay for the experience that comes with the music. You just need to find a way to leverage those.

What's interesting in the entertainment space is that there seem to be no big winners in the game. Big problems = Big opportunities. That's what I'm banking on, anyway.

Economy's turning?

Tough times these days. With Microsoft dropping 800 peeps, Nokia-Siemens dropping thousands etc. I have a sneaking suspicion that layoffs in the mobile location space are imminent, following Google's launch of the Android full featured free GPS app.

There's no good reason for rehashing all of that other than sharing my feelings about the recent one to bite the dust: Zeemote. To be honest, I was a bit cynical about the use case and liklihood for proliferation of their gadget. But, as we know, the gaming industry has gone places no-one has predicted. In any case, Zeemote was built by a true visionary, Beth Marcus. I cringe when I think of the people who put so much effort in, go home empty handed.


All those talking about the economy turning, and there's no better time like now to start something new, I'm not sure what you're smokin', it sure is great stuff!. Here's my advice to working people: if you have a day job, get some super-glue, and put a lot of it on your chair. And I mean, A LOT!

IODA gets iPhone app for artists from MixMatchMusic

Image Courtesy: MixMatchMusic

Congratulations to MixMatchmusic and Alan Khalfin for getting IODA on the bandwagon for their artist mobile promotional tool. IODA is a key player in the marketplace and their recognition that promotion on mobile is important, is great.
I found the quote from Adam Rabinovitz (IODA VP Marketing) interesting: "The MobBase iPhone app is an innovative and low-cost solution for independent artists who want to participate in the explosively popular iPhone app market".

We at Adva Mobile asked ourselves the question whether an iPhone app was the way to go initially, or Mobile Web. It was fan reach vs. hype. Admittedly, an iPhone app has far more hype than mobile web. From our little research, it seemed like artists wanted to reach all of their fans in the crowd, using simple and known tools like mobile web and SMS. We ended up deciding that resident iPhone, Android and blackberry app would come second.
The 2nd question I'm asking myself, reading the article, is the economics of providing artists a tailored app. We all know creating and deploying an app is not an insignificant effort. What kind of revenue artists need to make to pay $20+$15/month just for this app. (BTW, the iLike iPhone is not free). What's gonna happen in a year when Android is expected to come close to the iPhone reach? Are artists expected to pay another $15/month or more? An artist who can justify this expense is a household name. Selling out big venues, music and merch. Again, this is a dilemma we've been discussing at Adva Mobile. We ended up deciding that by charging artists that much, you essentially give up a huge chunk of the market. Our service is currently free, and maybe in the future we'll add some premium services.

Overall, I'm delighted to hear these news. It means more people add mobile to the promotion toolbox, and that's good for everyone!

Mobile Location is here (now for real)

In the last couple weeks I've been playing around with new mobile technology. This time, I came across this nice piece that enables marketers to learn their audience location as they view their mobile web pages.

Mobile location, it seems, has been the talk of the industry forever. Devices that don't come out with GPS chips installed seem to be the minority these days. Many applications have some form of mobile location awareness to them. Even Google has stormed in with Google Latitude, although the availability of that database for commercial purposes remains unclear. Has the real time location awareness made a dent in how marketers think of entering the mobile playground? questionable, I think.

One reason for not making a dent is that the effort associated in creating a mobile application is not insignificant. You need to consider coverage, features, maintenance etc. There's not an obvious easy entry point for marketers to test the ('mobile') water if the options are limited to mobile applications. If users' location were available on the mobile web, then with the development of a small portal, marketers can get huge reach instantly, and figure out the next step.

It seems that the technology is becoming available to create location-aware websites, and more specifically, location-aware mobile websites. I am hoping that this will really open a new path for marketers that wasn't available before, it is certainly an exciting opportunity for innovation!