Raj Singh’s Mobile Life

Got to Love the Music Industry

So unfortunately, I missed the San Fran Music Tech run by my good friend Brian Zisk. In any case, I was chatting with a buddy catching-up on how the event was and as always, he pointed out that about half the attendees were attorneys. Now don’t get me wrong, I have lots of good attorney friends and some of the most insightful conversations I have at music conferences are with industry attorneys but you have to wonder why is this the case?

So I’m pulling up a slide here - I reconstructed it pretty quickly, it was originally shown in an episode of South Park:

You got to love it! Is this the slide for the music Web 2.0 industry:

Ha!

What Platforms Should I Build For?

FYI - Re-posting this since my server had crashed and this was between a backup.
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At a recent dinner with a number of friends from the mobile gaming industry, I validated that iPhone was the #1 platform in terms of revenue but what’s interesting is what the rest of the platform stack looks like in the US - in order of revenue rank:

1. iPhone
2. Blackberry
3. BREW
4. J2ME
5. Android

One of the game publishers said iPhone was doing 7X Blackberry which was their #2. Note, in the BB App World, apps are often listed upwards of $20. Also interesting to see Android at the bottom of the list but I fully expect that to climb especially as more Android based devices are launched later this year assuming we don’t have massive app store fragmentation on the platform. That being said, I also hear Android has the highest return rate, near 75% for some developers given how seamless the process is to return an application (clicking a button rather than having to make a phone call).

BREW is still a big money-maker and several X more than J2ME even though it’s basically a Verizon-only proposition - this story hasn’t changed from 01. The contrarian move would be to double-down on BREW given that so many developers are focused on the high-end. Also interesting is that S60 and Windows Mobile are not on the map but again, I fully expect that to change once the Ovi store is in full-force and the Windows Marketplace is up and running.

To Operator or to Not to Operator

At CTIA last week, I helped lead a session on “Making Money” at WIP JAM run by my friend, the mobile machine, Caroline Lewko. Anyways, a couple interesting notes came out of our discussion that I want to share - the question is whether I partner with an operator to distribute my application?

This simple table actually represents quite a bit of learnings. The most controversial row is volume - app stores have definitely made it a lot easier to achieve millions of installs but most developers still get stuck in the 100s of K of installs.

Most interesting is with revenue, many of my friends at many of the large mobile game publishers are struggling with the iPhone and other “democratized” app stores. The problem is, with carriers, they have guaranteed revenue since they have guaranteed placement - with the app store, there is no guarantee, they could spend 3 months of dev time, money on licenses and not achieve an ROI. This high-risk distribution avenue doesn’t immediately suit well for the traditional “tight margin” mobile game publishers.

And as you would expect, working with operators takes a lot longer (and a lot more money) than most people imagine. Most of this is because of the painful requirement of having to port to all their phones - I fully expect this to change since there has been increased focus on the high-end.

One final note, sort of the VC pain, how many mobile companies do you know that make millions a year that do not require operator partnerships (very few) - that’s why I’m an industry fan of the lifestyle business.

What Do Bankers Do?

When I used to live in NYC (for 2 yrs in 01), I didn’t really know anything about finance. Well, when living in NYC, you learn pretty quickly and I realized that a big part of a bankers job is coming up with these fancy “instruments”, basically new ways to trade (lose) money, ha! (ie instead of buying currency, buy futures on the currency or options on the currency, the list goes on).

Anyways, how does this relate to mobile? The mobile content industry is in some pain. It’s still, w/o a doubt, the majority of data revs (sans SMS), over 10B last yr as compared to sub-1B in mobile advertising (although the buzz is in the latter); however, the revenues have gone flat and growth has really stalled. This can be attributed to a number of things:

1. Std’ization of content formats (ie MP3 as a ringtone format)
2. iPhone teaching people they can sideload (install from the computer) content
3. Growth of smartphones enabling more sideloading
4. More storage meaning full MP3s or large images can be installed w/o concern
5. Proliferation of laptops meaning more Bluetooth making it even easier to sideload
etc. etc.

I know this first-hand since I used to run ToneThis which enabled ringtone creation.

In any case, if less people are buying premium and more are side-loading, what does the mobile content industry need to do? I think the key is in recycling - it’s not about the music itself, it’s about developing new and clever ways to personalize your phone. For example, push ringtones, ringbacks, push vibetones, 3D vibetones… the list goes on.

The nice thing about many of these new emerging content types is they require carrier infrastructure / buy-in - normally, I’d say that’s not a good thing but from a publisher stdpt, this means, the user can’t sideload the content, so the risk of “leakage” becomes nullified and the bonus is you can likely charge a subscription meaning recurring revs.

Fewer unique customers but significantly great revs per customer. Bankers, we can use your help in coming up with some more creative personalization types (ie “instruments” :)

My Older Posts

Glad to finally get this set up - years of procrastination.

I’ve been off-and-on blogging for some time at a variety of places. Here are some links to some of my older posts:

VisionMobile - My buddy Andreas Constantinou, encyclopedic knowledge of the mobile industry.
Feb 11, 09: Inventory Convergence: Mobile Ads, PC Ads or Both?

GotoMobile - Run by my friend Kelly Goto - most awesomest UX thinker!
Nov 5, 07: Mobile Advertising Redux

O’reilly - Blogging for O’reilly Emerging Telephony until it shut down.
Sep 25, 07: The Vodafone UK Debacle
Aug 12, 07: Why Widgets Remind Me of Mobile Development
Jul 6, 07: Side-Decking
Jun 20, 07: Is the Walled Garden Getting Worse?
Jun 6, 07: The MMS Hockey Stick
May 24, 07: Is Off-Deck Browsing Really Growing?

Enjoy!