Navigating the Mobile Content Landscape

The mobile content space has changed a lot over the past 5 years – I have given up in trying to keep up! In any case, I’m doing a talk on marketing mobile music for NARIP and they asked me to provide a cheat sheet for their audience. Below is part of what I quickly prepared for navigating on-deck content – I’m sure I’m missing some companies and there may even be some inaccuracies below but I figured this was a good starting point for anyone seeking to do mobile content bizdev with the operators:

Let me know what I’m missing.

Wholesale Application Community

As many of you know, the App Store landscape is becoming quite fragmented. There are scenarios where a device may have an OEM App Store, Platform App Store, Operator App Store and maybe even a 3rd Party App Store – as a developer, this is a challenge and you really have to think about where to spend your time to prioritize your energy. It’s not uncommon that the vast number of downloads come from one particular App Store or maybe even your own website. Gone are the days that being listed on an operator deck meant a gold rush unless of course you are still very feature phone focused.

In any case, as much as I’ve wished for reduced fragmentation, I haven’t seen it yet in 11 years in the mobile industry (and philosophically, it can be argued both ways as to whether fragmentation drives or stymies innovation). That being said, Apple’s success with the iPhone in some ways demonstrates what happens when you have 40M phones that can all run a single version of an app (ie no porting required). Nokia’s plans (at least what I heard) to focus on fewer devices that are cross-compatible going forward is consistent with this view (ie do you rememer J2ME’s original goal of write-once, run anywhere!?)

Anyways, my long-time friends at WIP have led a charge to ask operators and the WAC (Wholesale Application Community) to be cognizant of developers needs in an open letter to the ecosystem. Caroline Lewko is seeking additional comments/endorsements and had asked me to make this post, please check out the letter and provide your feedback – the goal here is to solve the App Store fragmentation problem – thanks in advance.

Sharing Overload?

I probably am not the case study for over-sharing data but there is no denying that there is a broader trend of sharing personal data. This is how I use the following services:

I use Facebook for photos, personal thoughts, birthdays and friends/fam events. I don’t tend to post too many photos myself and I’ve been kind of light on posting personal thoughts, mostly because I haven’t spent the time to organize my social circles (eg family, friends, acquaintances).

I use Picassa for more professional photo albums, often captured with a digital camera as opposed to my phone. I still use Flickr a bit as well and those photos are always public and tend to be more real-time.

I use Twitter for random and professional thoughts, often with a mobile bias since most of my followers are mobile geek-heads.

I haven’t really used FourSquare yet, mostly because I’m scared I’ll be addicted to mayorship but obviously, it’d be used to publish my location to friends; I did try Google Latitude for a short bit but it being mapped to my Gmail contacts was overload!

I have registered for Blippy but I haven’t yet given them my Amazon and Bank Account etc details; I’m holding out to make sure it’s secure but there is no doubt that the data they are collecting is absolutely interesting. I have found myself scanning some friends who use the service and being fascinated by their purchases.

I have used a mix of services to share what I’m listening to, including Playlist.com and others. I’m definitely more top 100 and so I’m probably not an exciting musical person to follow.

I’ve started using a mix of services to blog what I’m eating, fascinating data from many angles including tracking my lifestyle and showing the world how much I eat-out (meaning unhealthy)!

I guess I should also include LinkedIn, although I don’t update it as frequently, I’ve thought about using it to start sharing what I’m reading, in terms of books etc and my favorite blogs which I’m often pinged about.

I suppose, I should also include my own blog where I share other misc thoughts that can’t be characterized in 140 character snippets.

All of this represents my identity and if aggregated, probably an advertisers gold-mine – I’m sure they can extrapolate an incredible behavioral profile, some pieces like what I buy and where I eat being a lot more monetizable than others.

My question is how does this evolve? Do I end up sharing more and eventually use services like Zeo to share when I sleep? Who becomes the ultimate aggregator of all of this data and how is all this data shared? There is an argument for being open with the data but in some way the data is also your IP? And how many of these services will require user-initiated publishing/sharing as opposed to implicit sharing (eg location constantly being broadcasted). All of this in someways contributes to an ADDish lifestyle because of the constant pinging with different social graphs.

Thoughts? I guess the counter argument is that I live in the Bay Area :)