Mobile backup, the new VAS providers play zone
A phone looks fairly simple from an end-user prospective. Basically it’s a tool to give call. Well, at least it was… since now the device we hold in our pocket are more close to a PDA merged with a camera than to a phone. The consequence is that it has become the placeholder to the some of the most important contents for the end user:
- Personal communication (SMSs/MMSs) – Kids even write down their SMS exchange on paper sheets to save them and declare their love or break up through SMS!
- Pictures – cameras are getting better and better (8Mp and increasing), the phone is replacing the compact digital camera
- Videos – the first HD phone was released and 2010 is going the year of HD in the phones thanks to the various upcoming chipsets such as Nvidia’s Tegra
- Address Book – still at the core of your phone. Slowly being replaced or rather duped by Facebook, this simple function is critical and yet so badly handled on our various devices
A lot has been going on lately in that space since at Steek we announced our Mobile offering, Gemalto has acquired O3SIS to enter the business, Newbay and Voxmobili have been expanding and Funambol should be reaching profitability this year thanks to company such as Zyb or Mobyko using its SyncML backend to power their services.There are also a huge set of small players such as ClickOva or Pleex focusing on J2ME clients on handsets.
The space is crowded, and yet few operators have yet to start to deploying backup solutions that go beyond the legacy SIM Backup functionality. Yet most of those are still very focused on the Address Book and do not integrate in the devices core the way they should to deliver a proper “Save, Share and Play” experience.
I thinks we are going to see some pretty interesting moves in the near future since the end-users are asking for solutions and most operators are now offering online drives services to their end-user (and Steek has been providing those solutions to lots of them), it sounds natural that they add the mobile to the equation in a convergent and homogenous offering.
Interesting. Nothing has changed in 10 years (when we started Ukibi – proud owner of the StayInSyncâ?¢ trademark -, to unleash the power of self-updating, network address books).
Despite protocols such as vCard or SyncML, implementations remained bad because the UI on the client was bad. I remember prototyping in 2007 the first (and maybe only) SyncML enabled DECT phone that was talking to a VoxMobili server.
Things are changing because of smartphones, and this is bad news because a smartphone is nothing more than a powerful enough, smart UI over a dumb network.
Next move shall actually come from companies like Silentale or Skydeck as they are able to extract those precious data from smartphones, send them wirelessly and at no additional cost (as data plans are now unlimited), and process them in the cloud.
What is left for telcos ? Dataplans and billing. Dataplans are getting (finally) competitive and margins will go down, hence the reason why I have been suggesting more than a year ago that big Telcos shall look at their billing systems and reverse engineer their CDRs to help their customers “rebuild” their address book from the network side. Same for SMS.
But app development seems to go much faster and to be more exciting on the iPhone than on top of a legacy billing system…
We shall not understimate facebook either, that has de facto built one of the largest, uptodate set of address books as a side effect of its social networking offer.
And of course, make sure those services all come with a sleek, efficient, controllable deduplicating solution as everybody now knows that the biggest risk of a failing synchronization is as much about data inflation than about data loss…
My 2 cents from Cambridge, UK
– P