Operators have lead in mobile portal branding - Industry Trend or Event

CommunicationsWeek International, March 20, 2000 by Joanne Taaffe

Mobile operators are a step ahead in the race to set up mobile portals, but they cannot afford to rest on their laurels as others scramble to grab market share.

A new report from Analysys suggests that mobile operators may be better placed than their fixed-line counterparts to establish brand-building on-line portals.

When it comes to building portals, mobile operators hold a strong card: having aggregated content for short messaging services they already have nascent relationships with content providers.

"[Mobile operators] are natural aggregators and they have been puffing together alliances," said Katrina Bond, a senior consultant with Analysys Ltd., cambridge, England.

As a result, mobile operators are better placed to string together content deals than were their counterparts in the fixed world when they faced the consumer Internet boom. 'Unlike the fixed Internet world, mobile operators will have more of a head start," said Bond.

The report, Mobile E-commerce, claims that the value of goods and services transactions over mobile will be $13 billion by 2003. It further says that rapid development of a strong portal brand will be key to dominating the mobile commerce market, and found that many me bile operators have chosen to develop partnerships with portal companies and content providers to achieve that goal.

What's more, mobile operators have a lead in a booming market. Mobile subscribers are expected to reach 1 billion worldwide by 2003, says the report.

They are further aided by the fact that they have a firm control on the content the customer receives. "Even if the operators don't have the best skills, they own the ball--distributing the phone, defining the things that you see [when you switch on the phone]," explained Pedro Ripper, senior specialist with Cluster Consulting in Barcelona.

But there is little room for complacency. Mobile operators used to having their brand name appear in front of their customers each time they turn on their phone will have to face the challenge of other would-be portal sites.

Established sites such as AOL, Yahoo! and Excite@Home already offer wireless application protocol (WAP) services for on-line information, and more recent upstarts are being forced to get in on the act. Lastminute.com, on the back of much lower-than-expected revenues and a poor rate of converting registered customers to purchasing on-line, this month announced a new division devoted to developing WAP services for its portal.

And specialist portals, providing targeted, location-based information, are springing up to edge in on mobile content provision and aggregation. "Now it's a race against time to have established mobile portals," said Bond.

Operators are already busy striking deals for WAP content services. Vodafone AirTouch plc, of Newbury, England, is one of many mobile service providers tuning into the need for a wide range of content. The operator recently signed a deal that will link mobile phone users to a version of football club Manchester United's site.

"The Vodafone portal will appear on the screen, but you'll access other sites," said Ian Germer, executive of product strategy at Vodafone. "What's important is that we give our customers choice. We're building a portal of our own [but] we have many partners providing content and service.

Vodafone's project includes creating for enterprises and their employees what it calls "private shared portals," which provide secure mobile access to data on company intranets.

Other operators are looking at establishing corporate portals, said Cluster Consulting's Ripper, who added that developers including Lotus Corp., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, have added extensions to their groupware software so data can be viewed over a mobile phone.

Earlier this month BT outlined how seriously it is taking its mobile portal strategy with the launch of a [pounds]160 million ($252.3 million) Mobile Internet unit. The division will establish an international mobile portal based on the U.K operator's Genie Internet service. Mobile division BT Cellnet, and partners Viag Interkom, of Munich, StarHub of Singapore, SmarTone of Hong Kong and Amsterdam-based Telfort NV will offer the services.

And Swedish operator Telia has gone a step further. Last year it established a joint venture with Oracle Corp., of Redwood Shores, California, to create Portal to Go, software for reformatting and aggregating content for wireless devices. Oracle will sell the software--which enables links from the screen of a mobile device into companies such as Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade and MapQuest--to operators through its newly established division OracleMobilecom.

Operators and analysts agree that mobile portal market share is still up for grabs. But Ripper thinks that mobile operators, as long as they do not have to open their networks to other service providers, will call the shots rather than the content providers. While with the fixed Internet anyone can launch a Web site, content providers for mobile sites will have to woo the operators to get access to their networks, said Ripper.