Briefing with Michael Stone CEO Mobile Analytics firm Amethon

So, when I announced that I was going to interview Michael Stone from Amethon – a friend of mine Camilo Sabogal from Telefonica Spain asked me to ask him a few questions on his behalf. So my questions are first Michael (voice an email conversation) with Camilo’s questions second.
 
Bena: HI Michael, can you give me a 30 second pitch on Amethon Analytics?

Michael:  First of all it is important to stress that we have two products:
•         Content Fingerprinting: Tracks P2P content as it is forwarded/shared by MMS
•         Mobile Analytics: Provides analytics and statistics for mobile web browsing

Bena: OK what about the company?
Michael: I will give you our standard PR pitch, OK?

Bena: Sure email it to me and I will put in it.
PR: pitch
 
Amethon Solutions (Asia Pacific) Pty Ltd was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2000. In the last eight years since it its inception, Amethon has successfully captured the accelerating market for managing content in mobile communications. The company continues to grow by building capacity and technical expertise, attracting investment from EpiCorp and MAP Venture Partners, and winning the Deloitte Fast 50 Rising Star and a RedHerring Asia 100 award for 2007.
 
Amethon has developed into a premium provider of mobile analytics tools for mobile telecommunications operators with the release of its products Content Fingerprinting in 2006 and Mobile Analytics in 2007.
 
Bena: Great.  Can you give me an idea of your clients and types of publishers you attract?
Michael: Everyone really from publishers to mobile operators.

Bena: Hmm OK. But what is your main target audience? I mean, you seem to have been an early adopter in analytics – has uptake meant lots of education in the market and been a bit slow?

Michael: We typically deal with two different types of content publishers:
•         Large, web/media companies who are experimenting with putting their content on this mobile ‘thing’ and either can’t be bothered with detailed analysis of the traffic or simply throw their existing Google Analytics or Omniture tags on the mobile site.
•         Mobile content start-ups who are in customer acquisition mode and will monetise their site with advertising once their numbers are big enough. Although analytics are critical to measuring audience and improving their content services, they typically can’t afford a comprehensive solution such as ours.
 So the problem is more about market maturity and demonstrating a return on investment as opposed to education about the need for analytics.

Bena: OK. So is education in the mobile analytics market necessary?

Michael: We are trying to educate the market is in two key areas:
Analysing and measuring mobile traffic is very different to measuring web traffic. The underlying methodology is different and the key metrics are different. For example, data consumption is not measured in the web domain because almost everyone has broadband connections to their home PCs with large data plans. In the mobile world, most people have 2.5G connections and are paying per kb. Measuring the data consumption will tell you
a) what your mobile customers are ‘paying’ to access your content, and
b) how long they are having to wait for each page to download. Mobile Analytics is the only mobile solution that provides this insight.

Bena: What about for mobile operators, are cookies used?

Michael: The different carrier networks mean that mobile sites need to be designed correctly to optimise measurement. For example, using cookies is very hit and miss as some handset don’t support them and some carrier networks will block them. Secondary indicators such as IP address can also be extremely inaccurate as a handset’s IP address can change multiple times during a browsing session. We work with our clients to implement optimisation feature such as cookieless session tracking to avoid these issues. Mobile Analytics is the only solution that uses these types of site features to improve accuracy.
 
There is also a lot of misinformation in the marketplace from a number of mobile analytics vendors. Claims that they are ‘the most accurate’ or that they can ‘tell exactly who a customer is, what network they are on and the country they are in’ are either not provable/disprovable or blatantly untrue.

Bena: So how are you different to your competitors?
Michael: A key difference between Amethon and our competitors is that they are offering a mass-market, self service tool whereas we focus on working with a smaller number of customers in a far more consultative and advisory manner. This means that we continually optimise their individual Mobile Analytics systems to improve the accuracy and customise their reporting to ensure they are getting the information they require to make business and marketing decisions.
 
Bena: When you target operators what do operators have to do to adopt your services is there a license fee or do they need to have some kind of additional mobile service?
 
Michael: Our relationships with Mobile Operators are typically in the form of a software license, revenue share or consulting. For consulting assignments, we use our technology to gather the relevant data and then perform the analysis ourselves in order to solve a specific issue the operator may have. For example:
•         Analysing the extent of malicious mobile phone viruses within the subscriber base of an operator in the Middle East
•         Analysing the performance of traffic stimulation campaigns for an operator in South East Asia
•         Analysing iPhone subscriber web browsing and data consumption behaviours for an operator in the Asia Pacific region
 
Again, our technology is so new and innovative, mobile operators don’t realise you can measure the things that we are measuring so are not looking for our type of technology yet.
 
Bena:  So how important is mobile analytics in the advertising paradigm and your one biggest competitive advantage.
 
Michael: Mobile advertising will simply not evolve beyond the experimentation we see today without hard numbers for advertisers and brands to make investment decisions. The biggest issue today is comparing mobile with other advertising media – TV, online, print, etc so an advertiser such as McDonalds can decide where to put its advertising dollar.
 
I also see this as our biggest competitive advantage in the context of mobile operator deployments. When deployed in the mobile operator we see all mobile web browsing activity to every domain by every subscriber with absolute accuracy for unique visitors, sessions, etc. None of the other media listed above has the potential to report audience with the accuracy and detail that we can when deployed in the mobile operator. None of our competitors who are tagging mobile pages can do this either…

Bena: That is it from me – now the questions below were sent to me from Camilo Sabogal – from Telefonica Spain -
 
Camilo Sabogal at 8:44pm October 23
Bena, it looks very interesting. How it works, it’s an application you have to install, which devices are supported? and how analysis can be done. Really interesting if really allows you to track p2p content.

Michael: I think is is for our Content Fingerprinting solution – here is our response – please thank Camilo for hs interest and pass on my details.

Content Fingerprinting tracks and analyses P2P sharing of mobile content via MMS. Typical applications include:
·         Tracking the success of mobile viral marketing campaigns in order to report back to the advertiser
·         Measuring the performance of MMS traffic stimulation campaigns e.g. Christmas, New Years and Valentine’s Day
·         Encouraging P2P sharing of content e.g. ‘forward this ringtone to 5 friends and receive a full music track download’
·         Calculating the P2P MMS revenue generated by operator content such as M-Cards or handset pre-loaded mobile content
·         Identifying and eliminating malicious mobile phone viruses spread via MMS e.g. CommWarrier or Mabir
 
It works with any mobile handset, any MMSC and transcoder and tracks all content attached to MMS’s.
 
It is deployed as a passive appliance in the operator network which means it does not introduce any delay or latency into MMS delivery and does not pose an outage risk  to the network.
 
We have deployed systems and provided associated consulting to a number of operators in the US, South East Asia, Australia and the Middle East.