Chat with Graham Rivers CEO of mobile technology enabler WIN

I have known the company WIN for a while now. The company first came to my attention when I was working on the Rate Your Night business. That business was a mash-up between an imaging solution and YoSpace’s See Me TV.
At the time, I was doing a lot of competitive intelligence for the business plan and was assessing potential competitors’ to YoSpace. Funnily, there were very few. One company had launched a product which didn’t make it. But at that time the rumour was that WIN-plc was in financial trouble.

I wasn’t aware of the facts, but I did know if anyone could compete with YoSpace – it would have been WIN.

So that is where I started the conversation with Graham Rivers CEO of WIN. He responded that he had joined the company 18 months ago and the company was never in trouble but was in need of restructuring – hence his arrival. Since then the business has gone from strength to strength and the hiccups of growing too rapidly were behind them.

In the 18 months that I had missed – WIN has implemented and succeeded in a business model for mobile content that starts with traffic driving relationships such as managing on-deck alerts. Rich media is now painting a larger picture as well and video traffic is on the rise.

I asked him to elaborate on the uptake of video content.
He said that video content had two fantastic drivers for success for mobile operators and media companies. As an enabler of rich media content, WIN has seen that video is just as much about voyeurism for consumers as it is for traffic generation for operators.

The appealing nature of live results, video results, video goals, video from BBC News 24 is what consumers want. They don’t want to read they want to see. Video enables this anytime and anywhere.

I did mention my concerns about video, seamlessness and consistency. Graham agreed that there were issues with mobile video relating to when users go from 3G to 2.5 G networks and the enablers with the core technology are not able to monitor this.

I then moved the discussion around to mobile advertising. I wanted to know what Graham thought about the addition of advertising in to rich media. He said that the company had worked with brands as well as operators for delivering rich media. But in general they are an enabler. They work closely with advertising agencies to manage campaigns. They work with trusted partners and hence can tailor rich media services to include free or ad funding billing as well.

All in all, WIN is now on the radar and we will be following any more rich media deployments by win to operators or media companies.

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