Handango Future Forum

by: admin Sunday, September 14th, 2008

This afternoon, I went over the the San Francisco Hilton to attend the Handango Future Forum. This was one of the more interesting events at CTIA 2008 SF. One of the sessions that I sat in on was the Panel: “Fast Forward: The Future of Mobile Content Retailing”. The panel was quite refreshing in both their questions and thoughts regarding content, services and even devices. The panel certainly represented the entire ecosystem involved in content, with the exception of a mobile operator on the panel.

Moderator
Alex Bloom, VP Content and International, Handango
Panelists
Mark Mosiniak, Consumer and Technology Manager, Best Buy Mobile
Aaron Brown, Director, Services Product Marketing, RIM
Mikael Nerde, Head of Accessory & Developer Program, SonyEricsson
Dave Stritzinger, CTO, Brightstar
Greg Clayman, EVP, Digital Distribution, MTV Networks
Bill Stone, CEO, Handango

few highlights from the panel:

Mark: BestBuy operates in different countries and we need to understand each market, the products and the content. Then we need to personalize and customize product/service bundles accordingly

Mikael: With respect to handsets and content, working more efficiently on my phone is boring, people want entertainment and what looks good, that’s exciting. People are also looking for what else can I do beyond email, calendar, address book from my phone. Windows Mobile is good because is has a lot of features, but it looks ugly. Application awareness is here for consumers looking at mobile content. Excitement can be generated by any platform, not just iPhone.

Dave: Color is a simple example as the many possibilities for a mobile phone to be more personal. It’s amazing that people treat is as a fashion accessory.
…
We ship 80M handset in the US annually and if the phone sells 2,000 to 100,000 units there needs to be a customization for a unique experience for the consumer. It can be as simple as having an autographed phone by a NASCAR driver or special color.

Greg: Kids don’t want the iPhone, they want a Blackberry. Since they do a lot of texting and email, the Pearl is easier. For MTV, the iPhone and Android represent another port for our content and services.

When asked about things to improve for mobile content, here were some of the comments:

Bill: Make it easier to market content and ingest it for the consumer. There also needs to be more aggressive approach to provide developers a better process for creating content.

Aaron: The iPhone user generates about 500MB of data usage a month. In comparison, we have looked at the Blackberry Bold which uses 10MB per month. This is because we are incorporating data compression in order to deliver a better experience.

Greg: We need to adapt to our customers. If they have mobiles, we must develop to phones. MTV is starting to have an API for music videos that potentially could be pushed to both web and mobile. [Be active, instead of responsive to customer behavior]

Mark: One of our nightmares is the ongoing fragmentation. The Customer always wants “one sizes fits all” and we are deeply concerned when the day comes when we cannot fulfill it. And the industry will simply not be ready to handle this request from the consumer.