At CTIA last year, Motricity’s Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Jim Ryan grabbed headlines when he said, “Shame on us…My hope is that the mobile internet does not go down the path of re-creating the internet.”
Unlike with the internet, he believes users should pay for content and services they access on mobile devices—and the carrier should get a cut of the revenues. Fast forward six months, and Ryan says that he’s still getting grief for making those comments, but now he can fully explain what he met. Today, Motricity is taking the wraps off a three-part overhaul of its carrier offerings that attempts to bring them up to speed in the areas of applications, advertising and social networking.
To be sure, carriers are looking for the silver bullet, however, it remains to be seen whether these efforts are too late, and consumers are already programmed to go elsewhere for their needs. Motricity will also have to compete against all the noise in the space, which has a decibel of at least 38 app stores. Clearly, Motricity, which is seeking $250 million in an IPO, is banking on it.
Motricity works with carriers, including AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon Wireless, to provide storefront infrastructure that allows them to sell games and other mobile content to subscribers. However, as the trends shifted toward smartphones, carriers were edged out as handset makers and mobile-OS companies, like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), BlackBerry and Palm (NSDQ: PALM), got into the business of selling applications and providing high-end internet browsers to consumers.
Motricity’s new services focus on the carrier regaining some ground in the smartphone market, by helping carriers roll out new storefronts and social networking services across all of their entire portfolio of phones, ranging from low-end to high-end devices. While the move makes sense, and carriers are looking for a solution, Motricity has a tough job in front of it. It will have to sell carriers on the idea and also lure developers to its platform, which is getting increasingly difficult as the number of platforms multiply.
—Motricity’s mCore Marketplace: The app store will aggregate carrier content, carrier services like additional minutes, applications and even hard goods. Motricity will manage all aspects of it for the carrier from content management to uploading additional content, merchandising and billing. A carrier can also use demographics, location, prior activities and purchases to customize the experience. It will be cross-platform, running on Wap, Java, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, laptops, netbooks, eReaders and operating systems including Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile and Palm webOS. No carrier partners are being announced today.
—mCore Connect: Motricity has had a number of social-networking aggregation tools for carriers in the past, but this one is more on par with what Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is doing with its Blur technology. The application will integrate all the top sites, like Facebook, mySpace and Twitter, along with e-mail sites like Gmail, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), MSN and AOL (NYSE: AOL) Mail. But rather than making the user click each one to see if they have any updates, Ryan said they will be alerted to any updates or new emails right within the user interface. In addition to saving the user time, Ryan said it also uses less network bandwidth. Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) will be the first carrier to the service in the UK.
—Campaign Manager: This tool provides marketers with a simple means to create and manage mobile marketing campaigns. A&E has implemented Campaign Manager to integrate mobile messaging programs into live broadcast TV events. Motricity previously was in the business of delivering the messages, but did not help the agencies create the campaigns. Now, a marketing department can create the campaigns themselves.