Raimat, 2006, Chardonnay, D.O. Costers Del Segre

Wine Stats

Type	White
Varietal	Chardonnay
Vintage	2006
Winery	Raimat
Country	Spain
Appellation	D.O. Costers Del Segre
Bottle size	750 ml
Alcohol	13.5%

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Chateau Margaux, 2001, Premier Grand Cru Classe, MEDOC

Wine Stats

Type	Red, Rosé
Varietal	Red
Vintage	2001
Winery	Chateau Margaux
Country	France
Appellation	MEDOC
Bottle size:	750 ml
Alcohol:	13%

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Paxton Wines, 2006, Aaa Shiraz Grenache, Fleurieu/McLaren Vale

Wine Stats

Type	Red, Rosé
Varietal	75% Shiraz, 25% Grenache
Vintage	2006
Winery	Paxton Wines
Winemaker	Michael paxton
Country	Australia
Appellation	Fleurieu/McLaren Vale
UPC	858787000047
Bottle size:	750 ml
Alcohol:	14%

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Open vs. Reality

Lately it seems that the carriers talking about Open but still acting very Closed.

Both ATT Mobile and Sprint has reduced their game deck to 250 titles and 13 or so publishers.  All others must now go thru a company called the Wireless Developer Agency and others.

It seems to me outsourcing services to 3rd parties just makes these channels more closed and creates more friction in the market.  If further reduces time to market, increases costs and you are one-step further away from the market.

Is there a “Tipping Point” for mobile

Eric Schmidt recently spoke about the “Tipping Point” for mobile at a Telecomm roundtable in Davos.  What has actually “Tipped” in mobile? For argument sake, lets define “Tipping Point” as the point where adoption becomes main stream.  For mobile, “Tipping Point” would then depend on the underlying technolgies you are talking about such as Voice, SMS, J2ME, Video, WAP, Location etc.

For voice there is no question its the most pervasive and widely adopted mobile technology with over 270M or about 85% of the population in the US using it.  One could also argue that SMS is a close 2nd but has it really reach its “Tipping Point”.  The reality TV show American Idol helped make the SMS market what is it today but according to M:Metrics – in September 2007, only 97M or 45% of mobile users are using SMS.  The adoption rate for games, email, IM are even lower ( in the 3-10% range).  One could argue that with the exception of voice and SMS, not much has ”Tipped”.    

General costs for on deck apps and games J2ME & Brew

Here are some general estimates of the business model and costs for a typical J2ME/BREW game.  I did not include the NSTL testing costs in the Brew analysis, however that would be around $12-14K and would just make the Brew Breakeven longer.  In general it takes about 1.5 years to breakeven on a game according to my estimates.  Of course if you had the rights to Tetris and/or can hold on to great deck placement you can breakeven faster. 

46M mobile data users use mobile search in Q307

According to Nielsen( http://www.nielsen.com/media/2008/pr_080116.html), 46M people used mobile search in Q307.  The interesting observation here is that most used Voice and SMS.  I am assuming the 411 usage is voice with 18.1M users and SMS with 14.1M users.  I found another piece of research that suggests only about 9M used mobile wap search in Q307. 

Where is mobile traffic headed?

Its seems that there is more and more evidence that mobile off-deck traffic is growing fast. Here are some findings

1) Myspace - 150M pageviews/month

2) ESPN – 100M pageviews/month

3) Mocospace - 500M pageviews/month.  Note as of 1-28-08 they are reporting 2M users and 1Billion pageviews per month.

4) Admob – serving 1.5B pageviews/month – in 160 countries

5) Adinfuse – 500M impressions per month

6) Greystrip – 3M downloads per month (all off deck, J2ME games)

7) Myxxer – 3M unique users

411Sync – 500K users 

Potential areas of wireless opportunities for entrepeneurs and investors

- Handsets –  I caved in and bought an iphone. It has an awesome UI and great for web browsing, but doing email is very time consuming.  I decided to get a Nokia N61i as backup, and to my dismay that has a bad UI and poor browsing capabilities.  Its clear from my little experiment that one product does not fit all. 

- Mobile 411 – $7B in revenue/year and 2.6B calls/year – and no way to find someone’s mobile number easily – can someone fix this without having a federation of carriers and a need for expensive fees.  I have looked at it and would be happy to work with someone on it.

- Content discovery – take a look at  http://mosh.nokia.com/- great beginnings of a mobile content directory business; there should be more opportunities like this in the future.

What “Open Network” means

Having been in wireless for some time, i figured i would start documenting my observations.  I was recently at a Sprint Developers Conference and John Burris – VP of Wireless Content gave a great talk on what open means.  I thought his speech accurately frames some of the issues facing mobile:

Frictionless development	The ability for Content Providers to get to a mobile presence quickly AND easily.  This implies more web ASP development models in J2ME, WAP.
Frictionless deployment	Ability to get your application tested quickly and cheaply by the carrier.
Frictionless support	Customer support costs related to content is a source of pain at the carrier – more so with off-deck content sales – with costs as much as $7/call.  To reduce these costs the carriers are suggesting that content support become the responsibility of the content provider.
Frictionless discovery	This is an area where there needs to be more innovation.  There is clearly a limited amount of space for content to be discovered on the phone. If you promote one content provider; you risk getting others pissed off; so in the long run this becomes the responsibility of the content provider
Frictionless monetization	While billing to the phone bill has been the only way content is purchased today; clearly there will be more ways to buy content in the future
Frictionless CRM	This was not in John’s presentation but I do believe in the long run, content providers that work with carriers are going to want more data on users.