TiE Seattle Chapter hosted its annual mobile event earlier today, discussion was on “Mobile Content Monetization – Challenges and Strategies”

Some points which is really intresting:

• An interesting stat was that 52% of all voice calls in the US are on mobile. Clearly a milestone.
• There are 150M email users but only 10% use it on mobile. Huge opportunity to monetize.
• Changed the branding from “Get More” which was about more minutes (people were telling – we have enough minutes, give us a different value prop) to “Connecting People”.
• what’s the driving factor for mobile content, everyone agreed (of course) the personal nature of the device, the asynchronous capability, and personalization capability is important. Satoshi mentioned his nirvana moment was when he saw the first version of a mobile fishing game in Japan, where users could set the location for fish and when the back-end server ‘caught’ the fish, an SMS alert was sent. It affirmed the “different nature of this medium”. Hank narrowed it down to communication, jewelry, and entertainment being the key elements for mobile. Jai said that presence and location are going to make a huge difference in mobile UX.
• Satoshi pointed out two business models, one is people will pay for mobilizing their Internet experiences. He said, Myspace is free online but the mobile version is $3.99 but is the biggest selling app on AT&T (value is in immediacy) and second the standard comcast/cable model of flat fee for services like VCast irrespective of the apps and content you consume (with bundling of course).

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vivek