Few killer apps have fizzled the way mobile e-mail has.
Although it seems nearly every U.S. consumer has at least two e-mail accounts-one for work and another for personal use-only a small percentage access e-mail from their handsets. And while Research in Motion Ltd. dominates the largely untapped enterprise market with the BlackBerry, the price of full-blown push e-mail services and the hardware to support it can be prohibitively expensive for casual wireless users.
So instead of targeting high-powered executives, messaging providers are looking to soccer moms, students and others who may want to access just a couple of e-mail messages a day on their phones. Oz, a Canadian technology company that has gained traction as a mobile instant-messaging provider, hopes to expand its business with a service that pushes only the sender and subject line of an e-mail to a handset.
The offering, which launches with Cingular Wireless L.L.C. this week, is free aside from the carrier’s MEdia data services plans. It notifies subscribers of AOL Mail, MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail as new messages are received, allowing users to access them on their phone if they choose-drawing from their monthly data package-or to view later from a PC.
The application is available on mass-market phones including the Nokia Corp. 6230 and 6620; the Motorola Inc. V180, V220, V400, V551 and Razr V3; and the Sony Ericsson Z500 and S710. While it is downloadable for handsets in the field, new phones will have embedded software with icons and user interfaces that duplicate the user experience of PC e-mail.
Users won’t have to configure their devices for the service, but only need to sign in with existing account information, removing several substantial barriers to uptake, according to Skuli Mogensen, Oz’s chief executive officer and founder.
“The more we looked into the wireless e-mail space, the more we realized how poorly it had been (addressed),” said Mogensen, who declined to discuss the financial details of the Cingular deal. “It was just not very user-friendly at all.
“When the consumer now enters the Cingular (retail) store and buys a phone, it already has the application with the icon, and it recognizes his e-mail account.”
The new offering is a natural step for Oz, given its IM work with AOL, MSN and Yahoo! The three Internet giants claim a staggering 730 million active e-mail users, many of whom are the casual e-mail users Oz seeks to tap. While the service isn’t branded with Oz’s name-Cingular is marketing it simply as “Mobile E-Mail”-Mogensen said it’s more important to push familiar e-mail providers’ names than to create a carrier-branded service.
“I don’t believe in the carrier-branded solution,” Mogensen explained. “Sometimes it’s perfectly fine, but if an e-mail user buys a phone and he sees `Verizon E-mail” on the device, the first thing that goes through his mind is, `I already have an e-mail account.”‘
Many enterprise-focused wireless e-mail providers have set their sights on consumers, as well. Visto Corp., Seven Networks, Intellisync Corp. and Critical Path Inc. each offer low-end solutions that generally cost between $5 and $20 a month. Most of the consumer-focused services allow users to control which messages are sent to their phones and which are confined to the PC.
According to a recent study commissioned by Critical Path, 82 percent of consumers ranked the ability to control which messages they receive on their phone as an important feature in a mobile e-mail service. Low cost of service was the second most important feature in the poll.
“Consumers don’t want to receive every e-mail from their regular inbox on their phone, especially when most of it is spam,” said Mike Serbinis, Critical Path’s chief technology officer. “They want the messages that matter, and they want an affordable service that is easy to use and works on their current phone, with their current e-mail account.”
While Critical Path and its competitors launched the first wireless e-mail services targeted at U.S. consumers just six months ago, uptake remains disappointing. Personal e-mail use among U.S. wireless users grew less than 3 percent between July and August, according to M:Metrics, as business e-mail use increased 5 percent. Analysts say that for carriers to see any substantial revenues from low-end e-mail users, developers will have to continue to provide familiar services that are as easy to access on the handset as they are on the PC.
“Messaging will remain the bedrock of mobile data service revenues in the U.S. and Europe,” said John Delaney, a principal research analyst at Ovum. “Mobile operators have an important opportunity to enhance their customers’ messaging experience by providing easy mobile access to familiar Internet messaging services.”
