Whether it’s goofy pet photos, front row at a rock concert or eyewitness to disaster, the spread of camera-equipped phones has enabled up-to-the-minute photos for social networks and citizen journalism of the most compelling sort.
In fact, as camera-equipped mobile phones have penetrated the market and ease-of-use issues have been resolved with carrier-based or third-party applications, people are taking pictures and sending them, generating multimedia services and subscription revenue for carriers and their partners. Call it social networking, mobile blogging or the unpronounceable “mo-blogging.” The industry is finally entering a phase it can call “mo-cash.”
The market for sharing amusing and informative photos constitutes a small stream now, but it is the fastest-growing segment in the mobile data arena, according to M:Metrics.
“The real untold story is the rapid uptake of photo messaging,” said Seamus McAteer, principal analyst at M:Metrics. “For a variety of reasons, this is becoming a mass-market play. Peer-to-peer sharing of photos has taken off like gang-busters.”
McAteer said that in contrast to stagnation in the ringtone market and solid growth in gaming, (but with a slow-growing base of users), photo messaging activity is doubling year-over-year.
Out of the 190 million mobile-phone subscribers in the United States, for instance, 83 million, or 44 percent, own camera phones. Nearly 40 percent of those owners tote Motorola Inc. camera phones, with LG Electronics Co. Ltd. devices at 19 percent, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. at 15 percent and Nokia Corp. with 8 percent, according to M:Metrics.
Early on in the market, users were snapping plenty of pictures, but—frustrating to carriers—the images largely remained on the phone itself, generating giggles for whomever stood nearby. Now, as carriers have largely resolved MMS interoperability between networks and the carriers and third-party partners provide applications to simplify archiving, sending and sharing of pics, users have overcome their reticence to archive their best or wackiest stuff to a personal or commercial Web site, establishing that there’s gold in them thar hills.
The primary revenue generator is MMS, McAteer said. Third-party applications on a subscription model, with revenue-sharing between carrier and partner, work best on smart phones or BREW-enabled phones, and trail as revenue generators.
Ease-of-use of camera phones actually outshine the non-mobile corollary of digital cameras uploading to PCs, according to Daniel Winterbottom, senior analyst with Informa Telecoms and Media. Winterbottom said there’s solid data to underscore that as camera-phone optical resolution improves, the number of photos taken and sent or uploaded increases as well.
Apart from the issue of revenue streams, carriers are finding that hosting their subscribers’ photo albums is an effective customer retention strategy, according to Winterbottom.
“The business sense of offering such social networking tools is sound,” Winterbottom said.
Verizon Wireless, for instance, offers a Pix & Flix service for its subscribers’ photo archiving, sending pics to other Verizon Wireless customers and to other carriers’ subscribers. The carrier also offers subscription-based services from third parties for a subscription fee.
One such application is Pictavision from Exclaim Wireless, a privately held startup that has morphed since 2000 from dotPhoto, a Web-based photo portal, to its latest incarnation as a facilitator of mobile blogging.
As Jiren Parikh, vice president and general manager at Exclaim, described it, the company’s mantra has changed as the market has evolved. Its original Web-based model wasn’t wireless and it followed the mantra “store, print and merchandise”—that is, upload pics to your PC, print them at home or through a commercial printer and make them into postcards. That changed over time to “store, share and communicate,” reflecting that the Web’s interconnectedness allowed one to send photos or allow others access to one’s personal publishing site. Travelers could send e-mails to everyone with a link to one site to see the latest and greatest pics from far-flung locations.
Today, with camera-enabled mobile phones in the hands of nearly half of American subscribers, VGA lens giving way to ever-greater megapixel optics and handsets offering expandable memory, a young demographic has driven the business model mantra “share, communicate and entertain.” Exclaim Wireless has issued Pictavision 5.0, which allows mobile-phone users to upload their pics to their dotPhoto archive site. Pictavision 6.0 is about to launch with more messaging functions (adding voice tags, etc.), connections to any Web-based photo portal, including personal blog sites and commercial sites that offer to print your phone-generated pictures and send them to your home—where, presumably, you can amuse someone standing next to you.
