Innovation must be institutionalized to drive content adoption

ATLANTA – Innovation has to become institutionalized if wireless content is going to be successful, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega last week told attendees at the GSM Association’s first last Mobile Innovation Marketplace – Americas event in Atlanta. “Just having it pop out once in awhile at random instances is not enough,” he said.
Companies need to innovate internally, form alliances with the right partners and align with entrepreneurs to find interesting applications, de la Vega said.
Nearly 400 people attended the event, which is designed to highlight the best-in-class entrepreneurial companies that are trying to play in the wireless space.
Israel’s modu, a modular phone manufacturer, and Germany’s Ubidyne, which makes digital antenna embedded radio technology, won the right to compete against other regional finalists for the title of 2009 GSM Mobile Innovation Global Award Champion, to be announced at next year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
As data applications become more prevalent in the wireless industry, the roles of all of the players in the ecosystem change. However, operators continue to play an integral part in the industry.
“Carriers will only launch products today that will make a difference and make money,” said Christina Domecq, SpinVox CEO. SpinVox changes voice mail messages into text and has raised $200 million in venture capital funding to date. The company , which counted 200,000 customers in December, has since aligned with 12 operators and now counts more than 4 million customers today.
Targeted and relevant applications are important, said ChaCha Chief Business Development Officer Jay Highly. ChaCha, which provides a mobile search service, also saw a huge uptake in its application once it partnered with AT&T Mobility.
Carriers are interested in applications that are radically simplistic, said David Christopher, AT&T Mobility CMO. “As complexity goes down, usability goes up.” For example, in one year, AT&T Mobility’s music revenues increased 400% once the carrier demanded that its devices have a hard key (or soft key with a touch screen device) labeled for music.
Devices are now driving data services and that’s never happened before,” said Syniverse CEO Tony Holcombe.
An application that can grow virally gets VC companies’ interest, said venture capitalist Dixon Doll.
However, even though data overall has increased its uptake, content consumption has remained flat at $1.1 billion, said Warner Music Group’s Michael Nash.
There is incremental value in sharing revenue for all partners in the ecosystem if they work together to bring the right content to consumers, noted Mitch Lazar, Yahoo Inc.’s director of business development.