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Columbitech Demonstrates Transfer from GSM to Bluetooth...
Finally some good news about Bluetooth. How this affects M-Commerce and Microsoft.
As the wireless world becomes ever more competitive, hungry startups are stealing a lesson out of the Greek’s playbook by attempting to bring their own Trojan Horses behind the well-guarded gates of wireless carriers. The strategy is simple. Rather than overwhelm carriers by trying to sell them everything today, startups are hiding their once grand ambitions under the clock of very targeted niche offerings. Their hope is that getting under the gates with success in a limited vertical will lead them to larger business opportunities.
As a result, you end up with the “king of wireless taxi access via Palm OS” or the “leading developer of wireless CRM applications for the stapler manufacturing industry.”
This serves only to confuse carriers who are confronted with a seemingly endless stream of limited applications that require huge effort to implement and have no track record of providing any ROI.
Enter MobileRAIN. Their company pitch reads like a hundred others. MobileRAIN is “a wireless infrastructure provider for current and next generation wireless carrier networks.”
But the company has an advantage. First, MobileRAIN’s four founders have worked at places such as AT&T Bell Labs, NEC, Alcatel, Oracle, MCI, Global Crossing and Booz Allen, so once they get past the guard, and into the carriers, they know how to speak the language. More than that, they’re offering something no one else is—no new services. (Gasp!)
MobileRAIN’s game plan is to offer enhanced versions of services people already use. Got a new device? Well, carriers could spend tens of millions of dollars advertising, hoping that the consumer learns to use the new services for that device. Or they could offer an enhanced version of something as simple as caller ID and ease consumers into the data world with services they already are familiar with, and more importantly, are already comfortable receiving a bill for.
“If you look at the mindset of carrier’s customers, people will gladly pay for telephony services, but no one has figured out how to get people to pay for content services,” explains MobileRAIN CEO -Raj Puri.
Imagine a caller ID service that allows consumers to identify people with graphics or a corporate service that allows a sales force to receive instantly updated sales data on the phone screen whenever a customer calls. What’s on the bill? Not a $250k integration fee, but an extra 10 bucks a month for “enhanced Caller ID.”
MobileRAIN is currently preparing to trial their service with a major US carrier. And once the MobileRAIN box is brought through the gates and into the carrier network, it will still be there when consumers are ready for new services. MobileRAIN will allow carriers to create new services through an automated visual drag and drop service. “We’re not telling them the [network and device] migration story,” notes Puri, “It’s not ‘here’s a box that will let you do this.’”
It’s a matter of giving the carriers something they are comfortable with and it’s a strategy that should pay off.
Josh Newman is editor of Unstrung and is remaining consistent with his strategy.
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