ANTHEM™ Company Contact

January 02, 2009

Intercasting Corp in 2009

I am comfortably certain that somewhere in a cornfield in Peaksville, Ohio, now lies 2008.

The New Year’s Eve ritual this year was more about sweeping 2008 under the rug and forgetting about it than it was about celebrating it. I cannot remember when the “celebration” part of the holidays was more about looking forward to the following year. As far as the world in general is concerned, I am very much looking forward to 2009, if only out of morbid curiosity.

Regarding Intercasting Corp, I am flat-out excited about 2009. The confluence of trends that we have been predicting for so long are now coalescing, and this year we will see a general redefinition of mobile data services and the way consumers interact with them. We are working with many developers, carriers and OEMs to leverage our ANTHEM platform to evolve the mobile communication experience, and the result is going to be awesome.

We are sharing some details of our new platform release in Q1 at various events, so if you will be at one of the following and would like to see the evolution of ANTHEM, please send us an email and we’ll set up a time to meet…

CES – We will be in Las Vegas from January 7th through the 11th. Qualcomm generously gave us space in their booth, so you can also stop by there.

Social Networking Conference – I will be co-presenting with Jen Byrne from Verizon Wireless at the social networking conference in Miami on January 22 and 23. It will be the warmest place in the country. Do stop by.

Mobile World Congress – Have you justified going to Barcelona on February 16-19? We have. Come see our new technology. In fact, I will personally be in Europe for two weeks visiting various countries, so if you have always wanted to meet in person but couldn’t get to sunny San Diego, I might just be in your country. (If your country is Spain, Germany, Belgium, France, Czech Republic or the U.K.)

Happy new year and success to all in 2009.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 10:51 AM

December 18, 2008

Social wrapped around everything

I haven’t felt very bloggy lately. Forgive me – it seems I have been living on an airplane for the past two months. I have been traveling around the world, visiting clients, planning for next year, etc., and I can tell you that next year is going to be awesome: There is a convergence of trends that we assumed would happen one day, and those trends are really starting to converge in a big way. Those trends are:

1) Social networking becomes a mainstream communication medium (check)
2) Mobile operators embrace the value of social networking in the mobile space (check)
3) Social communication becomes a feature of the native mobile device UI (soon)

That last one is the bit that is going to make 2009 so exciting for me. Underway now are the various projects at various carriers and OEMs to make mobile phones “social.” Derrick and I have been meeting with all of our clients to plan around their initiatives and our new functionality, and I have to say that what I see in general is really the most innovative thinking I have seen across the industry in some time.

Almost every carrier in the world has the following projects in various stages of development at this very moment:
- “Social address book”
- “One-click upload” camera
- Active UI
- Open app store

As a quick aside, I should note that most of the OEMs and some of the infrastructure providers also have the same projects defined, and it is going to be a zero-sum game among them; among large hardware companies, some move more swiftly than others. As the lines blur between hardware and software, everyone is swimming upstream. Who does the future belong to? Ask Verizon Wireless, soon to be the largest carrier in North America, how they plan to dominate their market. Then again, ask Nokia who they think the customer belongs to, as they continue to build their capabilities not just in handsets and infrastructure, but also in services now. Talk to companies like Alcatel Lucent, in the midst of a management upheaval, where they need to go to stay in the game. “Closer to the consumer,” is the answer for everyone. How to do it? PANDER to consumer whims as never before, give them what they want, and give it to them in the absolute best experience possible.

What do mobile consumers want? Ease of use, low cost and social interaction. And that is exactly what consumers are going to get starting in 2009. Imagine your cheap subsidized feature phone acting more like an iPhone, getting a simplified user interface that is easy and even fun to use, and wrap the word “social” around the most important features. Look forward to the following:

- Active UI: Get RSS feeds, friend feeds, alerts, notifications, messages and media delivered directly into your phone’s native UI. What is an inbox anyway? Can’t the idle screen work more like an active communication dashboard? Yes. And soon it will.

- More useful cameras: Why do only 10% of photos ever make their way off of the mobile device? Because it is really hard to send photos. And what is the incentive to send a photo via MMS anyway? Sharing? Is it more valuable to share with a million people versus one person? Yes. Tighter integration between camera phones and photo hosting and sharing providers is like wrapping “social” around your camera.

- Social address book: Communication is multimodal. You send emails, you use IM, you use Facebook, you send SMS, maybe you even use Twitter. All of your contacts are in different address books. Your mobile phone should be more multimodal than it is. Since it is the device that is with you more than any other, it makes sense that it should have a superset of all your contacts no matter where they originate, and no matter what mode of communication you wish to employ, your phone should be able to do it.

- App store for the rest of us: With all the hype around the smart phone market lately, you would think that everyone in the world had an iPhone. The truth is that Apple represents a small slice of the smart phone market, which amounted to no more than 120mm units shipped worldwide this year. Feature phones (the less expensive, lower-powered types) account for 1.13 BILLION units sold this year, and they are getting better every day. Those consumers will soon be able to pick and choose functionality and add applets that extend the value of their phones, and it won’t be a rev of the existing “download storefront” model. Look for something totally different and refreshingly simple.

As all of these initiatives make their way to market, consumers will end up winning big. The entire mobile communication experience is about to shift and just get…better. What it all adds up to is a personalized and frictionless communication experience. That is the power of “social.” It is a too-often used word that is ill-defined in the context of technology and communication, but nonetheless it is fueling a revolution in the way people communicate that is about to raise the bar in the mobile industry.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:07 AM