Mobile email triggers content. Looks to advertising

By Brian Dolan, May 18, 2007

The cliché scene of a chattering mobile phone user on a busy subway car has given way to a quieter rendition of mobile phone use: the click-clacking of the mobile email user. Although mobile email has seen dramatic growth over the past few years, most of that growth has been dominated by the enterprise user. Current Analysis reports that in 2006 about 1.2 percent of corporate email accounts, or 8 million, were mobile.

There is still plenty of room for growth on the enterprise front, particularly as handsets become more sophisticated and offer a more compelling user experience. Nevertheless, some mobile email providers are turning their focus to the consumer market. And to help tap that market, they are integrating email with mobile content and exploring advertising.

Better handsets, better email
"Consumer retail email is suddenly very much the opportunity," says Seven's CEO Ross Bott. "The single most important factor for this is the rate of change and evolution of handsets: They're finally reaching the depth of tide where all these mobile applications are beginning to float." Indeed, handsets now offer a much more compelling email experience and that is driving much of these changes. SMS won't hold the spotlight for much longer, Bott says. "CPUs on mobile phones are rivaling some PCs and they have enough memory now to make things really interesting, especially for really powerful email clients."

To help draw consumers and round out their offerings, some mobile email providers are adding more applications that will drive email usage and increase overall consumer data usage. "We see two areas in the way that we look at content: personal and general content, as it relates to mobile," says Visto Vice President of Marketing Joyce Kim. "General content people can access through carrier portals, the mobile web and mobile advertising, while personal content includes everything from contacts, photos, user-generated videos and desktop files from a computer accessible device." Kim said that email is just another form of content, and it happens to be the one the company tackled first. "Some of the other email providers have begun pushing and syncing weather updates or stock quotes, etc., but we really focused instead on how people use their email accounts and decided to streamline those things to drive content usage, [thereby] making mobile email more contextual and relevant in the process."

Visto, Seven and other mobile specific email solution providers are taking their cues from Web-based email portals such as Google's Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail. The timing is appropriate because these email giants are now beginning to invade the mobile platform. "If you get an email with a street address in it, you will be able to trigger a mapping function directly from the mobile email," Kim said. "The same is true for Web addresses, with one click you can seamlessly open your mobile browser and visit that site." File attachments, remote desktop access and more will become standard for most email services in 2007, according to the email service providers.

More than text
Nokia may be a bit ahead of the game after its acquisition of Intellisync last year. Tom Libretto, Nokia's director of portfolio strategy and product marketing with the mobility solutions group, says that mobile email users want more than just pushed text from their email service. When Nokia acquired Intellisync last year, the email solutions provider merged with Libretto's unit, and brought a white-labeled mobile email account: Verizon Wireless. Libretto said his unit powers hundreds of thousands of active Verizon Wireless email users, who have access to presence functionalities, remote desktop access, IM and RSS feeds. Each of the services leverage Intellisync's push capabilities, which makes integration with the email client much easier. "Whether we're pushing content to a user's handset via an RSS feed or sending documents to an enterprise's sales team, fundamentally, on the back end, the technology is identical," Libretto said.

MVNO Helio, which has positioned itself as a carrier looking to recreate the PC experience on the mobile phone, also has integrated email with other applications. Helio's latest offering, the Ocean handset, is the culmination of Helio's efforts to bring the PC experience to the handset. "If you get an embedded phone number in an email, you can dial straight off of it, or text that person," says Helio's Senior Director of Products and Services Doug Britt. "If you receive a Web address, we will parse it and invoke the mobile browser right away. We've also worked hard from an attachment standpoint; users can now take attachments right off the email and save to their device."

Integrating email with messaging
Because consumers see email as just another form of communicating, many email application providers are investigating various techniques for combining email and messaging. The goal is to help consumers track and manage their communications. "We need to decrease the complexity of them, because humans don't even consider the differences between them, they're just messages. Combining these services in logical ways is something Seven will start doing in mid-2007 and complete in 2008," Bott says.

Helio's Ocean handset already demonstrates how effective and compelling integrated messaging solutions can be, as noted by the many favorable comparisons between the device and the much-hyped Apple iPhone. Britt says that the Ocean has instant messaging platforms such as AIM, Yahoo and MSN. In addition it offers email from Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, Helio Mail and Earthlink Mail. Users' regular contact lists show their friends IM presence, or whether they are online. Hyperlinks trigger browsers and friends can be located through GPS. These services are integrated with the messaging services, thus blurring the line between where one application ends and another begins.

The next frontier?
Integrating applications with email may be on the forefront of many email application providers' to-do lists but some are also looking closely at the advertising model. The key is context. Google has been successful in launching a contextual advertising based Web-based email service, Gmail.
Likewise, Visto's Kim believes that advertising is an opportunity for mobile email if it's done correctly." It's a challenge to make advertising relevant to what the users are doing, to make it contextual so they feel that it adds value," Kim says. "You've also got to be careful not to make such contextual advertising seem intrusive from a privacy standpoint."

Whether or not advertising-supported email models will make their way into the mobile space is still unclear. However, mobile email providers are confident that integrated email with other applications is the answer to getting more consumers onboard.

From: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/feature-mobile-email-triggers-content-looks-to-advertising/2007-05-18