CTIA SPECIAL EDITION - APRIL 3, 2008

Finding “stuff” on your mobile phone has not always been
the easiest task in the world. But vendors and carriers alike are trying
to make it easier with on-device portals and widgets..

You might not hear about it every day. But the on-device portal (ODP) industry is alive and well.

ARCchart coined the term several years ago as a way to describe various vendors’ attempts to leverage the handset’s capabilities to deliver a more compelling user experience and increase content adoption. Today, “it’s clearly a defined market,” says Matt Lewis, research director at ARCchart. Now ODPs are on the agenda of several Tier 1 carriers around the world, he says. The expectation is a lot of content will be consumed over an ODP interface, which requires the direct involvement of carriers to reach any significant volumes.

Alltel Wireless grabbed a lot of attention last year when it started deploying Celltop, enabled by Qualcomm’s uiOne technology. Celltop features “cells” that come pre-installed on handsets and represent various categories to help users quickly navigate to their weather, news, stocks or other applications. More recently, Cincinnati Bell announced it is using software from SurfKitchen to enhance data discovery and delivery with its MyPhone portal.

GROWTH PROSPECTS
Worldwide, key players in ODP include Abaxia, Adobe, Cibenix and SurfKitchen. But Bellevue, Wash.-based Action Engine lays claim to being the oldest ODP player. It was founded in 2000, and while it has taken several different iterations over the years, it finally is coming into its own.

Silk: Seeing RFPs from carriers

Action Engine has deals with top media brands but also has seen a good number of RFPs coming from the carrier community of late. In fact, “the market is just exploding,” says President and CEO Scott Silk. “We’re feeling really good about our prospects.”

Silk gives a lot of credit to the Action Engine team for aligning the company’s products with buyers’ requirements. The company is now launching MAX, its Mobile Advertising Xtension platform. With MAX, the company is opening up its in-application ad-serving capabilities beyond the applications it builds, making it easier for third-party developers to ad-enable their applications and for operators to put ads on offline device screens, company executives say.

Action Engine says it pioneered the technology for inserting, caching, rotating and tracking mobile ads within offline mobile application screens back in 2005. It has launched ad-enabled applications for brands such as The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated.com, MSNBC.com and Golf.com.

Things are also cooking at SurfKitchen, with Cincinnati Bell as its first North American carrier customer. Eric Schimpf, general manager of Consumer Wireless for Cincinnati Bell, says SurfKitchen’s experience in markets outside the United States helped Cincinnati Bell, a GSM carrier, gear up for its MyPhone deployment. Orange Group, Telefonica Moviles Espana, Telstra, Maxis, Etisalat and Saudi Telecom are among SurfKitchen’s customers.

Like other regional carriers, Cincinnati Bell can’t place orders for millions of customized handsets. But the on-device portal allows the carrier to personalize phones and give devices the same-looking interface regardless of the manufacturer. The MyPhone portal first will launch on about four handsets that meet certain requirements, such as memory size, but expand after that.

“It absolutely is about making the user experience seamless and easy,” Schimpf says. “That’s the driving motivator, to make the handset experience very user-friendly and consistent.”

GADGETS WITH WIDGETS
Like other ODP vendors, SurfKitchen is talking a lot about widgets, offering its SurfKit Widget Framework for operators to offer a broader, more relevant choice of data services by providing a certain environment on the device. Borrowed from the online environment, a widget fits the core definition of ODP; ARCchart is now including widgets under the ODP umbrella term, Lewis says.

In the past six months, more ODP vendors have made aggressive moves toward widgets. The iPhone itself may not exactly meet the definition of an ODP, but it has elements of it. “The iPhone is another example of a device moving toward having a widget framework at its core,” Lewis says.

In wireless, a widget typically means it sits on a handset and gets periodic updates, so when a user is not connected to the network, he or she can still access updated, fresh content, explains Vicki Mealer, senior director/product management at Qualcomm Internet Services. For example, the handset might have a stock quote widget, which is updated daily – the operator dictates how often. The same could apply to weather, news, sports or other areas of interest.

Boden: The next phase of mobile Internet will be driven by service adoption.

Widgets are top of mind at Openwave. The Openwave Mobile Widgets solution – available now – is based on the Openwave Mobile Integrated Dynamic Application System (MIDAS) environment, which is an AJAX-based runtime environment that leverages common Web technology, standards and developer tools. Whereas the first phase of the mobile Internet was driven by technology and access to services, the next phase is being driven by greater service adoption and usage, says John Boden, senior vice president of product management at Openwave.

A lot of attention still is centered on the idle screen, sort of the prime real estate under the operator’s control. If you can push content on the idle screen, users are more likely to engage in that content. “The idle screen is really the Holy Grail,” Lewis says. “It’s the screen everyone looks at most of the day.”

Data discovery still seems to be one of the largest barriers to entry in terms of mobile content or application adoption, Mealer observes. So operators are embracing many different strategies to improve discovery, whether they be called ODPs or widgets. “I think on all fronts you’re really seeing the strategy is trying to break down some of the barriers,” she says. No doubt, it’s all part of pursuing that other Holy Grail – more wireless data adoption.