Thursday, March 20, 2008
Location, Presence and Context: KPN Shows the Way with “Aware” Mobile Services That Deliver
A newly released and must-read report on mobile advertising from eMarketer provides us with more than useful stats (it forecasts worldwide spending on mobile advertising will reach $19 billion in 2012, from $2.6 billion last year); it supplies us with a simple summary of the issues that the industry must tackle before companies can deliver content, services (among them relevant mobile advertising messages and offers) to the right user at the right moment.
As report author and wireless analyst John du Pre Gauntt astutely points out, the contest at the moment is between the mobile operators, who own the customer data through their direct billing relationship, and the many mobile companies, search engine providers, brands, advertising agencies and vendors who also want to connect with the customer.
Against this backdrop, an “area of intense jockeying will be how location is baked into mobile marketing,” Gauntt writes in his report. The stakes are indeed high as we consider how important a factor location has become in a slew of services – of which mobile advertising is just the tip of the iceberg.
The end-game is literally about delivering consumers “an offer they can’t refuse” because it is so well aligned with their location, presence and context. Mobile operators clearly have what it takes to deliver this new breed of “aware” services, but they are, as Gauntt points out, increasingly under attack from other companies to their left and right in the value chain that correctly sense a huge business opportunity. Today’s partnership between European operator KPN and Artilium recognizes this tension and therefore tips the scales that extra bit in KPN’s favour, allowing it to enable a vast range of new mobile commerce, advertising and social networking services.
At a basic level the partnership between our companies opens KPN’s mobile networks to create an ecosystem of user-generated applications. The software enabling this transformation is Artilium’s ARTA Connected Mobile Services architecture, designed to facilitate rapid creation of new mobile applications, packaged as services. (By way of background ARTA is an open, modular and highly extensible Service-Oriented Architecture that includes a Service Creation Environment, a real-time Service Delivery Platform including Intelligent Network, and a Mobile Presence Server. The Mobile Presence Sever combines highly accurate, continuous real-time location and state awareness to enable the deployment of services that are in synch and in tune with consumers’ and prosumers’ lives and lifestyles on the fly.)
As KPN Mobile Chief Executive Officer, Stan Miller put in this release: “Artilium software allows KPN to surge to the forefront of mobile/Web innovation. We are able to open our network to developer communities worldwide to deliver an infinite range of differentiated services and an exciting new level of personalization and interactivity for subscribers. In doing so, we begin to transform the very essence of our business creating new service-centric business models across a broad value chain that includes developers, advertisers and our commercial partners.”
The partnership includes a licensing agreement allowing KPN deployment of ARTA as a platform for next-generation converged services across its growing base of over 27 million mobile subscribers in the Benelux, Germany and Spain. (The partnership also builds on the successful relationship between Artilium and BASE, the KPN mobile operator in Belgium. Artilium’s ARTA platform currently provides the foundation supporting the more than 30 MVNOs on the BASE network, allowing the operator and its brand partners to provide a broad range of mobile services targeted to diverse consumer groups.)
At one level we can say it’s all about the ability to deliver personalized apps and services that dovetail with users’ locations, presence and even moods (as indicated by their browsing patterns and level of interaction with their mobile devices). But, as this announcement shows, real success depends on the creation of an open and equitable ecosystem that allows operators to lead developers, advertisers and commercial partners in the creation and delivery of context-aware services that unite mobile commerce, mobile advertising and social networking.