(Editor’s note: We asked Konstantin Othmer to provide his views on the voice messaging area, which has seen a growth in interest. His company, Core Mobility is a player, as are Comverse, Glenayre, Pinger, Voice Genesys and Fast Mobile. Some, like Hey Anita, have exited the business.)
Phones have been around for over 100 years. The first phone calls were made by operators who manually connected wires and has evolved to audio highly compressed into packets automatically routed through switches on wires or over the air. The phone has changed from a speaker and microphone with wires to a device with a full color screen capable of receiving (and displaying in color!) satellite and terrestrial video and audio broadcasts.
After all of that innovation, the primary driver of carrier revenue remains phone calls and the number one usage of the devices remains the same: phone calls. Calling has become more convenient and cheaper, but interestingly the overall quality of service has gone down dramatically: wire line phones didn’t have advertising campaigns featuring the slogan “can you hear me now?” But that is a topic for another time.
The question I’ll discuss here is the next killer app of telephony. By killer app I am referring specifically to a usage paradigm for the mobile device: what is the next application of mobile technology that will generate the most usage? I’m using this definition to separate from things like ring-tones or wallpapers which are personalization features and generate a lot of revenue, but aren’t a usage paradigm per say.
First, let’s agree what the number one application is. OK • it’s the phone call. That was easy. And number 2 is pretty easy as well: Without a doubt, it’s text messaging. But what is number 3?
As it turns out, there is a close race for #3 which includes mobile email, mobile instant messaging, and push-to-talk. Each of these applications is used, and often heavily used, by over 10% of users. Interestingly, these are all communications applications as compared to something like stocks, weather, maps, etc. Clearly, the number one use for the phone is communications. Are we having fun yet?
Let’s put these applications in a matrix to see if we can better understand them. Picking the axis is critical, and it’s hard to argue with making voice vs. text one of the axis. For the other axis there are a number of candidates cost, convenience, speed, dialog-based, real-time vs. async. While there are certainly some interesting things to learn from looking at the cost, speed, and convenience axis, the most interesting is probably the communications modality: real-time, dialog based communications vs. asynchronous, messaging based communications. That gives us the following matrix:
These communications paradigms fit nicely into a four quadrant grid, with three of the quadrants populated. Two of the quadrants share services: for intrusive, dialog based voice communications you can use either Push-To-Talk (PTT) or a phone call. And on the text side you can use either SMS (of telephony origin) or IM (of PC origin).
The most interesting quadrant is the one that is blank: non-intrusive, asynchronous, voice communications. You might say that that quadrant is occupied by voicemail. Isn’t voicemail asynchronous voice communication? Yes, and many people are sophisticated users of PBX systems and know how to leave a message for someone else on that system. But normal voicemail “lives” behind a failed phone call, so you actually “risked” interrupting the person (intrusive communication) and having a conversation, rather than just sending them a quick message.
How big could this empty quadrant be? As it turns out, in the US, we make approximately 650 million phone calls a day and send about 1.1 billion emails per day. That data is old and might be off by a bit, but it seems reasonable. At least it passes my gut check - I certainly send many more emails than make phone calls, and if you believe the numbers and take a slight leap of faith, it says the desire for asynchronous voice communications could be twice as large as the market for a phone call. And certainly the number of text messages sent further indicates a desire for asynchronous communication.
Wow! The voice communications capability of a phone has a functionality gap possibly larger than the phone call itself!
Before I had email, I didn’t miss email. Today, email is nearly my fulltime job. Before I had IM, I didn’t miss IM. In fact, when I first heard about IM I couldn’t quite figure out what it gave me until I started using it. Today, I spend a great deal of time using IM and keep the application running almost all the time.
My company, Core Mobility, calls the asynchronous voice product that fills the missing quadrant “Vnotes”. Sprint launched a version of our product in a test in late 2003, and as of early 2005 has included the functionality on almost all new Sprint data phones (smart phone version coming soon). The Sprint version of the product is called “Voice SMS” and meets the key asynchronous voice messaging requirements:
• universal reach • you can send a message to any email address or mobile phone number
• rapid fire interface • one click listen and one-click reply to messages
Although there has been no marketing of this feature to date, the usage of Voice SMS-like products has been ramping up. It’s more convenient than tapping out a message on a keypad, and it allows complex communication between individuals or groups without interrupting them as you would have to do with a phone call. Personally, I find the application particularly useful in situations where I don’t have easy access to a keyboard or couldn’t use one even if I did such as when I’m in the car or traveling.
If you have a Sprint phone that was purchased in the last year, you can try Voice SMS simply by selecting a contact from your contact list, selecting “Send Message”, and selecting Voice SMS. In addition to sending messages to mobile phone numbers, if you have entered email addresses in your phone, you can send messages to email.
If you don’t have anyone to send a Voice SMS to, try sending one to yourself and you will see what it is like to receive a Voice SMS. I use this frequently to send myself reminders. Or, if you send a Voice SMS message to joke@telco51.com, I will respond with a Voice SMS with my favorite joke. Seriously. You must send a VoiceSMS, an email will not work. If you don’t have a Sprint phone, find a friend who has one!
Please leave comments here and let me know how you like the joke!!! ïŠ
14 Comments
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carl rahn griffith said:
No RSS?
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Devang Shah said:
Considering that more than two thirds (I have heard claims as high as four fifths) of those 1.1 billion e-mails are SPAM, what do you think will be the impact of all these shot-gun-marketers on voice messaging ? It is not as if internet can be regulated and I assume that you propose to use the internet infrastructure to enable these application.
All I can say about voice messaging is, ‘No Thanks’. I have enough trouble as it is dealing with those annoying telemarketers operating in a regulated market.
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km4 said:
What a lame article !
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Zaid said:
Trust me, day iPhone or whatever comes out, the primary use of the phone will become…you guessed it, music.
I have a SLVR which has 512mb built-in iTunes. There’s nothing like having ONE slim device for both phone + music.
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niti said:
Banking and funds transfer on the mobile, using your phone to pay for stuff, sending funds from your phone to another’s phone, checking your balance at the store before making a purchase. “Paypal” but on the go…
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Stozz said:
ZAID is right. Get a Nokia N91 and live the dream. (OK - it could be slimmer; but it does phone calls and emails better than an iPod ;-)
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Sulccc said:
Hi,
MMS using only for voice content isn’t the same as you mentioning in your article under Voice SMS? OK, may be one button click is the different, but on some phone is very easy.
How about server based Podcast with control on mobile?
Sulccc/Tamas
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rick gregory said:
hmm… in determining #3 there’s no mention of camera usage or music usage. I have no stats here, but I’d like to see those in the mix - is PTT really used by more people than the camera on their phone?
Also, people use phones for communications because that’s the expectation set going in… Phones are sold as, well, phones. Not small computers that can act like phones. Customers say to themselves “I need a new phone… and my new phone has to have a camera/IM/PTT/whatever.” This initial mindset thus biases people toward using the phone for communication. Witness the Nokia 770 - people did not get that it deliberately was NOT a phone… it was a small, general purpose computing device that was intimately tied to the IP network, not the cell network.
Also, this usage is colored by the fact that people get their phones from their phone companies - this further cements in peoples’ heads that what they are buying is a phone vs a small computing device that also has phone capabilities. There are FAR more phone models out there than you can get on the wireless vendors’ sites, but the vendor supplied phones are far cheaper to the customer and hence dominant. Add to this that few people ever unlock their phones from their vendor and you have an even more restricted set of functionality.
Finally, this article veers a bit too much toward being a promo piece for one company… I’d rather see your analysis of the space with links to blog posts by Konstantin and others than vendor written articles. Read/Write Web does this too and I think it dilutes the voice of the blog.
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William Oudsema said:
the next killer app will be converting print to audio so print can be listened to via the phone. i can’t wait to pick my audio “skin”.
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William Oudsema said:
There is a solution to spam with regards to the print to audio conversion app. The biggest problem is which audo “skin” to select …..
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Francis Galton said:
I believe Rick Gregory hit it right on when he mentioned cameras. I’m not sure why the author is still out pondering what the number 3 killer app is. Anyone who’s been paying attention would be aware that our new media environment is filled with contents taken from mobile phone cameras and video recordings. Research shows that there’s a big big percentage of mobile phones that now comes standard with a camera. And if we could go a step deeper and survey how often users use their mobile camera, I believe the results would be fairly convincing.
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chris said:
Anyone mentioning music, cameras, etc. completely misread and subjectively responded to this article; you’re comparing apples to oranges. I couldn’t agree more with Konstantin. The basis for his prediction focuses specifically on channels of ‘communication’ not ‘entertainment’. Point: How does a child leave a message for a friend or parent or a secretary leave a message for a boss using a camera, ringback, ringtone, song, etc. Incorporating video into messaging is cool but more intrusive as it inherently weakens the ability to multi-task - a major point in his argument. Voice SMS is superb in being personal, private, non-intrusive, speedy, and efficent.
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Matt Marshall said:
Rick, I hear your concern. I’m trying to make this contributors column more opinionated, but also don’t want authors to pitch their own companies. I thought Kon had some good analysis, which is why I let this one slip. Going forward, I’ll continue to try to avoid overt pitching.
Thanks for the feedback.
Matt
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Dan said:
The barrier to voice SMS spam, is that it costs a dime to send it (at least it would cost at least that much on my carrier, Cingular). $80M is a lot to spend on ads no one wants to see.
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12:18 pm
Ramblings of the Wanderer said:
[...] Konstantin Othmer has an intresting article at Venture Beat about the next Killer App for Mobile Phones according to him : Voice SMS. [...]