Lessons from a Mobile User Generate Content (UGC) Portal

I usually don’t write about PixSense’s products and customers. Recently, however, I was questioned at great length about our experiences by many of our potential customers after they read our announcement of exceeding one million unique visits in less than a month after launch. Considering it to be a well worth milestone achieved, I decided to share it on a public forum and get comments from others on their experiences and thoughts on UGC portals.

Most of us are familiar or avid users of UGC portals. However, as of late, they seem to have become specialized in terms of media sites (Flickr, Photobucket and Snapfish, YouTube) and social networking sites (FaceBook, Friendster and MySpace). Maybe, it’s due to the fact that there are specialized devices for each; digital cameras for photographs, camcorders for videos, and PCs for maintaining contact information and uploading and viewing the media. One of our customers/partners launched a mobile UGC portal in China and wasn’t sure as to what areas to focus on initially. Looking at how broadband UGC sites have developed over time, it’s natural for us to speculate whether our mobile UGC portal will become a photo site, video site or a social networking site?

When you look at today’s mobile phones, a 5MP camera is becoming commonplace (At this point, I would add that I do feel empathetic for all of us in the U.S., where a 2MP camera is still the standard camera phone offered by our mobile operators) and so our logical speculation was that we would become a mobile photo destination. But wait, taking a YouTube style video is possible from most new moderately priced camera phones too! So, why wouldn’t our mobile portal be a destination for videos? Lastly, consider social networking sites: At a very basic level, it’s a combination of an address book, e-mail and the users’ media. Every mobile phone has a very potent address book. That, coupled with the users’ mobile media and text messaging capabilities indicates that social networking should dominate the mobile environment.

So, what have been the results so far? In less than four weeks, over 12,000+ media pieces were made public, and probably the same numbers were kept private. About 60% of the public media comprises of user generated videos, while the rest is comprised of photos. Interestingly, videos started out slow, but now seem to be dominating photo uploads. Like other media sites, there are lot more viewers than creators, the ratio being 100:1. Interestingly, users are viewing the content not just from their web browsers, but also from mobile devices, using WAP connections. Moreover, users are sharing media with their friends, with some sharing it from mobile to mobile, but most through their existing social networking sites.

Summing it up, here is a quick overview of some of our findings on mobile user generated content sites and how they differ from broadband user generated content sites:

Mobile camera phones are an integrated device. As they come equipped with capabilities for both video and photo capturing, mobile UGC sites will be able to host and manage both, and hence, stand out (i.e. these sites will have no difference and will host both videos AND pictures).
There is a higher percentage of content creators in the mobile UGC world than in the broadband UGC world. Why? Maybe it’s because it is easier to create, upload and publish content from a mobile device using the right software (like our partner, Paiker, has experienced).

Most people want to post their content to more than one social networking site directly from their device, which, in this case, was a mobile camera phone. Would users shift away from their existing social networking sites to start using mobile social networking sites? The statistics don’t support this; users still want to use their preferred social networking site. A mobile UGC portal, thus, needs to be able to integrate with already preferred social networking sites. Offering familiar media-posting destinations coupled with an ease of mobile media management, makes for the ultimate mobile UGC experience.

What are your experiences? Similar or Different?





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Nokia and Apple; the McCain and the Obama of the mobile industry

From newspapers to magazines, from the internet to the television, all attention is on Obama – the undeclared winner of the race before it is even over. Oops! I meant the Apple iPhone. Then there is McCain struggling to get attention, despite having all the experience in the world – kind of like Nokia.

The parallels don’t stop here. Message of change with not much talk of substance is what defines Obama and the iPhone. Of course, Obama’s message is sexy and attracts a lot of attention from the youth market and many foreigners – even the ones that can’t vote. It’s the same story with the iPhone, a riveting sex appeal and deafening attention from the world over, including from the ones that can neither buy nor afford it. McCain, on the other hand, keeps talking of his experience, like Nokia, vocalizing their extensive knowledge and experience of the mobile industry.

Let’s now turn our attention to the mobile industry and look beyond the hype at an attempt to uncover the real deal behind the Nokia/iPhone war. Nokia makes phones for the masses and so, for comparison purposes, Nokia’s higher-end ‘N series’ phones, like the N82, N95, should be compared with the iPhone.

What is the basic purpose of a phone? To make calls anywhere, anyplace. If you call someone from your address book, probably both phones provide a similar experience. However, my test of a phone is to make calls with one hand while driving and when I put both of these phones to test, the iPhone failed me while most phones with keypads like Nokia worked well. Having a standard RCA phone jack gives us the flexibility to buy headphones of any type – Apple does a good job by equipping the iPhone with the jack, and finally Nokia is learning and standardizing on it. Wearing headphones in both ears has been deemed illegal in many states before the current cell phone laws came into effect. In the case of the iPhone, the way in which headsets are packaged, most users tend to wear headphones in both ears which may be illegal in many states. Nokia, and many others, who had this advantage are giving it up by packaging stereo headsets. Voice quality, although subjective, is surely somewhat better with Nokia’s headset than with the iPhone. Now, on to using the iPhone away from your home network – Yes, you can use AT&T and pay as much as two dollars per minute, but if you want to unlock your iPhone and use the local SIM of the country that you are visiting, don’t expect help from AT&T, which it seems to provide for other phones.

Web browsing is a new purpose introduced by iPhone, with all previous attempts being sub-optimal. There is no doubt that Apple wins here, hands down from every other vendor. Needless to say, with iTunes and iPod’s success, the iPhone offers a much superior experience. Unfortunately, with the limited memory on the iPhone, I wouldn’t use the iPhone any more than I’d use my iPod Shuffle.

Email is another function that the Blackberry streamlined, and just like the iPhone excelled at Web browsing. Needless to say, the Blackberry is the king of the email functionality hill, and the iPhone has a long way to go to catch up. In addition, the absence of a real keypad ensures the sad fact that the iPhone may never be able to catch up on email functionality. Nokia did well on its E Series, although its N Series experience can only be termed sub-optimal.

Five mega pixel cameras and great branded lenses are the hallmark of Nokia’s new phones, including the N95. The iPhone, however, has a long way to get there, but more pictures are being taken per phone by iPhone users because of the bigger screen size and the pictures just look better on the iPhone screen. However, don’t try shooting a video with the iPhone yet, since it doesn’t support that feature, while many low end phones already come equipped with that capability.

The part that really surprised me was the attention that the Apple developer kit and other third party software got from the media. Hello! Symbian (and hence Nokia) has had one of the best developer kits in the industry for a long time and have applications in the thousands available. True, Nokia and Symbian failed in hyping it up, but the fact is that Apple came fashionably late to this party and simply stole the show. Apple has created a revenue model for its software developers, and Nokia needs to learn while it fruitlessly tries to be Google rather than making money for its developers, and hence, for itself.

Extensibility is another area where the iPhone gets zero marks. I’m shocked at how little has been written about it in the press. You can’t replace the battery yourself and the memory is not extendable either since that’s how Apple chose to differentiate its models. On the other hand, most other phones come with a removable battery that you can buy anywhere. Memory is also pretty much standardized in the form of MicroSD cards for most phones. Oh yes, if you want to charge your iPhone without a PC/Mac, be ready to shell out another $20 for the charger, since Apple chose not to supply one.


R. Paul Singh
President & CEO
PixSense.com



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