The MoPR Blog

Full disclosure, James Wanless is president and COO of MoPR client Talkster, and he’s a friend. But bias aside, he still posted a very interesting piece today about the “revolution” coming in communications.

James points out that the current view of communications is based on silos. For example, most people maintain separate accounts for phone, email and instant messenging (and may have separate accounts for each of these for home and work). This siloed approach means that people maintain a distinct contact list for each service. Even though we can synch and import contacts, the systems are distinct.

This approach is about to be shattered by the needs and desires of a new generation of people who are literally being weened on social networks. James is not talking about Facebook and MySpace users (although they matter a great deal too). James is referring to people like my daughters, who years before they could write their name or had any phone etiquette were meeting their friends and making new ones on Club Penguin. Club Penguin is a social network for kids, and despite it’s video game-like appearance has many of the same attributes of the more grown-up social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

James asserts that as these children become adults, their expectation of communications will change, forcing the communications platforms to likewise change. In the end what we will have is not a siloed series of communications services, but a singular platform that integrates everything we use and creates portability. Instead of using Outlook we’ll use Facebook. And Facebook will be on our mobile phone too. We’ll use Facebook (or MySpace or LinkedIn or Ning, etc.) as our conduit to communication.

Once that happens, instead of looking up a person, deciding whether to call, email or text, and then establishing the communication, we’ll simply open our friends list, click on a face and voila — we’re connected in the most convenient fashion for both parties. In this environment you have greater control on who and how you are contacted. Business contacts are able to reach you at certain times on certain devices whereas friends and family may have a different set of times and methods. You would no longer need to give out phone numbers, email addresses, etc (although you would probably still maintain them). Thus you would have a better ability to maintain your privacy while at the same time still be very public with your profile. And if you need to change any of this information, you simply update your profile and that information is updated for everyone, much like how Plaxo is building their service.

After walking the floor at CTIA with James and discussing this very subject, I think he is completely accurate. It’s an exciting development, and it’s surprising to me that the social networking Goliaths have not been more vocal about such a change. I am certain that the folks building Microsoft’s next version of Exchange are thinking about it.

One added benefit James didn’t discuss — this could spell an end to telemarketing! And for that reason alone, more resource should be devoted to making this change happen.

Oh yeah, and a sidebar note: I would be remiss in my role as a member of Talkster’s PR team if I didn’t point out that Talkster can already enable this revolution today with their communications platform.

Read James’ post “Giving Voice to the Social Revolution” at the Talkster Blog.

You can add Under the Radar | Mobility to the list of industry conferences we really love at MoPR. This past week both Melissa and I had the opportunity to attend this conference together with our clients Talkster and Hovr, who were both presenting companies.

At Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, 32 early-stage startups, together with 10 “Grad Circle” companies further along in their development, presented to an audience of VCs, reporters, bloggers and other industry watchers. The premise of the conference is telegraphed by the conference name. All of these companies are young businesses that have not yet become household names in their respective markets – they are “under the radar.” But the name of the conference producer really implies the purpose – Dealmaker Media.

There were awards given to the companies that were considered best by a panel of judges and another by the audience in each of the respective mobility categories: Publishing Platform, Messaging/Sharing, Search and Discovery, Voice Services, Advertising, Media Platforms, Infrastructure and Social Network. Having worked with Dealmaker Media to place companies into the conference, we can tell you that all of the 42 companies that made presentations are in fact winners as there was an extensive vetting process, as one might imagine, to whittle down the field of mobility startups to just 42. As a result, the conference was a fascinating portent of how mobility is going to be changing consumer and business services in the near future.

Hovr walked away with the Category Winner prize in Advertising for their ad-supported mobile gaming and social network service. As CEO Vipul Sawhney began his presentation, a group of VCs sitting behind me casually dismissed Hovr as being the same as their competitor, Greystripe – a company that was earlier in the market with ad-supported mobile games, but does not include any of the ad targeting or social networking capabilities of Hovr. But as Vipul explained MobileSpace, the social networking component to Hovr’s service – which enhances the social engagement aspect of mobile gaming that encourages repeated play of the same game by a group of friends thus driving more ads to be served and more revenue for Hovr and game producers – these same VC’s had their “a ha moment” and understood the big gulf between Hovr and Greystripe. In the end, judges Erik de Kroon of Vodafone Group, Daniel Rosen of AKQA Mobile and Eric Ver Ploeg of VantagePoint unanimously picked Hovr as the best in the Advertising category.

But as I said, each of the 42 companies were winners just by being selected to present, and the purpose of the event was not to win prizes but to make deals. In between sessions and during the breaks both our clients were engaged in several meetings with VCs and potential business partners. Each exec that attended from both Talkster and Hovr left the event with a pocket full of important business cards and, more important, a schedule of follow-on meetings.

We saw a lot of interesting companies at the event. Certainly, and quite objectively, our favorites were Talkster and Hovr.  Talkster had great momentum having won Best Overall Service at CTIA in October, and the buzz from their newly announced platform to ad-enable any voice or text communication carried over into the conference. It must be very gratifying after all the hard work of building and launching a service to have VCs approach you, as happened on a couple of occasions for COO James Wanless and president Jim Fergusen.

But besides our clients, people in the industry should pay attention to each of the 42 companies. Among our favorites were Vollee, a company that can stream processor-intensive applications to 3G phones (and other IP devices such as IPTV set top boxes) in the form of video. Their application allows for the best of console and PC games to be played on a mobile handset. They solved the problem of portability for Second Life, and that alone should make them hugely successful. TileFile was another interesting Media Platform company which allows the easy sharing and publishing of video optimized for the mobile platform.

Socialight was our favorite by far in the Social Networking category. The company has built a platform for content producers to create communities based on location. Another company in Advertising that was interesting is Zoove, which is looking to replace the five-digit SMS short code with a telephonic process. Zoove’s CEO Tim Jemison showed how their technology can replace a six step text messaging based call-to-action with a one step process that works like placing a phone call. In the Search and Discovery category, Dial Direct was category winner by both audience and judges for their very simple service – dial into your phone the word d-i-r-e-c-t-i-o-n-s (347-328-4667) and speak your location and the place you want to find and this service will not only find it for you but will send you step-by-step driving or walking directions. We actually met their co-founder Amit Desai earlier in the week at FierceMarket’s Wireless Voice conference in San Francisco and used the service several times even before seeing it presented at Under the Radar.

Another favorite aspect of this event is the event producers themselves. I met a lot of people at this conference, but among my favorites was Dealmaker Media CEO Debbie Landa. She has one of the coolest jobs in high tech. Through her events and blog, she gets to see the entire landscape of emerging technologies and watch the progress of the very best young companies. I’m jealous. Most people in her position would be harried and frazzled as she had to manage all the moving parts to ensure everything went off smoothly. But Debbie was omnipresent, always with a smile on her face and happy to talk to anyone who came up to her. On her staff, Shay Nowick was extremely helpful to us throughout the entire process of submitting our clients and getting them to the stage. But the entire Dealmaker Media staff gets our vote for a great conference very well produced.

If you’re at a young start-up looking for funding and exposure, we highly recommend participating at Under the Radar. Oh, and if you’re a young mobility start-up hoping to emerge from being under-the-radar, contact Mobility Public Relations!

Long time, no post. The entire MoPR team has been swamped. The good news, we’re working for clients!

Last week the MoPR team made its second excursion into Canada. This time, we headed east to Toronto. It was a jam-packed few days, but in between client meetings, breakfasts with venture capitalists and brunches with editors, we did manage to have a good time. By the way, if you’re in town, try Le Petit Dejeuner on King East for breakfast or brunch. No doubt Melissa will write about her crunchy eggie bread. John G is working on his power breakfast post too.

First and foremost, it was essential to right an egregious wrong. Stacy was the only person in the MoPR team never to have dined at Harvey’s. Not only did she get to eat at Harvey’s, but she got to sit in an actual restaurant and not inside a Home Depot as the rest of us did in Vancouver. But just like the rest of us, Stacy chose poutine.

Toronto is a beautiful and amazing city. We were lucky that we had an opportunity to fit in some sightseeing and spend a night out with our new clients (shhh… their name is a secret for now).

Our secret client took us out to a great Mexican dinner and then to the world famous Second City - Toronto sketch comedy theatre (I’m using Canadian spelling for a little added flavour), the improv troup that gave rise to the careers of Dan Akroyd, Gilda Radner, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Andrea Martin, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Mike Myers and so many others. We laughed our asses off! It was a ribald good time, and none of us will ever look at a three-toed sloth the same way again. No doubt members of this cast will be among the notable alumni of SST.

Stay tuned for more posts about our trip to Toronto.

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