Earlier this month, members of our management team sat down with Rob Bamforth of Quocirca in London to share insights on current trends in the wireless data industry. This week, we caught up with Rob again to ask a few burning questions which we thought would be of interest to our readers.

1) You’ve often been quoted as saying that people and their needs should be the driving force behind technology and that we should ‘avoid technology for technology’s sake’. Can you elaborate on this, specifically as it relates to the mobile industry?
Service value and user experience should come before megabytes, MIPs and megapixels. Technology products and services are too often sold for what they are, rather than what they can do.

2) What mobile phone features or applications do you think would make people’s lives more productive as opposed to more complicated? Are there consumer demands that simply aren’t being met right now?
I think the need is more generalized than specific, which I’d encapsulate as ‘fewer clicks between thought and action’. If the thought is ‘Get hold of Bill’, ‘When’s the next train?’, or ‘Where could my kids go to eat later?’, the last thing I need while mobile is to be clicking through lots of options and having to make lots of decisions.

3) What do you see as the biggest opportunities for wireless carriers to drive ARPU over the next 1-2 years?
Add value on the side, rather than on the network - i.e., don’t charge for music downloads or tune recognition, but instead take a slice on the purchase of a concert ticket. It takes a leap of faith, but good marketing has always involved loss leaders, low-margin teasers, etc., and the higher-profit-margin ARPU is made on the back of relationships in the mix, rather than as profit centers on each line item or service.

4) Are there any mobile or technology brands out there whose products or services you feel are doing a particularly good job of meeting consumer needs?
Apple (so far).

5) Some operators have hinted that they may institute data caps based on time of usage as a means to combat the stress that skyrocketing data usage is placing on their infrastructure. What are your thoughts on this? How do you think this will affect subscriber usage?
‘Just when they’re (subs) getting used to using it and demanding it, we’ll (operators) cap it’ – not a good idea. I always thought operators (and others in this space) should be making markets before making money – i.e., don’t take big margins during the fragile growth phase, but wait until a little later! I know it’s tough with investors breathing down your neck, but the model does work - it just needs patience, and sometimes deep pockets.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we sit down with other key industry influencers to discuss the trends and issues important to the mobile internet ecosystem. If you have any specific questions you’d like us to ask, feel free to leave a comment or send email to sinfantino@bytemobile.com.

-Stacey Infantino

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How are wireless network operators going to encourage new consumer growth but remain in control of their networks? How are they going to ensure continued delivery of profitable revenue-generating services?

These and other critical questions will be addressed tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. EDT, when Bytemobile hosts the first in its 2009 series of Mobile Minute webinars on challenges and opportunities facing operators today.

The May 27 event – Mobile Data Caps: Can Carriers Profitably Control Data Usage? – will be led by FierceWireless as part of its FierceLive! webinar program. FierceWireless Executive Editor Lynnette Luna will moderate the discussion among John Jackson, analyst at CCS Insight and former vice president at Yankee Group; Larry Socher, global lead of the Network Offering Group at Accenture; and Adrian Hall, chief marketing officer at Bytemobile.

See here for details and registration instructions. The next Mobile Minute webinar – Making a Better Mobile Browser – will be held on June 18.

-Jaishree Subramania

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I am pleased to announce that Bytemobile has further penetrated the tier-two operator segment in North America with the signing of MetroPCS. This is a multi-year, multi-product supply agreement that validates the unique value proposition of the Unison™ Mobile Internet Platform and the rich portfolio of applications deployed on it.

Based in Dallas, Texas, MetroPCS currently serves approximately 6.1 million subscribers across the top 25 U.S. metropolitan areas with flat-rate, unlimited-usage voice and data plans that require no long-term contract. MetroPCS’s principal competitor in this space is Cricket Communications, a subsidiary of Leap Wireless International, which deployed our Optimization and Services Node (OSN) Web Optimization solution in 2007 and added our OSN WebGate™ Service gateway solution in 2009.

On May 7, 2009, The Wall Street Journal stated, “MetroPCS and Leap both offer flat-rate pre-paid pricing with regional restrictions, and sit in the sweet spot in the industry as more customers are trading down to cheaper plans and avoiding contracts.”

The MetroPCS and Cricket accounts are managed by the sales team of Todd Gore and Chris Tow. I want to congratulate and thank Todd and Chris for their commitment and professionalism in establishing Bytemobile as a dominant tier-two supplier in the U.S.

Following the MetroPCS deal, Bytemobile can legitimately claim market leadership in North America, with AT&T, Sprint and Alltel/Verizon in the tier-one segment and Cricket and now MetroPCS in the tier-two segment. This is indeed a proud moment for the North America team and for Bytemobile.

-Hugh Barton

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I am pleased to announce two exciting new initiatives in Bytemobile Product Development. We believe that these initiatives will accelerate our momentum in China and advance our efforts to ‘green’ the mobile internet industry.

China Development Center
We have established our fifth development center – after Patras, Belfast, Champaign, and Mountain View – in Beijing. China is the world’s largest market for mobile services, and we are rapidly penetrating the provincial operating companies of China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom (see John Cole’s blog post on the China Mobile Web Gateway project). Given the growth of our customer base and the singular requirements of the market, it is only logical that China would be the next destination for the expansion of our global engineering team.

The new development center will focus initially on three areas:

• Customization of our products to meet local market requirements and support mobile devices used in China
• Localization of our product interfaces in Chinese languages
• Custom engineering to respond to customer requests with unique solutions

Our first priority is the adaptation of our products to local handsets. Therefore, our first engineer in China – who started last week – is focused on handset profiling and customization. Until now, we have performed this function in our handset laboratory in Patras. With the launch of our team in China, we will be more efficient and better able to meet local demand. We are also working closely with partners in the region to outsource parts of the process under the direction of the local team. As customer demand increases, we will ramp up the team to scale and manage the workload.

Our next priority will be custom solutions engineering in China. To date, we have performed this function in Patras and outsourced to key partners in Greece. The new center in Beijing will enable us to anticipate and respond to the local market and continue to drive our thought leadership throughout the region. We are actively recruiting solutions engineering candidates in the area and are also seeking candidates with a combination of global and local experience.

Green Network Platform
Greening the Mobile Internet and White Space Innovation are two strategic programs that we have launched in the last year. They intersect in a new research and development project designed to dramatically expand the capacity of the Unison Mobile Internet Platform and make a significant contribution to the sustainability of our customers’ network environments.

We launched the project – appropriately named ‘Fusion’ – on April 1, the day after general availability of the new Unison release. Our goal is to reduce our customers’ hardware requirements as they deploy and scale Bytemobile applications in their networks. The Unison platform is already the most scalable mobile internet gateway in the industry. However, Bytemobile has never rested on its laurels and isn’t about to start now. Rather than targeting incremental improvement, we aspire to the seemingly impossible: a ‘quantum leap’ increase in system capacity, which would yield a proportionate decrease in power, cooling and rack space requirements – and therefore in overall data delivery costs.

Because this is a white space innovation project, there are no limitations on methodology. We will evaluate technical solutions ranging from software changes to new operating systems to custom hardware.

Project Fusion will provide a useful model for white space innovation projects of the future. The ‘greening’ of the Unison platform will further enhance our strategic value to customers as they implement environmental responsibility in their network operations and service delivery.

Building a Great Company
Both the China Development Center and Project Fusion are ambitious undertakings. As such, they are consistent with Bytemobile’s history of global market and technological leadership. They also support our plans to continue building a great company that fundamentally changes the shape of its industry through innovation and localization.

-Chris Koopmans

Image use courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/dongbin/3296818794/ under Creative Commons attribution license.

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