Whitepaper
Unified Mobile Data Platform An Analytics based approach
Sponsored by InfoSpace Mobile
Executive Summary
2006 was a banner year for mobile data. Revenues from mobile data increased for all major carriers across all major regions around the world with data contributing 10-30% to overall revenues. In Q1 2007, US carriers recorded over $5B in data revenues with mobile data contributing to over 16% of the more than $32B in carrier service revenues. In fact, the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) from data jumped 43% from last year. It has been a long journey though. Driven initially by SMS messaging, the market embraced ringtones, graphics, music, and gaming, each creating multi-billion dollar markets. As we look into the next five years, not only are new content applications such as broadcast video, idle screen, user-generated-content, community, and mobile search being introduced, but the functionality available with these applications, such as the sharing and tagging of data, is also increasing the demand on the mobile entertainment platform to be adaptive to the growing needs of the market. To stay competitive in this rapidly evolving and challenging market place, service providers must move from silo’d point solutions to integrated unified platforms to maximize their returns from the declining services and better prepare for the technical and business challenges in front of them. The vast potential of mobile data services in general and mobile search and advertising specifically can’t be realized without a retooling of the fundamental approach to deploying services, engaging partners, and serving users with the best possible analytics-driven contextual user experience. This paper outlines the evolution of data services, discusses the need for unified mobile data services approach, and lays out the basics and the merits of a services-oriented analytics-driven framework.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary 2
Evolution of data services 3
Integrated solution offering 11
Mobile Search – providing impetus for integration 15
Rise of the brands – What’s your Audience Strategy? 17
Analytics driven unified framework 21
Mobile Advertising 26
Recommendations 29
Conclusions 30
Your comments are always welcome.
Chetan Sharma