Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace. Those companies’ products spread over the Internet like a virus. But why hasn’t there been a runaway hit like those in the mobile software world? Why does it take so much longer to build value, and a strong customer base, in mobile companies than in certain Internet startups?

Dan Shapiro had some entertaining thoughts on this yesterday, as he spoke to the Mobile Northwest 2009 crowd in Seattle. Shapiro is the co-founder and CEO of Ontela, a Seattle-based mobile imaging startup, and he’s a veteran of RealNetworks and Microsoft. I won’t do justice to his presentation, but here’s the gist.

Hotmail was one of the first examples of viral marketing. By appending the message, “Get your free e-mail at hotmail.com” (or some such) to the bottom of each e-mail, Hotmail helped pioneer a new method of promotion that was “basically free, highly measurable, and ridiculously effective,” Shapiro said. Its number of new subscribers jumped from hundreds to tens of thousands per day.

Maybe there’s something about the viral distribution model that doesn’t fly in the mobile world, Shapiro thought. In epidemiology, he pointed out, researchers use a parameter called the basic reproduction number to gauge whether a viral outbreak will spread or die out. The corresponding number in the Internet world tells you how many people a given user will “infect,” on average: Shapiro gave some estimates for Facebook (6), Gmail (5), MySpace (4), and Twitter (1.5). He argued that Twitter hasn’t been spreading virally; it has used more conventional marketing through word of mouth and the press.

“Heterogeneity in the target population is the best protection to keep you from being infected by viruses,” he said. That means some people have different levels of resistance, different behaviors, different types of contacts, and so forth, so not everyone will get infected by, say, the latest flu bug.

And that same kind of variety that makes individuals different is exactly why mobile isn’t viral, he argued. He cited some survey stats to explain how fragmented this market really is: There are roughly 500 different types of handsets, about 30 per carrier; about two-thirds of people (65 percent) don’t have a data plan; three out of four people (75 percent) are on a different carrier from you; almost that many (70 percent) don’t have a smartphone. And despite all the attention it gets, 98 percent of mobile users don’t have an iPhone. (iPhone apps are definitely not spreading virally, Shapiro said. He also argued that Tegic’s T9 predictive texting did not spread virally; it was pushed out by carriers and handset manufacturers in a dedicated partnership.)

“We will not see the Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo of mobile until this changes,” Shapiro said. He added that he’s not advocating one standard mobile platform; he’s just saying how it is right now.

So his advice for mobile entrepreneurs and investors was:

—Be skeptical of anyone peddling viral marketing in mobile.

—Build a business model that doesn’t require big adoption.

—Pick a market segment that’s homogeneous. (Examples: BlackBerry corporate users, Silicon Valley techies.)

—Use ubiquitous technologies like WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and SMS texting.

—Wait… (”Things are getting better,” he said.)

Afterward, Shapiro said he thinks “Europe holds the future of the U.S.” Over there, wireless carriers have influence, but only about half of consumers get their services directly from carriers, versus about 90 percent in the U.S. “I think you’ll see the carrier role diminish,” he said, when it comes to mobile software.

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LegiTime Technologies, a Farmington, CT-based developer of software that organizes and secures text messages on mobile phones, has raised $1.5 million in equity financing, according to an SEC filing. Company executives could not be immediately reached this morning. The regulatory filing does not identify the investors in the round, but the firm’s website says that it is backed by Connecticut Innovations and iNovia Capital, of Montreal.

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San Diego’s TelCentris is announcing an upgrade to its VoxOx universal communicator service that includes a personal assistant feature, a virtual service that can answer your phone calls and route them according to your personal preferences. With the technology, you can direct phone calls from a family phone to reach you on your cell phone, office phone, or home phone—and you can send phone calls from that pesky sales rep to your voicemail.

The company says VoxOx is meant to solve your personal communications overload by unifying all the different methods that you use to communicate into a single user interface. While the startup faces a number of larger rivals—such as Google Voice—that offer unified communications service, TelCentris executives maintains that its service represents a different proposition than Google Voice or Skype. “There’s really no other product like it that’s out there,” says TelCentris CEO Bryan Hertz.

TelCentris CEO Bryan Hertz

Before today’s announcement, Hertz told me that while some rivals have combined communication services, most “unified communications” are usually done within the limits of an enterprise software application. Microsoft Exchange Server, for example, enables users to get audio voicemail messages, faxes, and e-mail delivered in their mailboxes, and lets them access their mailboxes from their cell phones or wireless devices.

In contrast, Hertz says VoxOx is “technology agnostic.” Unlike Google Voice, Hertz says VoxOx can be used to integrate a variety of communications services from a variety of third-party providers. So a VoxOx user can combine his or her existing phone number with their Gmail or Microsoft e-mail service and an outside instant messaging provider such as Yahoo, AIM, MSN, as well as social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. “We’re not necessarily here to replace them, but we are here to organize them,” Hertz says.

The new VoxOx service—which is free—also aggregates the user’s list of contacts from different sources into a universal address book that is part of an iPhone-like graphical user interface. “We go much deeper than any of these other tools do individually,” says Hertz.

For example, if you use the VoxOx desktop display to update …Next Page »

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Woburn, MA-based Integra5 announced today that it has changed its name to MediaFriends, a move intended to underscore the startup’s focus on technology that lets people communicate across multiple devices, including phones, PCs, and televisions.

Under the Integra5 brand, the 10-year-old company was known mainly as a supplier of “converged services” software to cable, phone, and wireless operators—think cell-phone text messages that show up on PCs, or Caller ID information for incoming land-line calls that’s displayed on a TV or a cell phone. Its specialty was devising software that bridged the traditional gaps between the infrastructures that deliver data to land-line phones, cell phones, PCs, and TVs.

The new name, MediaFriends, reflects the company’s move toward technologies that allow two-way or multi-way commmunications alongside video content. It’s the same name the company has been using since August 2008 for its latest package of social media applications, including one that lets TV viewers see the SMS and instant-messaging conversations they are having with friends on the same TV screen with network programming.

“The name Integra5 was meant to refer to the integration of lots of services, or taking the flat plane and moving it to the fifth dimension, but to be honest with you it doesn’t properly reflect our focus around communities that are using multiple devices,” CEO Meredith Flynn-Ripley told me last week.

MediaFriends is pitching the TV chat technology as a way for cable, phone, and Internet companies to cater to the media habits of younger viewers, who—as any parent of teenagers will attest—are often using their cell phones or laptops to chat with their friends via SMS or instant message while they’re watching “Lost,” “American Idol,” or “The Simpsons.” The MediaFriends system, which Flynn-Ripley demonstrated for me at the company’s office in Woburn, puts a stream of messages on the same screen with a TV show, with the goal of making such conversations simpler to manage.

At a time when subscription-based video providers are worried about audiences migrating to free Internet video sources such as Hulu, adding the MediaFriends technology could be seen as a way to retain customers. In fact, the first paying customer for the MediaFriends TV chat technology is about to go live with the service, and a second company is installing it now, Flynn-Ripley says. (She said she couldn’t yet name the companies.)

“Communications is what drives technology adoption, and today people are fundamentally communicating differently, based on a generational divide,” says Flynn-Ripley, who joined the company in 2006. “SMS is a huge phenomenon that isn’t going away. If you are in the business of delivering communications services, you had better be aware of this, and meet the needs of this growing group of consumers.”

MediaFriends has engineering operations in Israel and is backed by Benchmark Capital, which has offices in both Menlo Park, CA, and Herzeliya, Israel. Gary Lauder, the founder of a Los Gatos, CA, interactive TV company called ICTV, is also an investor.

MediaFriends added cross-media chat capabilities to its existing platform when it saw how prevalent texting-while-watching was becoming among younger TV viewers, Flynn-Ripley says. She cites research by youth marketing company Ypulse showing that 78 percent of teens and “tweens” (8- to 12-year-olds) say they’re often using a computer while they’re in front of the television. About 66 percent say they’re sending SMS text messages while watching.

Media analysts argue over whether this form of multitasking is a good thing, and whether it poses a threat to traditional media revenue models. In an “ADD culture,” to use a term coined by Interbrand CEO Andy Batement, brand experiences are greatly attenuated, since …Next Page »

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A year ago this week, Cambridge, MA-based speech software company Vlingo released its first study of the texting-while-driving phenomenon, finding that 28 percent of all survey respondents admitted to sending text messages while behind the wheels of their cars. It’s a hazardous habits that, with the recent Green Line trolley accident in Boston (linked to alleged texting by the trolley’s driver), has been in the local news recently. The good news in Vlingo’s second annual study, released today, is that texting-while-driving is down slightly nationally: only 26 percent of drivers admitted to engaging in the behavior this year. The bad news is that drivers in Massachusetts are apparently texting more from their cars than last year (or are at least admitting to it more openly): the state ranked 23rd worst in the nation in the 2008 rankings, but advanced to the 11th worst slot this year, with 30 percent of respondents saying they text while driving.

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Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

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Tapioca Mobile wants to see your cellular phone play more videos, and the San Diego-based wireless media company has the know-how to do it—no matter what phone you use. Tapioca has created a unique video-transcoding process and has, according to co-founder and CTO Chas Wurster, “the largest footprint of addressable video mobile devices in the U.S. We can get video into the hands of more consumers than anybody else.”

Tapioca is helping users gain access to video in a couple of different ways, by using multimedia messaging (MMS) or text messaging (SMS). Its customers include Univision, NBC, FOX-TV stations, and Border Media, a chain of radio stations previously known as BMP. These customers send video or audio clips of weather reports, news reports, and special messages to Tapioca, which uses its technology to distribute the clips to cell phone users who have signed up to get the broadcasters’ content.

Mass messaging is a technology and market that still has plenty of room to boom, as more video-capable devices come to market and prices come down. But any company attempting to provide such a service faces a daunting technical challenge: it’s not possible to use a single technology to transmit video that can be received by the multitude of cell phones.

For example, when Tapioca gets a video clip from Univision, the Spanish language network, the company processes the video so that it can be used with different messaging technologies. So video of a breaking news event can be sent to Univision’s subscriber base as an MMS message with the video clip or as an SMS message with a link that can be opened using the phone’s net browser. Different phones, bandwidths, carriers, transcoding, and video standards make this …Next Page »

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You may not realize it, but your mobile phone is a cold-blooded killer.

Its assault began with little fanfare—the first victim, the phone booth, wasn’t particularly well-loved, and nobody was expecting a complete extermination. Yet here we stand in a world where Clark Kent couldn’t find a place to pull on his Supersuit if the fate of Metropolis depended on it.

The next victims were just “accidents.” Seen anyone whip out a paper address book lately? And who would have thought that a little thing like the clock on the phone’s home screen could cause so many business professionals to stop wearing watches? Just who, exactly, is next?

For those looking over their shoulder, here are the three keys that will lead us to the next genre killer:

1. Every phone’s got it. Until a feature is a part of every phone, mainstream, non-tech-savvy America won’t notice that it’s there—camera phones only penetrated everyone’s consciousness when they were everywhere.

2. The user experience really works on a phone. Mobile TV is coming, but 50″ plasmas aren’t going—the 2″ experience just doesn’t compare. SMS remains the definitive mobile success story, but don’t wait for the end of email—at least not until someone solves the keyboard problem.

3. It crosses the Good Enough Threshold. The “GET” is the point where the best phone experience exceeds the minimum consumer bar for the feature. For example, the camera GET is two megapixels, autofocus, and flash. It’s no coincidence that this is about the quality level of a cheap disposable camera.

Following these rules, let’s break down the likely victims:

Point-and-shoot cameras—The writing’s on the wall.
There’ll always be a place for high end single-lens reflex models and the like. Enthusiasts will want the very best, regardless of cost or size. Most consumers, however, ask for two things from their camera: make it small and make it cheap. The GET for camera phones is being crossed as we speak, and then comes the end of the mass market digital camera. Who’s going to pay $250 for “just a camera” when their carrier just put one in their pocket for free? Danger level: critical.

Landline phones—The signal is still keeping busy.
The latest innovation often destroys its predecessor—CDs killed records, and DVD decimated VHS. The most obvious target for the phone, then, is the landline. But while the dial tone is clearly in decline, a tradition of reliability and security in case of emergency are keeping it alive. Burglar in the backyard? Hope you can get signal for 911. Extended power outage? Your touchtone telephone will be up and running, even as cell sites go offline and your phone battery dies. Installing an alarm for your house? Neither cellular nor VoIP are approved alternatives for trusty old copper. The GET for landline replacement is high reliability, and until carriers can guarantee it, the wires are safe. Danger level: moderate.

E-mail—Just a flesh wound.
SMS has revolutionized the way we communicate, but it’s still hard to beat …Next Page »

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[Update 12:00 pm 3/20/09: We were swamped with hundreds of e-mails in response to our offer of 100 free Google Voice beta accounts this morning. Thanks everyone! We'll be in touch with the winners as soon as possible with details about their new accounts.]

Brace for impact, again. Google is about to change the way you think about telephones.

The information giant has a pattern of setting its sights on an existing technology, moving in with overwhelming software-engineering force, and upending all of our old expectations. We didn’t know we needed ads alongside our search results, and Google turned keyword-based advertising into a multi-billion-dollar industry. We all thought e-mail was something we could only access and manage using desktop programs like Outlook, then along came Gmail. We thought we had to go to libraries to find out-of-print books, then Google went and created Google Book Search. We imagined cell phone platforms would always be controlled by a few elite carriers and handset makers, then Google started Android.

To be clear about it, Google didn’t invent keyword-based advertising, Web mail, book scanning, or open-source software. It just figured out how to apply such technologies more cleverly and pervasively than anyone else. And that’s what it has done once more with Google Voice—the renovated version of Grand Central, the phone-number-unification service it bought in 2007.

Grand Central was a startup that allowed users to sign up for a single phone number for life. A call to that number would automatically ring through to any or all of the other phones the user designated, meaning they no longer had to give their acquaintances separate home, office, and mobile numbers. Google paid somewhere north of $50 million for the technology, then spent more than a year and a half rebuilding it to work with its own infrastructure. Starting March 12, Google upgraded old Grand Central’s existing users to Google Voice accounts, and started inviting in a few beta testers. It plans to open up the free service to anyone in the U.S. starting “soon“—in a few weeks, by all accounts.

I’ve been testing Google Voice for the last couple of days, and I’m impressed. I think the service will mark a kind of tipping point in public perceptions of telephony. Before this, it was still possible to think of the phone system as something predating the Internet and therefore distinct from it, surrounded by its own set of customs and usage patterns. After this, we’ll think of phone calls more as if they were audio e-mails—finding their way through the uber-network to their intended recipients wherever those recipients may be located, and leaving a digital record that can be stored, searched, and manipulated on the Web.

There are a lot of features to Google Voice, which makes the overall concept a bit hard to explain, as I’ve realized over the past couple of days as I’ve talked with friends and colleagues about it. So I’ll try to simplify things. You start by signing up for a new phone number in your area code of choice. Google provides a search page where you can look for numbers that spell out mnemonics like “617-IM2-COOL.” In practice, there aren’t that many numbers available, so you might have to search for a while before you find one that spells out something that appeals to you, and that won’t embarrass you five or 10 years from now. (Google could do a better job explaining the number selection process—and it wouldn’t hurt if they showed a picture of a phone keyboard, to remind you of what letters go with what numbers.)

In the same way that an e-mail address doesn’t correspond to a single computer, your Google Voice number doesn’t correspond to any single phone. Indeed, that’s the beauty of the whole system. So once you’ve picked your number, the first thing to decide is which actual phones should ring when someone calls it. You can tell Google Voice to route calls to your office phone, your home land line, your mobile phone, your vacation rental, your Aunt Minnie’s house where you’re staying for the weekend, or all of the above.

The next big decision is about how Google Voice should handle voicemail messages, for those times you can’t answer or don’t want to. As soon as someone leaves a message, it goes into your Google Voice inbox, which you can access by calling the service or by directing the browser on your computer or your mobile phone to the Google Voice website.

If you like, you can simply let messages pile up in your inbox, and check them once in a while by calling in or visiting on the Web. Or you if you want to know about new messages right away, you can set Google Voice to notify you via e-mail or SMS text message.

Now here’s the really cool part. Rather than just notifying you that you got a voicemail the way your cell phone does, Google Voice can—if you choose—send you a text transcription of the message itself. Transcriptions are created automatically using speech recognition software, so they aren’t as accurate as one might like, but they …Next Page »

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Charles River Ventures of Waltham, MA, is one of the lead participants in an $11 million Series A funding round for Mumbai, India-based Webaroo, according to several reports this week. The mobile software company sells SMS-based systems for group messaging. Charles River was joined in the round by Helion Venture Partners.

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At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, October 18, 500 couples will fan out across Philadelphia in search of a $25,000 diamond ring hidden by a local jeweler. Equipped only with cell phones, the couples will receive text-message instructions directing them to an array of local landmarks, where they’ll have to complete puzzles and other challenges to earn points and get directions to their next stops. The first team to earn 100 points will be sent a riddle whose solution is the key to the diamond’s location.

It’s called the “Robbins Diamonds Scavenger Scramble,” and it will be the biggest test yet for a new Boston company called SCVNGR. Led by 19-year-old Princeton undergraduate Seth Priebatsch, the company is one of the first startups to emerge from DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based incubator similar in conception to Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, the well-known “startup camp” based in Cambridge, MA, and Mountain View, CA. SCVNGR’s shtick is running text-message-based interactive games for corporations, associations, and non-profits, using proprietary algorithms designed by two Princeton professors to efficiently direct large numbers of game players (or museum visitors, or anyone moving in space) through a series of checkpoints.

You might not think it would be very difficult to set up a scavenger hunt using text messaging, which is, after all, a 20-year-old technology. But the hard part isn’t sending out the messages, says Priebatsch; it’s knowing where to send the players. If you’ve got 500 teams competing, after all, you don’t want them all rushing to the same spots in the same order. That’s where the routing algorithms come in.

“Once you finish a question and send in the right answer, the system dynamically picks your next location and clue based on how far away the other locations are, how many people are there already, and how important the clues are,” Priebatsch explains. “You can’t know where you’re going to go ahead of time. If you played the same game 100 times you’d never take the same path.”

SCVNGR has already hosted demo scavenger hunts for organizations like the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and for Dreamit Ventures itself—where Priebatsch was in residence from May to August—and it has other events coming up at Princeton, MIT, Tufts, two museums in Boston, and one museum in Philadelphia. (A major hunt in downtown Boston, planned to coincide with Boston Arts Festival in early September, was scrubbed due to bad weather.) In just its first few weeks out of Dreamit, the company booked $25,000 in revenue, Priebatsch says.

The Boston native would be starting his sophomore year in Princeton’s Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) department right about now, but he’s on a one-year leave from the university to get his company off the ground. ORFE is a section of Princeton’s engineering school where students are drilled in both the technological and management skills needed to become entrepreneurs. Which sounds like the perfect place for Priebatsch; even at 19, he’s already a serial entrepreneur, having started out with the obligatory lemonade stand (albeit on Boston’s posh Newbury Street), then followed up with PostCardTech, a Boston-based startup that produces CD-ROM-based “interactive postcards” for tourists.

SCVNGR is half events company, half platform provider: at the same time that it’s mounting scavenger hunts for individual clients, the five-person startup is polishing a free, Web-based interface that allows anyone—from a mom organizing a teen’s birthday party to a museum administrator planning an innovative way for guests to explore a new exhibition—to write a series of clues and assign them to a network of locations. The company may try to monetize free games by sending out location-based advertising messages along with clues.

It all adds up to a busy schedule: “I’ve been running at 600 miles an hour and having a great time doing it,” says Priebatsch. That was certainly the case when I visited SCVNGR’s offices at TechSpace, a renovated loft in Boston’s SoWa neighborhood that’s home to dozens of small startups. In the 30 minutes I was there, Priebatsch had to excuse himself three times to deal with urgent phone calls and text messages about a scavenger hunt that was getting underway that morning at Drexel University.

The concept for the hunts came together last winter. “I was messing around with some ideas, and I thought it would be cool to build an easy-to-use, high-tech, cell-phone-based scavenger hunt that could be played from any phone,” Priebatsch says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be great if …Next Page »

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Mobile Collect, a Rochester Hills, MI, company that makes software for text-message-based marketing and debt collection (yikes!), will merge with SoundBite Communications of Bedford, MA, in a deal valued at $500,000 plus up to $2 million in payments contingent on text-messaging revenue, SoundBite announced today. “Mobile Collect’s customer base and domain expertise in text messaging and collections are complementary to our strength in automated voice messaging, email, campaign management, and reporting and analytics,” SoundBite president and CEO Peter Shields said in the company’s statement.

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