Dear Mark and Sheryl,

We have not had the opportunity to meet in person, but I would be interested in doing so if your schedules permit.  Right now I know that you and your team are busy kicking off a road show that will soon result in the largest Internet IPO in the history of the world.  As part of that road show, I know that one of the largest and most important topics of the institutional dialogues will center on Facebook’s market position and strategy for mobile, including its advertising centric mobile monetization initiatives.  You have recently suggested that mobile is a key area of growth for Facebook and also that you intend to invest heavily in mobile rolling forward now that half of your global audience already consists of mobile users.

I am writing you this message today because I believe that you are continuing to make a critical and fundamental  mistake in your thinking about mobile that all of the advertising monetization in the world will unfortunately not solve for you and your team in the mid and long term.  Namely, you appear to have gotten overly religious about technology for technology sake and are mistakenly pushing a web and HTML5 centric “write once run everywhere” mobile application portfolio that jeopardizes the enormously critical high value touch point between the Facebook brand and your “anything, anytime, anywhere” audience.  Without near term and material strategic change to your mobile engagement philosophy, and a core understanding that the mobile user experience needs to override the underlying technology delivering the user’s mobile access to your platform, I believe that all of your tactical mobile advertising monetization efforts will either result in suboptimal profit yield per user in the best case or a complete failure in the worst case.  Clearly you are thinking big in this area as you recently paid $1B to acquire Instagram.  However, thinking big on mobile before getting your operational mobile house in order is not going to give you the experiential results that you seek for your global audience.  And unfortunately, without the experiential results for your global audience in the mid and long term, you are not going to be able to achieve the financial results that you seek in parallel for your soon-to-be public shareholders.

Before either of you click delete or simply move on to the next Internet URL, please allow me to explain myself and also please allow me to qualify myself on behalf of Phunware.  While we do not count any individual mobile experiences (our term for client-side apps) on the scale of 500 million mobile users worldwide, we have created category defining mobile experiences for many of the largest and most important consumer brands on Earth and in the aggregate we can compare to both your global reach and scale.  In the last 3 years we have delivered tens of billions of minutes of mobile user engagement across more than 100 countries and 10 languages, including CBS, NBC, ESPN, E!, The CW, Univision, Demand Media, OWN, Turner, Discovery, Sony, NASCAR, Formula One, Callaway Golf and the NFL just to name a few, and their aggregate audiences, communities, content and traffic are extremely representative of what we would expect to see within your mobile community.  As such, we believe that our assessment of your mobile application portfolio is educated, qualified, targeted and practical based on empirical rather than theoretical data (or beliefs).  With that as a backdrop, and assuming that you would be kind enough to allow me, please let me make a few suggestions for your consideration.

First, you should realize and accept that web and HTML5 centric mobile applications are simply not ready for prime-time right now and should only be applied and deployed exclusively on unproven or “audience challenged” mobile platforms.  While the concept of “write once, run everywhere” mobile applications sounds extremely seductive, I have written extensively about this delusion and how they simply don’t work at all.  Not yet anyway.  Your potential technology religion in this area is effectively ensuring that your applications will remain “average everywhere and exceptional nowhere” and will continue running the risk of offending your “anything, anytime, anywhere” community.  Web and HTML5 are not silver bullets, panaceas or viable consumer offerings and your nearly 1B person user base simply deserves better than what they are getting from you currently.  What is that?  Unfortunately it is an extremely content rich, but incredibly slow loading and latency ridden mobile experience that is best characterized by “sticky” scrolling, clumsy navigation and inaccurate, out of date or unsynchronized friend requests, messages and notifications that far too often culminate in application freezes or crashes.  Some of the most noteworthy crashes are typically tied to fragile in-application web browsing through web sites and user shared news URLs such as TechCrunch and equally fragile content consumption navigation with user photos.  While “killing” and relaunching mobile applications over and over again speaks volumes to the content and connectivity that your users seek (and may even be obsessed by currently), it should equally represent a major red flag concerning the potential mid and long term effects to your brand, business, mobile users and the underlying viability of your mobile advertising monetization model.

Second, you should immediately invest the time, money and effort to develop deep, broad and engaging native mobile experiences for at least the iOS and Android mobile operating systems.  Rightly or wrongly, today’s mobile reality is that native code deployments afford the necessary control of memory, processing power, screen resolution and feature sets underlying the various mobile operating systems exponentially better than any web or HTML5 centric comparable experience.  If you want to engage and enrich your mobile user’s Facebook experience (which I know you both do), then you have to arm each mobile user with a mobile experience framework and platform interface point that will allow them to effortlessly do whatever they want, wherever they want, however they want.  Why would you want to support all mobile platforms via a web and HTML5 centric code base as a core tenet when all of the mobile platforms are not even relevant yet?  Be phenomenal on those that have critical mass and enrich the underlying user experience by custom building purpose-built mobile applications that show off the high quality of the Facebook brand and the value and esteem with which you hold your user base.  After all, it is impossible to say that you are where you are for and because of your users and then deliver a product that epitomizes the exact opposite.  In the world of telephony, nobody really cares if a specific phone call is completed using TDMA, CDMA, voice-over-cable or voice-over-IP as all of the technology should be completely transparent and simply a means to an end where someone dials a number, connects to a person that they are looking for and everything simply works.  Unfortunately, your current mobile experiences cause the technology to become overtly noticeable to the end user, who then focuses more on trying to figure out how to either make them work or tolerate their limitations (like we all do currently with bad cell phone connections) instead of building their brand loyalty, continued engagement and the perceived value and utility that they internalize via what should always be a timely, responsive and satisfying platform interface with Facebook.

Third, you should invest heavily in to the alerts, messages, notifications and caching associated with the content of your mobile experiences for those use cases where your mobile users have either bad Internet connections or no Internet connections at all.  Right now your mobile experiences turn in to digital paper weights whenever users lack the appropriate network connectivity (or are on a flight).  Your mobile users deserve far better than a message “No Internet Connection.  Try Again.”  What really separates the mobile good from the mobile bad or ugly is the care and attention afforded mobile user experiences when there is bad Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G or no network connection at all.  Proactive user alerts, messages and notifications, accompanied by intelligent content caching, will dramatically improve the perceived value of your user base in your interactions with them and also prove that you understand “the other IOS” – Cisco’s Internet Operating System – for the network routing and switching fabric so critical to the server-side foundation of your client-side experience.  In the brave new mobile world we all operate in, the client-side, server-side *and* content side are all necessary and sufficient conditions for “anything, anytime, anywhere” mobile success.  Choose one or two of the three at your own peril and risk in the mid and long term.

In closing, please accept my congratulations on your successes to date with Facebook and also on your very well deserved transition from the private markets to the public markets.  Your market and mindshare position worldwide is enviable, but your mobile strategy and tactics for both engagement and monetization could benefit from some additional external expertise, assistance and mobile DNA.  If you are interested in talking to me further or learning more about how we can help, please contact me at your convenience at aknitowski@phunware.com … or better yet … just shoot me a message on my Facebook Timeline.

Respectfully,

Alan Knitowski

CEO

Phunware, Inc.

(877) 411-PHUN

Read this article on : Business Insider 

Common sense holds that a first-rate mobile application will give the consumer an optimum user experience. That experience is influenced not only by a product’s technical features but also by the general context in which the application and the device are used.

Developers need to eliminate the PC or the TV as a reference point and instead dream up truly original, mobile ways of engaging with information and services.

Alan Knitowski, CEO and chairman of Phunware, gave FierceDeveloper a startling example of why this is important now. He said that recently a major TV brand found that 50 percent of its core demographic had never seen one of its leading TV shows on the TV and that half of the target audience was watching the show on mobile devices.

Behavioral shifts like this are happening all over the place. For example, teenagers are abandoning console games for mobile games. In a survey of teens conducted by Piper Jaffray, 63 percent of the teens said they are willing to play games on their mobile phones, compared to 33 percent a year ago. Nearly 66 percent of teens said they’ve lost interest in console games because they don’t offer the same opportunities for social interaction as mobile games. The research firm said that console games are facing unprecedented competition from tablets and smartphones, as well as connected TVs.

ABI Research recently projected that apps designed for young children may propel media tablets to become the de facto replacement of personal DVD players, particularly in cars. In 2016, it expects users to download nearly one billion media tablets apps for young children.

Consumers are shopping more from their devices. IBM reported last week that online shopping originating from mobile devices represented 13.3 percent of all online sales in March, up from 7 percent a year ago.

Add these together with other, similar trends from other mobile segments, and it’s clear that the market that is using applications is nothing like it was a year or so ago. Regardless of whether this qualifies mobile as the so-called “first screen,” developers should begin treating it like it is.

Knitowski suggests that developers really think hard about the user interface and user experience to make sure the device fulfills the core purpose of the application being developed and that each feature of the app support that core purpose as well.

Developers will still have to consider a realm of issues, such as how their applications perform on smart phones vs. tablets and other devices, and perhaps how content will interact if projected to other, larger screens. They will also want to pay attention to what’s going on in the market to identify trends indicating where needs for new types of applications might emerge.

But the main thing is to turn off the old ways of thinking and open the imagination to completely new things.

Read this article on : Fierce Developer
 

(It’s even more interesting against the backdrop of an election year in which politicians continue to push the hot-button issue of border control. But I digress…)

The U.S. Hispanic population has quietly grown by more than 40 percent over the past decade according to the US Census. And by 2016, according to IBISWorld, Hispanics will make up nearly 18 percent of the population. Immigration is not the reason. Instead, those who already are here are giving birth, (with some frequency, apparently), and raising their families right here in the U.S. This leads to the inescapable conclusion:

We’re brown (or maybe white, yellow, black or pink, but brown is close enough)…
We’re around…
And we are coming to a webpage, blog, mobile screen, and social networking site near you.

Why? Because the digital space is where we can share our experiences, determine our own media destiny, and be who we are. It’s an arena of unfettered creativity, immediacy and directness. And for the first time, it allows us as English-dominant Latinos to be authentic.
I myself am a U.S.-born, Dominican-Italian-Spanish-American, (what I would describe as Hispanic-American with an international twist.)

I began my career working for major TV networks and record labels that had “Latina”, “Latino”, “Latin America” or “US–Latin” attached to them. Their content was largely in Spanish.

Five years later, the trend shifted to Spanglish.

And today – se habla Ingles, baby!

What does this mean, big picture?

A Scarborough Research study found that Bilingual Hispanics make up 82% of the U.S. Hispanic population, and market research has found that 80% of Hispanics prefer their TV content in English.

Advertisers are thrilled. Not only is it easier for them, (they can focus on just one language for a change), it’s expanded the number of platforms available for their message. Perhaps most importantly, digital media provides true metrics that allow advertisers to track their audience and know, unequivocally, that they are reaching their target.

This is huge in a world where, by 2016, IBISWorld estimates that the Hispanic population’s buying power will grow to $1.6 trillion

Clearly this is an economic niche that needs to be scratched. And media companies have taken notice. (“A little more to the right…now left…now down…Ahhhhhh…”)

It’s why in 2007 we created ES Música, mobile media’s first Latin music and lifestyle channel to fill out our suite of other music offerings. Our foresight has been rewarded with more than 100 million online views and the widest-possible distribution on mobile.

We figured out early on that the people driving consumption of Hispanic media content would be bi-lingual and, most importantly, bi-cultural. They choose to acculturate (or merge US and Latin cultures) to create their own unique identity rather than assimilate (or be absorbed into the existing culture.) They know that embracing BOTH cultures enriches their lives and they refuse to limit themselves by choosing one over the other. ES Música has always created and programmed content with that in mind.

But we’ve only scratched the surface.

Our continued success will depend on us being nimble enough to adapt to a still-forming and ever-shifting digital media and demographic landscape. The balancing act of keeping costs down and production quality high while trying to monetize an increasingly selective audience with exponentially more options have relegated more than one company to the stepping stones of history.

So, welcome to the party! We think you’ll like it here. It’s been good to us and it’s always interesting!

And it promises to be even more so as the investment in the Hispanic market gives rise to fresh ideas, the discovery of new talent, and a more diverse media landscape. Make yourselves at home and get comfortable. We’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other over the coming months and years.

These digital and mobile managers are extremely well intentioned for their brands, but they are also extremely overwhelmed right now as the amplitude of the mobile market noise currently far exceeds any discernible underlying signal that is easy for them to see, hear or recognize. To make matters even worse for these folks, the sheer volume of choices, alternatives and options available to them for running their mobile businesses are crowding their thinking and clouding their decision-making in to something far from desirable for optimal results. This really isn’t new news to any of them, but it is the stark reality that they each face with each passing day and each expansion of ever more mobile choices, alternatives and options to choose from and engage with.

An age old adage in venture capital and private equity suggests that great businesses should do just one thing in business and do it better than anyone else in the world. “Best of breed” is the preferred phrase and the larger the market and the faster the growth rate, then the more scalable the business and the more viable the investment for outsized returns.

Unfortunately, however, when this approach was applied to mobile as it has been in the recent past, it has created an absolutely unmanageable operational mess for those attempting to run their mobile businesses. Why? Because “best of breed” has resulted in mobile islands, partial point solutions and scores of mobile partner permutations with an equal number of quite unmanageable logins and administrative accounts to attempt to keep track of and manage … with none of these actually built from the ground up to talk to one another, interact with one another or integrate with one another on anything but a forced, unnatural and ad hoc basis.

We often see the debates of “open” versus “closed” systems and “native” versus “write-once-run-anywhere” platforms on mobile. We have also seen this extend to how managers perceive the structure and architecture of the mobile cloud and the motivations for decision making tied to which mobile partners to choose and why, even if many of these partners are tied to systems originally built from the ground up for the Internet rather than mobile and even if they are being retrofitted on the fly to act as something that they are not.

While “open” and “best of breed” sound wonderful in theory, in practice the reality is quite different. Why? Because when everyone is involved in the mobile solution, then nobody is involved in the mobile solution. There is simply not a single throat to choke when something goes wrong. No accountability at all. No direct phone line or email. Just a committee approach to a live, real-time audience that wants whatever it wants, wherever it is, whenever it wants it. Right now.

So what is a good example of a “best of breed” mobile solution composed of a tangled web of band-aids, rubber bands, paper clips and duct tape … all made from completely different providers and all intended to serve different masters? For this we simply need to look at the example of a free, ad based, second screen TV companion app for a large multinational media company across the iPhone, iPad and Android smart phone platforms and leveraging push notifications, daily deals, advertising and analytics for engagement, monetization and business intelligence. In such as example, a digital or mobile manager might select Urban Airship for push notifications, Groupon for affiliate daily deals, FreeWheel for advertising and Omniture for analytics.

Sounds good, right? Yes it does, but it unfortunately isn’t and it never will be. Why? First, while Urban Airship can support transactional scale, it was never built to handle either deep URL linking to content management systems or direct ties to daily deals, advertising or analytics. Second, both FreeWheel and Omniture were never built from the ground up to support mobile. They were simply retrofitted to try to provide insight and support for something that was never contemplated when they were originally built and they lack any relevant integration to the push notifications and daily deal offerings incorporated for proactive user engagement, tracking and monetization. And third, Groupon was never built to be a monetization vehicle for other people’s businesses beyond a simple affiliate model with no linkages to any of the other cloud based mobile infrastructure contemplated for such a demanding anytime, anywhere user base.

We have spent more than three years building mobile application experiences and fully integrated mobile application infrastructure across several hundreds of apps for tens of millions of downloads supporting billions of minutes of usage across more than one hundred countries and ten languages for the largest brands in the world at transactional scale … and what we have found is both simple and profound. Namely, having a single partner that can handle everything in one place simplifies the operational problem immensely, not only from the front-end side of engagement, but also on the back-end side of fulfillment, maintenance and support.

Engage a mobile cloud, not a mobile ghost. Find your one throat to choke behind a system built to holistically address all components of the actual problem – nothing more and nothing less. Eliminate your pain and eliminate the noise. Eliminate the waste and maximize your results. Simply find something purpose-built to just work together and a mobile partner you can trust for the next five to ten years rather than the next project or program. Reach out and touch someone already!

Along the way, we have seen scores of companies pop up to address different elements of the problems accompanying the headaches that exist for optimizing the high value touch points between brands and their anytime, anywhere audiences and communities. In general, these companies have made decisions about where and how to engage the mobile ecosystem by focusing their mobile solutions on one of three primary areas of headaches: (1) the client side problem of multi-platform application development, (2) the server side problem of mobile application infrastructure, or (3) the original or branded programming problem of mobile content.

The client side problem is one in which software companies, advertising agencies and internal IT departments have opted to create the application experiences representative of the “apps” that are being downloaded in mass. In some cases these groups have opted for religious debates about native coding versus HTML5 coding and purpose-built, custom applications versus write-once, run anywhere template-based applications. On the client side, elements such as user interface, user experience and look and feel are all viewed to be core elements to the features, functionality and utility created for users and consumers of the “apps”.

The server side problem is one in which technology companies, infrastructure companies, service providers, carriers and internal IT departments have opted to create back-end systems to address operational and monetization challenges that exist for these client side “apps” at transactional scale. In some cases these groups have opted to build out custom internal systems and solutions to address these needs, while in other cases these groups have opted to stitch together a wide variety of “best of breed” partners and service providers to provide a “complete solution” that can work on a worldwide basis across disparate languages, engagement requirements and business rules. Operational challenges tend to involve issues such as content management, media streaming, digital distribution management and business intelligence while monetization challenges tend to involve issues such as advertising optimization, cross promotion, loyalty /rewards, daily deals, flash deals and commerce (whether physical or digital in nature).

The original or branded programming problem is one in which media companies, content companies, social media companies, advertising agencies and internal marketing departments have opted to create the content, feeds, offerings and engagement to be consumed by application users and typically come in the form of photos, videos, audio, news, information, blogs, forums, social graphs, products, services and calls to action. On the client side, this programming provides user engagement and interactivity whenever and however desired by the application user and on the server side, this programming provides measurement, management and monetization tools to gauge what works, what doesn’t work and why.

The fundamental problem with addressing any one of these three areas without addressing them all concurrently is that the end result of the anytime, anywhere interaction between the brand and the consumer is failure. Doing the client side front-end well without a strong back-end and engaging content will leave the user frustrated and confused as the application will fail to deliver the content desired whenever and however selected across the networks engaged by the user. Similarly, doing the server side well without a strong front-end and engaging content will leave the user angry that the application is stable and fast, but lacks a desirable user experience or anything of utility, value or interest. And finally, doing the programming well without a strong front-end and back-end will leave the user annoyed that the application has exactly what they want, but they are unable to engage with or enjoy it.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of companies throughout the mobile ecosystem are opting to address just one of the three areas required for successful mobile applications. In each instance, they are citing “focus” as the reason for this choice and are claiming that they want to do one thing and do it better than anyone else in the world. While this answer sounds good, and even alludes to the perceived benefits of both competitive differentiation and putting more proverbial wood behind fewer arrows, it rings hollow and fails to acknowledge that mobile is quite different from anything else that we’ve all experienced in the past. Mobile users are finicky, demanding and have extremely high expectations for their personal engagement and attention. As such, each point solution in the mobile marketplace is simply creating a stand-alone and isolated digital island that has been cut off from the rest of the world. As you work through your mobile strategy and tactical planning, make sure that you can answer all three of these elements openly and comprehensively. As if you don’t, you can expect that the end result will likely take a path of unnecessary risk and potential failure for both your application and your brand.

Read more at businessinsider.com

We have just witnessed year two of a perpetual boom in the demand for content-rich applications.  The more than 5 billion apps downloaded in 2010 was eclipsed by almost three times that number in 2011, and over 1.2 billion of those downloads came in the last week of December alone.  This past year saw every major industry – including the entertainment, automotive, educational, financial, medical, transportation, business and the professional services industries – take a joint next-step towards building long-term mobile infrastructures for each of their respective sectors with apps as the primary method of engaging their customers.

2011 introduced us to our first pocket-sized personal robot (yes, robot!) named Siri, an intelligent piece of software that will forever change the way we interact with our electronics – products which will one day (in the near-term) cease to be lifeless, becoming instead an extension of our inner circle, like a trusted friend or relative.

2011 also showed us the impact of mobile technology, even in its most basic form, astonishing us all by delivering real time images, videos, texts and status updates from developing nations in the midst of political uprisings.  Mobile phones provided vital health information to remote villages in the poorest parts of the world, and captured the devastation of a natural disaster off the Japanese Coast.  So, while it is safe to say that 2011 was the year that the “smart” device began replacing the ordinary cell phone, it was also (thankfully) a year in which the legacy of mobile technology changed the course of societies and not just communication.

So where do we go from here?  What happens now that mobile has truly connected us all?  What do we say about an industry where convergence is no longer simply a fancy, ambiguous term to include in a company’s mission statement?  But rather a wide open forum of sorts that brings together independent agents (i.e. users, software, media, and so on) – no matter how far apart they are from one another – to a shared space where they can interact without much complications.

At Phunware, we are quickly progressing into a newer, faster, more empowering version of ourselves.  The synergistic approach to our development and design, with each new deployment, is driven by our belief that products must be able to handle the incredible breadth of a user’s expectations, which are becoming more fluid, more exact and more expedient.  We are hell-bent of creating products that are highly adaptable, able to serve multiple purposes.  We recently showcased a device-to-device communications technology – in partnership with Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. (QuIC)’s AllJoyn™ – that brought together some of the best elements of our development toolset.  This companion application enabled a user’s tablet or smartphone to interact seamlessly and wirelessly with a television broadcast, offering them unique advertising pop-ups related to the content on their TV screen, as well as compelling trivia about the program they were watching.

Just think about what something like this will mean for marketers.  For media companies.  For users.

In one demonstration, the consolidation of these distinct variables (device + user + smart TV + ads + media + trivia + ease of use + design + innovation + multi-screen + interactivity + transactional systems) illustrated the wide array of possibilities.  It also informed us of our next steps, since the next logical iteration of such an app would have an entirely new set of variables, some of which have yet to surface.

And this is what gets us up in the morning.  Convergence, plain and simple, in all its complex splendor.  The union of things.  The connecting of things through technology and creativity.

In 2012, we’re aiming to put forth the most connected entertainment experience in the history of the world – yes, the world! – through a visually stunning app that features layer-upon-layer of discovery for users, powered by unmatched solutions for our clients that leverage our expertise in support services, scalability, content management, ad serving, analytics and monetization.  This is convergence, as we see it: personal, impactful and unbreakable.  It is the cornerstone of what we do.

As a once-television executive, I carried with me the firm knowledge that it was not the size of the television, or the display itself that would garner ratings.  Rather, it was my attempt to understand the audience – their tastes and behaviors – and the subsequent creation of quality content for that audience that would keep them engaged with my programs.  The same can be said of my approach to creative development on mobile today.  Phunware is not in the business of device manufacturing (not yet anyway), but we are at the forefront of developing the best possible user experiences on the planet – for any device.  It’s about what goes into these devices – from content creation, to visual design, to our bulletproof back-end infrastructure.  We balance these variables better than anyone, and connect them all to our industry’s main power source – the customer, the viewer, the user – to achieve (you guessed it) convergence.

2012 is young, but mobile technology is in full maturation mode.  Ordinary objects are now prime destinations for discovery.  Cars, refrigerators, you name it.  And soon they will all be connected, forming a virtual convergence network around every man, woman and child – a fertile ground for retailers, media companies, automakers, etc. to reach and influence consumers in a whole new way.  If the past 12 months have shown us anything, it is that we cannot overstate the importance of mobile innovation.  What the next 12 will show us will be infinitely more powerful than what we have just seen.

The Future of Multi-Screen, Multi-Device Engagement Now on Display

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, JANUARY 10, 2012 –Phunware, Inc., the leader in enterprise branded mobile application infrastructure and experiences, announced today that they will showcase a unique multi-screen television and tablet experience that leverages Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. (QuIC)’s AllJoyn™ peer-to-peer, proximity-based, device-to-device, communications technology running on a Snapdragon™-powered smart TV platform, along with Phunware’s Hip Hop Official original programming content and brandME™ branded mobile experience framework, during the 2012 International CES from January 10 – 13.

These live demonstrations will highlight how a person with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled television and tablet or smartphone can dramatically enhance their viewing experience far beyond the use of a simple companion application. Phunware’s application and content, coupled with AllJoyn, create an immersive, interactive and synchronized viewing experience that allows a consumer to connect and engage with a television broadcast through their personal tablet in order to consume related value-add content; select and view ad-insertions; sing along with their favorite musical artists; and even play a trivia game. AllJoyn allows the fixed television widget and the mobile tablet application to seamlessly and wirelessly communicate with one another so that each device is aware of the other and all content and devices remain completely in synch with no latency.

“Phunware was excited to have the opportunity to work with QuIC on this innovative demonstration,” said Alan S. Knitowski, Chairman and CEO of Phunware, Inc. “We are constantly looking for creative, innovative and entertaining ways to push the device capability and mobile user experience envelope, and we found a powerful way to bring some of our more advanced entertainment ideas to life with AllJoyn.”

“Qualcomm believes that AllJoyn has vast potential for innovative developers like Phunware to further enhance their applications across multiple screens,” said Liat Ben-Zur, senior director of Software Strategy and Business Development for Qualcomm. “This is a good example of how a developer can quickly and easily add proximity based peer-to-peer functionality to their application experiences using AllJoyn without having to manage the complexity of network management.”

To see the fully synchronized companion viewing demonstration at the 2012 International CES, please visit the Qualcomm Booth #30313 in the South Hall 3, Upper Level of the Las Vegas Convention Center from January 10 – 13.

About Phunware, Inc.
Phunware creates brandME™, the best and most powerful branded mobile experiences in the world, PRAISE™, the global industry standard for bulletproof mobile application infrastructure, and PRIME™, the most original content and programming for digital distribution worldwide. Phunware has introduced category defining experiences representing tens of millions of mobile downloads across billions of minutes of usage, challenging the outer limits and capabilities of the best mobile devices on Earth for the largest brands on the planet. For more information, visit Phunware at www.phunware.com.

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AllJoyn is a trademark of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. Qualcomm and Snapdragon are trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated, registered in the United States and may be registered in other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Apple has perfected the “Always leave them wanting more” product methodology by incrementally rolling out new software and/or hardware features. This methodology typically results in one large hardware/software release per year and incremental releases sprinkled strategically throughout the year (e.g. White iPhone) that keep the buzz going and force users to consider their own upgrade strategy. I have my own little conundrum in trying to figure out if I should adopt the instant gratification upgrade strategy and get the 4GS for my wife or leave her on an earlier model. The core utility of why she uses the phone is for talking, texting and email. However, with the new camera and associated camera software on the Apple iPhone 4GS, the core utility has now expanded to include picture taking and video capture. Core utility is critical when trying to determine why a user might download your application and critical when deciding release schedule.

I could spend much more than a paragraph writing about the Apple methodology (and many have) but how is this applicable to the creation of mobile application experiences for your customers? Alan Knitowski wrote in his blog, “Generation Now and the Mobile Velocity Acceptance,” about how the mobile release budgeting cycles should now be every 2-3 months, versus a traditional model of 1 release per year. This is critical for allocating budget and resources for your initiative. But what about the release cycles? One option in this hyper-active market is to initially focus on the core-utility of your mobile application (e.g. Real-time racing leaderboard) and make sure that the overall experience is tight. Subsequent releases 2-4 weeks later can add new features such as real-time video, then real-time audio and then the ability to control the racers yourself (strictly for advanced users . . . ).

Each release creates “engagement reinforcement” and potentially expands the core utility of the application and may address different segments of the audience who download for different core utility reasons. Additionally, with the proper messaging, each release becomes an event unto itself. Users will start to anticipate these releases and hopefully create viral social media activity (aided and encouraged by the application of course). Messaging can pre-date the release. For example, maybe an in-app message alerts the user to a new set of features that will be released next week and encourages them to check back in a week. Additionally, when the new release comes out, a push notification with deep-linking functionality that takes the user directly to the new feature drives further engagement. Finally, dedicating real-estate on the main screen for new features or “what’s hot” provides the visual cues to try out the new functionality. This real-estate can also be used to remind users of existing functionality that heretofore, may have gone undiscovered.

Another interesting side effect of these incremental releases is the ability to measure individually the impact on usage and engagement. Perhaps a release is generating significant incremental usage. In order to take advantage of this wave of usage, the next release might get pushed out until the engagement numbers start to level out. If the opposite happens and a new feature is not generating incremental usage, the next feature can be staged and released ahead of schedule to keep engagement and interest level high.

The velocity of the changes required to satiate the mobile user’s appetite doesn’t have to be overly burdensome. Assuming the proper budgeting and resource allocation, it can simply change the frequency of releases, not necessarily the overall quantity of features. Plan for a full release but trickle out the functionality incrementally to whet the appetite of the passionate fan base and drive them into a frenzy. After all, isn’t it better if your fans ask for more instead of ignoring you?

As devices become smarter and more intuitive, so will the programming. The age-old adage of “Content is King” is already reclaiming its crown as the ruler of the mobile airwaves. Back in 1996, Bill Gates predicted, “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” And here we are, just fifteen years later, touting that same mantra on the mobile side, living through the next great phase in humanity’s ever-evolving fascination with moving pictures. Only this time, it’s the viewer that’s on the move, and the content needs to keep pace.

It is expected that video consumption will near 700 billion minutes by 2015, which advertisers are certainly seizing on. With faster loading times, more robust connectivity and a public that is now beyond the early educational years of mobile, video will soon become the preferred method of receiving information across mobile, just as it did online. And it will be driven by YOU – the average citizen whose appetite for a more personal, customized experience will create a crescendo.

Users expect more, and we as an industry must provide it. For instance:

• Increase the quality of how we produce. We must produce specifically for mobile, not simply take what works on television and regurgitate it here.
• Create platforms on mobile like YouTube that will revolutionize the industry – and make it an engine for self-creation, self-expression and global interactivity. Not to mention monetization unlike the medium has seen before. Just remember what YouTube has done for Google Ad networks.
• Make content that invites and triggers responses from users.
• Mobile phones will soon replace remote controls, making these devices not just the “end” to our users’ tastes, but the “means” as well.
• Mobile phones will also soon become a full-functioning television studio for users to showcase their own talents, so we should be ready to embrace them, or compete with them.

When we first started to play in the mobile space, we were way ahead of our time. We were one of the few companies leading the way in a medium that allowed what traditional television could not: untethered consumer viewing. The ability of people to engage the content they want, when they want it, wherever they are was (and remains) nothing less than revolutionary.

But like every revolution, there were challenges. And for us, these challenges boiled down to content and production costs, distribution and delivery, audience tracking, and the 600 pound gorilla: monetization!

We solved these challenges. So well in fact that we now have hundreds of millions of video views, we are on hundreds of devices, we know exactly who is watching us, and we’ve launched successful campaigns that have led to millions of targeted brand impressions across multiple platforms.
Content and production costs we figured out: find creative young talent with something to say and give them a place where they could run wild. In exchange for their content, they got a platform. Think Roger Corman, or Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland “putting on a show!” — but with some serious technical geekdom thrown in.
Speaking of tech geeks, ours, and I use that term with TREMENDOUS respect and affection, figured out the distribution and delivery of the bazillion smart and feature phones, websites, and pad devices. They didn’t just figure it out. They nailed it. And because of them, Phunware has ShoBot, a distribution system that can deliver a single piece of video content to an infinite number of platforms in the same number of specs – simultaneously.

But perhaps the greatest things about what we do, aside from creating killer content and inventing an economical and seamless distribution system is that we can track who our viewers are and monetize them better than anyone else.

We do this because every time someone downloads a mobile app or one of our awesome, specifically-targeted music channels, we learn who our viewers are, what they watch, how long they watch, what time of day they watch and if they’re coming back to watch again and again. And being able to track your viewers this closely provides advertisers with:

In short, we’re a great solution to anyone who wants to get their programming (and their message) to the right audience, with the greatest probability of successful engagement, and within the most sensible cost structure around.

Yes, it’s a revolution. But it’s one in which everyone wins.

And isn’t that the way it should be?

“Whether your headaches are operational in nature or monetization in nature, we will assist you with increasing your return on investment in mobile and the engagement underlying your users’ experiences by leveraging the infrastructure solutions and tools that we have built and used heavily across hundreds of our own original and branded mobile applications at transactional scale,” said Luan Dang, President and CTO of Phunware.

Phunware’s first private beta release includes access to its PRAISE™ Ad Optimization SDK for first and third party banner, interstitial and video pre / mid / post roll advertising, PRAISE™ PhunDeals™ Daily Deals SDK for daily product and service offers in more than 100 cities across the United States, PRAISE™ Cross Promotion SDK for proactive application download yield management and PRAISE™ PocketShare™ Mobile Analytics SDK for detailed data and business intelligence to make more intelligent sales, marketing, promotion and advertising decisions across mobile application portfolios.

“While our initial private beta offerings will only include these four areas of capability, we expect to release a large number of additional PRAISE™ infrastructure solutions and tools over the coming months and quarters ahead,” said Alan Knitowski, Chairman and CEO of Phunware. “We have learned a lot over the past several years and we are now productizing that learning for the benefit of mobile application developers everywhere.”

PRAISE™ modules represent key mobile application building blocks for iOS and Android platforms to support enterprise class, carrier grade, geographically redundant and hyper-scalable mobile application experiences and are ideally suited for carriers, enterprises and application developers requiring millions of simultaneous interactions and transactions across complex global deployments dependent upon multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-channel demands and requirements, including monetization acceleration.

For more information, or to enroll in the Phunware Private Beta Program, please visit developer.phunware.com.

About Phunware, Inc.
Phunware creates brandME™, the best and most powerful branded mobile experiences in the world, PRAISE™, the global industry standard for bulletproof mobile application infrastructure, and PRIME™, the most original content and programming for digital distribution worldwide. Phunware has introduced category defining experiences representing tens of millions of mobile downloads across billions of minutes of usage, challenging the outer limits and capabilities of the best mobile devices on Earth for the largest brands on the planet. Visit us at www.Phunware.com.