Future Mobile Awards 2008
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The Future Mobile Awards are given to companies that we believe have made significant progress within their sector during the previous year, and are now poised to make considerable market impact in the future.
The awards were granted by a panel of expert judges based on a number of criteria, including: Innovation; Customer retention; Customer growth; Commercial deployment; Ease of use/user interface; Revenue generation; Pricing (for services/products); and Capability/functionality. From a short list of nominations, the case was made for each nominee, with their relative merits and shortcomings debated and scored. Gold and Silver awards were conferred for each category.
The following are the gold and silver category winners and runners up from the Future Mobile Awards 2008:
Mobile Gambling | Mobile Games | Mobile Music | Mobile TV | Mobile Adult | Mobile UGC
Future Mobile Gambling Category
Gold Award: Spin3
“One of the undoubted pioneers in mobile gambling services and products, Spin3 had continued to innovate during 2007, including the January launch of the GameWire MultiLink integration package, adding a crucial 24/7 player support system (SpinSupport) to its managed solutions package, and the key implementation of multi-currency and multilingual games, while continuing to head the field in terms of major deployments.”*
Matti Zinder, Head of Spin3, says, “We are delighted to have won the Gold Award in the Mobile Gambling category of Juniper’s first Future Mobile Awards. It is great to be recognised by Juniper for our leadership and innovation in the mobile gambling sector." He continued, "2008 will see Spin3 retain its position at the sharp-end of the industry through an ever-expanding portfolio of market-leading products. One of our main areas of focus in 2008 will be markets outside the UK, in particular, Asia. Spin3 will continue to drive the development of mobile gambling with breakthroughs and industry-firsts, such as the launch of our new Pub Fruity game which boasts the most advanced sound effects and 3D simulation in mobile casino games to date.”
Silver Award: Probability
“Another company which had prospered in 2007, and the two major deployment contracts announced in November – with Orange and The Sun – are evidence of the strength of Probability’s casual gaming portfolio. The company has also been innovative in its support for higher-end users – witness the launch of its Private Room for Casino VIP customers. In addition, the company has also demonstrated its commitment to addressing the social issues surrounding gambling, as evidenced in its receipt of a GamCare certificate. Overall, the company has prospered in its first year since AIM listing, and the recent publication of its interim results showed a sharp (83%) increase in y-o-y net gaming revenues and the key achievement of operational breakeven point.”*
Future Mobile Games Category
Gold Award: EA Mobile
“EA Mobile continues to be one of the leading mobile games publishers in the world, producing a range of compelling, exciting titles which are popular with consumers and reviewers alike, including “The Sims 2 Pets”, “Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 07” and the recently published “Need 4 Speed: Pro Street”. It has successfully leveraged the strength of the EA brand to dominate the mobile gaming charts across a host of markets.”*
“We are honored to win the Future Mobile Gold Award from the judges at Juniper Research,” said Travis Boatman, VP Worldwide Studios at EA Mobile. “We’re pleased to have been recognized for our continued commitment to the mobile space. EA Mobile will continue to incorporate innovative features in the company’s products like we did in 2007 – Tetris included over-the-air multiplayer and chat, The Sims DJ allowed you to create in-game music and save it as a ring tone, and Tiger Woods 07/Need for Speed Prostreet were great examples of excellence in 3D.”
Silver Award: Gameloft
“Another early entrant into the mobile adult field which continues to generate impressive adoption rates in its target markets, both on and off-portal. The company recently passed the 800 million hits per month mark, with up to 16 million unique visits per month, notable successes in a market still severely limited by regulatory restrictions (and indeed prohibitions) in a number of key markets.”*
Gold Award: Omnifone
“Omnifone’s Music Station is a highly exciting product: it enables users to access unlimited music content at a modest cost, and is extremely “sticky”. The fact that those users build up a playlist, which would be lost if they then churned to another operator, will make them loath to unsubscribe. It is a very useful aid both to customer retention and to enhancing ARPU by several dollars per month. A number of operators have already recognised the clear benefits of offering Omnifone, and more will undoubtedly follow. An excellent application and associated business model!”*
Commenting on the award, Omnifone CEO Rob Lewis said “We are delighted to win the Future Mobile Award’s Gold Award for Mobile Music ahead of Apple,” he continued, “The subscription based unlimited downloads model is coming of age; traditional pay per track services are failing to engage the majority of mobile users and failing to generate significant revenue for the mobile and music industries. MusicStation is now live across three continents, providing a differentiated music experience to consumers and enabling mobile network operators to remain centre stage of music whilst substantially increasing revenues over traditional pay per track services.”
Silver Award: Apple
“The iPhone represents a major step forward in the improvement of the user interface – the touchscreen design is elegant, stylish and intuitive – while the handset provides enhanced storage capabilities for music and video content. Lastly, but by no means least, the publicity generated by the iPhone launch, and the fact that other vendors have felt obliged to offer their own competing designs, can only be of benefit both to mobile music consumers and the mobile music industry as a whole.”*
Gold Award: 3 ITALIA
“While 3 Italia was perhaps fortunate in that it was able to acquire spectrum for mobile broadcast TV services through the acquisition of La7, it must firstly be congratulated for the fact that it was far-sighted enough to make that acquisition. Further congratulations are due for the way it launched the service – the service was launched shortly prior to the 2006 World Cup, ensuring that the soccer-mad Italian audience would be able to watch their team’s progress (all the way to success in the final, as it happened!). This coverage provided an immediate fillip to sales, with more than 110,000 handsets sold in the six weeks after launch. While growth understandably slowed, the company remains the leading DVB-H operator worldwide, with 719,000 users as of late-August, representing nearly 13% of its active user base. Finally, the service has had a positive impact that on ARPU, with ARPU for mobile TV subscribers was around 60% higher than the Italian market average. It has undoubtedly been the trailblazer as far as European mobile TV services are concerned, and – considering the difficulties that other mobile pay TV services have encountered – has arguably set the standard for others to follow”*
Vincenzo Novari, CEO of 3 Italy said: "We are extremely pleased to receive the Future Mobile Gold Award from Juniper Research, as we consider it a significant recognition of our ability in the area of innovative business model development. Our commitment to this continues while we work towards becoming an integrated fixed-mobile publisher in the future digital TV arena. Today we're improving our offer, not just by building the platform for DTT and DVB-H, but also through the creation of mobile specific formats with a high level of interactivity".
Silver Award: KDDI
“In terms of adoption, Japan is comfortably the most successful market thus far for mobile broadcast TV. Clearly the fact that the service is free-to-air appeals to consumers – the jury is out as to whether it represents a viable financial model – but in terms of promulgating the service then much credit is due to KDDI. The operator has consistently offered a far greater range of one-seg capable handsets than its competitors – 21 by mid-August 2007 – and had sold 5 million handsets by that time, meaning that 17% of its user base could receive broadcast mobile TV by that time. KDDI has been one of the most innovative operators in its approach to mobile entertainment – witness the success of both Chaka-uta and Chaka-uta Full – and it now has the opportunity to offer interactive TV services to a significant user base of broadcast TV services, and thereby further enhance its data ARPU.”*
Future Mobile Adult Services Category
Gold Award: Cherrysauce
“Cherrysauce has continued to demonstrate it’s pre-eminence within the mobile adult sector, delivering high quality D2C and B2B services and products and maintaining high subscriber conversion rates. The company’s video chat services, implemented in association with CC Media, have been particularly successful, generating high monthly spend and exhibiting strong customer retention levels.”*
“Cherrysauce are very honoured and grateful for this recognition from respected industry peers. The key here is in the detail. Being able to maintain a presence in wholesale B2B distribution of erotic mobile content, whilst simultaneously winning the hearts and minds of mobile consumers means Cherry Media are well poised to continue making a massive impact with mobile operators and its D2C offerings over the next 12 months,” says Cherry Media’s Julia Dimambro; who was also recently voted as one of the mobile industry’s top 50 most influential players.
Silver Award: Phonebox Entertainment
“Another early entrant into the mobile adult field which continues to generate impressive adoption rates in its target markets, both on and off-portal. The company recently passed the 800 million hits per month mark, with up to 16 million unique visits per month, notable successes in a market still severely limited by regulatory restrictions (and indeed prohibitions) in a number of key markets.”*
Future Mobile UGC Services Category
Gold Award: GoFresh
“For an off-portal service, the success of GoFresh’s itsmy.com has been remarkable. Launched in June 2006, by June 2007 the site was recording around 8,000 uploads per day with a cumulative total of more than 3m; monthly page views were in excess of 100m (up from 55m in December 2006). The following month – July 2007 – the site passed 500,000 registered users, primarily hailing from the US and the UK, and reached 600,000 in September 2007. This total has been achieved wholly by viral marketing. The site, which comprises video and picture blogging, a user-generated TV channel and an array of location-based social services, now also allows users to personalise their homepages with music clips provided by international DJs. The site continues to be at the forefront of innovation, and seems certain to appeal to an ever-wider audience.”*
Commenting on the award, CTO and Co-Founder, Jukka Saarelainen said, "We are very proud and very pleased with your desition to award GOFRESH/itsmy.com the GOLDEN Future Mobile Award 2008. We have worked hard for the past 5 years to make itsmy.com what it is today: the leading mobile content community. The millions of cell phone users, who have already gotten a taste of itsmy.com´s services, whether as registered community members or as "pass-by-downloaders" are already taking advantage of the new possibilities of the mobile internet. We and our customers have proven that off-portal is the way to go. Thank you Juniper and thank YOU, dear itsmy.com users!"
Silver Award: Cyworld Mobile
“The success of Cyworld Mobile has been undeniable. In 2006, it generated $55m in revenues, making it comfortably the largest mobile social networking site in the world, with some 2.2m registered users in Korea in early-2007. This success clearly demonstrates the enormous potential for social networking and UGC services in the mobile environment, and its continued success in 2007 makes it a deserving recipient of a Juniper Research Award. That said, we believe that, for its rapid penetration within markets which are traditionally far less receptive to mobile content, GoFresh should in 2007 edge out Cyworld for the Gold Award.”*
*All comments are from the awards panel judges
Contact
For more information on the awards or to contact someone on the future mobile awards team please contact John Levett on john.levett@juniperresearch.com or telephone +44(0)1256 830002
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