I covered a new Boulder startup called 5o9 back in March and at that time the founder (Liz Coker) was extremely vague as to what they were really up to.
Today, Liz told me that the company has exited “total stealth mode” as they progress towards their first full scale pilot tests. Indeed, the 5o9 web site provides much more information now. The company appears to be building a platform for content providers to use in order to facilitate mobile connections that securely access opt-in personal information such as identity and location.
5o9 calls their approach Pushing With Permission. The end user uses a mobile application to define what information they’re comfortable with sharing and to which content providers. This includes data such as current location (for GPS enabled mobile devices), name, address, phone number, type of device, etc.
Content providers install the 5o9 platform and in turn have access to this information and can optimize the mobile experience. A great example of this is to serve a location-based coupon, as shown here. The nice thing here is that I can use a single tool on my mobile device to configure what I want to share, when and with whom. This is a critical and missing element in the mobile strategy of most organizations. 5o9 proposes to provide the standard toolset to enable these features for content providers.
5o9 wants to “connect the physical and virtual worlds“, which is certainly quite the challenge. At least one blogger covering the “Personal World Connection (PWC)” space finds the 5o9 solution to have a chance of doing just that. In order to make a dent in this market, it seems to me that 5o9 will need some big time strategic partners such as cellular operators and/or device manufacturers to pre-install the mobile component. Distribution is often the challenge in the mobile space. 5o9’s solution has to be viewed as a well supported standard by the consumer. If not, it will be very hard to get people to make the effort to install the application just to gain benefits on a single site. Liz hinted to me that they are in the process of signing on a “very large strategic partner” which may address this very issue.
5o9 hopes to close a Series A investment round by the end of this year and have an initial product release by Q2 of 2007. Thanks to Liz Coker for the update.
David,
Couple of thoughts on distribution:
1) The Carriers. They’ve spent 100’s of millions of dollars building infrastructure to support data plans. MobileMe offers a platform that carriers can use to drive incremental advertising revenue. Selling $40 dollar a month data plans is more profitable than $5 a month SMS plans
2) The Portals. Think of these as “super sites” Every site has a “desktop toolbar” component which they push to the user. It would be easy to incorporate MobileMe as “Desktop Me” as part of the toolbar. The branding is then simple, it becomes “GoogleMe, YahooMe, AOLMe, MSNMe” – each synchs to their MobileMe coutnerpart. Now you have a consistent experience from the desktop to the mobile. For the search engines it is easy to see the revenue generator. For example lets take Google. They now know where you are – everytime a search takes place they can direct you to the closest result. In addition they can incorporate mobile coupons as part of an additional revenue kicker. The value of their adwords just went up dramatically.
Distribution is always tough, the portals are perfectly positioned to “push” the client. The win-win is easy to see. The Internet user (Me) wants convenience, privacy and control, while the business get to make money from Me.
For sure, if you can convince the players to distribute, you’ll be in a very intersting position. As for desktop stuff, I agree that is compelling as well. I’ve seen others try to approach this using inaccurate tools, but opt in and user generated is clearly the way to go long term.
Distribution is key and Mobile data communication is hurdle. By Mobile data communication, I meant beside PocketPC and Blackberry it’s very hard to send out any data. But leave that problem, essential thing is being able to give meaningful content. This problem is not solved on internet yet. We have 100’s of coupon sites, have u ever find yourself trusting to any of those. At least I don’t. Even if I get Dell.com mails, or buy.com mails about new interesting things “they” think are useful to me. I am not going to buy that or even look at that. Large consumer location based mobile advertising is still going to be too far dream if we can not create that “attention” data in first place. Location technology and it’s application are around from last 5 years and no one yet found anything u can use as target medium. Opt in is best way of doing things, at least proven by SMS but still keep me interested is dam difficult. When you talk about anything on Mobile, it’s not like standard screen with keyboard for every other user. It’s not 2-3 browsers or 3 types of data plans.
Not to attack the company, but I would like to see that in product offering. As always, it’s a problem of catch22 (where are shops and where are users). I wish you guys good luck.