Interview (Part 2): product plans, competitors and challenges overcome for phling!

This post is a follow on from yesterday’s interview with Graeme W. Smith, V.P. Marketing, Oxy Systems on mobile content service phling! Yesterday, Graeme took us through the motivation for phling! their target market and business model. Today Graeme covers product plans, competitors and challenges overcome.

From what I can see video is not a current media that phling! supports. Any plans for Video, or indeed any future product plans in general that you can share?

Smith: Yes, right now we are focused on music and communities. Currently, our Mobile Music Promotion Program announced at CTIA 07 in Florida lets indie bands and labels promote their music, gigs, and latest news all for free. They can create accounts at https://www.phling.com/music-promotion.php. Bands can labels can showcase their music by uploading it to our secure servers and the entire phling! community can listen to it. I think adding the capability to enable them to upload videos as well is where we’ll probably go. Watch this space!

Who do you see as competitors to your product, and how do you think your product has the edge?

Smith: We think phling! is pretty unique in its focus on combining mobile music and social networking. We see other remote access technology vendors that let users access documents stored on PCs. There are also companies like Sling Media that focus on giving users access to their cable television when on the road. We believe our whole product offering, our product focus, and our partnerships give us the edge.

What have been the challenges to getting the product on different phone types, and different mobile carriers? (i.e. where have your most support calls been from!). How did you overcome them?

Smith: The phling! Phone App is a J2ME applet that is downloaded over the air (OTA) to the subscriber’s handset. The applet could also be preloaded by our partners should they wish. What we have found is that the implementation of the Java engine on different handsets varies and so we have to make work arounds. We wanted to take advantage of open handsets and open mobile IP handsets and certainly the future is on our side. Right now we port to new handsets as they are announced and this can be done fairly rapidly.

What is your vision for phling! for the next say 18 months?

Smith: Well, in November 2006 we announced the availability of phling! for deployment in operator networks and in July we launched in Switzerland on Orange, Sunrise, and Swisscom Mobile in conjunction with the media company, Edipresse. Our focus is on Europe and we are in discussions with all major mobile operators in this market. We expect to make additional deployment announcements over the next 12 to 18 months. We want to grow the phling! community of users across Europe. We are also beginning discussions with digital marketing agencies and major brand holders as we believe that phling! can become part of a brand’s strategy for going mobile.

Next week we will do a final posting on Graeme’s views on mobile media sharing and social networking.

Richard T.