- Limbo — definitely the top story of 2009, Limbo has risen to the top of the charts overnight. It is rumored that OpenMarket and Verisign carry their business. Lucky them..

-  T-Mobile Policies — T-Mobile has gone quite draconian on the penalties side, applying a stiff $10 fine per customer care call. While this move is shaking up the industry, it is an intelligent policy which reduces T-Mobile’s need to police content providers, since  “bad apple” programs will be naturally shaken out.

- AT&T OPPC and Buylink Reversal – There are rumors that AT&T will be significantly revising it’s OPPC and Buylink platforms. It seems the “one size fits all” approach of the platform might be it’s undoing. An improved version will likely surface soon.

-  The Quiz Explosion — It’s now clear that Mobile Messenger and some of the other major ASP’s and content providers have moved fiercely into the Quiz space, with marketing done primarily on Facebook. For strategic reasons we have no interest in this space, however it is certainly on fire right now. We’re hearing that the premium SMS Quiz crowd is single-handedly cornering the market for Facebook in-app ad inventory.

- OpenMarket Fad — At CTIA once again OpenMarket had the most buzz amongst the aggregators. In the field, too, OpenMarket is all the rage. Some of their offerings are a bit outrageous…unlimited messaging? Here we go…

-  New Faces at the Carriers — Craig Leonardi is now in charge at AT&T off-deck, and Cindi Sullivan at Sprint. We’ve enjoyed working with both Craig and Cindi, and wish them our most sincere congratulations.

- Andrew Dark & mBlox — mBlox has a new CEO who’s keen on modernizing the organization a bit. Despite being a young Silicon valley company, mBlox is the old geezer of American aggregators, with fairly dated client tools and reporting. Look for some fireworks out of mBlox over the next year.

- Legal Showdowns — If you’re in the Premium SMS business and doing volume, whether you are a content provider, ASP, or aggregator, you will with virtual certainty be included in one of the dozens of class action lawsuits circling around. This year the # of suits continues to escalate, and it has become a true feeding frenzy for class action attorneys, with all segments of the value chain getting sued. Quite the mess..

- The Death of the VC-Funded Mobile Startup — Nothing different here. In 2007, around 40% of our clients were venture capital funded mobiles startups. Many of whom were part of the mobile web 2.0 crazy/flop. In 2008 this number reduced significantly, and this year there is literally no such thing as a VC-funded mobile startup. But who cares…VC’s suck and should be excluded from most good business models.

The latest Q3 Nielsen Mobile report shows our company’s continued growth in the U.S mobile content market. Some statistics from the latest report:

• GoLive! Mobile traffic now amounts to 3.6% of the U.S mobile content market, up from 1.1% in the first quarter.

• We are ranked #11 amongst all mobile content providers in the U.S

• 40% of our users make over $100k

• 86% of our users are over 18 years old, with our primary demographic being 25 – 44 white males

We’re excited by these results, and we hope to be in the top 5 list on the next report!

If you haven’t purchased the Nielsen Mobile report, you can do so at nielsenmobile.com

Lisa

An interesting side note, this time-lapse between aggregator cut-over dates for Buylink left the opportunity for some “arbitrage” of the different dates by content providers, but AT&T quickly caught that and made a prudent announcement that migrations of non-OPPC short codes would be suspended.

While I haven’t had any direct contact with Mr. Leonardi yet, GoLive! Mobile offers our warmest congratulations to you and we very much look forward to working with you as the industry continues to grow.

All short code campaigns running on Sprint’s network must comply with both MMA Consumer Best Practices and the new Sprint policy. During an audit, a violation of these rules is assigned a severity level (1, 2, 3). Guidance on the actions needed to resolve specific types of violations is included in the attached document. We have also included a copy of the MMA guidelines for your reference.

Sprint will reward content providers who have limited or no audit violations. Incentive payouts may range from 2.5% to 10% of standard revenue share payout. Furthermore, Sprint will be imposing penalties dependent on severity level, which could range from 2% to 100% of your monthly revenue as outlined in the schedule below. All incentives and penalties are assessed at the sole discretion of Sprint, on an individual short code basis. GoLive! Mobile will pass along the relevant incentive or penalty to the owner of the associated short code as part of the outpayment settlement process.

Compliance Adjustments

In addition, Sprint is imposing penalties on billing incidents resulting in refunds. If the billing/refund incident is found by Sprint, Sprint charges 115% of the refund amount per incident. If the billing/refund incident is communicated to Sprint within five business days of the incident, 105% of the refund amount is charged, and after five business days, 110%. Reports of an incident must include the amount of the refund/billing incident, a list of MDNs affected, and root cause analysis, which should include cause of the issue, dates of the incident, steps taken to resolve the issue, and next steps to ensure the incident does not happen again. Please see the attached documents for several templates that you may use for this purpose. Lastly, if a content provider has a refund rate greater than 7% for 3 consecutive months on one short code, Sprint will terminate the short code.

Up and coming carrier U.S Cellular has recently launched Premium SMS connectivity and GoLive! Mobile was invited to participate in the Beta Test. A few weeks into the Beta, we have now successfully processed thousands of mobile billing transactions on the U.S Cellular network on behalf of our clients.

Once the Beta test concludes successfully (2 – 4 weeks), we will be offering U.S Cellular PSMS connectivity to all of our shared short codes. Dedicated short code clients doing over $50,000/month in revenue will be eligible to add U.S Cellular at no additional cost.

While U.S Cellular is not AT&T or Verizon, adding this regional carrier  gives existing PSMS clients the ability to increase their revenue by a few % without doing anything. Who can argue with that?!

Besides the language, there are many oddities about the Chinese market. To name a few, there is no requirement for double opt-in, and there are very little content restrictions whatsoever.

The primary drawback of China is the low tarriffs available — for example 1 – 4 RMB. If you pull up a currency converter this amounts to very small payments in dollar or euro terms. But then again — with around half a billion mobile phone users live with Premium SMS, the country has staggering possibilities.

We have partnered with a translation services firm to launch a Mandarin version of Concierge and InstaConnect API, as well as a Mandarin version of our website.

Sometime in the fall we should be putting out an official P.R — look for it!

But then again this blog is about mobile marketing not about soda. So — hats off to Jones for joining the GoLive! Mobile family!