FoneMine uses prebuilt Web components and SMS, voice, and mobile browsers
FoneMine’s ready-to-use software uses existing cellular services to allow companies to reach out to cell phone users with a range of mobile content.
A start-up mobile content vendor is offering prebuilt software components and a hosted Web site to let companies create mobile marketing, commerce and customer service applications.
By exploiting ready-to-use software, FoneMine eliminates the need for complex software infrastructure and coding for mobile applications. By using existing cell phone media, it can be certain that information can reach almost anyone with any kind of cell phone. And none of it requires cutting special deals with carriers or downloading separate client applications to cell phones.
The privately-funded company, FoneMine was founded in 2005. The name is intended to suggest the result of tying content and applications to a business phone number that can act as a URL, making it possible to personalize communications for a specific cell phone user, according to Steve Cox, FoneMine’s vice president of marketing. FoneMine founder Jagadish Bandhole previously was a vice president at Veritas Software, and founder of Jareva Technologies, a company that focused on server and application provisioning.
Reaching mobile customers through the handheld device is a seductive proposition for businesses. Verisign in 2006 spent $250 million to acquire m-Qube, a start-up with a wireless gateway for delivering a range of services to cell phone users. Earlier this year, a trio of banks announced plans to let customers do mobile banking via cell phones.
But mobile applications can be complex to build and deploy, and are often limited to users on a given cellular net or with a particular type of phone. FoneMine’s goal is to make it much easier, and cheaper, for businesses to build these applications to reach many more end users.
For corporate customers, FoneMine offers a hosted real-time Web publishing system, dubbed the Interactive Mobile Service Platform. You log in, and use a browser-based editor with about 40 drag-and-drop software components to create a Web-based application. That content is stored and served via FoneMine’s hosted Web servers. Other elements of the hosted architecture include 411 phone directory services, a search engine, location services, and a click-to-call application.
Applications can, for example, combine a SMS ‘opt-in’ invitation, combined with a Web page of current products on sale, with maps and directions to the nearest retail store.
Because the content can be delivered via SMS, voice messages or voice-response systems and mobile Web pages based on the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), virtually any cell phone today can make use of one or more of these channels, with no special client software or enterprise infrastructure required, according to Cox.
One restaurant chain created a SMS code that customers can key into their cell phone at the restaurant, joining a loyalty program, and receiving coupons or a summary of other promotions. A San Francisco association of local theaters sends SMS messages to subscribers, offering a last-minute ticket discount or free tickets to the first 50 respondents.
“We serve businesses that ‘face’ consumers,” says Cox. “And we make it easier for these businesses to work with their customers via mobile [content].”
“They have an interesting architecture, and they seem to ‘get’ a lot of the pieces needed for successful mobile content,” says Neil Strother, mobile marketing and media analyst for Jupiter Research, based in New York City. One particular strength is the server-based architecture, which maintains presence information about the cell phone users, and can link that information with mobile content through the basic carrier services such as SMS or voice.
Strother says FoneMine seems a good fit especially for small and midsize businesses wanting to reach mobile users with marketing and advertising campaigns. But there are many other vendors tackling tackling some or all of the mobile content space, he says. These range from the cellular carriers themselves, to a flock of new and emerging companies such as mobile advertising vendor ThirdScreen Media, and mobile content platform vendor Crisp Wireless.
Charges for the FoneMine service vary, but include a monthly hosting fee, a set-up charge, and typically a per-transaction charge, such as a fee for each SMS message generated by the mobile application.
