The Future of Wi-Fi

By Sheila Shayon

David Staas is a 13-year veteran of marketing and product management experience in the mobile and advertising industries. Prior to his tenure as senior vice president of marketing at JiWire, Staas was at Ad Infuse, a pioneer in mobile advertising, where he was vice president of marketing and helped build a premium network and platform business with leading mobile operators.

JiWire is the leading mobile audience media company serving 20 million unique users per month at more than 30,000 high-traffic, premium Wi-Fi hotspots.

Staas will be speaking at the Digital Media Measurement & Pricing Summit, held in New York April 7-8.

DMB’s Sheila Shayon spoke with Staas about JiWire, consumer mobility and understanding the effectiveness of reaching an on-the-go audience.

Any significance to the name, JiWire?
Yes - when the company began in 2003 and it was all about using Wi-Fi for connectivity, the name was created to mean “Joining Invisible Wires.”

How did you build one of the largest location-based interactive learning channels?
We were in the wireless Internet access business and built a directory of public Wi-Fi locations. We developed deep relationships with advertisers around the directory and this evolved into a new business model for early usage - instead of subscription driven with daily/weekly/monthly fees, we moved it to an ad-based model.

How big is that directory today?
291,493 free and pay Wi-Fi locations in 145 countries.

JiWire leverages the context of a user’s location. How?
WiFi is a media channel. It allows us to track location and context. Venue is as important as place. In other words, are you in a Starbucks in San Francisco, or an executive lounge at JFK? Then we can supply advertisers with user location, network provider, and even the venue brand: 123456 café, in Barnes and Noble, at such and such street corner, using a MAC. So the inventory plan and model back into the venue type.

Which venues are seeing the most user growth?
Obviously airports have exceptionally high traffic, and hotels, but as brands like McDonald’s integrate free Wi-Fi, and market themselves as café environments, adding free connectivity results in consumer affinity and the café footprint is growing quickly. US McDonald’s locations that have become free in 2010 are 11,400.

So does being able to reach audiences in the context of their daily lives drive deeper engagement than traditional media?
Absolutely. The mind-set of the consumer is critical to the advertiser. Our channel allows for dynamically delivered, location-specific campaigns. We know the DNA of our audience across our footprint - are they a college student, a tech enthusiast, or a business user. You need scale for the economics to work.

Can you give me an example?
We worked with Microsoft in customizing messages about their Student Edition and Home Edition. In Denver, the ad might read, “A PC without Office is like Denver without the Rockies,” or in New York, “A PC without Office is like NY without the Statue of Liberty.”

Who do you make your business deals with?
The wireless carriers — AT&T or Boingo — and they negotiate the deal with Starbucks or McDonald’s. Foremost on our mind is always — how do we connect with an on-the-go audience.

What verticals will see Wi-Fi next?
Transportation - trains and subways. Also in-flight and college campuses.

How does the U.S. mobile audience compare to the rest of the world?
U.S. leads in public Wi-Fi locations with about 70,000. China is next with 36,000. Then England with 29,000 and France is fourth with 26,000.

How about U.S. cities?
New York is number one with 887, then San Francisco with 869, and Chicago with 794.

As legacy media distribution channels become less relevant to marketers than audience segmentation, how is JiWire leveraging this?
The shift is more to digital and interactive - and as widely distributed as possible. Consumers on average spend 44 percent of their time today on the go - not in front of their PC. The industry needs channels that reflect that behavior. It used to be separate agency teams addressing the issue, digital, OOH, emerging media and mobile. Now those teams are working together and pulling budget from each towards the unified goal of audience as focus - not individual channels.

So in 2010 mobile ad buys will start to look more like online buys?
Yes. The history of online is that people bought channels. Today the buy is to identify the audience and not the device - this is the heart of the mobile ecosystem.

Let’s talk about cost per engagement as an increasingly important metric.
Digital campaigns are all about engagement - it’s the new paradigm. Social media is about spending time with a brand, being a part of the conversation. Banner ads are no longer sufficient. Our Ads for Access model is a value exchange for the consumer and the advertiser: come spend time with my brand and you get free access. It’s an opt-in value-add proposition.

When Bing first arrived on the scene, we did a promotion with Microsoft offering visitors to airports and hotels across the country access to free WiFi in exchange for performing one search.  The results were significant. The average online click through rate of .01% was transformed into a 29% rate when the user was engaged by the value-add offer.

Has the mobile consumer himself become a DOOH destination?
In a sense - yes. It’s all about “the channel finding me.” The key problem with DOOH is the lack of measurement and interactivity. How many people saw an ad - and were they the right audience and was it personally relevant?

Where do you see the mobile industry heading in the near future?
The overall evolution of the mobile ecosystem is amazing considering the time frame is roughly one decade. Mobile devices changed consumer behavior — ahead of the advertising industry. Consumer’s lifestyles are not slowing down. 900 million new, wirelessly-enabled devices will ship this year. The advertising industry has to keep up with the convergence of technology and legacy channels.

The Broadband Debate: Is White Space the Answer?

By John Greaves

The Federal Communications Commission has been working for months on a National Broadband Plan to transform how we use and allocate broadband spectrum.  That plan will finally be presented to Congress on March 17 and may directly impact wireless providers who advocate remedying  spectrum shortages by reallocating white spaces between analog TV channels for broadband use. Broadcasters believe such use would interfere with broadcast television programming.  Meanwhile critics say there is no real-world data proving white spaces are the answer.

“There are some delusional technologists who believe that white space devices will compete with LTE and WiMAX, but it’s extremely unrealistic to think that white spaces will have an effective range of 30 miles with just 4 watt EIRP,” says George Ou, policy director for the think tank digital society. “There are no white space devices for consumers and even if someone comes out with a new product, it will likely be very expensive since it isn’t widely produced.”

White space proponents cite Spectrum Bridge’s white space deployment in Claudville, Va., as proof that white spaces can deliver.

Ou calls Claudville more symbolic than practical saying, “they probably could have used 5 GHz for the point-to-point backhaul connections. Claudville is using Wi-Fi for the last mile rather than white spaces because there are no white space devices on the consumer end.”

Rick Rotondo, chief marketing officer for Spectrum Bridge disputes this.  “We tried using Wi-Fi at 2.4GHz, 5GHz would never have made it; 2.4 didn’t make it,” Rotondo says.  “We did use Wi-Fi for the last hundred feet, not the last mile, but for the last hundred feet because there are Wi-Fi receivers built into laptops and smartphones and that’s who we wanted to be able to connect to this network,” he says.

Alan Tilles, legal counsel to numerous public safety and business radio users agrees. “If you look at Wi-Fi in the time we’ve been able to use it, you have a service that obviously has to worry about legacy.  Here you have a new technology and you don’t have to worry about legacy equipment and so you can see even farther in the future and be as creative as you can be with regards to coverage area and possible services,” he says.

Google spokesperson Dan Martin says, “The white spaces are like Wi-Fi on steroids - delivering higher connection speeds across much farther distances than traditional Wi-Fi. Because of the much longer range of these spectrum signals, wireless broadband access utilizing the TV white spaces could be brought to more consumers using fewer base stations,” Martin says.

Rotondo also cites 5GHz’s poor propagation. “If you think propagation and wall penetration are bad in 2.4GHz you’re really going to hate 5GHz. It has very poor propagation characteristics in non line of sight conditions, very poor wall and ceiling penetration and it does not propagate around corners whereas TV white spaces have excellent propagation, very good building, wall and foliage penetration and it can also bend around obstacles,” Rotondo says.

However, propagation has drawbacks. “The white spaces are really not a very good choice for Wi-Fi substitution because in Wi-Fi scenarios you don’t want the signals penetrating the walls and going into your neighbor’s house or apartment,” says Richard Bennett, an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation research fellow who has contributed to Wi-Fi standards for 15 years.

Digital society’s Ou agrees.  “It’s bad enough with 2.4 GHz getting interference from 8 of your adjacent neighbors who are trying to use the same channels you’re using, but getting 700 MHz interference from 50 of your neighbors would be really bad,” he says.

Where does 700MHz apply? Bennett says we have two problems, the last mile and the middle mile. “Actually the last mile breaks down into two divisions, fixed and mobile. The most challenging thing is the mobile in the last mile and these frequencies below 3GHz are the best for addressing that problem. As far as fixed goes you can take 3-6GHz and that works pretty well and then for the middle mile applications you need to get into the higher frequencies and the reason is when you’re building the middle mile you want something that behaves actually more like a wire than like a radio,” he says.

Ou says, “The solution is to eliminate the white space gaps altogether by consolidating all of the broadcast channels into a solid block with modern digital technology. This not only frees up to 180 MHz of valuable bandwidth, but it also preserves the spectrum for the broadcasters and protects them from interference.  The channels that are freed up should be auctioned off to licensees for high power applications that will make it cheaper to deliver broadband to rural areas.”

Tilles asks, “Is there any reason why we cannot exploit white space to the point of having a certain portion of it be licensed, a certain portion of it unlicensed and of the licensed portion have a portion that is set aside for auctioned services and another portion that is set aside for non auctioned services like public safety?”

Rotondo thinks we should dynamically allocate spectrum on an as-needed basis. Meanwhile, Spectrum Bridge just launched another experimental white spaces deployment in North Carolina. “What’s different about the deployment in Wilmington, N.C., and New Hanover County, North Carolina, is it’s what is called a smart city application. We’re looking at specific applications that white space can be used for to help the city deliver existing services more cost effectively as well as new services using this white spaces technology.”

Tilles says, “I believe that the Wilmington experiment is exactly the type of uses that we’d like to see, which include non-consumer uses for necessary communications activities within the jurisdiction.”

As debate continues about what to do with 700MHz, many will look to the National Broadband Plan for direction.

Google Broadband: One Giant Step For Google

By James Zipadelli

Google is planning on building and testing its own high-speed broadband networks in select U.S. cities, the company announced in its blog recently. The company has put out a request for information (RFI) until March 26 to see how many communities want to participate in this experiment. A Google spokesman says, “We will connect at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people, in one or more trial communities across the country.”

One city that is participating in Google’s experiment is Baltimore, Md. A team of technology and business leaders began working Feb. 22, and entrepreneur Dave Troy says Baltimore’s government and research institutions are also on board. “We hit the ground running,” Troy says. “We have world-class research institutions (the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University). One of the things Google listed is 3-D medical technology. This is something that Hopkins has done. We can do that right here.”

According to Troy, there were other reasons Google’s experiment benefits the city. For example, Baltimore’s proximity to Washington, D.C., makes it helpful if there is a question on regulations. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Obama signed Feb. 17, 2009, included the Broadband Initiatives, which has essentially the same goal: to “accelerate broadband deployment in unserved, underserved, and rural areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits.” Troy says that Google’s experiment helps because it creates competition. “Not only is Google getting access to more people, but they are doing it by using an open access approach,” Troy says.

Asked for clarification, the Google spokesman says, “We will allow third parties to offer their own Internet access services, or other services, using our network. We believe this approach will maximize user choice as well as spur greater innovation and competition. Most providers in Europe and many places elsewhere in the world operate open access networks.”

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents cable operators, is optimistic. “We look forward to learning more about Google’s broadband experiment in the handful of trial locations they are planning, says spokesman Brian Dietz. “The cable industry has invested $161 billion over the past 13 years to build a nationwide broadband infrastructure that is available to 92 percent of U.S. homes, and we will continue to invest billions more to continually improve the speed and performance of our networks and provide tens of millions of consumers with the best possible broadband experience.”

Not everyone is pleased with Google’s experiment, however. Scott Cleland, president of Precursor and chairman of NetCompetition.org, called Google’s announcement a “PR stunt.”

“This is classic Google,” Cleland says. “Everything is about them. When the nation is trying to move from a jog to a run, they’re wanting to take airplane rides.” Cleland says the timing of the announcement was poor because it coincided with the National Broadband Plan.

“They want a gigabit to the home, which is 50 times more than people have right now, and there aren’t any applications other than Google’s plan that takes advantage of that network,” Cleland says. “Google is the biggest bandwidth consumer in the world because YouTube broadcasts over the Internet and it’s 14 times bigger than any video broadcaster. Google is constantly crawling the trillion pages on the Internet.”

AT&T spokesperson Jenny Bridges was cautiously optimistic. “We commend (FCC) Chairman (Julius) Genachowski for his plan to set an ambitious goal for broadband deployment in America,” Bridges says. “But in setting a 100mb goal, the FCC surely recognizes the massive investment by the private sector that will be required. As the Commission’s own broadband team estimated, it would cost an additional $350 billion to bring 100mb service to every household in America. It is thus all the more important that the FCC resist calls for extreme forms of regulation that would cripple, if not destroy, the very investments needed to realize its goal.”

Verizon Wireless spokesman James Smith says, “The Internet ecosystem is dynamic and competitive, and it’s delivering great benefits to consumers. Google’s expansion of its networks to enter the access market is another new paragraph in this exciting story.” To learn more about Verizon’s network, VerizonFIOS, click here. VerizonFIOS serves 16 states including Maryland and Washington, D.C., according to the fact sheet.

Baltimore’s Troy says the benefits for the city from Google’s experiment are just beginning. “It will make Baltimore a world-class destination for technology entrepreneurs,” Troy says. “It also will keep people here that might go somewhere else. The combination of those two things makes it extremely compelling.”

TV Goes Live On Verizon Wireless

By Rebecca Henely

As the fourth generation of mobile communication networks looms on the horizon, Verizon Wireless hopes to bring faster, more reliable live TV to its products. To do this the company has enlisted the services of digital service provider MobiTV, which was a featured developer for Verizon Wireless at the International Consumer Electronics Showcase in early January.

“We are excited to be working with MobiTV as we dive even further into the applications world out there and expand what people can do on their phones,” says Debi Lewis, spokesperson for Verizon Wireless.

Lewis says Verizon Wireless hopes to start offering its 4G network in various U.S. markets later in 2010, and has many companies working on hardware and software for the new network, of which MobiTV is only one.

This will be the first time Verizon Wireless and MobiTV have worked together. MobiTV was part of a developer’s conference with Verizon last summer, and the partnership between the companies officially started at the International CES, Lewis says.

Jacquie Robison, senior director of consumer marketing and public relations at MobiTV, says MobiTV has previously worked with phone companies Sprint and AT&T, as well as numerous others, so this new initiative will not be exclusive. Nevertheless, MobiTV is excited about the partnership. “As a carrier Verizon has a fantastic record of service. They have a deep listing of phones for the consumer,” Robison says.

Lewis called MobiTV a great provider and packager of live TV on mobile devices, which is important to Verizon Wireless because as mobile devices move into the next generation, video has the potential to be delivered with faster download times and more efficiently. Cost will also be less. “A lot of the [technology] challenges we see in existing networks are starting to melt away,” Lewis says.

Robison says more consumers want live TV on their phones. “We know there’s a high demand for entertainment, news and politics,” she says.

As an example, Robison cites MobiTV’s work with other mobile services, in which the company recently delivered the broadcast of President Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address from networks that aired the speech live to mobile devices. Minutes used during that time period went up by 1,544 percent. “That’s the sort of experience we’re looking to deliver to Verizon,” Robison says.

“There’s a demand for that kind of content,” Lewis says, “and the better experience we can provide on the phone, the more people are going to be inclined to participate.”

Robison says the current plan is to offer live television made for mobile devices and video on demand from more than 40 different channels for Verizon Wireless devices. There are no concrete plans for other applications for the devices, but Robison says both companies will be on the look out for opportunities based on user needs. She cites MobiTV’s recent work leveraging capabilities from most recent iPhone upgrades for consumers to make purchases within applications.

“There are a whole host of services that are available and are a part of the consideration set,” Robison says.

Regarding any capacity or bandwith issues, Lewis says there may be some “bumps in the road” as Verizon Wireless moves from 3G to 4G, but the company has moved from analog to digital to 3G and anticipates the move to the next generation will go well.

“[Verizon Wireless has] been in the business of building and maintaining wireless networks for a long time,” she says.

WatchNBuy.com to White-Label its Interactive Video Commerce Player

By: itvt.com

Interactive video commerce company, WatchNBuy.com, announced Wednesday that it is offering its interactive video player on a white-label basis to other Web site operators.

[Read More and Discuss]

DECE and Disney Race Toward Universal Video Standards

By Barbara Gengler

In the race to take the guesswork out of digital distribution of films, two advancements have been made public that will allow consumers to buy movies and other digital content once and play them almost anywhere on any type of device.

The advancements result from efforts by the Walt Disney Company and the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) consortium.

Disney, which at this time is the only major Hollywood studio not a part of DECE, rolled out a technology called KeyChest that would allow consumers to pay a single price for a movie or TV show and then access it from the Web, iPhone or on-demand cable services.

Disney is planning to deploy the technology before the end of 2010 as it is pretty much complete. Disney says KeyChest will neither be a Disney-only venture not will it be governed by Disney.

“As for partners, we continue to engage in discussion with a number of companies across various industries,” says Disney spokesman Eric Maehara.

According to Maehara, KeyChest does not compete with DECE as both technologies aim to allow people to watch the content they purchase on any device they own. KeyChest is not a competitor to DECE rather it can work with it.

“It is our understanding that DECE is developing what is commonly known as a format/ecosystem,” he says. “KeyChest is not a format nor an ecosystem. It is an interoperability solution that will empower formats and ecosystems to work together.”

The aim of KeyChest is to create widespread adoption of standards for digital media based on existing Digital Rights Management (DRM).

DECE, on the other hand, is a coalition with support from various industries involved in digital entertainment. The system will provide a new way for consumers to share their purchased content on a number of devices in the home or by streaming them over the Internet to other gear such as cell phones or laptops.

Twenty-one companies joined DECE in 2009 including Adobe, Cox Communications, Motorola, Netflix, Nokia and Tesco bringing the total to 48. Philips Electronics, Sony, Hewlett Packard and Cisco Systems are among the group’s founding members.

Surprisingly missing from the group is Apple, a key player in the rapidly growing world of digital distribution, although it is still possible the company may one day join.

“DECE has taken a significant first step toward creating an open market that will shift the digital distribution model and make ‘Buy Once, Play Anywhere’ a reality for consumers,” says Mitch Singer, president of DECE. “Our ultimate goal is to take the guesswork out of buying, downloading and playing digital entertainment.”

The cross-industry initiative revealed an agreement on a Common File Format, an open specification for digital entertainment, which will be released in the first half of 2010; approval of five DRM solutions that will be DECE-compatible and a cloud-based authentication service called Digital Rights Locker that allows consumers rights access to their digital entertainment.

The five DRM solutions, which will ensure content can be played back by streaming or downloading on a variety of services and devices, include Adobe Flash Access, CMLA-OMA V2, the Marlin DRM Open Standard, Microsoft PlayReady and Widevine.

DECE has also selected Neustar to provide a digital rights locker that will authenticate rights to view content from multiple services, with multiple devices and manage content and registration of devices. DECE says devices that are DECE-compatible may be available to consumers in 2011.

While there are still challenges ahead, the pace is expected to step up significantly and both services are expected to go live before the end of the year.

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