Getting
Pushy on Email
Today, most
marketers in the fast-paced mobile world are trying to push everything –
from soap operas to Olympic Games – on to your handset. However, few could
think of a mundane yet highly useful application for mobile consumers.
It’s push email. To address this emerging market, here comes Funambol,
which is based in the
Silicon Valley
with an R&D center in Italy. It provides open-source push email and mobile
sync solutions for the mass market.
Fabrizio Capobianco,
Funambol CEO, talks about the push email ecosystem in this article written
exclusively for My Techbox Online.
In the
always-connected world in which we now live, the average consumer has been
largely ignored when it comes to mobile email services. With sales of
smartphones expected to overtake those of laptops in the next 12 to 18
months and with voice revenues flattening, mobile operators are slowly
encouraging the transition from voice to data services such as mobile
messaging.
Of all the
services that are available, there is still a huge void for consumers when
it comes to the most popular mobile application among enterprise users:
push email. In the last few months, a number of events have raised the
profile of consumer push email. These include Microsoft’s acquisition of
Danger (the company behind the HipTop/SideKick) and more recently the
launch of Apple’s MobileMe service.
Teething
troubles aside, the MobileMe approach of simplifying the process of
enabling a unified desktop, web and mobile push messaging is a winning
idea. It’s a concept that has generally been lost to the average user in
the hard-to-navigate mobile ecosystem of manufacturers, operators, and the
layers of technology between.
Apple and
other proprietary providers have recognized the key to success – that a
complete end-to-end service is essential. This includes:
-
Affordable
“all-you-can-eat” data plans – it is 2008 and most mobile operators
still don’t offer these as standard
-
Easy-to-use configuration – until the torture known as “on handset
multi-field text input” becomes an Olympic sport, it’s best to be
avoided
-
Offering a
backup solution – when everything works, help the user keep it that way
(or at least offer a painless path to recovery)
-
Synchronization – To keep the modern little black book under control
-
Ensuring
the best email user experience – using push email technology for battery
life and immediate gratification
Anyone who
has worked in the mobile industry for any length of time will understand
why until now, proprietary systems have had the lion's share of the market
– providing this service is hard. Using a closed system – from handsets to
services – is a much easier beast to tame.
While this
works well in the enterprise space (providing a single platform and device
policy within a business environment makes life for the CIO easier), it
does not represent the choices consumers like to make.
Generally
speaking, people hate restrictions -- be it lock-in to a particular email
service provider or more importantly to a specific type of handset. Any
successful consumer push email service has to let people connect to their
choice of messaging provider, on their choice of handset.
The matrix
is frightening: currently available handsets, email services providers,
operators (and the various protocols and standards each support). This is
why taking push email to the masses with a ubiquitous solution for all
handsets requires a different approach. One company cannot own the
required end-to-end delivery mechanism with so many stakeholders in play.
There is a
flurry of activity as various standards have been proposed and to some
extent adopted. From IMAP-Idle to IMAP-Push, from Lemonade to SyncML. All
have their pro’s and con’s. But one thing is clear – for a real solution
to this particular problem, openness is the key.
Open-source
initiatives and open standards offer a democratic process to foster a
bridge across the messaging ecosystem. This is essential to support the
growth of push email in the fragmented consumer marketplace. By engaging
interested parties it encourages participation, information to flow
smoothly, and competition to be fostered and ensures that everyone's
rights are protected.
Ultimately,
from the consumer's point of view, how all this works doesn’t matter, so
long as it all ties together to provide a reliable and easy-to-use
service. While openness will make it technically possible, the industry at
large needs to take a note from Apple’s book and remember it all has to be
usable and presented correctly to wildly succeed.
Fabrizio Capobianco is the CEO of Funambol, a cross-platform mobile
open-source project. A serial entrepreneur and veteran executive in the
mobile industry, Capobianco founded the Italian Web company, Internet
Graffiti, as well as Stigma Online. He has held industry positions at
Reuters, Tibco, and holds a Ph.D. in computer science at the
University
of Pavia, Italy. He was recognized in 2007 by readers of Mobile Village
for being a mobile email visionary.
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