Mobile Solutions CI

The strange and enduring saga of Visto and what it means for mobile social networking

At CTIA this year I somehow completely missed the fact that Visto has rebranded itself as Good after acquiring the IP and brand from Motorola.

It's amazing to me that Visto is still trundling along. Changing the name and brand makes a lot of sense given Visto's aggressive litigation, brash claims of growth which it never fulfilled, and history of burning through large amounts of VC cash.

And now they have acquired moblie social networking tools provider intercasting.

On paper this might make sense. In the real world it will further delay any real progress in the one area Visto needs to make progress: Acquiring customers for its existing operator customers. Good had a very nice client UI but the server--yikes. Integrating that technology into Visto's roadmap would take a good 1-2 years. And now to add a third layer of complexity?

This further opens the window for an upstream player, either an OS provider such as Android or a service provider concentrating on one flagship OS, to develop a complete service experience based on the mobile social address book. The startups and technology vendors trying to bring white label and third party social networking tools and integration are getting bogged down in a spaghetti code fest of features rather than focusing on defining and driving the key user stories and experiences which will define the platform. This is why Twitter exists and is exploding and creates a huge window of opportunity for the player with the resolve to focus on service experience rather than features. Who will that be?

Can SyncML survive Microsoft's expansive licensing of ActiveSync?

Microsoft continues to license its ActiveSync protocol to competitors. It's a great move by Microsoft as it ties email to Microsoft software and preserves Outlook and Exchange share. It's a great move by Google as it broadens the reach of other Google mobile services.

Many of the fastest growing email, mobile calendar, and mobile contacts-syncing startups rely upon SyncML protocols to extend data synchronization to feature phones. They generally go to market with a "Blackberry for the rest of us" message and thru SyncML are able to target basic feature phones. ActiveSync as a protocol is really only meaningful to smartphones.

However, this seems like an increasingly perilous positioning when you combine Microsoft's licensing and down-market pushes by RIM, Google, Nokia, etc. with the aggressive trend for device makers to enrich feature phones with smartphone-like capabilities and price and position smartphones across consumer segments. How long before most phones are smartphones or the term becomes meaningless because of the capabilities of all devices?

Firstly, as Google continues to push into the sync market the consumer price expecation goes ever more rapidly to free.

Google licenses Microsoft’s ActiveSync, beats rival to market with synching service - RCR Wireless News.

Secondly, RIM itself is finding new ways to reduce the cost of its service. And while it will never have the broad reach of an industry standard, neither will services which reach all handsets find compelling ways to drive uptake of add-on pricing services for email, social networking, and device backup. If they could SEVEN and Visto would have cracked that nut some time ago.

Synchronica and other mobile email startups would do well to try and leapfrog RIM in packaging prepay services with specific devices to drive uptake. By choosing a limited but targeted set of the most mature and common devices, and working hard with operators to co-create and fund marketing and demand generation, they could offer downward compatibility to existing handsets and offer operators a real chance of turning email into a mass consumer proposition as promised for so many years.

Instead, what you see are resources poured into building out support for more handsets. This won't work. The consumers who want email as a core service, i.e. will pay for it and/or use it at least weekly, will choose handsets and services which have a decent experience for messaging. Those handsets support ActiveSync and other third-party services to deliver messaging. The huge mass of consumers who don't want these kinds of handsets and services will be served just fine by sms and next generation messaging, such as Twitter, which uses sms as a platform. This broad pool of consumers will not be reached by extending a stripped-down email service which is not great to more and more handsets. Synchronica is chasing a segment that is dipping in size faster than it can be monetized.

Visto adds social networking, photo share

Visto is announcing a new version at CTIA which includes email, social networking, SMS, IM and photo sharing.

" Featuring an innovative "living address book," VISTO Mobile 6 offers end users expanded push mobile email and mobile social networking capabilities. This living address book combines favorite contacts from multiple sources, including social networks, into a seamless user interface. VISTO Mobile 6 utilizes VISTO's patented push and synchronization technology to keep users constantly up to date in real time on their messaging and social networking activities.

In addition, VISTO Mobile 6 provides end users the ability to filter updates from their list of contacts; meaning each user has the control to see only the updates they truly care about. This eliminates the clutter of unnecessary updates and requests."

Visto will target both small business, SOHO, and consumers with this offer. For operators Visto will emphasize the ability to federate many solutions through one client application and control data costs through Visto's NOC and data compression capabilities. There are no announced operator customers yet.

Visto's product positioning:
"VISTO Easy Setup(TM): End-to-end self provisioning with pre-installed clients, enabling mobile email users to set up their service from their device in a matter of seconds

VISTO worklife.freedom(TM): -- access email from the most popular portal email providers and social networking sites including Yahoo!, AOL, Google Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Photobucket

VISTO ConstantSync(TM): instantly pushes data right to the phone so the end user is always up-to-date - alerts, emails, status messages - everything is always current. -- get notification of new pictures, posts, and other important events from social networking and photo sharing sites from your favorite contacts pushed to your phone -- share photos from your phone to multiple photo sharing sites. Support for multiple services: send and receive messages from work and personal email and social networking accounts, each with its own inbox, with full attachment handling"

Time to re-start the Visto deathwatch?

Visto is making the news for job cuts, despite getting ready to roll out services for T-Mobile and several Vodafone country operators.

As RIM consumer growth spikes, accounting for about 50% of new adds, why is a lower-priced competitor struggling?

Does this mark the beginning of the end of "mass market" white label email approach, with subscription-based software clients distributed to handsets which aren't optimized for messaging?

Visto lawsuits: Microsoft settles, RIM wins patent round

Visto's strategy of patent litigation is not proving successful against RIM. RIM won a judgement against Visto and hopes to use this case as precedent in the similar cases in the US and Europe.

Update: Good commentary here at Barron's.

However, Visto did get Microsoft to settle in the suit against the software giant.

Visto gets a win

The Mobile World Congress announcements got off to a start with T-Mobile international announcing it would go with Visto for a mobile email solution. This is a big win for Visto as it is designed to roll across up to 18 different TMO properties in Europe.

Due to Europe's business demographics the small-business and "prosumer" solutions are far more critical. It will be interesting to see if Visto can provide more sustained subscriber growth than they have been able to provide Vodafone.

Startups and subscriber claims: Visto and Berggi

Here is a very interesting exchange from Oliver Starr on Berggi's claims of subscriber uptake.

This caught my eye because just yesterday I was reflecting on Visto's aggressive subscriber uptake claims in the absence of any data. I may be a bit off on the exact timing, but Visto claimed they would have 500,000 subscribers by year's end back in 2005 when they likely had around 100,000.

They didn't make it. Then, instead of recalibrating, the CEO comes out and says by the next year they will surpass RIM's subscribers. RIM took off, Visto stalled, and RIM adds more subscibers than Visto's entire base about every two weeks.

Instead of recalibrating, Visto then comes out and says this year, 2007, they'll hit 10 million subscribers.

Taken in conjunction with Visto's patent suit business strategy how can anyone take this company seriously? What are operators thinking partnering with a vendor who can't speak the basic truth?

Good and Visto both announce new versions

Motorola Good and Visto both announced new product versions this week.

Good has been late coming to market due to conflicts getting certification on WM6 Treos. Visto's updgrade is scheduled for Q4. These products both focus on improving user experience in client and administrative capabilities.

Visto's new release is migrating the solution to be more of a direct competitor to RIM and makes an important step in adding "in the cloud" backup and management features. This release stengthens its integration with ISP email services while adding web PIM access, backup and management features for end users.

Key new features:

Advanced Easy Setup: End-to-end self provisioning with pre-installed clients, enabling mobile email users to set up their service from their device in a matter of seconds and “Walk Out Working” (WOW).

iPortal: A new web-based repository of contacts and calendar entries that can be accessed from anywhere at anytime. The iPortal synchronizes directly with the iDAC and allows users to transfer Microsoft and Microsoft Outlook Express contacts and calendar items from one device to another or access this information on two devices concurrently.

iDAC: A desktop-based software that allows complete synchronization of MS Outlook/Outlook Express calendar and contacts between a desktop PC and the iPortal.

Smart Notifications: Intuitive messages automatically sent to the email inbox to inform users about service status, software updates and roaming.

Good has bundled their Device Management and Email servers into one and focused on improving the client PIM experience. This is the most substantial upgrade to Good’s solution in years. In general, Good continues to focus on extending Outlook functionality to mobile devices. Good is going to struggle with this “straddling” position by being an “almost” solution for device choice, platform breadth, and beyond email roadmap--on any one dimension you can find a best of breed (RIM BES, Sybase Afaria, Intellisync) and the feature parity is too close to anchor positioning on UI. 

For extending Exchange mobility Good is an expensive corner-office solution to offer a slightly better UI to basically the same limited handsets that Microsoft supports. It’s essentially a much more expensive version of Direct Push/WM6 with extra license costs.

For extending Lotus Notes mobility, Domino support lags once again with key features Exchange-only.

For “beyond email”, Good has no UC roadmap and a completely distinct server solution for intranet capabilities that is clunky and expensive.

Good does have a strong advantage in its slick client and clean server-side UI. They should focus on optimizing around a small device set to leverage their new parent and create a clear leadership area to focus on. 

Seven concedes patent litigation to Visto

Visto and Seven announced a settlement in their ongoing lawsuit. Visto had previously won judgment against Seven which Seven then contested.

"SEVEN has acknowledged the validity and enforceability of Visto’s patent portfolio and has agreed to licensing terms including monetary and non-monetary considerations. Both companies will dismiss all pending legal claims in all jurisdictions."

This move also clears the way for any potential merger/acquisition that either side may be considering.

While Visto may be emboldened to use this victory as reason to continue aggressively pursuing its litigation against RIM and Microsoft you have to wonder if it won't work against them in the long run as they may be tempted to continue pouring resource down that hole while growth stagnates.

It's worth remembering that when RIM settled it's R&D and marketing budget took up the money that had been invested in legal fees. It subscriber growth has increased greatly, now averaging over 12% per quarter, since settling.  Settling the NTP case led to its current success. Visto subscriber growth is slowing while RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia Intellisync are taking off. Can Visto afford to focus on anything other than subscriber growth? Is the overhang of pending litigation affecting partners?

Visto: Just plain crazy?

Visto is frequently the topic of Silicon Valley rumors, either of its pending IPO, acquisition, or demise.

But it's quite something to get mentioned as a candidate for all three in the same week.

Visto's claims at successful growth are tempered by its lack of willingness to disclose subscriber numbers. Several times CEO Bogosian has said they will and followed instead with incredible targets rather than actual current numbers. This makes his claim of "exceeding Blackberry numbers" impossible to believe.