MOBILE PORTALS

A mobile portal is a customer channel, optimized for mobility, that aggregates and provides content and service for mobile users. These portals offer services similar to those of desktop portals such as AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_portal for additional discussion of portals.) An example of the best “pure” mobile portal (whose only business is to be a mobile portal) is zed.com from Sonera in Finland. The world’s best-known mobile portal, with over 52 million members, mostly in Japan, is i-mode from DoCoMo.
The services provided by mobile portals include news, sports, e-mail, entertainment, and travel information; restaurants and event information; leisure-related service (e.g.,games, TV and movie listing); services; and stoke trading. A sizeable percentage of the portals also provide downloads and messaging, music related services, and health, dating, and job information. Mobile portals frequently charge for their services. For example, you may be asked to pay 50 cents to get a weather report over your mobile phone. Alternatively, you may pay a monthly fee for the portal service and get the report free any time you want it. In Japan, for example, i-mode generates revenue mainly from subscription fees. A special service for travelers is offered at Avantgo (from iAnywhere)
Example AvantGo (described earlier) is the world’s largest mobile Internet service that delivers rich, personalized content and application to PDA, wireless PDA, and Smartphone users. Today, hundreds of major media brands and marketers deliver their online content through the AvantGo mobile Internet service portal.
In addition, over 50 major marketing brands use AvantGo mobile advertising to target and reach a valuable trendsetter audience of over 7 million unique users. For more details, see avantgo.com/biz/aboutus/index.html.
Increasingly, the field of mobile portals is being dominated by a few big companies. The big player in Europe, for instance, are companies such as Vodafone, Orange, O2, and T-Mobile; in the United States the big player are Cingular, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint PCS. Also, mobile-device manufacturers offer their own portals (e.g., Club Nokia portal, My Plam portal). And, finally, the traditional portals (such as Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN) have mobile portals as well. For example, google Mobile provides news, e-mail, and more to cell phones.
Sina Corporation, a major portal network in China (sina.com), in its Sina Mobile, offers mobile value-added service including news and information, community service such as daring and friendship, and multimedia downloads of ring tones, pictures, and screensavers. Users can order these service through the sina website or through their mobile phones on either a monthly subscription or a per message basic.