Vodafone aims to change Live! portal ‘beyond recognition’

The carrier portal market has gone through many phases in its short life. Portals like Vodafone Live! started out as the closest thing users could get to a real mobile web experience, as well as a refinement of the old walled garden, designed to allow the consumer some web roaming capabilities, but to keep them within the operator’s environment by making the internet experience usable and content-rich. This strategy has recently been weakening for the major operators as the unfettered mobile web becomes more accessible and usable, and as the headlines have been dominated by vendor-driven front ends, portals and stores like Nokia Ovi. Now Vodafone, learning many lessons from Japan’s majors, is looking to reinvent its Live! portal and set a new benchmark for operator offerings, that could see the balance of power shifting back somewhat to the carriers again.

The world’s largest cellco by revenue aims to integrate its mobile and fixed line web interfaces and sites, as it finally casts off its mobile-only heritage and looks to become a converged operator, buying up or partnering with fixed broadband providers in many of its core, but saturating, cellular territories. It promises to launch a new portal that will make the “current experience of Vodafone Live! pale into insignificance against what we have planned and we’ll replicate that online,” according to the company’s consumer business director, Ian Shepherd.

He said in a recent interview: “We’re developing the mobile internet fast and online in parallel with that. We want the web site to be a place that’s meaningful and useful so that customers bookmark it and come back to it regularly.” Although details are currently sketchy, and the product will not be seen in public until early next year, some techniques will include expanded exclusive and non-exclusive content and web services deals - to add to existing alliances like those with the BBC, Facebook and others; plus a new range of online tools, providing the ability to manage contacts and media, where several recent acquisitions, such as that of the Zyb social networking tool, will come into play.

If successful, the new Live! could achieve several important objectives. It would strengthen Vodafone’s brand and reputation as a converged service provider and pave the way for future developments like integrated mobile televsision and IPTV, or a full quad play. It would help the cellco catch up with other European rivals that have stolen a march in the mobile web experience, notably Orange and T-Mobile, which have gone beyond the basic store and content springboard pioneered in Europe by Live! and are providing full sets of web services integrating such facilities as social networking, location and presence awareness, and unified messaging. It would also help Vodafone create a web platform that would attract and retain users within its now-unwalled garden, and make its own portal - and therefore its network and branded handsets - the users’s default rather than one from Nokia, Google or Microsoft. All that would increase Vodafone’s power in the mobile internet value chain, and improve its strength in negotiating its share of the revenue split.

Operators were slow to recognize, or admit to, the need to offer unrestricted web browsing, but now they have woken up to the new era as laptop dongles and high end webphones stimulate mobile internet usage. Some seem prepared to accept the role of bit pipe, notably 3 with its very open and advanced service in partnership with established web brands. Others want to gain the pivotal role in the complex mobile internet spider’s web, and Vodafone will be fighting for that honor with majors from the cellphone and PC internet worlds.

Those operators that adopt the Vodafone approach are driving a renaissance in mobile portal investment and development, and are also seeking greater differentiation as the characteristics and functionality of the mobile web interface and applications become as important to brand position as the choice of handsets (a shift accelerated by Apple). Orange, therefore, is focusing on strong content, much of it for high value niches; T-Mobile on personalization and social networking; Vodafone on allowing the customer to define his or her experience very flexibly.

Current Analysis comments: “Whereas Orange has actively chosen to spin out separate mobile portal and on-device portal offerings for distinct user groups or interest groups, other operators have chosen to stick with the one-size-fits-all model, providing users with features to reconfigure their own content positioning and even pull applications straight to the home page, if required. The treatment of location-based technology is also creating some major differentiation between the competitors’ portal offerings, both at a functionality level and at a services level.”

Of course, for real success, the issue of tariffs needs to be addressed. Despite the rise of all-you-can-eat packages and unfettered web access, there are still some on-portal deals that may suit some users, but the various options are usually confusing and poorly presented. In the end, however functional and attractive the new Live! may be, if it is not well priced it will see consumers preferring to negotiate the minefield of mobile browsing by themselves.