Everything Is Going Mobile

| Technology

John Duffy, 3Cinteractive CEO, and I did a round of PR interviews a couple of weeks ago. Duff is a telecom serial entrepreneur who has built a pretty neat company, a profitable and high-growth mobility platform service that doesn’t depend on advertising for its business model.

I’m sharing the 3Cinteractive story because it’s an important mobility building block … and everything is going mobile!

The online Web was built on ubiquitous standardization that is universally accepted by all users. However, the mobile services infrastructure is very different: The mobile infrastructure is owned by the telecommunications carriers themselves, and each mobile carrier has unique protocols. This results in a fragmented mobile system. Finding a solution to this fragmentation of carrier protocols is critical because everything in the digital world is moving swiftly towards mobile. While there are 1.5 billion PCs in use today, there are six billion mobile devices.

Into the fray comes 3Cinteractive’s new MuSIC platform-as-a-service, a layer of middleware that arbitrates the different protocols between each carrier. (“Middleware” serves as a kind of glue among software applications, beyond services available from the operating system.) This greatly simplifies development of cross-carrier applications and services.

Mobile services traditionally have been valued using the model of the lifetime value of a customer. Replacing a lost customer is many times more expensive than keeping an existing customer. Consequently, important mobile services metrics should focus on ways to increase the value of a customer.

MuSIC is a simplified, low-cost, reproducible business process service that aids customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer loyalty programs by integrating mobile media services alerts that can increase customer monetization. It’s a “customer relationship engine,” converting data-driven business intelligence into M2M (machine-to-machine) instructions that turn mobile user clicks into customer relationships.

As an example, MuSIC uses social media content from Facebook and Twitter to enhance business analytics in order to personalize customer relationships.

Duff and I are really excited about 3Cinteractive and the possibilities it offers. I’ll be sharing more as the story unfolds.