Discovery Services

All the statistics show we watch less and less television, spending more and more time with various Internet activities instead. The same is true comparing radio stations and MP3 players. That is the trend we cannot argue, more choice, more personalization. But to be honest sometimes I miss the old days when radio and television were stars. Why? Because they have been great discovery services. I used to learn about new music from my favorite radio station (and imagine 20 years ago it was both free and ad-free). Millions of people have learned new things and have shaped their tastes watching TV. Behind the scenes there have been millions of professionals selecting the content for us. Sure it has not been the long tail... the selection has had to be according to the Pareto rule (20% of hits to please the 80% of the audience). And now what? We have the Internet, we have the Long Tail, we have everything personalized... and we are completely on our own to search and discover.

Sure there are services breaking the Google rule. By saying the Google rule, I mean users actively searching for and pulling the content of interest to them, instead of the network pushing the content their way. One crown example of a perfect discovery service is the Pandora radio, I have been touting here for years. Pandora is still the #1 Internet service in my personal ranking (such a pity it cannot be legally used outside the US... just another craziness of the labels who - let us say it loud and clear - have already lost control on the music distribution channels). Interestingly Google itself is doing very little to actively follow the tastes of the users and push content their way (apart from personalized ads of course). But I would love to have a Google Pandora RSS Reader. Walking through the daily portion of posts coming from subscribed RSS feeds, I would love to have an option "thumb up" or "thumb down" each of them. And next morning my morning coffee selection of RSS news should come not strictly from the subscribed feeds, but also taking into account what kind of news I liked yesterday and the day before and what kind I did not like. This way the content would have a chance to be actively pushed to me, leaving me just an option to rate it, instead of myself searching the Net for what I like.

Following this thread I came to some product conclusions related to my business. As some of you know, Wind Mobile, where I work, supplies the leading personalized ringback tones platform to mobile carriers. At the moment ringback tones are quite static, this means most of the subscribers keep a fairly constant set of tunes tied to their profiles. Our vision is to push it forward, to the "Ringback 2.0" level, and to make the ringback content as dynamic as can be. There are two important factors here. First, from the end-user's perspective, selecting a new ringback tune must be as easy and straightforward as possible. Second, there must be a good discovery mechanism.

To answer both issues we have introduced the "I like this song" (or "thumb up" in Pandora terminology) feature. It works like this. I like the new song "I hear" by the Strange People (I bet you have not heard it before, and I bet you will like it a lot!). I set it up as my personalized ringback tone. Now you call my mobile. You hear this tune as my phone rings (this is how ringback tones work). And as you like it, you just press an asterisk [*] while it plays. That is all. It is now copied to your ringback profile. OK, there is one intermediate step in between. You have to actually purchase the tune. So after pressing the [*] button you get a text message asking you to confirm the purchase. After the confirmation your new ringback is automatically provisioned and the purchase appears on your phone bill. Now the next person calls you, the newly purchased tune is played, and likely she does the same. Each time the [*] is pressed, the Strange People get their tune sold. Great, interactive, viral, easy to use service bringing more purchases and more happy users.

And of course there are more features to be derived from that one. The confirmation SMS can bring you an option to buy the whole bundle: the ringback tone, the ringtone and the full track download. Again you are billed by your mobile service provider, but the single tune, multipurpose bundle is inexpensive enough for you not to stop the "I like it, I WANT IT" impulse... Go for it! Music is about emotions... do not let them fade away by complicated setup procedures and multi - step billing. Want it and want it now? Just press the [*] button...