What Is a Mobile Portal?

Mobile technology is enabling the creation of new specialized service channels. As a result, firms are innovating their offerings to better serve their customers, e.g., catering to frequent fliers that want in-flight broadband access to check e-mail and browse the Internet. These emerging mobile relationship opportunities can be broadly categorized as mobile portals. We highlight some examples of portals in action below.

• GM has expanded its business focus from a major car manufacturer to a mobile portal provider with Virtual Advisor. This portal offers voice-activated traffic information, news, e-mail messages, and stock quotes over the web. The portal is built on Hughes Electronics' OnStar, a cellular and satellite based communications service. GM anticipates profits from selling mobile services to individual drivers and resellers like Honda and Lexus.
• Boeing "Connexion" and Tenzing Communications are competing to bring web browsing and e-mail to airline passengers in their seats. The goal is to provide the portal-in-the-sky capability for business travelers to work on airline flights. Several airlines, including Lufthansa German Airlines and British Airways have begun three-month service demonstrations of these mobile portals, and Japan Airlines and Scandinavian Airlines may begin offering the service in 2004. Boeing projects that the in-flight Internet market will grow to $45 billion per year in the next decade and hopes to grab a 10 percent share, or $4.5 billion in annual revenues.
• AT&T Wireless, Nextel's etrieve, BeVocal, and TellMe are creating voice portals where customers speak instead of click to obtain the information and services they need. These portals provide customers with shortcut access to web-based content and services, voice-activated dialing, and e-mail by phone. To use a voice portal, you call a toll-free number and, using simple voice commands, select from a range of information services: driving directions, weather, stock quotes, news, sports, lottery results, or favorite TV dramas.

As the examples indicate, a mobile portal is a customer interaction channel optimized for mobility. The term portal essentially describes an entry point for accessing Internet content and services. A portal aggregates large numbers of users and/or subscribers around specific types of service. They provide a context for web-based interaction, communications services, information content, and software application access from a remote or wireless location. Mobile portals are comparable to fixed Internet portals, such as Yahoo!, which provide a gateway to content and transaction-based services and can be customized according the needs of the user.

As customer needs and preferences change, new mobile portal opportunities become important. These new channels have direct contact with the buyers and access to how customer preferences are changing. Also, the new portals can identify unmet customer needs, develop new types of value-added services, and interpose themselves between suppliers and customers in creative ways. The result is a profusion of new ways to bring content, information, community, and commerce to customers.

Currently, the mobile portal business is characterized by rapid, chaotic change. This will continue for several years, stimulating the emergence of radically different types of companies. New portal companies whose services add value to their customers' lives are poised for significant growth. Consider, for example, the astounding penetration of the i-mode portal of NTT DoCoMo. However, for every one success there seems to be hundreds of failures. As in any new market, new portal players will see their power and importance rise, fall, and rise again as the market dynamics of the m-economy fluctuate.

Mobile portals are still young and plagued by several significant but surmountable problems such as unproven business models and insufficient user demand in Europe and the United States. However, the customer access that mobile portals offer may be worth the wait for companies looking to reach new audiences and build new revenue streams.

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1. Reuters News Service, "Boeing to Announce Airborne Internet Deals," June 12, 2001.