Neil Wiles

You’ve moved from just ringtones to a whole variety of new content, what’s the biggest challenge in keeping that content up-to-date and competitive with a lot of the other mobile software out there?

We have a digital asset management, which is our entire content hosting infrastructure. So we have software that automatically repurposes our apps on the fly, so that every handset and image is optimised for the screen of that handset or software. Mobile games are complicated, because you can’t just modify them on the fly, so we have multiple builds for multiple handset ranges.

We’ve partnered with the majority of the top mobile content developers, or suppliers, in the world, and we also produce our own specific applications and keep up-to-date in that. So in terms of competing over a number of years, we’ve built up the expertise in marketing and producing and developing content ourselves. We’ve got the range, and the relationships with developers to keep that going and up-to-date.

We’ve also got a digital media merchandising plan, which sort of bridges the gap between search and discovery. So people will look for a particular piece of content, whether it be through a TV ad or seeing it online or whatever, and then we basically give them relevant content based on that search. That’s very important in terms of engaging customers.

The other part of engaging customers, for which the 2009 financial year became a bigger focus, was that we’ve started developing things like virtual currency, loyalty and rewards systems, so people can start getting credits. There are other ways to deepen the customer relationship beyond just mobile entertainment.

As the business goes forward, phones are starting to become more and more advanced. What is Mobileactive doing to take advantage of the market beyond the smartphone?

I was talking to a major mobile phone retailer lately, who was telling me that phones in the past have been much more about the fashion accessory. So people look at how thin it is, the colour, and those sorts of things. We went through a huge phase of that, but now people are very, very much about what the phone can do in features and functionality. This is seen as the trend, and irrespective of how the phone grows, that’s what people want.

So based on that, what are we focusing on? We want to provide services that give an ongoing benefit, so whether they download a game, or a ringtone, or whatever, we’re also delivering other types of services that take advantage of whatever handset they are using, using that mobile network and keeps that user engaged with the business for a much longer period of time.