Squaring the circle...

How do you reconcile consumer privacy with a wireless directory? WDN’s Jeff Strunk believes he has the answer…

Mobile telephony is synonymous with the notion of privacy. After all, your residential land line ‘belongs’ to the house. That is, it’s static and it becomes the communal property of all those who live there – mum, dad, kids, gran and granddad… you get the picture.

However, your mobile phone is yours – solely and uniquely yours. The number isn’t associated with an address as such, just a person – you. So, it’s understandable that people want to keep that number to themselves and just trusted friends and associates.

That’s all well and good until there’s a crisis, as Jeff Strunk of Wireless Directory Networks (WDN) can confirm. Several years ago, a family bereavement left Jeff desperately trying to contact his brother, who was out of town. Unfortunately, so was Jeff and he hadn’t got his brother’s new cell phone number.

By a cruel twist of irony, Strunk’s brother was actually in Chicago at the same time as he was and staying at a hotel just down the block.

Eventually, knowing he was unlikely to find the number, Strunk rang his mobile network and asked them. As you’d expect, they weren’t very forthcoming.
Having called friends and relatives to try to contact his brother, Strunk eventually dialled 411.

“I called directory assistance just for the heck of it and they said: ’No, are you crazy? You’ve got to get that number off the person’ .”

“So, I was totally stuck – we could have gone out to dinner, we could have talked about our uncle who had died, I could have informed my brother quicker. Yet we totally missed each other.”

A serial entrepreneur and inventor, Strunk decided that there had to be a better way and came up with the idea that would become WDN’s ComNote proposition. In short, this allows a caller to request that an SMS message is sent to somebody else’s mobile – giving them a series of options to respond (or not, as the case may be). It’s a tidy proposition which seems to resolve the mobile DA quandary – allowing both access and availability, whilst ensuring and respecting privacy.

However, the privacy issue in respect to mobile DA hasn’t gone away and is still causing controversy. Earlier this year, US-based Intelius launched an online directory assistance service for cell-phone numbers, but backed down and withdrew the service after pressure coming from both wireless carriers and consumers. According to its website, the company had around 90million numbers in its database and was selling them to anyone who had a name and wanted a number for $15 an enquiry.

This all comes nearly four years after CTIA – The Wireless Association, proposed the idea of a wireless directory. Verizon Wireless (a significant player in the CTIA, and whose President and CEO Lowell McAdam is the current chair) described mobile directories as a “dumb idea.” In January, Verizon Wireless called on Intelius “to halt the mining and sale of these private numbers.”

Perhaps the ultimate winners in all this will be the companies offering mobile internet or mobile enhanced SEO, who can deliver internet information services direct to mobile devices.

Farhad Divecha, Managing Director of Accuracast, thinks that this is definitely the case:

“As information aggregators / organisers improve their mobile offering and content providers use mobile SEO / PPC adverts to ensure consumers can find their websites when searching for them, the ease of searching online and the lower cost will drive more consumers away from directory assistance services – especially those that charge money.

“For operators like Verizon, the objective is to position themselves as the information organiser (via their own search offering), thereby safeguarding the potential to earn large mobile search ad revenues in the future. While this may seem far-fetched, most operator moves in the past few months have been based on this drive to protect their walled-gardens and not give away too much to the likes of Google.

“Anything that allows consumers to quickly and easily find accurate information is good. If it does that for free, it is a winner. That’s the whole reason why Google exists and why it is so successful.”

So, the intractable privacy issue could actually speed the decline of traditional DA, as more and more of us use mobiles rather than landlines. The internet community seems poised to win the Information Services race. But this is by no means a forgone conclusion.

WDN’s ComNote proposition could be amongst a series of innovations which could help DA players retain market share in the mobile world. Interestingly, Jeff Strunk regards the privacy issue as the first major problem he faced when starting the development of ComNote.

“The privacy issue around the globe means that people were very concerned to keep their numbers private. There would only be between two and eight per cent of the people willing to list their cell numbers – so it wasn’t enough to create a critical mass and have a successful system.”
So how do you tap into a market that is predominantly concerned with privacy? Strunk’s solution was to develop a caller ID system that would be able to send the name and number of the enquiring party to the person they were trying to find. Crucially, the person receiving the call could make the choice whether they would accept the call or not.

Essentially ComNote works in a way similar to other directory services in that you call or go to the internet and give the criteria of the person or business you’re trying to contact.

A typical enquirer would give the city and state and then the name of the person or business they’re looking for. If there are several entries under the same name, they could narrow the search with a street name. They would then be informed that the operator has a wireless number that has privacy protection, so the enquirer would have the option to send an SMS with their name and call back phone number.

The person they are trying to contact receives a ComNote which tells them who is trying to contact them and how they can reach them, if they wish. Additionally, a ComNote can be labelled as an emergency, a business relationship, personal or urgent. The people who send the ComNote are charged for the service rather than those who receive it.

“So it’s very simple and fluid – and it’s not intrusive. People can take their time in the decision to call back right away, or they can text message it, put in their phone book or put it on a blocked numbers list,” says Strunk.

Strunk is philosophical about the recent furore about Intelius’s moble directory:

“The good news is they proved that there is a demand for a directory service that provides wireless numbers and that people will pay a premium – they charged $15 per query.

“The thing they did wrong, was they went on social sites and sites where you sign up for ring tones and acquired the data without anybody’s permission. They even had [CTIA President] John Stanton’s number on there – and he couldn’t get his number off.”

Strunk sees the business case for his proposition as one that is growing – as many small businesses as well as residential customers have a decreasing need for landline services.
Mobile penetration is at saturation point in most mature marketplaces and service providers are increasingly offering ‘naked broadband’ (a line into a house or business purely for data and not traditional PSTN voice services).

“Small contractors have no need for a landline. They don’t want to pay the extra fee but they have no place to go with the business wireless network. Yet for a lot of small businesses, that’s what drives their business – being listed, and listed in many places.”
Add to this, the fact that as voice services migrate into the IP world in the next few years, more and more of us will have IP telephony services offering intelligent numbers. This will present interesting challenges and opportunities to the traditional directory business model. As intelligent numbering is essentially agnostic of device, you could have an intelligent number with a VoIP provider and whatever device you use, whether it’s a PC, blackberry, mobile (cell phone), traditional landline, or even your laptop, you could log in wherever you are in the world. The system recognises the number, so the number goes with the person rather than a device.

Strunk is enthusiastic, to say the least: “Well, I think that’s just about the smartest thing since sliced bread. On the downside, if there are multiple numbers for that one person, you might call 118 four or five times. But on the upside, this proposition heightens the requirement to guarantee privacy.”

Alongside the emergence of IP telephony, is the rise and rise of the mobile internet, which again has significant implications for the availability of personal data, especially in relation to online social networking – indeed, one commentator has described the whole phenomena as nothing less than “a stalker’s candy-store”.

Facebook’s FindMe application allows consenting opt-in user-groups to see the whereabouts of all the users within that particular group.

As Strunk points out, in a context such as the one he found himself in – where both he and his brother where in the same area of Chicago at the same time, this could work well. However, for many online social networkers, not all their ‘friends’ are trusted friends and family. Some young people have literally thousands of contacts online and this widespread dissemination of personal information and location is clearly a threat to privacy. Jeff Strunk agrees, but sees this as an opportunity to extend the ComNote concept:

“Privacy is something that has to be enacted by the individual – so people have the option to block out their location, or only make it available to certain individuals.”

WDN are now trying to put together a fluid universal system that works seamlessly off the internet and any 411 / 118 call centre. Strunk sees this as enabling consumers to choose different levels of privacy protection – whether it goes to print, online or DA.

“So you’ll be able to choose business ComNote. For example, I’m CEO of a company, so I don’t want my number known but want to be contacted. As a complimentary service, our client, Yellow Pages Group in Canada, are launching Canada 411.ca. You’ll be able to search a business listing or residential listing and if there’s a wireless listing you’ll be able to either contact that person if it’s listed or, if it’s privacy protected, you can send them a ComNote directly.

“It’s really built around the consumers. What do I want in privacy? How do I want to use privacy? I want to be able to get that number anywhere. If someone goes online and says, ‘now I want to be unpublished because I’ve got this jerk stalking me’, with a couple of clicks, wherever you are in the world, you can change your listing status and it’s immediate, not six months later, like it used to be.”

Industry commentators, seeing a decline in call volumes to legacy DA providers, may be gloomy, but Strunk doesn’t share their pessimism. Instead of a threat, he sees a great opportunity from the rise of the mobile internet and the proliferation of online social networking. In addition, he has an oversight of both the US and EU markets and has a presence in both.

That’s not to say it’s simply a case of onward and upward, says Strunk. He cites the wide variety of European regulatory issues around questions of privacy, and adds:

“There are still some European countries that operate legacy systems, so their inability to charge for a premium SMS restricts where we can operate at the moment. The good news about the US is that we can send a ComNote to someone and the guy who’s called DA is charged $1.50 plus 50 cents to send – so there’s more revenue available here.”

“In Spain for instance, you don’t have a system to be able to charge an extra 25 cents to send that SMS out, meaning you have to include the expense of sending the SMS in the call. On the upside, directory call revenue can be generated by how long they’re on the phone whereas in the States it’s a flat fee. So the longer you keep the person on the phone in Europe, the higher the rate of revenue the 118 provider receives.

“The 118 providers we’ve been working with have given us a great reception and we won the Global Directory Award from the EDM for the ComNote service – which we’ve now patented in the US and 120 countries world wide.

“I think the US does about the same amount of directory calls as Europe does as a whole, so for us, the US is a huge market. Expanding this service to the web and search engines means we are able to generate revenue for the 118 provider from web searches. It opens a whole other avenue to potentially double the revenue and make it easier for carriers and consumers to use.”

Similarly Strunk looks at the Canadian example and delivers an optimistic forecast, despite seeing the number of successful search queries going down:

“In Canada successful search queries are going down because there are less and less landlines. Yet, there are no wireless numbers listed – which obviously is a big opportunity for us. We’ve been championing this, but it takes all technology providers to champion it, as a whole, to get the EU to move things forward. We need to say ‘look, open your eyes to this, it’s so important to the future of not only your business, but for every online business there is’. ”

“Despite the decline in volumes, voice and 118 is never going to go away because it’s a convenience – but it will level off until service providers start adding new contact details like wireless numbers.

“In the future, online searches with the capability of being conducted on your phone are going to be the predominant way of doing searches.”