Here, There and Everywhere

For Jason Devitt, the future of wireless was literally right around the corner. “I had a realization: That no matter what else you might want to do on a phone, you would like it to be able to tell you where you are and where you're going and what other things in the world around you might be of interest,” said Devitt, the co-founder, president and CEO of mobile content publisher and developer Vindigo Studios. “And I had some very modest ideas about how to contribute to the development of this new world.”

Turns out that no matter where he was going, Devitt was in the right place at the right time. Launched in late 1999, Vindigo's location-based wireless city guides quickly emerged as one of the first commercially successful consumer data applications: Metropolitan navigation services encompassing restaurant locations and reviews, shopping tips and nightlife options alongside directions to nearby ATMs and gas stations, the city guides now cover 70 major markets across the U.S. and remain Vindigo's flagship product.

But the New York City-based company is also expanding into other entertainment applications and beyond location services. In addition to news, images and trivia from the New York Times, Vindigo also offers Couch Potato, a mobile database of more than 100,000 DVD reviews searchable by release date, genre and cast; FotoShare, which enables subscribers to wirelessly customize and swap photos; and Mobile Vibe, which features news and record reviews from the pages of the popular urban music magazine.

In all, more than 20 different applications are now in various stages of development, with 14 of them now available to Verizon Wireless subscribers.

“We're continuing to introduce products we think have broad consumer appeal,” Devitt said. And in true Vindigo fashion, he knows exactly where the company is headed: “We're going where the customer is.”

Devitt was born and raised in Ireland. Although he studied electronic engineering, he started his professional life as an investment banker with D.E. Shaw, first in the financial firm's London office and later in its New York City branch.

Although he conducted his post-graduate research into techniques for delivering full-motion video over noisy channels — like wireless phones, for example — Devitt truly began to grasp the potential for multimedia over mobile devices as the 1990s drew to a close. “In particular, I started to see the opportunity for delivering the Internet to a mobile phone as something like the apotheosis of the Web,” he said. “Being able to deliver all the information in the world to anyone at any time in any place is extraordinary. It remains an extraordinary and unfulfilled idea, and I just couldn't get it out of my mind.”

Devitt co-founded Vindigo with programmer and software designer David Joerg, adapting the company's name from the Latin VINDOCO, meaning “to liberate or make free.” The first Vindigo city guide, which covered New York City, went live on New Year's Eve 1999. Although the inspiration behind the city guide concept was the always-on connectivity of wireless networks, Vindigo initially focused exclusively on PDAs.

“We didn't believe in the first generation of WAP phones — we didn't think we could deliver a compelling consumer experience,” Devitt said. “We were right. A point that was lost on a lot of people is that it was easier to look at Vindigo on a PDA and make the mental leap to what might be possible than if it was on a wireless device. The experience on the phone was so crude and irritating that a lot of people said, ‘I will never use wireless data. I don't see the value.’”

That consumer mindset has only started to change over the past couple of years, thanks to the proliferation of next-generation handsets and the popularity of the BREW and Java platforms. Another catalyst behind the growth of mobile data is the evolution of the business model for premium content. “In 1999, it was not possible to charge the consumer for services, and carriers didn't want us to include advertising — moreover, they wanted content providers to pay for placement on the deck,” Devitt said. “Back then, the only source of revenue was cheap venture capital. Now carriers can do direct billing, with a share of the revenues coming back to us.”

Vindigo started expanding into other services beyond its city guides in 2002. According to Devitt, at that time the PDA market was beginning to sputter, but with new-generation, feature-rich handsets on the horizon, the wireless marketplace he'd always envisioned was finally beginning to develop some definition and shape. Vindigo's portfolio of applications now breaks down into three general categories: personalization, entertainment/information and communication-driven applications.

“Personalization includes wallpaper and downloadable graphics — that's a market that didn't even exist in 2002, but it's a significant driver in revenue in 2004,” Devitt said. In addition to the city guides and the NYTimes.com Mobile News Service, information applications include MapQuest Mobile, a wireless version of the popular online maps and driving directions service, while communication apps include a partnership with wireless messaging developer Upoc to offer a version of Upoc's mobile community service for BREW-enabled mobile phones.

While detailed demographic breakdowns of Vindigo's subscriber base are not available, Devitt said the majority of users fall somewhere between the ages of 25 and 34, a demo much younger than the typical PDA user that initially comprised the company's customer base. Although applications like Mobile Vibe and CelebrityNow! (which delivers showbiz news and photos) certainly skew toward younger demographics, Devitt said he fully expects that a more mature audience segment will eventually materialize, and that younger subscribers are simply more proactive in seeking out the kinds of applications they want to download. He credits viral marketing as the crux of a given application's success or failure.

“Consumers are educating each other,” Devitt said. “They see a friend using it and ask how. I don't think that's going to change.”

Vindigo's carrier partners now include Verizon as well as AT&T Wireless, Sprint PCS, Alltel and U.S. Cellular. The latter approached Vindigo to develop Metromix Mobile, a city guide-type consumer app built on content from the Chicago Tribune and available exclusively to U.S. Cellular subscribers in the carrier's hometown Chicago market.

”Vindigo was able to create an application that provided a user-friendly way of getting access to the Metromix content,” said John Cregier, senior director of data services and strategy for U.S. Cellular. “Given that this is an application only of value to our Chicagoland customers, the sales numbers actually compare favorably to some applications available across the country. Because it's a subscription-based application, the customers really see the value over time, and our sales numbers are increasing every month.”

But the Metromix project almost didn't get off the ground, Cregier said. The Tribune's earlier attempts at distributing content over WAP phones were a source of considerable frustration. “They were hesitant,” Cregier said. “Many content providers in the early days of wireless data didn't see a return on their investment.”

Still, despite Vindigo's own frustrations with the mobile content billing model, Devitt said carriers have done a reasonably good job of marketing and promoting wireless data services. “It's really hit and miss, and to [carriers'] credit, this is an entirely new marketplace with no road map, so it's hard to develop marketing plans that are appropriate,” he said, adding that applications like messaging are still something of an underground phenomenon. “This is the first time in my life that I've experienced a technology being adopted by a generation younger than me that I wouldn't even have noticed happening, if not for the fact that I was immersed in it myself.”

Instead, Devitt argues that what's hampering wireless data from reaching critical mass is the fragmentation of the marketplace. “Put bluntly, the handsets in the markets are good enough for us to deliver hundreds of excellent services. The biggest challenge is that every handset is slightly different and every operator has chosen a different set of technologies,” he said. “The mechanism by which a consumer can get my product on their phone can vary dramatically, not just from one carrier to the next but from one handset to the next within each carrier's portfolio. Nor are we seeing any progress toward standardization.”

Despite the current limitations of the market, Vindigo achieved profitability earlier this year. Again keeping with the Vindigo aesthetic, Devitt has a pretty good idea of where he'd like to see the mobile content market end up — and where Vindigo will fit into the equation.

“We will reach a point where millions of people are using applications and services on their phones every day to communicate with their friends, to express themselves, to kill time, to have fun and to get useful information,” Devitt said. “We'll see people not only using these services on a regular basis, but perhaps using them to the exclusion of other media and other ways of getting entertainment and information. We also think there will be no more than five to 10 dominant providers and publishers. And we seek to be one of those.”