The other members of the value chain, particularly the service providers and device manufacturers, vie strongly against one another for differentiating content. Through the use of the access in order to top content as currency, content or brand owners and publishers will extend their control of the value chain by buying or merely controlling and by way of content distribution points. (Future Mobile Entertainment Scenarios: MEF White Paper) Possible opportunities and Risks in the Content Producer Scenario: In this scenario in case when content dominate mobile entertainment, operators and manufacturers will stand to earn just a minor share of content revenue generated while paying for premium prices for exclusive access to brands, In certain cases, operators and manufacturers will be compelled to distribute comparable less-desirable content so as to gain access to popular brands. This group's opportunity lies in its capability to license content that has been demonstrated to be effective in other media for translation to mobile. By providing content owners with mobile expertise, operators and manufactures could gain on content owners' lack of adequate knowledge regarding the medium. Since content owners will all the time be more or less isolated from the technology and the data part of mobile entertainment, service providers and manufacturers could compete effectively with one another by supplying business-critical information to content providers.

Portals: Because of their proximity to the content portion of the value chain, specialty portals and niche-market mobile sites possess better opportunities in this scenario compared to in the two earlier ones. Through a move, which aligns themselves with the content providers, portals can have the potential to give rise to the content wave and capture consumer loyalty. Nevertheless, there will be few independent portals, even in this scenario. It will be publishers and content owners who will be the strongest consolidators who will govern the main conduit to consumers. (Future Mobile Entertainment Scenarios: MEF White Paper)

Service Providers: Service Providers equipped with value-added offerings particularly in the gateway infrastructure, billing, support or tracking will be successful in this scenario. They see an opportunity in the form of providing cross-network services, technical expertise, sales trends and market to content owners. The threat, nevertheless remains that Service providers assume to be natural takeover targets for owners of content looking for growth or control over technical expertise. (Future Mobile Entertainment Scenarios: MEF White Paper)

Marketing Issues in favor of VAMMM:

Of late mobile telephone operators have convincing reasons to integrate voice and data applications. Presently, mobile voice portals support hands-free operations, unified messaging and pervasive access to enterprise data. The various factors propelling this are (i) Mobile users will not be ever completely satisfied with the tiny keypads and screens of the mobile handsets. Voice is the natural human interface, thereby offering a fast and less fatiguing manner of entering the data. (ii) The experience had through the development of mobile voice portal services will be advantageous for every voice-powered Internet applications. Mobile carriers need voice portals which are extremely scalable, their performance are reasonably well in noisy environments, and are especially simpler to navigate. (iii) It is imperative that vendors provide carriers outsourced voice portal services. The mobile phone industry has its hand completely graduating to the 3G and agreeing to that of the FCC's 911 mandate. As a result of carrier consolidation, a tiny minority of voice portals will stand to gain the greater part of business share. (Mobile users like key pads, not speech recognition) iv) Application of the Automated Speech Recognition -- ASR and Text-to-Speech -- TTS technologies embedded inside mobile applications will boost unified messaging. It is seen that mobile users do not have the time or the tools for tackling e-mails and faxes in their native formats. It is through voice technology that enables content to travel easily across one media to another. (v) It will be the turn of the mobile voice portals which will spur the use of Voice over IP -- VoIP The chief advantage of VoIP is that it lowers the cost of transportation, facilitates new telephony characteristics, and lets integration of mobile phones and the World Wide Web. (Mobile users like key pads, not speech recognition)

The Future is Voice:

More and more solutions will be seen in Automated Speech Recognition -- ASR and thus will be available to the market. One instance lies in Text-to-Speech -- TTS in which more natural sounding voices will be provided. This will result in far wider acceptance of speech...

Through the use of speech technology, it will help businesses function more efficiently which will witness greater application of the technology in mobile devices specially in-car navigation, toys and games. The technology will also witness increased application in products and services meant for the disabled. The industries which will stand to gain from speech applications are those which need to go in for automation any of their processes which are a time consuming one. (Leading Speech Recognition Companies Speak Up About the Future)
In fact any document intensive professions, in which specific terminology is applied, like medical diagnosis, will see maximum uptake of the technology. In the future, voice-activated mobile media will see enhanced adoption by the telecom operators. Information services like weather updates, horoscope results, traffic updates, and news regarding sporting events will appear. It has been demonstrated that when mobile telephone companies adopt something, it triggers a consequent adoption elsewhere. The present level of technology continues to carry over the demands of today and tomorrow, however continued investment in Research and Development will produce higher accuracy and increased text-to-speech. (Leading Speech Recognition Companies Speak Up About the Future)

The Revenue stream for Voice-activated VAMMM:

Dramatic levels of voice-activated technologies and the innovative and customer satisfied business applications have gathered the attention of business managers across the world. When it is developed and completely implemented, basic voice-recognition systems can have the potential to attain accuracy proportions of 97% which is equal to human levels of recognition. Voice commerce will be implemented strongly, especially by businesses in consumer aware sectors like financial services which will garner 39% by the next 3 years, telecom that will witness a 35% share and government 27%. Voice commerce will be often used by companies as part of a multi-channel strategy. (Voice Commerce: A Sound Proposition for Business)

75% of the business who regarded voice commerce would come to be important to them also considered the same in case of wireless commerce. The instantaneous support for voice commerce is evident as it saves on costs and improves service. By adding voice commerce to the present sales and service channels has the potential to cut down the cost of incoming service call significantly. Through the reduction of the amount of time, customers or the mobile worker have to spend waiting for their calls to be handled; voice commerce also improves the level of service. Voice commerce can also be used to generate new sources of revenue. There are quite several mobile operators who have also developed voice portals. These portals both increase the brand of the operator and provide access to a range of revenue-generating services like directory services, the latest news, voice dialing, weather and stock prices. (Voice Commerce: A Sound Proposition for Business)

The Target Markets:

a) The target market in the mid twenties loves entertainment-based content. Content that are interactive in nature are liked best by this target group. The advertisers offering this type of services are provided a lot of opportunities to connect with the audiences through quizzes, games and other interactive features that showcase their products. As far as this youth segment is considered, online music is the king and they download mp3 music more often. (Reaching teens and young adults in the Middle East)

The basic ingredients of VAMMM:

i) Market potential: A need must exist or use that customer will demand and eventually pay for over a period of time. It should not be a fad or novelty that dies down when the next fashionable innovation arrives. (ii) Value based and payment-simple. As is common with all successful business, the customer must think that he or she is getting certain things that are worth the price. This is known as the price satisfaction ingredient and a crucial part of it entails price clarity and easy payment. Mobile phones due to high costs and complex delivery systems present a higher pricing and payment challenges. A crucial factor in the success of NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode service is that its is based on packet-switching that delivers data in irregular streams and the company is providing pricing plans based on timed-data connections. (Making Money on Mobile) iii) Service Provider Synergy: It is a fact that carriers will not be creating all the interesting content and applications which the mobile mass will desire. Moreover service providers will not be making any profit if they…