phling! Shot

David Murphy talks to Graeme W. Smith, VP Marketing at mobile music service provider phling!

DM: So Graeme, tell us about phling!

GS: The three founders of the company, myself, Michael Krasner, our President and CEO, and Lawrence Denenberg, our CTO, all worked for InTouch systems developing Voice portals for mobile operators. We ran Sprint TPS’s Voice Command voice-activated services, for example. The company was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was sold to Comverse in 1999 and there we built up the voice solutions division from 20 to 300 people. So we understand the mobile space. The key to mobile applications, as we see it, is ease of use for the end user.
We left in 2003 and started Oxysystems and spent a long time working with end users to really understand what they wanted in terms of mobile music and how they listen to it while they are mobile, and this has driven a lot of the features of phling!
phling! has had a series of incarnations, but it launched officially in November 2006 as a mobile music lounge where people can listen to their own music, Internet radio, independent bands and artists who upload and want to promote their music, so users can share music and opinions and find other people with similar tastes in music. So it’s like a social network tied into the mobile phone, trying to help people get more from their mobile music and to turn listening from a solitary to a social experience. Users can rate songs, find out which are the most popular songs in the phling! community and what others think of the artists.

DM: Where did the idea come from?

GS: It really came from talking to end users about how they would want to use their phone to listen to music. We surveyed 350 students on five university campuses and the overwhelming response we got back was that they wanted to listen to music on their phone, but also, that there was not much storage space on their phone for all their music. The average number of songs they said they had in their music collection was around 5,000. They told us that they wanted to make their PC their own personal music server without needing a physical connection between the PC and the phone to transfer the music. So with phling! all the music is stored on your PC, and streams from your PC to your phone in real-time, so there’s no need to decide what to sideload. There’s a piece of software that runs on the PC that indexes your music and transcodes it and streams it to your phone, which is running the phling! Java application.

DM: So your PC needs to be left on?

GS: Yes. It needs to be left on and connected to the web so the phone can talk to it. From January, you will be able to upload your music to a central server where we will host the music, so you won’t need to leave your PC on. You’ll just need to have a mobile signal to access the music on the server.

DM: What phones does it work on?

GS: We support a number of handsets from Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. All the models are listed on our website.

DM: And where did the social networking element come from?

GS: One person in one of the focus groups said they used to go to record stores and talk to people there to find out about new bands, so this is where the social networking features and the ability to look at other people’s profiles came from. Each user has a message board so you can leave messages for people on their profile. There’s also another feature that allows you to send an SMS from within the phling! application to tell them about phling and each one is tagged with a little message the recipient what you’re listening to now and how to get phling!
Also, we can integrate with the operator’s existing mobile music store, so if a user finds a song they are interested in, they can buy the song and have it downloaded to their PC or their phone. 

DM: And where can people get phling!?

GS: We have launched on the 3 network in Switzerland, it costs 7 Swiss Francs per month (£3) and this includes all the data usage. We believe this is key to making mobile music applications like phling! a success. We have also embarked on a trial with another operator in Scandinavia. In fact, anyone can go to phling.com and sign up and get it for free, but you will have data charges from the operator. The key to going to market for us is to partner with the operators who can package us with data for one monthly fee and share the revenue with us. This is why it works in Switzerland.
In terms of rolling out, we run it as a hosted application service, so for an operator to roll it out, there’s no capital expenditure involved. It becomes a question of how to promote the service to their subscribers. They zero-rate the data, they bill, and we run the service.

DM: And are you focused exclusively on Europe?

GS: Yes, because of the sophistication of mobile users in Europe, who are looking for innovative services. The networks in Europe are much faster in terms of the physical speed of the network, and the operators are also looking for services such as phling! to help differentiate their offering.
We are on target in terms of working with the operators. We would hope to have one more deal in place before the end of year and as we look to 2008, we see it having a domino effect as we get two or three more. And although we are focused on Europe, we are also beginning to get interest from a couple of operators in the US.

DM: So what’s your USP?

GS: We are turning listening to music from a solitary into a social experience. We allow users to find other people within the phling! network by browsing profiles, find what they are listening to in real time, what they have listened to in the past, the most popular songs, and what new users are listening to. A key feature is that as a user I can share my songs with up to six friends. They can browse my music collection and listen to any of my songs. In legal terms, it’s considered to be a private performance, so there are no copyright issues.
Also, earlier this year at CTIA, we announced a mobile music promotion programme that allow independent artists, bands and labels to create profiles on phling! Upload music, promote gigs and new releases and build a fan list for free effectively. For the users, it’s a great way to discover new bands. We’ve already got two independent labels and around 40 bands signed up on this.