Bringing Magazines to the Mobile

David Murphy talks to Picsel's chief marketer to find out how a mobile productivity solution is moving into the mobile marketing space

Anyone who has ever tried to view PC documents on a small device will know its often an unsatisfying experience. Since 1998, Picsel, a Scottish technology company, has been working on a solution to improve the experience.
Its ePAGE software enables mobile users to view PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, Word and other types of document, including web pages, on a mobile device, exactly as they would on a PC screen, with the ability to pan and zoom to see the part of the file they are interested in.
It works on a wide range of operating systems, including Microsoft, Palm and Linux. The technology is already installed  on several mobile phones and PDAs, including some of Sonys Cli PDAs, and the Samsung D600.
From this description, it sounds like a mobile productivity solution, pure and simple, but as Senior Marketing Manager Zubair Salim explains, there are obvious mobile marketing applications.
We are working with a number of big brands who pride themselves on the richness of the experience when people read their magazines, to bring those to the handset, bypassing the world of WAP he says. People who are used to a certain experience when they look at a magazine or a document on their PC want the same sort of experience on their mobile phone, and thats what Picsel technology delivers.

Salim refuses to be drawn on which brands, or even which publishers, it is working with, but promises announcements later this year.
We are working very hard in the area of content delivery, because this is what Picsel is all about he says. We should see some large and well-known brands delivering high quality content solutions into the mobile space net year.

Logical progression
The move into content delivery is a logical progression for the company. Founded in 1998, it spent a couple of years unsuccessfully courting printer manufacturers, before seeing the potential for its applications in mobile devices. It signed its first mobile contracts with Samsung and Sony in 2001, and has since signed deals with Motorola, Sharp, Panasonic and NTT DoCoMo. It famously refused to do business with Nokia, which for anyone in the mobile space, would seem like commercial madness, but with 150 staff worldwide, offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and sales offices in San Jose, Seoul and Tokyo, it seems to have go over the disappointment.
We dont want our technology undervalued in any way explains Salim. It is a key component in all the devices within which it resides, and we have to ensure we get the value back for it. Nokia is a beast that likes to be able to consume technologies. At that moment in time when we were dealing with them, because of the vast volumes they were producing, it became more complex when it came to striking a deal that was right for Picsel as well as Nokia, and when all other partners are expending the kind of money that we would expect to be able to receive for this type of application, and the leader does not want to expend that kind of cash, it does become a little more complex.
Since then, however, the two companies have re-entered negotiations, and Salim says he expects to be in a position to publicise some of the work Picsel has been doing with Nokia very soon.

User experience
A planned demonstration of Picsel technology to Mobile Marketing Magazine that was due to take place late last year had to be cancelled, so we have not yet witnessed it first hand, but in 2003, Picsel's technology won the European Information Societys Grand Prize, and if its half as good as Salim describes it, it cant be bad.
We pride ourselves on delivering the kind of user experience people feel they can only get from a PC, and thats why we have been so successful in signing up leading carriers he says. The experience we deliver is pleasurable, beautiful and worthwhile on the small screen. You get exactly what you would see on the PC, but on the handset, so theres no replacement of fonts, no crunching down of the richness of the content. Its so good, in fact, that when users start engaging with it and using the zoom and pan tools, they start looking for the same sort of experience on their PC.
The company has also been successful in getting its brand onto the devices on which the application in installed. Its logo appears on Samsung boxes, and more to the point, when you open a Word, PowerPoint or PDF file on a Picsel-powered Samsung device, you get a Picsel splashscreen.
This is a testament to Samsungs belief in the technology says Salim.
Its next move is an aftermarket solution, which will make Picsel applications available to mobile users direct from a website and via channel partners.
We can only guess at the sort of brands planning to take advantage of Picsel technology to put their content on mobile devices, but who knows, if Heat, or even Hello, is your cup of tea, the opportunity to read the latest issue on your mobile may not be far away.

Picsel