Last week, Wireless Week provided an overview of On-Device Portals and this morning, MocoNews offers their own skeptical opinion.

MocoNews asserts that on-device portals are simply mobile applications in a vendor-defined category (i.e., there is nothing special about them). I beg to differ, agreeing with Wireless Week’s comment that there is an “underlying mission … to make content easier to discover and use”, although I would extend that definition to emphasize service discovery.

There is some confusion because some vendors take a more technology and tools approach to the problem (such as Action Engine and NellyMoser) while other vendors take a more brand-centric approach (Handmark and Yahoo).

On-Device Portals provide real value to the consumer, regardless of how they are implemented, but I prefer to emphasize their value in creating awareness & simplifying access over their value for making services easier-to-use.

If we rewind the web to its first phase of commercial deployment, directory companies like Yahoo were more successful than the search companies because their service provided two functions to the consumer. As with search engines, directories helped consumers find stuff. But unlike search engines, directories helped create awareness among neophyte consumers of what could and could not be found on the web. As the web matured, consumers became more sophisticated and the breadth and depth of what was available expanded, shifting the value of a directory to search.

Some have pondered that on-device portals will experience a similar shift. I heartily disagree. Unlike the early web directories, on-device portals serve another function. Handset manufacturers and mobile operators have failed miserably at creating a simple to use “phone top” equivalent to the PC desktop. From a consumer’s perspective, there are three pillar’s to a successful on-device portal:

1. create awareness for services (on and off device) relevant to the consumer (proactive)

2. improve discovery of services relevant to the consumer (reactive)

3. simplify access of services relevant to the consumer

The question I asked at the top was whether this is a demand-creation business or a demand-fulfillment business. Today, its a demand-creation business for two reasons: first, most consumers don’t know that ODPs exist and don’t have access to off-portal ODPs (now that is a mouthful); second, the total cost of mobile data (TCMD) remains out of the reach for most consumers.

The ODP business will shift to a demand-fulfillment business over the next 18 months. Consumers using services like Sprint’s “On Demand”, Handmark’s “Pocket Express, and Alltel’s “Celltop”, expect those services when considering a new service provider and they create awareness for those services among their peers. The TCMD is a function of both the data plan rate as well as the cost of using a data service. TCMD is slowly declining (not fast enough for me) as operators lower data access costs, shift to all-you-can-eat plans, and mobile advertising subsidizes the cost of many data services. All this bodes well for brand-oriented ODPs, while the technology & tools ODP companies will shift from selling platforms to selling services to brand-oriented media companies.