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Deal them in: Entrepreneurs stake future on virtual card-collecting via cellphone
December 7, 2006
By Kay Lazar, Globe Staff
Casey Jones has seen the future, and it's something from the past. And the present. It's the palm-sized communication device commonly known as a cellphone that is attached, as if by umbilical cord, to nearly everybody under the age of 30. These devices, Jones predicts, will soon be used to do a lot more than talk, text, take pictures, and download ring tones. They will become the mode by which a younger generation -- and many older folks too -- collects and trades a vast array of what Jones calls "digital assets."
Picture young fans exchanging and even carrying their entire trading card collections within their cellphones. And forget the stagnant stuff, said Jones, a Newburyport entrepreneur. These trading cards will soon contain snippets of video so fans can watch, trade, and store moving images of their favorite sports figures hitting a home run or scoring a touchdown. Would-be acquaintances can swap personal profiles, complete with photos and music, a la MySpace.com. And companies can cash in by charging for these multimedia messages and cyber collectables.
Count Jones and his start-up company, Hook Mobile, in that latter category.
Jones, 37, and his Hook colleagues recently teamed with the CBS television network to launch "mobile trading cards," which feature this season's contestants on the network's reality show "Survivor." For a weekly $1.99 fee, subscribers receive a random set of three cards each week by text-messaging the word 'TRIBE' to a five-digit code. Some are "Instant Win" cards that award cash or prizes. Fans also can send their cards, via their cellphones, to others. But cards sent to other fans are not considered "official" until a collector registers the card by sending it, via a text message, to a special "Survivor" phone number. Only weekly subscribers may register cards. As with traditional trading cards, there are limited quantities of each card available. Subscribers also can manage their virtual "Survivor" cards online, via a website developed by another Newburyport entrepreneur, 41-year-old David Strand, president of Strand Marketing.
"This is Generation C -- content -- from video games to mobile phones," Strand said.
"Digital content," Jones added, "is becoming the social currency of this generation."
Jones is probably the last person his boyhood friends would imagine as being on the cutting edge of high-tech entertainment. He didn't play electronic or video games while growing up -- he was the one outside playing football or lacrosse. But he was the proud owner of about 6,000 baseball cards. They were the old-fashioned kind, the ones that came packaged around bubble gum.
"We're still working on the gum," Jones said, smiling, a reference to his next-generation trading cards that consumers can see, but not touch or smell. A history major in college, Jones swore he has not morphed into a gadget hound in midlife. "But I am fascinated by the mobile phone," said Jones, married and the father of a 1-year-old.
"It's becoming a wallet and an entertainment device and, eventually, a minicomputer." Some top techies would agree.
"Once you get people doing this and being familiar with trading cards, then you open it up to other content, to other images and audio," said Jeff Sellinger, director of wireless operations at CBS. He describes the concept as "viral" -- one that has the ability to catch on within one demographic and spread rapidly to others.
"It's a pretty good marketing concept," Sellinger said.
Sellinger declined to say how many fans have been hooked on the "Survivor" cards -- the network's first foray into digital collectable content -- but said CBS is happy with the numbers and plans to expand the concept.In recent months, CBS and other media outlets have launched services that provide entertainment and news updates, including photos, to cellphone subscribers. Several, including CBS, also are promoting audience interaction, with cellphone users able to use text messaging to win prizes, solve crime shows, and choose the winners for TV contests, among other endeavors.
What makes Hook's innovation different, Sellinger said, is its simultaneous "viral" and collectable components -- it allows viewers to interact with each other and the network while collecting stuff on their cellphones at the same time. The concept intrigued Tom Dusenberry, a Marblehead executive who has been around the entertainment block -- virtual and otherwise -- a few times. Dusenberry, 53, was a top executive at Parker Brothers, the toy and game company that introduced Monopoly, and is founder and former CEO of Hasbro Interactive, the electronic gaming arm of toy-industry giant Hasbro Inc.
"In my 30 years in the game industry, one thing I have learned is it's all about the fun," said Dusenberry, now CEO of Dusenberry Entertainment, a company that focuses on emerging technologies. Dusenberry was so taken by Hook's mobile trading card concept that he helped the start-up company raise venture capital last spring and now sits on its board of directors.
"The idea of mobile customized trading cards can be really fun and go in multiple directions... such as sports, marketing, movie studios, and games," he said. And the profits could be considerable. The traditional trading-card business in this country adds up to roughly $1 billion a year, according to Scott Kelnhofer, editor of Card Trade, a journal that covers the industry. Initially, Dusenberry sees the primary audience for mobile trading cards as 13 - to 30-year- olds because they are "so techno-savvy, they like multimedia to be used simultaneously." But as that audience grows up, so too will its appetite for mobile collectable content, Dusenberry said.
Charles Golvin, a California-based analyst at Forrester Research who tracks the mobile industry, said it's an "open question" whether mobile trading cards will be the domain's next must-have. But the phenomenon of mobile collectable content, he said, will undoubtedly grow as cellphones are developed with larger storage capacities.
"There's no question," Golvin said, "that this is becoming a highly personalized device as people invest more of their content into the device."
Back in Newburyport, Strand, the entrepreneur who created the website for Hook's "Survivor" cards, tradingcards.cbs.com, said he and Jones are still working on a printer-friendly version of their cards for mobile collectors. So far, he said, there doesn't seem to be a big demand.
"Older people want something visceral you can print out," Strand said. "The younger generation is about immediacy, seeing it on their phone and their computer. They're not as interested in the hard content."
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