Board of Directors Presentation 2007Q1 – Part 3/3

[Continued from Part 1 (Vision) and Part 2 (Technology)]

Let’s talk products.

Products is what it’s all about. Technology is really fun to work on, and it’s extremely important for us to continue to push the envelope of what’s possible on the web and on mobile phones. But all of the technology, when it works, should be truly invisible, exposed to the world only through a sanitized viewport that is a product. As we say on the MyxerTones website, “the technology is mvisible.”

The focus of our entire company is the product currently called MyxerTones (with the Tones part giving off a kinda shimmery semi-opaque vibe like the picture of Marty in Back to the Future when he was in danger of never having existed). But we really have three distinct families of offerings, because the people we sell on our services can be divided into three main groups: web surfers; independent artists; and partners.

Web surfers are people that are interested in getting mobile content. These are people that we market to with “make your own ringtones” types of advertisements, and the people that we’re really going to start selling MyxerMagic to. They’re normal people – not power users, not content owners, piercings optional, etc. They have a run-of-the-mill phone from their carrier, and they want to get some cool stuff on it. They’re the people that get the most attention from the product team, because they’re the people with the biggest numbers.

The Independent Artists is meant to include anyone from a local band to a small record label that might manage, say, a few dozen acts. We have specific functionality baked into MyxerTones to support the kinds of things that these guys want to do – mainly connect with their fans to build loyalty by giving out ringtones/wallpapers, etc., but sometimes sell their own content for profit. The piercing ratio is definitely a lot higher in this group than the other two. We built MyxerTags and FanLists especially for these guys, and we have some other things in the works (geotargeting, MyxerTunes, etc.)

It turns out that most of our artists identify themselves as HipHop/Rap, with Rock following not too far behind. We also have reasonable showings in Country and Latin categories.

Finally, the Partners bucket represents everyone from PohDunkBands.com to [LARGE PARTNERS]. There’s obviously a lot of variation in the kinds of services various partners want, but the constant stream of partner requests we get into our mailbox every day (honestly) is a real indication that we have an opportunity to make some turnkey products that target these guy’s wishes to add mobile functionality to their own websites.

I’d like to point out that, while we will likely talk about [BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES] at this meeting, those types of partnerships are not the kind of thing the products team is overly concerned with on a day to day basis. We are much more interested in bringing value to users at the other end of the size spectrum. That is, we’re trying to support the millions of people with audiences in the low thousands or hundreds, as opposed to going after the biggest companies out there. We believe in the long tail, be they musicians or small website operators or someone else. The key is making everything as simple as possible, completely turnkey from our website, requiring no human interaction.

This is directly analogous to how we don’t really care about going after the Madonna’s and U2’s of the music world – sure, we’d like to have a couple more big names in the “partner” bucket to add to our credibility in the business world and visibility in the “real” world, but our success is only going to be assured when we have products that appeal to the much larger aggregate of the smaller guys out there.

As Executive Vice President of Products, a fancy title I just last week created and am trying out today for the first time to see how it fits – I’m mainly concerned with defining the feature sets that we should deliver in the products we build to address the real needs and desires of our various constituents (product management), overseeing – and participating in – the development of the actual bits that make up the features (product development), and working to ensure that we expose the merits of our products in the best possible light to the largest possible market (product marketing).

The current state of things is that product development (and I include QA, support, and IT operations in that bucket, mainly because it’s all handled primarily by Bill) is as healthy as it could possibly be in an organization of our size. Product management, which is mainly myself, could perhaps benefit from another worker bee to spend time, for example, fleshing out partner programs. But the need for a high level product marketing person isn’t as clear as it seemed a while ago.

We have a PR firm handling traditional PR, and while we weren’t overly impressed with the results of PR efforts last year, we do feel that we’ve made a lot of progress and are pretty well positioned to start reaping some very tangible benefits from our PR efforts in the coming year (news stories, bylines, speaking engagements, etc.). We have a part-time (but in-house) PR/Marketing consultant that is helping PR considerably, while at the same time helping to hone the marketing message more effectively.

And we had the VP of New Media at [A LARGE RECORD LABEL], while viewing the MyxerTones website look at us and say “obviously you guys are marketing experts.” I’m sure there will be more discussion on this as we go forward, but marketing is building a brand, and our brand is definitely building.

Enough organizational talk. Here’s what’s going on with our products.

We released MyxerTones 2.0 just a few scant months ago. The traffic grew that day, and hasn’t stopped growing since. I think it’s funny that we call it MyxerTones 2.0, even to this day, because we’re probably on like the 200^th version of the website that we’ve deployed to production. That’s the way we like to do things – we try to update the website every week or two, which might not seem like a big deal to some of you, but the difference between this type of development environment and one in an enterprise software company (how many years did Vista take?) is staggering.

What this means is that we can really quickly bring new features and bugfixes to the site, which keeps things fresh for the users. It’s awesome to be able to write some new code and have it live on production two days later.

So what are some of those features? MyxerTones is the best place to make and share mobile content. I’m going to save the statistics for Bill, but I can certainly tell you that it’s probably one of the most popular places to make and share mobile content anywhere. We’ve been innovating like made in the last quarter; after releasing 2.0, which was a complete redesign of the entire user interface of every page on the site, we’ve added: fan lists, comments, tags, search capability; image support; video support; MyxerMagic; artist profile pages; and that’s only what I’m able to recall off the top of my head. The site is alive with activity and change, and is really turning into a first class community site.

MyxerMagic, which I’ve alluded to, is the latest and greatest feature. It’s a tiny little piece of software that integrates into the web browser to add a “send to phone” option to every image on the web. It’s going to be huge.

MyxerFlix is what we’re calling video support in MyxerTones. While the first releases simply allow for the delivery of video clips that are manually uploaded from a PC, we’ll soon enhance MyxerMagic with video capabilities which will allow, for example, any YouTube video to be sent directly to a user’s mobile phone right from the browser. How sweet it that?

Finally, as a teaser, these are the things that I expect the labs to kick out over the next months. MyxerFlix is basically an extension of the system to support video content (up to 3 minute video clips) alongside images and ringtones. MyxerTunes will be OTA delivery of free or premium full-track, high quality audio. Given recent industry trends with regard to increasing bandwidth availability and more capable phones, we believe that 2007 is a practical year to offer this service.