Single Touch Systems has built itself a small mobile media technology empire, with the company’s Single Touch Interactive R&D (STI) subsidiary comfortably ensconced behind an impenetrable wall of increasingly inescapable IP (20 issued and 21 pending patents) that continues to grow stronger. STI has an extremely active recurring revenue stream network with over 500M mobile messages dispatched to date.
The most recent patent milestone for SITO came in the form of a USPTO issuance of a Notice of Allowance (Mar 7) to STI for a piece of key mobile data transfer technology known as “Searching for Mobile Content,” effectively rounding out the company’s already strong patent estate within the mobile ecosystem with important coverage of essential aspects of mobile data transfer via the cloud, as well as mobile content search. This is important stuff because of the device turnover rate in the market today and the patent’s applicability to data transfer associated with users migrating to a new device. More importantly even, the company has positioned itself quite well with regard to the prevailing evolution of the cloud as a primary mover and driver of new information technology infrastructure paradigms, well out ahead of the crowd with a souped-up intellectual property engine, as the majority of mobile users enter the device replacement cycle.
Single Touch has achieved a certain proficiency in monetizing their IP through aggressive legal enforcement of the company’s territory as well, something investors should take immediate note of as SITO fiercely guards their eggs like a hawk, filing (to date) major infringement suits against sector players like Zoove and Hulu. The company’s Mobile/Abbreviated Dial Code platform technology (MDC/ADC), upon which Zoove has allegedly infringed knowingly and willingly (as per the Feb 2012 filing), is particularly important, and SITO is calling for an injunction, as well as compensatory and enhanced damages. Similarly, the company has delivered multiple Letters of Notification covering their streaming and routing technology to some of the biggest names, with the deepest pockets in the sector today, from Apple and Google, to Time Warner components TBS and their CNN Worldwide division, as well as players like Amazon, Netflix, and Yahoo. SITO is also partnered with the top names in mobile telecommunications like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
It makes sense to guard this technology closely, as it represents an ideal way for advertisers, brands, and business to connect with consumers, providing highly engaging content through a unified, extremely modular, multi-channel (email, SMS, voice) messaging platform that is a snap to administrate. STI’s Anywhere Platform lets campaign managers seamlessly design, deploy, and manage/organize an entire campaign that still retains immensely personalized functionality. The back-end data aggregation capability is just as profound, with all that granular user data coming in from across all campaigns, making implementation of cost-effective mobile coupon programs, as well as rewards/incentive programs, and even ad hoc campaigns, all super-easy. This framework presents campaign managers with an intuitive web-based console that can handle complex mobile marketing and m-commerce tasks, all within a mobile CRM-focused (customer relationship management) environment.
The company’s Mobile Machine system for content delivery is a truly robust design workbench that lets users drag and drop content to do rapid web to phone deployments, all within a more complete, shareable, searchable environment, all driven off the mobile phone number. This kind of tight integration makes the overall platform offering an easy-sell to businesses looking for a means to launch various types of campaigns and the recent Q1 FY13 jump in revenues by 22% (over Q1 FY12) to around $2M draws a solid bead on this target. Mobile messaging is doing incredible numbers right now, with a full 18% organic jump and over 77M mobile messages sent in the quarter, compared to the same period in 2012.
Mobile campaigns driven by MDC’s (mobile dial codes) update customers on hot new deals and can be used to fluidly disseminate product tie-ins, allowing shoppers to simply enter the item’s UPC code to get detailed information about the product on their mobile device. This is a quantum leap past mere SMS and allows for interactivity, polling, and sharing. Users are even able to download additional content ranging from the product data and coupons/incentives, to ancillary content like product-associated rich media and apps, something which grants marketing and ad campaigns unprecedented depth of impact with consumers. Retail giant Walmart’s #WMT campaign is a perfect example of a well-executed usage of MDCs to not only increase customer engagement, but also hit the widest swathe of customers, since the messaging is across all major carriers in the U.S., bringing data distribution via the mobile device together with a customer enrollment scheme which accrues loyalty while achieving the campaign’s targets.
Having their mobile messaging platform used by huge, blue-chip, publicly traded retail channels like Walmart and Hibbett Sports, as well as major private firms like top-50 U.S. Midwest chain of employee-owned grocery stores, Hy-Vee, says a lot about just how vital and useful the company’s overall platform is. The Mobile Digital Coupon concept goes a long ways with point-of-purchase, MDC-triggered, retail site-based, and banner ad directed engagement all trumping extant options from the consumer’s standpoint. The best brand developers know that customer retention has a lot to do with customer experience and the kind of reciprocal CRM that Single Touch can help create for clients via their solutions translates quickly into a retail gold mine.
A bold pioneer in the mobile tech space with an increasingly vital, established IP footprint like this, which will become more and more indispensible as time moves on (as yet more consumers migrate to the mobile space), is a hot property and the company’s high-profile IP monetization strategy is helping generate even more buzz. These guys kicked off 2012 with a Letter of Notification to Facebook (issued Jan 10), slamming the social media mecca on several patents related to streaming and routing of media. That is what you want to see out of a company with an IP monetization strategy, decisive action. SITO is projecting an estimated growth in revenues for 2013 of around 50% over the $6.3M pulled down last year, driven by a combination of such activity and their hot-ticket platform solutions for mobile messaging.
For more information on Single Touch Systems, visit www.SingleTouch.net
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