Sonopia

Sonopia allows any ISP—or any other organization, regardless of size—to become an MVNO, for free.

by Jeff Goldman [June 20, 2007]

The Menlo Park, California-based startup Sonopia, which was launched just a few weeks ago, is the brainchild of a management team that's been building mobile operating systems and software for over a decade. Company CEO Juha Christensen most recently ran Microsoft's mobile division, and before that, he was one of the creators of the Symbian operating system.

The founders of Sonopia, Christensen says, wanted to move beyond operating systems to face what they saw as the next significant challenge for mobile phones—while carriers are offering a wide range of phones and applications, he says, subscribers aren't taking full advantage of those offerings. "And that's because, as a carrier, the way you're set up as a business is to treat everyone as being pretty similar," he says.

With the four leading carriers in the U.S. serving tens of millions of customers each, Christensen says those carriers simply can't be flexible enough to customize their offerings for any individual customer's needs. "So we thought, 'Hmm—interesting—there must be an opportunity to segment this market and create value propositions that are much more interesting for particular segments,'" he says.

The company initially considered selecting and targeting specific segments of the U.S. population itself. "But as we developed the idea, we thought, why stop at one or two handfuls of brands?" Christensen says. "Why not blow it wide open and enable anyone with a brand, or even just an idea, to become a mobile carrier? That was the idea, that we'd create this platform so that people could get onto the Internet, go through a few easy steps, and within 15 minutes, own their own cell phone carrier."

Three thousand carriers
That platform was launched a few weeks back, and Christensen says more than 3,000 organizations and individuals have already created their own carriers, which the company calls Sonopias. "We've gone out to some very large organizations as well—we have a dedicated sales force and a dedicated marketing team that works with large brands on promoting the Sonopia concept to them," he says.

In addition to basic cell phone services, other offerings available through Sonopia include news and other updates pushed out to end users' phones. "I think the people who do that the best today are the Long Island Ducks [a minor league baseball team]—they push a constant stream of news about players, about the games, about weather conditions and so on, to people who are subscribers," Christensen says.

There's also a social networking aspect to the offering. "If you're a Long Island Ducks fan and I'm a Long Island Ducks fan, we can connect with each other, a bit like you do on MySpace or LinkedIn," Christensen says. "When I put pictures up there from the game or from out and about Long Island, those will replicate onto your phone—so you can see them on your phone, or you can see them on the web if you long into your profile there. It's very much a user-generated content universe that we're putting together."

The point, Christensen says, is that personal, user-generated content is almost always inherently richer than anything a provider can offer. "The organization can provide a good layer of information, but an individual who takes photographs, or who blogs about what's going on, is more interesting," he says.

Phones and calling plans
Sonopia buys bandwidth in bulk from Verizon Wireless, though Christensen says he tries avoid discussing the specific carrier involved. "People care much less about the underlying network than one would think, and we're trying not to confuse people by having too many brands, so we really lead with the organization's brand," he says. "So in the case of the National Wildlife Federation, for example, it's all about the National Wildlife Federation and the fact that you can now get mobile service from them."

Because Sonopia purchases bulk bandwidth, it's able to create its own diverse range of calling plans. "We have a wider set of calling plans than you usually get from a carrier," Christensen says. Part of that range is a set of plans called Fair & Square, which are designed to be as transparent and easy to use as possible.

In the future, Christensen says, the company's plan is also to offer phones that are specifically targeted to key segments of the population. "If we find a great phone that works for outdoorsy people, ruggedized and splashproof, we will feature that on our network, because we know that there will be some people who will like that phone—and since we're all about micro-segmentation, if we find a sub-segment that likes something, we know we can get a better penetration into that segment by having a relevant phone for them," he says.

Launching your carrier
The process of creating your own carrier is extremely straightforward. Any organization with 50,000 or more potential customers, Christensen says, should simply contact Sonopia directly. "We have salespeople in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York, and we'll engage with them on handcrafting a proposition for them," he says.

Smaller organizations can go to Sonopia.com and create their own carrier online in just a few minutes. "There are some great tools in there for producing and creating content," Christensen says. "There are some good tutorials, and the maintenance of all of it is really simple. The companies or groups that have a webmaster are finding it really, really easy, because what we've created is way easier than the typical web tools that organizations use."

There are no upfront fees for creating your own carrier, and the payout increases with the number of customers—it starts at 3 percent and goes up to about 8 percent, depending on volume. In terms of end-user pricing, Christensen says the calling plans are no more or less expensive than those of any of the leading carriers. "We are price-neutral on our calling plans—and we constantly survey calling plans to make sure that we're price-neutral," he says.

ISP-branded phone service
Christensen suggests that there are two key ways for any carrier to stand out. "The real differentiator for a customer is really what customer service do I get, and what additional services do I get—and in both of those areas, we think we can help a brand be unique," he says.

For an ISP, Christensen suggests, it's a no-brainer. "The thing that we look for first and foremost when we work with an organization is, do they know where their customers are, and do they have demographic information about their customers," he says. "Generally, ISPs do have that—they have a list, they have names and addresses, they have customer relationships."

In addition to pushing news out to customers' phones about any system outages or other information, Christensen says, an ISP could also push any information that's on their web portal directly onto phones. "Over the next month, we'll also be launching the ability for the organizations we work with to create an application that gets pushed out and loaded onto the device," he says. "So if an ISP has some code they've written, or they have some apps that they want to put on the device, they can also do that."

— End