Stardust Global Ventures

For those of us across the ‘Net who have been Twitterpated, the conversation around Twitter’s monetization is a regular topic of conversation. Whether it’s in blog posts, tweets or chatter at a conference, it’s a topic that comes up often. Twitter is the service we love, sometimes love so much we get agitated when it stumbles. There isn’t a service I can think of that’s proven more addictive or that we’ve so quickly come to depend on.

One measure of success is how much users depend on a service. By that measure, Twitter is a huge success, although sustaining the service remains a question we talk about in public debate constantly. Rather than continue to add fuel to that fire, which seems pointless, I put on my business development hat and asked myself the question “If I were deploying a strategy to monetize and extend Twitter, what would I go explore?”

If I had a hand in strategic partnerships at Twitter, here are some of the concepts I’d explore:

Telemetry – That’s a broad brush sector, but let me provide an example or two for consideration. Consider the utility services we use – gas, water and electric. As children, most of us remember the meter reader who came around each month with a clipboard taking manual readings from the various meters. In the utility industry, these are called “consumption reads.” They’re vital to utility providers for billing purposes.

That method of reading utility meters has been obsoleted by technology. First meters were equipped with small radio transmitters that could send meter readings to a person walking down the sidewalk. This innovation led to increased efficiency. Meter readers were able to gather many more readings in a day. But this advance quickly moved from a handheld data collection device to something mounted in a vehicle. The territory a person can cover driving led to another huge efficiency increase.

Both these methods are very common today, yet they’re being rapidly obsoleted by the ideas of both fixed and wireless networking. By placing data collectors on utility poles, buildings, and other infrastructure, now meter readings can easily be gathered in real-time, using network technologies, for homes in a half-mile or greater radius. Today, two-way functionality in utility meters is an area of keen interest for utility companies.

This technology today uses combined technologies. For example, from the meter to the pole-mounted collector something like 900Mhz unregulated spectrum may be used. The collector devices then might use GPRS or 3G to send some upstream IP information to a network aggregation point. This requires the integration of cellular modem technology into the collector.

Since we’re talking about embedded chipset technologies, why put the expensive data radio in the collector device. Why not embed a cellphone chipset and enable an SMS-only account with the carriers. The utility sector wields termendous power with the carriers, but sadly they do not know how to flex their muscles very well. Cost reduction in an emerging technology using Twitter technology to transmit information that is not so critical it requires more costly networking. It’s simply utility utilization monitoring in very-near real-time, (VNRT).

Many telemetry and flow metering applications use simple text messages over a serial interface. In the information age, we can easily replace the old wired serial link with an SMS stream of tweets.

Of course the utility won’t want to use the public Twitter for this information stream. All that’s needs is some partnering and selling.building a custom infrastructure to support it. Voila, a revenue stream for a corporate Twitter product let’s call it ConEdTwit for sake of example using a massive utility company.

Transportation (Rail) – Given the previous examples, let’s think for a moment about railroads and consider a variation on the theme. Amtrak operates on a number of lines. Each tied to rail switching systems. I’m not sure what technology they use today to confirm that the track is switched the right way when a train is approaching, but it seems to me that many of the rail accidents are linked back to a switching mishap.

Why not enable the switching technology with those cheap embedded mobile phone systems and likewise equip the trains? I wouldn’t recommend this as the primary technology due to the reliability factor of SMS, but as a backup or secondary system, and for providing a means to simply confirm railway switching, this sounds like a terribly cost effective solution.

Let’s call this one AmTwit for Amtrack. We might also take a moment to recognize that in the rail transportation sector, Amtrak is a tiny player. Think about rail shipping in the US, and the industry is far larger than Amtrak will ever be.

Voice Powered AutoTwit (Mashup time) – People like to talk. People like to tweet. Most states now require hands-free operation while driving. Services like OnStar by GM are growing in popularity. There’s a simple way to bring new value into the automotive sector, and we all know how they’re hurting to add value and stay in business.

Let’s begin with a visual (graphics are clickable links)

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First, partner up with Pat Phelan over at Cubic Telecom and either collaborate or buy his TwitterFone solution that delivers a voice interface to Twitter. Now go meet with the Auto Alliance of manufacturers and work out how to embed Twitter in cars. The technology already exists with mobile phone integration and voice interaction with cars. Why say to my car “play radio” when I can say “tweet stuck behind accident on 101 southbound” instead?

The TwitterMobile module could easily become not just an option on new cars, but a nice aftermarket add-on to the automotive industry.

TweetHouse – We hear talk of smart buildings, and they’ve become popular in business parks for business users paying premium prices, but homes are getting much smarter.  More importantly is how our homes are connecting to the net. The video phone in our home will simply become and extension of the media room. Today flat panel TVs are the rage, and now they’re coming with Ethernet connections built in. Tomorrow’s big screen TV will simply be a media wall, but it’s becoming more than a television. In fact, it may not require television from the mainstream broadcast media at all.

The media wall of our future home will simply be a video panel that can be carved into however many virtual screens we desire. We’ll be able to watch a movie, ballgame, web news, email and hold a video call all at once in the comfort of our homes.

Our appliances will easily become network-connected devices that are far more intelligent than the Whirlpool our mothers had. Imagine your washing machine sending you a note that it had detected a problem with a bearing. What about your refrigerator letting you know the water filter needed to be replaced – or better still, letting you know it had placed the order for a new filter and scheduled the service appointment during a time it knew you would be home and placed it on your shared calendar.

So why not Twitterize the home to allow simple text communications and status updates from the phone. Single parents could get a simple Twitter direct message from home when the front door opens at 3:30, signaling the safe arrival of a child coming home from school. We could send a DM to the home AC to turn the air on before leaving work in the hot weather.

Leave home and not get back until unexpectedly late some evening? DM your house to turn the lights on.

The potential is limitless really. And the cost to implement the technology is cheaper and in wider use than we often recognize. Something to consider.

Vidtel Tweets – Just yesterday I did a podcast with Scott Wharton, the CEO at Vidtel. It left me thinking about some other viable options that extend service values through partnering. You can listen to the podcast and see reviews of Vidtel elsewhere here, but for the moment, let’s consider Twitter and Vidtel.

The visual above shows the Vidtel video telephone. It’s built by Grandstream, but holds the traditional telephone touchpad with a few extra feature keys. This phone already has a TCP/IP stack built in. It’s a VoIP phone that connects via Ethernet. How hard is it to bundle the guts in a slightly modified case to include a downsized QWERTY keyboard for text messaging. And it’s got a video screen already. How hard is it to put a simple Twitter client option onboard to see scrolling tweets in real-time on the video display. Simple enough to cut them off when a call comes in. A simple Twitter UI for this device is not a significant engineering feat. And I know more than couple of people who would love to make some money helping build it.

Why not a VidTweeterFone? There’s plenty of market. Not overly expensive or complicated to build.

In the second part of this, maybe we’ll start with Twitter integration with Google Latitude. We’ll see how the first five are received by Twitterati everywhere.

@ev … @biz … call me. We should talk. Really.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, monetization, telemetry, TwitterFone, Pat Phelan, smart homes, Vidtel, Scott Wharton, @ev, Evan Williams, @biz, Biz Stone