Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution (Part 4)

SM: What percentage of your clients are mobile clients?

CR: I would say the mobile phone platforms drive about 60% of our revenue base, 65%.

SM: What about media?

CR: Media is about 15%. One thing about our company is we only deal with larger media companies. So, it’s a model we’ve perfected over the years as opposed to working with longer tail content. It hasn’t been our niche.

SM: So, large media companies 15%, what other segments do you see major adoption in? You talked about Toyota earlier.

CR: Yes, auto’s a big growth for us right now. There’s a huge push to use mobility to connect the car where the phone becomes the transport to get content onto the big screen in the car. The other area where we’re seeing a lot of interest is using mobility in hospitality – hotels, resorts, skiing, cruise business, things like that. We’re starting to see a big amount of push there.

SM: I understand the media one. That’s very straightforward. All the media companies need to be – because iPad in particular has become such a major media consumption device, that’s a very straightforward one. Can we double click a bit on the car situation?

CR: Yes.

SM: Talk to me about the use cases that you’re seeing with the car.

CR: The phone is being used as the way to connect the head unit to some of the different media that you’d want to deliver into the car. So, users could sign up with I Heart Radio and have their I Heart Radio app on their phones and then extend the audio play capabilities to the speakers in the sound systems in their cars. We’re trying to see things like that happen. And it means that the mobile application has to be designed in a specific way to enable that extra functionality. That’s a big use case. And that’s being driven by the fact that the lifecycle of a car is seven years, and wireless and mobile technologies are going to change maybe four times over that period of time. And so, the auto manufacturers will always be behind the consumer mobile experience. If you can bridge that gap, then you can create a much safer driving experience by taking people’s hands off of their devices and using the controls inside the car to manage some of that content.

SM: In that context, what role does speech play?

CR: It’s huge. At the end of the day, to make the car safer, we have to find simple ways to make the software work. By simple I mean you can’t push a lot of buttons or have a lot of controls. So, the more we can have voice as the paradigm for navigation, launching applications, and speech to text and text to speech back into the car, the biggest thing they’re going to drive is safety.

SM: Do you have expertise in that area?

CR: We’ve integrated with various speech companies. We’re not investing in speech technology ourselves. That’s more of a partner driven approach for us. But, yes, we’re deeply involved in it to understand how the user experience paradigm needs to change, can be improved and be designed properly by using speech.

SM: The reason I’m double clicking down on that is because this is a topic that has come up in our work quite a bit. We have seen technology companies in 1M/1M that are focusing on this area of driving apps. So, I want to use Yelp while I’m driving, in a hands-free safe mode. How do I do that?

CR: Speech is one of the ways to do that. In fact, if you’re searching on Yelp or leaving a comment, if you’re doing that in the car, I would guess speech is the only safe way to do that. You can’t really safely do it any other way. For multi-media content like Internet radio or things like that, then the traditional controls in the car for managing radio content could still be interesting and useful by integrating those applications in. But when you talk about search, whether it’s Google or Bing, or you’re talking about Yelp or Facebook, which could be difficult to navigate using touch or other things like that, then I think speech is one of the safest ways to do it. [There’s] a lot of work to do still. I think what’s great about things like Apple doing theory on a mobile phone, even though it’s not yet a perfect technology, is the more speech-enabled application services that users get used to, then the usage data and success and errors within that data, can be improved on, and we can move speech forward much faster. I think the use case of the car is one of the best speech use cases there is. I struggle with it in some other places, like when I see the commercials about the guy talking to his device in his kitchen. We use humans for that already. I think if we were at that point, we would just get our phones out or laptops and type our questions in. But if speech is the only way you can get done what you need to get done, we will adapt it to be productive.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution
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