When I first heard of Klonies I thought to myself…”Oh my God not another asian like avatar program” and wondered why such a substantial company like Comverse would be promoting it so heavily. Then I met fellow mobilists Xen Dolev and her colleague Tal Dagan at the Comverse booth at 3GSM and quickly figured out that if anyone was going to deliver a on the fly user defined multimedia command line interface for really cool customizable avatars on a phone, and do it correctly, its going to be a company like Comverse.

So, what are Klonies? Simply put they are avatars that allow real personalization to identify users when they call or SMS someone else. Target towards 13-18 year olds, the Avatar that I create, which can either be a boy, girl or monster, will appear on any other person’s phone I call or SMS (the reason why they have “monster avatars” is because they found that some boys are a little “uncomfortable” dressing up an actual person).

The Avatars can be created and or updated via an online account or directly from your mobile phone for real time changes in self-expression. So if I am going out to play basketball, I can quickly put my avatar into a jersey and a pair of shorts and place him or her on the courts all from my mobile.

Klonies can also be used as my alter identity on the web, when I chat with friends over instant messaging or on my blog or web page.

Now, the avatar business is nothing new. Its huge in Korea where almost every 15 year old, both boys and girls, have avatars, 40 percent of which change it at least once a day. In the United States and around the world custom avatars are extremely popular on Instant messaging services like AOL AIM. Comverse wants to bring that phenomena to the mobile phone.

And they have a really tight application to do so. The interface allows one to easily dress, change and customize ones avatar via a plethora of personalized items and themes. Theme topics include everything from sports, lifestyles and music/celeberties with enough options to make no two avatars alike. The avatars look really good and have brief entertaining moments of animation.

What I was also really impressed by was Comverses business strategy for the whole thing. “Originally we wanted to charge for a good deal of our original content,” Tal told me. “But then we realized that we did not want to be fooling our customers like that. All of our avatar options are just as high quality as the other so there is no real reason to pay for one over the other.” So Comverse did the next best thing: branding.

Say, like in the example of above, I am going out to play a game of basketball so I change my avatar to the appropriate background and dress. But I am also a huge New York Knicks fan and think that it would be really cool to have my avatar represent who I am even more by sporting a New York Knick’s Jersey. Comverse is making this possible. Tal showed a plethora of branding options to chose from, from the New york Knicks, to the Yankees to the Rangers (yes I picked NY teams for example’s on purpose). And not just sports, but movie, music and other entertainment logo’s and paraphernalia will be made available as well.

What makes avatars so special, as well as a powerful branding solution, in my mind, is that they allow a user to create a moment of of self expression on another person’s phone. Unlike the mobile phone wall paper, the mobile avatar allows one to define a signature of self expression on another person’s phone every time you call or SMS. No one has to be around to hear your self-expressing ring-tone or call you to hear your self-expressing ring-back. A little bit of you appears on the phone of every call ypu make. With the ability for “self-expression” being one of the driving forces behind ringtone and ringback sales, Avatars are only the next logical step provided they they can up the self expression ante, and that Comverse has done so well.

Turning a phone call into a moment of self expression, with something as fun and cute as Klonies, is probably the only legitimate way I can think of of creating push content for a mobile phone. Of course, you will always have the option to turn your avatar rendering off, but with little guys and girls so cute, fun and (excuse the photoshop speak) well rendered who would want to.

On an aside note, I think that Comverse should also use the same model to allow other types of self-expression beyond just avatars (perhaps then capturing a whole new age group with the same technology)

Technorati Tags: 3gsm, avatars, comverse, ipod, israel, klonies

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Mobile Applications, SMS/TXT/MMS, Mobile Marketing, Art, Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.