19 Jun 2013

Mobile Miscellany, 19 June 2013. Register now for Mobile, Maps and Geolocation, Monday 24th, plus competition for free space at IBC Amsterdam ...

In this Miscellany: A couple of places remain for next Monday 24th June, Mobile, Maps and Geolocation. Round up of last event - Mobile Marketing, competition for free stand space at IBC Amsterdam and various snippets that may be of interest to the community.

Summer Season Kicks Off

With many thanks to the lovely people over at InfoBip we kicked off the summer season with an event on Mobile Marketing which took place on June 3rd. A team of seasoned mobile market commentators, ably captained by Alex Meisl, engaged with with audience in a highly spirited and interactive discussion. Read about it here: http://www.mobilemonday.org.uk/2013/06/10-great-insights-from-our-3-june.html

Next Event, Monday 24th June, Mobile, Maps and Geolocation

Our venerable 222 year old supporters, Ordnance Survey, will hold a pre-event sneak preview of their new OpenSpace SDK and API (iOS and Web, followed by Android). That will be followed by a panel session on Mobile, Maps and Geolocation, with a glittering panel led by Gary Gale. We have just a few spaces left for both events. Arrival at 4pm for the sneak preview and 6pm, as usual, for the panel session. Register on Eventbrite: http://momolo-2013-06-24.eventbrite.com

Mobile Operating Systems, Monday 15th July

Supported by Canonical, the folks behind Ubuntu, we'll be concluding our summer season on 15th July, looking at Mobile Operating Systems - just when the field seemed to have narrowed to two, all of a sudden it looks like the it is opening up again - not least, the new phone and tablet versions of Ubuntu. We'll be looking at what implications this has for mobile and the choices that app developers and others now need to make.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Winners

A couple of weeks ago you may recall that our friends over at Samsung invited you to enter a survey with prizes! I've already received my copy of "Tizen for Dummies" and hope that you are enjoying yours. They now tell us that they've picked the winners of the S4 competition, so the lucky winners will be receiving an email shortly. We'll not publish their names here to save their modesty ...

Keynote DeviceAnywhere, Testing and QA, Tomorrow Afternoon

Our other friends over at Keynote DeviceAnywhere tell us that they have an afternoon event tomorrow (1pm - 5pm Thursday 20th) that may be of interest on the subject of testing on Mobile - entitled "The Enterprise Goes Mobile: Everything Development Teams Need to Know About Mobile Testing". Check it out at http://www.keynote.com/mobile_testing_roadshow/enterprise-goes-mobile-london.html

Competition for Free Space at IBC Amsterdam 13-17 September

You have till 5.00pm on 28th June (Friday week) to apply for a competition being run by the Digital TV Group with UKTI, ICTKTN and The IET for one of four free spaces at IBC. Check out the entry form at http://www.dtg.org.uk/StandCompetition

Short that this Miscellany is, hopefully no less sweet for that.

Hope to catch you on Monday.

13 Jun 2013

24th June - Mobile, Maps and Geolocation - so much more than “Where am I?”

If you thought Mobile and Maps was about a pin in a map showing where you are, well, you’re not wrong - but needless to say, Mobile, Maps and Geolocation have much wider application than just helping you find your way to the pub. Important though that is, of course. Helping us navigate a journey that might just end up in the pub, we’re delighted to be visiting this topic with the help of our venerable supporters, the UK mapping agency Ordnance Survey.

Sneak Preview Pre-Event Workshop

Our event will, in fact, be two events - and you are most welcome to come to either or both, whichever takes your fancy. There will be a panel session, as usual, starting at 6.30 pm. In addition, starting at 4.30 pm, OS will be giving us a sneak preview of their new OpenSpace SDK and API (Web and iOS - followed by Android).

If you want to come to the preview and you’re a coding type of person, Ordnance Survey tell us that you might want to bring your laptop to follow along with the examples ... I, for one, am looking forward to finding out about the depth of features and the unsurpassed level of detail that 222 years of mapping experience provides - so I’ll be taking a product and commercial perspective.

Panel Session

Following that, as usual, we’ll be holding a panel session with the traditional MoMoLo audience participation-to-the-max! In that session we’ll be looking at opportunities for geolocation and mapping as a complement to apps of various kinds and to a very wide range of sectors: a powerful instrument for lobbying and social change, for big business like insurance and retail and for smaller businesses like restaurants too …

… Old themes and new seem to combine here - we’ve been talking about location, mashups, user generated content and so on for ages - now that real and useful examples have emerged, where is this all going? The much talked about intersection of physical and virtual worlds now seems here, so what are some good examples, what comes next and how does this all relate to the Internet of Things and next generation sensors? How might you choose between many different mapping providers, and what’s the trade off between open and proprietary data? How can we link the different data sets together to make compelling application and service experiences? And now that PRISM has emerged, it’s undoubtedly timely to think about privacy.

To lead us through this rich landscape Gary Gale @vicchi , Director of Global Community Programs for Nokia’s HERE, and a veteran of the mobile and mapping scene will chair our distinguished panel, comprising:

Christopher Osborne @osbornec, currently at AlertMe, and founder and organiser of GeoMob.
Ian Holt @IanHolt, Head of Developer Outreach at Ordnance Survey
Jeni Tennison @JeniT, Technical Director at the Open Data Institute and member of the W3C TAG
- Harry Wood @harry_wood, currently at placr.co.uk and OpenStreetMap volunteer

Location and Registration

As usual the event will take place at the CBI Conference Centre at Centre Point. Please use the entrance at street level. Nearest tube is Tottenham Court Road (Central Line and Northern Line).

Both the Pre-Event workshop and the Panel Session are free to attend, but registration is required and registration is now open at Eventbrite. http://momolo-2013-06-24.eventbrite.com

Sneak Preview Workshop Agenda

4.00 pm Registration
4.30 pm Workshop
5.30 pm Workshop Close, Coffee

Panel Session Agenda

6.00 pm Doors Open
6.30 pm Panel Session chaired by Gary
8.00 pm Networking
9.30 pm Close

6 Jun 2013

10 great insights from our 3 June Mobile Marketing: Truth, Misconception and Wishful Thinking

On a glorious early Summer evening, we gathered to discuss Mobile Marketing with our lovely event partners Infobip and

- Alex Meisl - @meislonmobile - Co-Founder, Sponge who chaired the event
- Ben Scott Robinson - @bcsr - Creative Director, Sapient Nitro
- Rube Huljev- @more_mati - Global Executive, Infobip
- Ilicco Elia - @ilicco - Head of Mobile, LBi
- Douglas McDonald - @DMcDonald01- Independant Mobile Marketing Consultant

Before we get to our guest post, a BIG THANKS to Alex for chairing, to all the panellists, to our volunteers and to the enigmatic Tom Evans @tomato_Evans, (who is currently attending our The Mobile Academy programme co-hosted with UCL) for writing this post.



Alex & Rube
There was a good balance of opinions and good chemistry amongst the panel of experts lead by Alex Miesl, who marshalled the discussion to a room full to the brim with professionals either from mobile, or with a vested interest in it, there was no shortage of questions. Among the group there was a good mix of creative and business minds from the agency world, some brands such as Selfridges and Carphone Warehouse and a mix of those from Mobile Operators, analysts and investors.

The proceedings format gave generous focus to the panel responding to audience questions with detailed debate, that blended both fact and opinion in good measure.

I'd like to highlight ten topics covered, that on reflection were important, current and relevant:

1. 12% of consumer marketing spend is now on mobile, it's grown as a channel 20% a year for the last 3 years.  When this is measured against the amount of consumer attention directed at mobile, it is not even close to being proportionate and therefore represents a brilliant medium for great work to cut through and leverage ROI for brands communications, and what's more there's no channel more measurable than mobile for this purpose despite abundant opinion to the contrary.

Ben, Ili & Douglas
2. Not everyone in the industry agrees on what is classified as mobile, but it  basically includes anything not chained to a desk. However it's a mistake to think that 'mobile' is a relevant word to agencies any more. Thinking of it as a category in itself is dead: people interact within their device ecosystems interchangeably, so agencies must have strategies that incorporate mobile as oppose to 'mobile' strategies.

3. Agencies are focused on doing whatever will get them the most recognition, and that all too often means doing something unexpected with a brand new technology rather than asking themselves what the consumer actually wants. The most important questions are: how does the consumer use, interact with and buy your stuff. Also people don't consider what's working, they consider what competitors have done.

4.Often the metrics are misunderstood and consequently the medium undervalued: mobile can be a catalyst to drive the consumer to the point of sale but it is not recorded as a sale because the purchase is made in store.

5. People in the industry overlook the potential power that mobile can offer, as it collects highly personalised data and they don't do anything with it, when in fact it should be being used to deliver a more individual, bespoke and intimate customer service experience in the retail environment, an experience that could in fact be the only thing that saves the High St, as we know it, from redundancy.

Ili getting heated with an audience question!
6. Mobile companies have not been especially adept in the marketing space, to counterbalance which they have now pooled their resources into a UK initiative called Weve http://www.weve.co.uk/- a mobile marketing consortium that's the first experiment of its kind. It will be interesting to see how they cooperate as they each have their own agenda.

7. During the Christmas shopping period last year, 17% of sales were lost in the UKand 34% in the US by people walking into the store, seeing an item and then going online with their mobile and finding the best deal to order that product, rather than waiting for the checkout and carrying their purchase home. For this reason mobile accounts for 20% of all online sales now and if retailers 'got' mobile they could mitigate against these losses. To quote:"Brands and retailers are in the middle of a storm as the immediacy of mobile means the consumer is one step ahead."

8. In order to persuade brands to use mobile, agencies have to have the courage of their convictions to change their pricing structure to a CPA rather than CPM model and take a hit if the campaign doesn't work out; a phenomenon that is starting to be explored.

9. To be able to provide a personalised service that their clients can use with consumers, mobile operators are faced with the challenge of getting the user to give continual consent to all of their data. Research has shown that people are generally willing to do this if their is an incentive such as a discount for opting in.

Plenty of audience engagement!
10. Brands are currently not using mobile payments systems to their full effect, but they are now starting to take it quite seriously. The UK is apparently one of the best countries in the world to simplify mobile payments, and simple things normally work.

It was commented on afterwards, that the discussion did gravitate towards the topic of marketing for brands rather than how start ups with a mobile product might leverage mobile to generate traction for example, and that is a fair point. We were nonetheless left with the certainty that mobile is the growth marketing channel of our time. To end with a quote of IIi Elia: "We want the future to get here much quicker so that the actual future is much better."



Some blog posts from the MoMoLo community:
From Adam Cohen-Rose

Thanks also to the audience for taking great photos! Look forward to seeing you on 24th June for our next event.