MITX: What’s next in mobile…takeaways
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Yeah, it’s been over a week but finally getting around to blogging a few notes on the recent MITX half-day “summit”: What’s Next. Mobile: What Does the Consumer Want? This was a two part affair, with the first part focused on “what’s now” and the next panel focused on “what’s next”. Being the wild west scene that mobile is these days, predictions on mobile are about as dependable as, say, predictions on “what’s next on the internet” were 10 years ago. But, the panelists were knowledgeable and some interesting points were discussed. I’ll try to cover a few of them here, based on my scrawled notes from my Boston Park Plaza notepad.
LBS
I took my seat late, amidst talk of Nokia and Garmin, both of whom are making moves to get gps and location-aware capabilities into mobile devices. LBS is definitely a hot area, and one of those areas that helps distance mobile applications from their desktop counterparts. The panelists were quick to bring up, however, the major security concerns facing LBS, which I think to most users are not trivial. It’s easy to see the appeal of an application that lets you keep track of your friends around town, or your child’s location. But as a parent it’s chilling to imagine this information falling into the hands of child predators, or other “unfriendlies”. Besides these privacy issues, carriers have most of their LBS API’s on lockdown, making you jump through hoops to get access (see verizon for more info). Add to this the general fragmentation of handsets and os’s, and LBS is probably not taking off any time soon. But still, the huge potential it has for mobile perhaps may break down barriers faster than I expect. Also, there’s lots of ways to have “location-based” apps that don’t necessarily use GPS or other LBS techniques, but have the user provide their location. I believe Socialight does this with their service, and some others.
QRC
Jeremy Wright of Enpocket spoke several times about the value of the “quick response codes” that are common in Asia markets. These codes, analogous to our UPC barcodes, can be scanned by a cameraphone, then directing the user to say, a URL to a product page. Jeremy pointed out the appeal of QRC types of campaigns versus other types of “push” advertisements, whether opt-in or not. Have you ever gotten Bluetooth spam while walking near some random store in the mall? Kind of cool, maybe. Quickly annoying, definitely. Anyway, QRC leaves it in the hands of the consumer to learn more about a piece of content. It’s not flashy, but to me it has the appeal of simplicity and ease of implementation, never a bad thing in the maelstrom of mobile technology these days.
What’s Next
The What’s Next panel included Linda Barrabee, Program Manager, Consumer Research, Mobility, Yankee Group; Seamus McAteer, Chief Product Architect & Senior Analyst, M:Metrics; Eric Puterbaugh, Account Director, Mobile Media, Telephia. These folks had some interesting stats on the mobile industry and content. One of the first I found compelling was a stat that about 1 percent of visitors to carriers’ sites go to the video service links. Surprising just considering the amount of marketing space they devote to promoting watching videos on their phones, ala VCast, etc. And admittedly, unless I had an unlimited data plan, and on a 3G network, no way I am I going to be sitting there downloading a bunch of videos on my phone. Yes, I love YouTube on the iPhone, but only when I’m around a wifi hub. On a similar note, Seamus on the panel was negative on OTA music downloads, saying most users are just going to “side-load” this type of content onto their phones, not pay a buck a song to download over the carriers’ networks. Makes sense, no? That said, sites like seemetv has a cool thing going with letting people upload videos taken with their phones and competing for cash prizes. How long before YouTube horns in on that?
A stat that was brought up, actually by the previous panel, was that in a poll of mobile users asking “what is the most desired activity” on their mobile device, the top response was to “share pictures with family and friends.” Hmm, doesn’t Flickr have a mobile version…maybe m.flickr.com?
A recurring comment in this “summit” was that engaging, easy to use content is key to getting users to start gorging on mobile content. Apple’s iPhone has, IMO, made a huge leap forward in this area, bringing things like Facebook to mobile in a nice, easy to use interface, not to mention YouTube, and many other sites. One of the potentials of Flash Lite I think is to help bring engaging content to many other devices, perhaps hooking into the many API’s out there for sites like Flickr, Yahoo maps, etc. We may not be able to do the “pinch zoom” of the iPhone (or can we?), but the potential is there nonetheless to break out of the horrendously spartan wap sites that exist today and usher in a new level of mobile rich content.
That’s it on MITX for now. They have another one coming up November 13 entitled “Mobile / Wireless Series: Mobile Social Networking“, during the Mobile Internet World conference. Not sure who the panelists will be, but could be interesting as well.
