Just back from the Mobile 2.0 Conference in Barcelona - wow - what a great event! It was brilliant to be able to hang out with other mobile people from around the world and listen to a load of great talks, presentations and panels. The event was brilliantly organized and I think everyone got a load out of it.
Highlights for me were:
brilliant group of people there ranging from one or two man iphone development teams to CEOs of the biggest mobile startups to representatives from Vodafone and other bigger companies
friendly and positive atmosphere - was great to forget the recession and doom and gloom for a while and be around people working in an industry with some sort of growth prospects
the food and drink was great - breakfast pastries every morning and a wonderful lunch at the main conference
venues were good - Barcelona Activa and ESADE were both brilliant spaces
Some of the key themes included:
Mobile widgets / web apps have moved forward significantly but still suffer from fragmentation in terms of standards
Location really starting to take-off with the data from the use of location services emerging as something really valuable when combined with demographic and other segmentation info
Operators starting to open up with the launch of improved developer programs, APIs and their own app stores
Business models not evolving as fast as the technological possibilities and consumer take-up...
I'll be blogging some of my notes from the conference here and you can find stuff with the m20eu tag on slideshare and twitter.
Thanks to Rudy, Miker and the team for organizing - I really appreciated it.
The mobile search company Taptu has been on a bit of a roll recently - they closed a large round of funding, changed their branding, hit 1m searches per day and have been hard at work developing their iphone app and an index of touch sites. Like admob Taptu is another company that is great for the mobile 2.0 ecosystem and we are really lucky to have them in the UK - they are often at conferences speaking about what they are doing and also publish some great white papers. Steve Ives the CEO gave a presentation at the Mobile Web Summit and here's some of the key points and stats:
Future of mobile is touch
- 220m touch screens shipped this year - only a small proportion are iphones
- touch is a fluent, relaxed way of mobile browsing ideal for MASS MARKET
- 10% of the Quantcast top 1000 websites now have a touch-optimized mobile site (GREAT STAT!!)
- this moves to just 0.5% when you expand to top 10k sites so a long way to go...
Taptu is growing strongly
- 60% of Taptu's audience is based in the USA
- they had done 0.25m searches by Dec 07, 2.5m by June 08 and 25m by April 09
- new iphone app coming out which allows browsing and searching of mobile touch sites (it looked great)
Tom Hume from the mobile development agency Future Platforms gave a nice presentation of day 2 of the Mobile Web Summit focused on the idea of play, engagment, happiness and mobile. The killer stat from this presentation was:
- Mobile quiz app players usually played the games 3 times, this increased to 7.5 times on average if they entered a league table
- Not just explained by these users being just generally more engaged - they played 2 times on average before entering and 5.6 times after entering league
- shows power of social elements, gameplay etc in driving mobile
"My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which
we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element".
That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of
"social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity -
and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building
a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude.
Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of
the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for
Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake
and loyalty."
Anyway the presentation is on slideshare and embedded below - it's well worth checking out:
Andy Smith, the Sales Director for admob was at the Mobile Web Summit last week talking about what they are up to. He also hung around a lot during the conference to talk to people which was brilliant - I had a load of questions as a publisher using admob answered by him. He really confirmed why I love admob as a company - great at what they do and nice people who contribute a lot to the mobile ecoystem. Anyway, enough of the props, here's a few notes from Andy's presentation.
Mobile ad formats are becoming more developed:
- Text link/ banners - Lozenge - Home-screen takeover - Video - Interstitial
Actions "after the click" also expanding:
- Microsite - Iphone app store (a lot of developer using admob to increase downloads and ranking on itunes) - mapping/ location (e.g. best buy showing your local store on mobile google maps) - Video streaming/ download (e.g. movie trailor) - itunes (e.g. for a band pushing to music download) - Click to call (actually very successful on mobile) - Form fill in / data capture - follow on Twitter (not seen that before - quite original) - add vcard to phone contacts
Case Study - Capital FM iphone app advertised on admob
- aiming to increase rank on app store via advertising - 1.35% click through rate - 8% conversion to app store download - 24k app store visites
Ilja Laurs the CEO of Getjar spoke at the Mobile Web Summit - Getjar is a mobile applications store that pre-dates the iphone app store by many years. They are now funded by Accel and doing great things in the space. Here's a few stats from the presenatation:
- getjar has done 450m downloads to date - currently running at 35m downloads per month
- 46k apps for all major platforms
- 200k developer accounts
- 35k active beta testers
- have grown strongly since launch of the iphone appstore - expanded app market beyond iphone
- aim to provide "everything for consumers'' - support all platforms, all types of apps, all types of device
- aim to provide ''everything for developers'' - tools, distribution, monetisation
- 1% of apps created by established companies - 99% are small 1-3 man shops
- Google maps has 300 different builds on the getjar site!
- Getjar now focusing on improving search and discovery by aligning results to segments e.g countries, devices, platforms - have the scale to do this
- also offering billing - in-app billing 7* more effective than SMS billing in tests
Mippin are a mobile content aggregation and portal company based in London and one of the most advanced companies in the world in terms of using applications stores as distribution channels. The clever thing mippin realised early on was that you don't need to invest huge amounts in creating full applications for each platform - by using a "wrapper" or "launcher" driving to a mobile website, you can have the best of both worlds - the distribution power of an appstorea and the screen real estate of an app on the device but with the lower development costs of a mobile site.
Here's some notes on a great presentation on how they use application stores at the Mobile Web Summit from Robin Jewsbury Co-Founder and VP Development. I actually got them the slot for this presentation as I knew they would have loads of useful points and I wasn't disappointed.
- initially mippin was 100% focused on an application business (Refresh Mobile) but out of every 100 people that downloaded their app only 20 would open and use (they couldn't find apps on their phone!)
- not so long ago a lot of people therefore thought that mobile apps were dead RIP Mobile Applications and it was all about mobile web - until iphone appstore came along...
- iphone app store not perfect - QA process abysmal, not really a sustainable model? - mippin only getting 100 downloads per week on the app store - need to also look at Ovi etc
- however ... fragmentation of appstores and platforms is a problem
- Nokia - Java, Symbian, WRT, Flash, Blackberry - Java, iphone - C++, Windows Mobile - .net, Silverlight, Android - Java, Palm - Web OS etc etc
- but there is a way around this - use HTML, CSS and Javascript as a common platform and then create a "wrapper" for it - Phone Gap framework can be used for iphone, android, blackberry mobile web apps, WRT for Nokia/ Symbian
- this has allowed mippin to quickly and cheaply launch a presence on a range of different appstores and be one of the first services on the likes of Ovi and Blackberry App World - 400% growth in RIM traffic since launch on Blackberry appstore
- 21% increase in page views from Nokia handsets since launch on Ovi with a WRT app
@jamesparton from O2 gave a short presentation at the Mobile Web Summit about their new developer platform O2 Litmus with some data on how well it is doing so far. Great to see operators sharing more information like this with the community and being open about the performance of new initiatives. Here's the key points I noted down:
What is O2 Litmus?
- O2 Litmus is a successor to previous O2 developer initiatives such as O2 Source and Revolution
- trying to create an environment that encourages experimentation without distracting from the core business
- NOT just an appstore
- engage customers, allow them to participate, offer early adopters a role to help decide what services O2 should roll out to the mainstream
- developers get 5 week payouts not 90 days, 70% revenue share and access to O2 customers in 18 minutes not 18 months
How has it done?
- O2 Litmus has been live for 4 months
- 617 developers have signed up, from 50 countries, with no real PR campaign apart from using social media
- 400 apps live on the site
- 3000 O2 customers registered (now rolling out a campaign to another 600k customers)
- Fring is the top-rated application
- events run with developers e.g. to help define product roadmap etc
What is next?
- being run on an agile basis - 3-6 month roadmap
- subscriptions and PC applicaitons
- network APIs
- more information passed to developers e.g. on devices
Here's some notes from the Mobile Web Summit from a presentation by Ben Tatton Brown of the mobile ad buying agency Ring Ring Media. Ring Ring are pioneers in bringing the agency model to mobile - buying advertising inventory in scale and using deep analysis and testing to optimize campaigns. I managed to scribble down a few key points from a great presentation that was full of useful data:
- Two types of mobile ad campaigns - Performance campaigns and Brand campaigns
- Performance campaigns typically £5k to £100k per month, run by mobile content companies etc require a lot of work to setup, in depth targeting, 10 different types of creative, multiple landing pages, line-by-line analytics
- Brand campaigns run by the likes of Tesco and Man United are much smaller in scale (£1k to £5k) per month so less interesting for an agency like RIngRing
- Buy advertising from a range of different sources including ad networks, portals, search engines
- CPM advertising typically costs £2 to £20 (for the really big portals)
- CPC from ad networks ranges from 1p to 30p
- Search £1 CPC - search converts much more effectively in general but very little supply - Ring Ring try and buy as much of it as possible
- Seeing a lot of demand for South African traffic at the moment - it converts well
- US traffic is cheap, Indian traffic as low as $0.01 per click
- Click through rates and conversations vary depending on the quality of the traffic
- Search has a 5-20% click through
- Display has a 0.3% to 3% click through (0.3% still higher click thru rate than online)
- track everything from CTR, to CPC, Spend, Conversion Rate etc down to the key metric which is CPA e.g. £3 CPA
Sean Kane from Bebo gave a great presentation at the Mobile Web Summit talking about how mobile is doing as a platform for their web-focused social network both in terms of traffic and usage as well as revenues/ advertising. Mobile is also becoming a key way of extending and developing Bebo now that we are near "the end of the friending boom" e.g. user growth. Here's the key points: Mobile growing very strongly for Bebo
- mobile page views up 53% in the last 7 months
- SMS up 118% in the last 5 months, 5% of all SMS traffic in Ireland is generated by Bebo
- Revenues up 253% (not sure over which period)
- 800m + mobile page views per month
- 16m SMS sent per month
Engagement marketing on mobile working well for Bebo
- Get more Luv campaign with Coke - virtual currency in return for inviting users get coke icon on mobile profile
- 354k participants, 13% increase in mobile traffic
- 562 photo uploads in a single day - took this feature down as too successful and overwhelmed moderators
- other forms of advertising not really worthwhile - massive crash in eCPMs in the last 9 months on mobile
Just back from a great day at the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit in London. Took quite a few notes from the various sessions including some useful info and data which I'll be writing up asap. The day covered a range of topics relating to mobile web and mobile 2.0 including mobile social media and mobile advertising, some of the highlights included:
speakers from a number of leading mobile social services including Nimbuzz, ebuddy, Qeep and Itsmy.com which together account for 10s of millions of mobile users
Ben Tatton Brown from Ring Ring Media sharing some numbers around mobile ad buying
Mark Curtis from Flirtomatic giving a really honest and useful view on what they had done right and wrong in terms of product and business model development
some great panel and audience discussion during the day - Andrew Grill did a great job of moderating the social media track in the main room
mix of audience from big companies like Nokia, Google and Opera to small startups and developers
The food and drink was also very high quality and there was a great mix of people - really enjoyed talking to everyone. I also finally got a demo of a mobile WRT widget - first time I'd actually seen one actually working on a phone (apparently you need to download the run time software that supports them). Vodafone announced the winners of the Mobile Widgets competition and there was also a Developers Den competition which was won by Wild Knowledge - a mobile education startup.
On the downside, the day did get off to a sticky start with a plenary session that was arguably a bit too general in scope and a first panel that went over the same old stuff around "who owns the data", a bizarre "me vs we" discussion and other generic "web 2.0" stuff that didn't really focus on mobile.
However, after mid-morning the day really got going and the quality of the speakers and audience really shone through. There was a nice buzzy and friendly atmosphere which lead to a lot of great conversations.
The mobile browser software UCWEB has a new English version out. UCWEB is one of the most popular apps on the mjelly.com directory and it just got a lot better. The user-interface has been massively improved and the software is really becoming a fully fledged mobile interface to the web, far more than just a browser, with features like a download manager, file converter, media player, bookmarking and storage. The Chinese company behind the software seem to be taking the international market a lot more seriously and have revamped their English website quite significantly.
Here's some stats - these guys are already major players in mobile:
UCWEB technologies has 210 employees and 140 developers!
the software has been downloaded over 64m times
users are accounting for 10 billion page views per month
user base has grown at 400% p.a. every year over the past three years
Following on from some recent posts here on mobile internet affiliate marketing and mobile affiliate programs I recently found out about a new mobile internet affiliate network that has just launched.
Mpex is a mobile web affiliate network which links marketers/ affiliates to a huge range of premium content providers and merchants.
At the moment the service is mainly plugging in adult content services. However they do have some merchants in other areas including Casino and mobile content (ringtones etc). It's a truism that the adult content sector always leads a lot of technical and business model innovation and this is definitely the case in terms of mobile affiliate marketing.
The system MPEX has built is quite simply the most sophisticated mobile affilatiate platform available today. Some of the features include:
Choice of a range of different merchants and content providers
Full microsite builder to create your own sites/ landing pages for the offers
the ability to create your own network of banners on your affilliate site to retain traffic inside your own network
full international support with multiple languages and billing system connections
real time statistics and analytics
I was really impressed with the system these guys have built and the range of merchants available. They are going to be expanding going forward into developing a non-adult front end and a few other things so lots more innovation to come.
I really believe this could be on of the first big success stories of mobile affiliate marketing. For anyone currently running mobile ads on their site or experimenting with mobile affiliate programs you have to give this a go. Anyway - check out Mpex and see what it can do.
For example, the Petrol Station operator Engen ran a campaign in South Africa where it created its own zone on Mxit. This was linked to a series of posers in station forecourts which had keywords on them which could unlock content such as ringtones and screensavers.
10,000 people added the contact on Mxit
3
million messages appeared in the chat zone
users downloaded 12,000+ content items in 6 weeks
This is really advanced stuff in terms of mobile advertising - going way beyond banners and text ads and its happening in Africa not Europe or the US.
The Nokia 5800 is Nokia's first response to the iphone - a touchscreen handset but aimed squarely at the mass market with other differentiators such as unlimited music. Anyway it has been doing very well in terms of sales
Three million 5800s sold globally since its launch in November 2008, and currently shipping more than one million units per month.
the 5800 was Nokia’s number one revenue and
gross margin generating product, and was the number one volume and
value product in the UK in Q1 2009
UKs biggest selling portable music device - outselling the ipod
With the launch of the Nokia Ovi appstore coming soon we might see more developers begin to roll out products focused on specific nokia handsets like the 5800 as a way of targeting the big nokia market whilst avoiding the problem of trying to serve every single Nokia/ Symbian device. The iphone has shown that it's possible to target one device rather than trying to deal with fragmentation and the next logical step is extending this approach to other platforms.
Rudy from the excellent m-trends pinged me with some details of the Mobile 2.0 Conference happening in Barcelona which is shortly after the Mobile Web Summit in London on June 3rd and 4th which I'll also be attending.
After 3 events in San Francisco and a successful Mobile 2.0 Europe event in Barcelona last year we decided to make this 5th official Mobile 2.0 conference a 2-day event:
At Mobile
2.0 Europe, we will explore the next big leaps of innovation in mobile
for the coming years. Six main themes will be covered during this
edition: Openness, Beyond Free, Play, Cloud, Context and Sense.
Each
section, eventually combined will have about an hour including a keynote or visionary talk on this topic, followed by a
panel discussion by C-level industry experts from major European
Operators, Venture Capital, Device Manufacturers, Startups, and
Application or Service Providers.
Currently confirmed speakers:
Marko Ahtisaari - CEO of Dopplr. Tommy Ahlers, Founder of Zyb, now Head of LBS at Vodafone / CEO atWayfinder Systems. Andrew Berglund - Global Interactive Creative Director at Cheil Communications. Xavier Carrillo Costa - CEO / Founder Digital Legends Entertainment. Andreas Constantinou, Ph.D. - Research Director at VisionMobile Regine Debatty - we-make-money-not-art.com.
Dr. Lai Kok Fung - Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder BuzzCity. Tom Hume - Managing Director of Future Platforms. Matthaus Krzykowski - Mobile Correspondent, VentureBeat. Brian LeRoux - PhoneGap and Nitobi. Inma Martinez - Digital Media Strategist and Investment Advisor at Stradbroke. Charles McCathieNevile - Chief Standards Officer at Opera Software.
Dr. Maximilian Niederhofer, Associate, Atlas Venture. Pat Phelan - founder and President of Cubic Telecom (MAXroam). Priya Prakash - Designer of Tools, Conversations & Experiences. Tom Raftery is lead analyst of GreenMonk, the Energy and Sustainability practice of industry analyst firm RedMonk. Gustav Soderstrom, Director of Portable Solutions, Spotify.
Prof. Atau Tanaka - Chair of Digital Media, Acting Director of Culture Lab. Andrea Trasatti - Director, Technology strategy at mTLD dotMobi. Katrin Verclas - Co-Founder and Editor at MobileActive.org
More C-level
speakers from the European mobile ecosystem (operators, handset
manufacturers, VC's, startups, applications and service providers) are
confirmed every day now, so stay tuned on our website for updates.
We'll also
have some startup demo presentations of some new and innovative
startups active in the themes we'll be covering. You can register your
startup here, it's FREE!
The mobile advertising network Admob is 3 years old this week after being founded in 2006. Admob is a great example of the opportunities available on the mobile internet - when they first started everyone assumed they would be quickly wiped out by the big guys like Yahoo! and Google. However, admob have out-innovated and out-perfomed even the mighty Google and serve as an example of how there is room for mobile-focused players to succeed against the major online incumbents.
Here's a few numbers showing just how big admob has become - happy birthday!
has grown from one employee (the founder Omar) to more than 100 employees
now has 7 offices worldwide
75 billion ads served
100 million unique mobile users reached worldwide each month
12.7 million iPhones and iPod touch devices reached in March 2009, appx. 1 in 3 of the devices worldwide
7,000 mobile Web sites live on the admob network
1,418 iPhone apps sent ad requests in March, including 33 of the top 100 free applications
186th Android application served its first AdMob ad
Drove 230,000 downloads of iPhone applications through the Download Exchange in first month
160 countries and territories either serving or buying ads
Tesco is the biggest supermarket in the UK and the world's third largest retailer in the world. When they start using mobile marketing you know that things are really happening. Anyway, I noticed that they have begun to start serving ads on admob using a click to call format - advertising their financial products. This is really fantastic for the mobile ad market for a number of reasons:
Tesco is a mainstream business not a mobile content company - which means that mobile advertising is starting to get budgets from a range of new sectors
Tesco spends huge amounts of money each year on advertising - it will have a big impact on the mobile ad market if they start to shift spend onto the platform
Tesco are clearly seeing mobile as a direct-response ad medium - the fact that they are using click-to-call suggests that mobile can drive sales effectively just like online search ads
Here is a screenshot of the ad on the mjelly mobile site - Tesco are using a mixture of text and text + banners with clear calls to action:
Once you click on the ad you go through to a landing page. I did notice that they are not really varying the landing page for the different ad creative - you see the same page whether you have clicked on an insurance or credit card ad. This is something they should look to improve if they want to get the best conversions possible.
Once you click through from the landing page you are taken to a click to call page which allows you to fire up a telephone call via a graphical button.
This campaign is great news for mobile - let us know if you see anything similar out there.
I spoke to the COO of Peperonity Marcus Ladwig and he also gave some details about why Peperonity has been so successful at making money from mobile advertising (they are apparently one of the top revenue earners on admob).
- effective ad placement - top, middle and bottom
- mix of direct ad sales, ad networks and add aggregators
- use of demographic and geographic data to improve ad targeting
As we all know the mobile ad market is kicking off big time with a proliferation of different mobile advertising networks. The more sophisticated mobile sites have for a while been tending to plug in a range of different networks in order to maximise revenues, using their own in-house ad servers. In perhaps a sign of the increasing maturity of the mobile ad market there are now a range of third party providers emerging to act as mobile ad network aggregators or optimizers. These services carry out the following functions:
allow multiple ad networks to be integrated into a site
determine the best ad network to use for specific countries or handsets
ensure higher fill-rates (if you have a large amount of traffic a single ad network is unlikely to be able to fill it, especially without resorting to very low value ads)
keep advertising fresh to the user by showing a greater variety of ads
seek out the highest cost per click available at any time across multiple networks
provide integrated reporting and analytics tools
Here's a quick run-down of some of the ad aggregators I'm aware of - let me know in the comments if you've heard of any others: I had a demo of admarvel a while ago and was really impressed. Admarvel is a spin-off from the Frengo.com startup which was setup by some former Verisign employees and has some great technology behind it. It integrates multiple ad networks and also allows content providers to use their system to manage their own direct ad sales. You can access statistics for all your mobile ad accounts from a single interface. The system takes something like 7-9% of ad revenues in return for providing the service.
Ringring Media are a UK mobile ad agency startup and the best in the business at getting the best out of mobile advertising on the buy-side. They also offer a publisher platform that builds on their knowledge of the market and the various prices available to offer sites a platform that will deliver the best revenues. Ringring have a nice page on their website which explains how their publisher platform works http://www.ringringmedia.com/publisher-solution.html
Smaato offer a similar kind of service to both Ring Ring and Admarvel - they have also signed up some big players like eBay and Mocospace. They have a nice graphic on their site which helps to explain what an ad network aggregator does.
Do you have any experience of using mobile ad network aggregators - let us know what you think.
Here are some notes to what has become my favorite mobile event - Mobile Design.
The event was hosted by Seren a user-experience firm who work for Vodafone, Orange and lots of other people in the mobile world. They have a great office and did a great job supplying a lot of beers, drinks and even some snacks so big up to them.
Ned talked about some work he did on the BBC iplayer mobile site whilst he was at the mobile agency Fjord. A great talk - nicely illustrated by slides showing some high fidelity screenshots of the BBC mobile iplayer.
- mid-2000 everyone thought mobile TV would take over the world but we ended up with the Lobster phone!
- BBC decided to reboot this - enablers in place (3G, HSDPA, UI improvements)
- BBC let them choose what devices to support so could build something really cool rather go for a lowest common denominator approach. However, I tried http://bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer on a N95 8GB and an
Android G1 and it didn't work on either. As Nick hinted BBC might be
restricting this service a little bit too much...
- average mobile TV length is 15 mins (so need to have a last played feature, restart session feature)
- modular construction - a fall-back for every feature that can be swapped in if a particular device doesn't support it
- did lots of iterations, user-testing and research
- "SURPRISE AND DELIGHT FEATURES'' (i love this phrase) - things that you can do now with mobile, but no-one really does e.g. SMS to friend, save to calendar
Whilst apologised for not having time to create beautiful "web 2.0'' slides he did impart a lot of useful information about how Future Platforms manages projects and work-flow - specifically the interface between developers and designers. Lots of great nuggets here, a lot of what Tom said really made sense and I made quite a few notes:
- everyone says they are "agile" and "user-centered" but that's a bit meaningless !
- have seen terrifying results from getting developers to do designs "database-driven design"
- have seen measureable difference in performance when move people working on same project to work close together in the office
- role of the "SCRUM master" project manager can include buying toilet roll - anything to make sure team don't have to worry about things like that and can focus on the project
- Future Platforms have defined roles (developer, designer, QA, biz dev) but also mix things up a bit
- QA seen as a menial job but really important, hard to find good people to do it
- "UI Polishing" (this really made a lot of sense to me and perhaps the key point I took from the night in terms of project management) - lots of little things build up during a project, not priority at the time but can make a massive difference when implmeented, best way of doing this is to block out time at the end and have the developer and designer sit down together and implement them - sending stuff over email etc doesn't really work that well
- QA should be used as "pre-user testing" - helps to flesh out problems early
- importance of having a "facilitator'' to manage inputs from different people but ultimately make the decisions
- importance of having planning days to really think though a project before starting
- Google docs make a MASSIVE difference vs excel etc - no problems with version control etc etc
- Skype for IM rocks - can setup chatrooms, customer channels (agree to be in there 15 mins a week to answer questions)
- use Index cards on wall for project management - instant visual input, put bug counts on wall, way to let things drip in, ambient
- documentation is fine, specification is not ...
- lots of different ways to capture information - what about a video of someone talking about what they want?
- mobile particularly hard to theorize, specify - need to see it on the screen in your hand
This was the final presentation and also really killer - Ustwo is a graphical design studio. @MattPolls and @daaain were great speakers and really kept the energy levels up at the end of the evening. They had loads of interesting thoughts and ideas - a lot of which really need the presentation to get across but here's a few of the key points:
- 4bn mobile users, 2/3 of the population, $1 trillion dollar industry (only tourism, defence, motors etc are this kind of scale)
- 1985 - first mobile phone
- 1992 - first digital phone
- 1996 - first smartphone (nokia 9000)
- 2000 - first camera phone (Sharp GSH 04)
- mobile technology has changed a lot over the last 20 years, UI has not changed that much, e.g. nokia still dominated by grid UI layout etc
- mobile UI should be more graphical, less hierarchical
- ambient interface, e.g. weather widget, cloudy screensaver to show poor signal, change background with seasons or time of day, liquid to show battery life
- Modularity, layout free, not staticis icons, dynamnic, syncronised
- need to create a market for UI a bit like the appstore, allow people to download stuff and customize
As i say you really need to see the presentation - the ustwo guys had some amazing ideas for mobile UI that made the iphone look pretty tame and boring by comparison. A great way to end the event.
That's it - thanks to @bryanrieger and @priyascape for hosting and to Seren for sponsoring.
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