Mashup Mobile - Android, Symbian and iphone

On Tuesday night Mashup* held an event at the ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) in London Soho all about mobile platforms  The sponsors were Net Benefit, Intel, Doughty Hanson, Rogers Ray and Berndston, Sun Microsystems and Speechly Bircham as well as BBH who provided the venue and a very good standard of refreshments and food (mini sausage and mash) so big up to them.

Here are my notes for the evening for those who couldn't make it and for those who did make it but want a refresher of what was said. 

BBH - Introductions

- mobile is "particularly exciting" for BBH as part of "moving from interruption to engagement marketing"

- BBH was the MMA mobile marketing agency of the year without doing any mobile banner advertising, there's a huge opportunity for brands in mobile much more interesting than just mobile ads

This dude in an incredibly loud shirt then did a bit of a demo of a site called Metrotwin.com which is an online community and content network with the idea of "twinning" New York and London - nice idea.

Alan Adult - MD - Wavemetrix 

- wave metrix does online buzz research and recently did a study on iphone applications and shared some of the results...

- users want full functionality on mobile versions of sites e.g. lot of complaints that the first release facebook iphone app was missing wall and photo functions (the m.facebook.com site has this so not sure why they left it off the iphone app)

- price/ value not an issue

- games discussed more than anything 1/3 of app buzz related to iphone games, 18% to productivity tools, 17% to music apps, 13% to messaging

- Super Monkey Ball and ipint got a lot of positive buzz (remarkable, look nice, new, used new capabilities like the accelerometer)

- people also like the remote control app, facebook, tuner app, Shazam (seems like Shazam has got a real second wind these days!)

- iphone really seems to be an amazing mobile games platform - level of positive buzz about mobile games never seen before on other devices as with the iphone

Tim Raby MD - OMTP

- iphone has shown that there is an appetite for non-voice services, but iphone has been subsidised by voice not data an content revenues

- how will Apple move forward, will they try and work without operators e.g. go direct to consumer, can they live without operator retail support, will they do an MVNO?

- iphone has both open and closed approaches built into the platform e.g. apps (closed system) mobile web (open system)

- dont forget iphone very expensive, focused on developed markets, a lot of the network innovaiton happening in China, India, Nokia 20 series growing really fast

- for mobile web and apps to take off need same thing as SMS to happen, no fragmentation, work across any network, any device

Stephen Upstone - Ad Infuse 

- iphone has transformed the way people are using mobile - great for the industry, innovations will get taken up by others and explode the mobile internet

- android - consumers must love it for it to work, operators must subsidise it (cant feel threatened), app developers must use it (needs scale)

- iphone is very easy to sync with computer - never managed that on a nokia (yeah especially with a Mac)

- in some video campaigns <1% of all devices were iphone, but 75% of video usage, and 30% of page impressions were iphone!

Panel Discussion

David Wood - Symbian

David represents Symbian so did a good job of bigging them up after this sea of luuuurve for the iphone/ jesusphone

- is impressed by iphone, intrigued by Android but wait for Symbian 2.0!

- a lot of the good things in iphone can be replicated, 92 new phones under development using symbian, a lot will have some of the iphone functionality

- iphone does have some contraints as a platform - e.g. app platform quite closed, no flash, no java, now people want to get their apps on the 100s of millions of Symbian devices

- the 7 Symbian manufacturers are going to come up with stuff that will take mobile internet to the next level

Tom Hume - Future Platforms

Tom is a developer working at the coalface at what is in my view the best mobile development agency out there with clients like Locomatrix, Flirtomatic and Trutap.  It would have been nice to hear a bit more from Tom but he kind of got drowned out by the noise from some of the others on the panel!  (not mentioning any names!).  Anyway Tom did make some really good points - i wish more panels had people working in development on them as you get some really good down to earth insights from people who are actually building mobile services.

- from a developer perspective iphone and android not making things any better they are making fragmentation worse...

- there are trade-offs with every platform - ok iphone is great but its only 2% of sales, even less of overall installed base

- iphone is standardised now but what happens in five years time when they have lots of different versions out there with different capabilities?

- Android is targeting mobile operators and OEMs not consumers really - they are basically offering a low cost operating system

- Android will take time - J2ME took several years to get into a decent amount of phones

- iphone is getting people excited about mobile and showing that it's ok to target a single device - you don't have to cover everything 

Peter Sells - Head of Mobile Development - BBH

- BBH have done campaigns for KFC, Unilever, Vodafone and BA but all branded experiences that provide consumer value - not just mobile ads (got to say BBH seem to have some interesting ideas in the mobile space, and a good way of looking at things)

- very excited about the iphone and they are starting to do a lot of work in this area

I'm afraid my note taking capability broke down at this point as we went into panel discussion - if anyone else blogged the event let us know and I'll link to it.

Thanks again to the organisers and the sponsors.

Comments

[Tom Hume]

Thanks for the write-up James. I'd hesitate to call myself a developer these days, much more talented folks than I take on that responsibility at FP.

I really enjoyed the event, personally. It was the first time I'd been to one and I'll be back...

[james (mjelly)]

hey Tom, you may not be actively coding but you are still involved in building services rather than working as an exec etc so i think you can still call yourself a developer!

[Pietig]

Why r u vacillating to call urself a developer?