Mobile pizza

It’s a long journey for the Travel industry

Last Wed I was in sunny Dubai, speaking at the Arabian Travel Market conference.  

The format worked well: 3 speakers, about 20 minutes each, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Paul Richer.  For a start, it gave me the chance to meet Paul and the 2 fellow speakers: Debbie Hindle from Four bgb and Giles Longhurst from Frommers.

Debbie talked about how the travel industry should approach social networks. A few points I picked out:

• Good on her for showing some data that was specific to the Arabian market – in particular the fact that Facebook have a higher penetration in the UAE than in the US
• The importance of photography in social networks – and consequently the opportunity that hotels, airlines and tour operators have in exploiting their existing pictures
• The importance of engaging with travel bloggers not as journalists, but more as publishers – individuals who may have a very intimate relationship with part of your audience, are going to be involved in the long-terms and may well have commercial interests in a close relationship

Giles covered both social and mobile, but from the perspective of a content owner who has been creating digital services for the travelling consumer. He shared some interesting data, so I intend to go and unpick his presentation. Here are the few nuggets I noted down:

• Social media, Content and Mobile development are the top areas where the travel industry is expecting to increase investment in 2012
• In-destination services, i.e. how tourists are supported once they have reached their destination, is full of untapped opportunities that mobile can now unlock
• The lowering cost barrier for smartphones doesn’t just lead to the exponential growth in the audience you can reach, but it also means that you are no longer addressing an exclusive club – your mobile audience will include cost-conscious individuals

 Giles also made a very good point during the panel discussion, relevant to the mobile web – mobile apps debate: if your service is likely to be used 2-4 times a year, then you’d better go for a mobile site. I completely agree, although I would also look at it the other way around: can I create an experience that will keep my audience engaged more than 2-4 times a year, so that I will be top of mind when they are ready to travel? 

My presentation was about the choices behind mobile development. I used our recent work for Lastminute.com to illustrate the importance of user experience when it comes to mobile:

• Convenience
• Playfulness
• Usability & speed

I then looked at the key considerations one has to make when investing in mobile.  It is a tricky balance:

• On one hand you need to consider the cost of reaching multiple platforms, supporting the application in the long run and getting your back-end infrastructure into a shape;
• On the other hand, one should not underestimate the importance of the user experience you deliver.

The recommendation is to have a presence on the mobile web as well as in app stores. I showed how our clients in the travel sector (Lastminute.com, Rough Guides, Malaysia Airlines, DeVere Hotels) have in many cases built a solid smartphone-optimised site and have then created apps to serve their highest value segments.  The numbers also agree: a significant percentage of people use mobile when they research, purchase and ‘consume’ travel services, with many of them using an app for part of the journey and the mobile web for other parts.

The closing point was about the wider context around mobile. As it becomes an increasingly significant channel, it cannot be developed in a silo. Organisations will need to have a clear understanding of how it fits in the overall customer journey and how it will need to be supported by their IT infrastructure.

 The fact that the 3 of us covered, in about 90 minutes, two topics like Social & Mobile, which could easily justify a conference on their own right, is an indication of where the travel industry is at present. As Vikram Singh pointed out in a later session, many hotels and tour operators don’t even have a presentable mobile site, let alone anything more sophisticated. 

There was a lot of talk about mobile and social across all the presentations I saw, but not as much action as I would have expected.  The numbers tell us that the audience is already there, so the travel industry needs to get a move on or risk getting disrupted in the same way music and publishing have been disrupted.

Mobile World Congress 2012

Another year, another Mobile World Congress closing its gates.

For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of attending this once-a-year mobile industry meet-up, you should know that it is so huge that the best way of really hearing what’s going on is to follow it online.  No point in walking miles to hit all the stands.

The point of being here is that you get to catch up with the rest of the industry around the Fira, at fringe events and at the parties around town (Helen Keagan’s Swedish Beers above all). So what were people talking about?

Mobile payments struck a chord.  Facebook’s announcement that they want to solve the mobile payments problem was the main highlight: app stores will continue to have the upper hand when it comes to micropayments until there are alternatives that are global and just as seamless.

Paypal joined in,with their own declaration of intent. They also added a data point: they are expecting $7bn worth of mobile payments in 2012.

While the big guns try and solve a problem that should have been sorted ages ago, the mobile industry is already setting the next challenge: NFC payments. Visa announced their partnership with Samsung for the Olympics and with Vodafone for the Vodafone Mobile Wallet.  It feels like it is just the beginning – surely device fragmentation will step in and hold back full rollout for a few years.

I may have been talking to the wrong people, but the Html5 vs. Native debate seems to have become more rational.  Facebook, again, brought it into light by announcing their involvement in Html standards evolution – effectively recognition of the fact that Html5 is still short of the build-once-deploy-everywhere promise – something we have talked about a lot.  It is still the future though, and the Telefonica+Mozilla partnership shows that powerful players are behind it.

I didn’t really look at many devices. Every year needs a tech first, and I would give that to the Galaxy Beam – mobiles with projectors have been promised for years and it’s good to see someone mad enough to make it happen. On the downside, I didn’t hear many positive comments about the award-winning Nokia 808 PureView – is a 41MP camera more likely to beat the iPhone than a projector beam?

The one theme that stood out when looking at devices was the idea of cross-media / cross-platform experiences. Sony were showing off multiplayer gaming with console vs. smartphone, Microsoft showed a preview of Windows 8 seamlessly working across devices and there was a lot of talk about 2nd-screen experiences. Designing and executing these kind of experiences is probably the most exciting challenge in our industry.

Last but not least – the OS war. Apple were not here, as usual. Still odd, given that they currently define where the mobile industry is at, in terms of audience and revenue. They at least organized a party and were (possibly) bothered enough to time their iPad3 pre-announcement with Eric Schmidt’s keynote. Android was everywhere – again, no surprise there. I think that Nokia & Microsoft did well out of it: they have a good product, Skype is now on WP7 (beta), they get some sympathy for the mountain they have to climb, and Windows 8 impressed everyone.

 

Brand Perfect Tour - Berlin

I was kindly invited to help with the Brand Perfect Tour event in Berlin yesterday. I wasn't quite sure of what to expect going into it. We had done a bit of prep for the afternoon's workshops, but I couldn't picture what delegates would have got out of the day.

Now I know.

The telling moment for me was when I was dragged out of the post event drinks to make my way to the airport. I didn't resent it so much because of the (excellent) Prosecco I was leaving behind, but because I was watching people from different disciplines making new connections, exchanging notes and imagining new possibilities.

I think that the buzz was created by two themes that ran through the day, starting with  Aral's opening keynote and replayed across all of our contributions as speakers and facilitators:

1) Do not settle for mediocrity, however tempting. Coherent visuals, behaviour and functionality are what will make your brand stand out;
2) New processes are needed if brands are to achieve that. It's about collaboration, and thinking of your mobile presence as a product, rather than a project.

So thanks to Monotype for creating a forum where mobile experts can mix with brand and marketing practitioners, sharing evidence and techniques rather than sales pitches. Looking forward to the next event in London!

 

Radio1 Big Weekend Retrospective

Richard Morland at the BBC has just posted a very open and frank report of how the Radio1 Big Weekend web app we built for him performed on the field. To summarise it:

• People seem happy to share their location when at public events and are pretty clear about privacy implications
• If you are creating some mobile tech for a live event, remember that things do not work as well as they do in central London (or Brighton in our case) and also make sure you have tech support during the event, because surprising things will happen
• Checking in to a gig, rather than just a generic stage/location, increased the bragging potential of people's posts and also drove likes & comments from friends

On a more personal note, this is the first time I see my name in the end credits of a video - thanks to the BBC team.

Creating the Check In app for Radio 1’s Big Weekend

Blogging about a project just before its go-live date, especially when it is centred around a single live event, feels a little scary - I hope we are not jinxing it by doing so.  It’s however worth doing it now because this is something of an experiment and a learning experience, so what better time to share than when you’re sprinting for the finish line?

The experiment is about using Facebook’s Places in the context of a live event - in this case Radio 1’s Big Weekend. There’s more background on the project on the BBC’s blog.

The process that got us there was an interesting one. Using Facebook Places via the new API and checking into gigs rather than physical places wasn’t something we had done before or could research, given that I guess very few outside of Facebook would have had the chance to play with it. We still had to commit to an unmovable deadline and a fixed budget.  

We got there by being truly agile and thanks to the BBC’s team’s readiness to trust us with it.

So what do I mean when I say truly agile? We have been running Scrum for a few years, so this project was no different to many others we have run: a backlog, sprints, daily standups, iterative development.  It however worked out particularly well because of the way we prioritised our work:

• We started by developing the core functionality - getting line-up data into the system and talking to Facebook’s APIs
• Styling and copy were applied slightly later on and evolved through the project
• We identified features (stories in Scrum talk) that the BBC could have done without, if it came to it, so we got to a release candidate a lot earlier than planned
• While we ended up delivering most of those, having a minimum spec web app ready to release did mean that we were able to slot in higher priority and unexpected tasks into the project without taking the risk of completely missing our deadlines

The most significant ‘unexpected task’ was related to the check in process. Facebook users are effectively checking into an artist URL that also includes Facebook metadata. The original plan was to point to the BBC’s website URLs for each artist. As the project progressed, it became clear that coordinating the necessary changes on the website would have taken too long. We therefore ended up implementing a more complex system of redirects that does however give us the advantage of better tracking and more control over the user experience.

Was it all smooth and perfect? Of course not. We hadn’t appreciated the level of detail required to satisfy the BBC’s information security requirements; if we had, we would have planned for more upfront technical architecture work.  While all parties showed plenty of flexibility, we were still operating under a fixed price contract, so we had the inevitable tense conversations over change requests vs. expected features.

All in all though, we are very happy with what we have done and we are looking forward to the weekend to watch it all play out. So particular thanks to Richard and Robert at the BBC, much appreciation for Simon’s support at Facebook (great dev support guys make a massive difference when working on new platforms) and well done to the team: Jon Markwell & Chris Williams on development, Aegir Hallmundur on design, Paul Welsh on QA and Cori Samuel keeping it all running smoothly.

Highlights from The Master Switch

These are my un-edited highlights from reading "The Master Switch" by Timothy Wu. I'm hoping to write an article on the book soon.

Just to give it some context, the book looks at the history of revolutions in the communications industry as a way of analysing where our current Internet revolution may be heading. A great read.

“Selling radio sets—the old revenue model—was a good if limited business, for ultimately few households would need more than one radio every few years. But advertising revenues could expand indefinitely—or so it seemed then”

“academic studies suggested that films were dangerous to children”

“The denial that Armstrong had in fact invented FM was, if not the last straw, then very nearly the last. A man’s decision to end his life is inevitably a complex one and cannot easily be blamed on any one person or event. [...] He was nearly bankrupted, as the lawsuit with RCA consumed the once great fortune from his earlier patents. [...] The story of FM radio gives some taste of what television’s inventors were in for, and a sense of David Sarnoff’s genius in the art of industrial combat. [...] He was a man who proved it is possible to defy both Joseph Schumpeter’s doctrine of creative destruction and, as he turned RCA into a television company, the adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”

“Films are not screwdrivers”

“Within two years of the iPhone launch, relations between Apple and Google would sour as the two pursued equally grand, though inimical, visions of the future. [...] Steve Jobs accused Google of wasting its time in the mobile phone market; a new Google employee named Tim Bray in 2010 described Apple’s iPhone as “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.... I hate it””

“these firms and their allies are fighting anew the age-old battle we’ve recounted time and time again. It is the perennial Manichaean contest informing every episode in this book: the struggle between the partisans of the open and of the closed, between the decentralized and the consolidated visions of a proper order. But this time around, as compared with any other, the sides are far more evenly matched.”

“Like all centralized systems, Jobs’s has its merits: one can easily criticize its principles yet love its products. Computers, it turns out, can indeed benefit in some ways from a centralizing will to perfection [...]”

“Apple’s long-standing adherence to closed design left the door wide open for the Microsoft Corporation and the many clones of the IBM PC to conquer computing [...]”

“The first major exercise was in blocking Skype, the voice-over-IP firm whose software lets users call each other over the Internet for free, eating into AT&T’s long distance margins.”

“And just as our addiction to the benefits of the internal combustion engine led us to such demand for fossil fuels as we could no longer support, so, too, has our dependence on our mobile smart phones, touchpads, laptops, and other devices delivered us to a moment when our demand for bandwidth—the new black gold—is insatiable. Let us, then, not fail to protect ourselves from the will of those who might seek domination of those resources we cannot do without. If we do not take this moment to secure our sovereignty over the choices that our information age has allowed us to enjoy, we cannot reasonably blame its loss on those who are free to enrich themselves by taking it from us in a manner history has foretold.”

10 minutes in Victoria

One advantage of having 20 mins to wait for your train is that you can pop into the nearby Vodafone shop and see what's happening on the front line.

So, what would a Vodafone assistant recommend if you were - say - a Nokia 5800 customer looking to upgrade?

• Nokia has new phones (points at the N8) but they are more or less the same as before
• Windows7 is not a good idea - too complicated (that was surprising)
• Blackberry is good for email but not much more
• iPhone and Android are pretty much the same, but his recommended droid (Galaxy) is free with a £30 contract while an iPhone4 would cost £150

It's not the most reppresentative sample, but one that sounds like a true reflection of what's happening on the ground right now.

Apple and apples

On Monday evening I took part in a panel discussion about mobile Java, hosted by Sun and organised by Momo London.

We covered several topics around the present and future of Java ME as a platform for deploying applications to mobile devices. My key points were that it is still extremely popular - despite its low profile - and is getting easier.

The topic that left me thinking after the panel was the discussion over App Stores: where is Java's version of the App Store or Google Marketplace? The fact that mobile operators and device manufacturers are launching app stores at the rate of knots didn't feel like a strong enough answer.

Having slept over it, I now realise that we were comparing apples and oranges. People do not care for a 'Java store'. If they see an 'App Store' icon on their home screen, they will however have a pretty good idea of what they can get out of it.

As a Nokia user, for example, I would look at an iPhone TV ad and think "I wander if my brand new gadget can do the same...".  I wouldn't care to know that I'm actually looking for Java applications (or Flash Lite, Symbian and widgets for that matter).

Comparing Apple and apples would therefore involve looking at how Ovi and other app stores match the iPhone experience in terms of:
 * awareness of the store
 * how easy it is to find (homescreen or top-menu access)
 * navigation and search to find what I want
 * convenience of payment mechanics
 * simplicity of the installation process

Brands, publishers and developers would probably like to see few rather than many marketplaces, but if Vodafone, Nokia, Orange, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry can give us easy access to several millions of users each, then I suspect we won't complain too much.
 

Mobile Internet 09, Vienna

A quick summary of the Mobile Internet 2009 conference last week. I went there to speak on the final day and ended up also taking part in a panel discussion.

It was a relatively small confrence, but with highly qualified attendees. Here are a few general themes:

iPhone

I missed the beginning of the conference, but the iPhone effect was still clear to see on day 3. Everyone in the industry accepts it as the standard everyone has to aim for. The problem is that it is different in so many ways that people end up cherry picking from it to support their own causes/interests.

Platforms

What are going to be the dominant platforms in the next few years?
There was consensus over the fact that only 3-4 will survive. With Limo and Symbian reppresented, it shouldn't come as a surprise that they felt that mobile OS's are going open. iPhone is however the notable exception.

Bondi amongst others also suggested that whatever happens in mobile OS, the browser is going to be the most viable runtime platform, with more standardised support and additional (and hopefully also standardised) APIs plugging into device functionality.

Mobile Operators

Mobile Interet 2009 saw a heavy reppresentation of mobile operators and releated service providers, so most of the discussions about revenue were focused on that part of the value chain.

The long term picture isn't so rosy. In several countries, flat data tariffs are expected to become the norm and have been pushed to fairly low levels due to competition within the industry and with fixed line providers (with the broadband dongles). The operator's concern is getting to the situation where 4% of users consume 75% of the network traffic and where they many not ultimately benefit from the expected growth in data traffic.

On reflection, flat tariffs may have a wider implication for the whole industry: operators have so far encouraged mobile internet development with the expectation of increasing revenues. Flat rate will put a cap on those expected revenues and will actually introduce an incentive to reducing/optimising network utilisation. That's unless network operators find alternative ways of generating revenue from the mobile internet. A few thoughts/models:
+ charge for different bandwidth levels (the problem being that people won't necessarily appreciate how high the limit is and may therefore limit their behaviour)
+ charge for service packages, similar to digital TV broadcasters, where higher bandwidth services like video streaming are charged at a higher rate
+ control the advertising (more below)
+ establish themselves as the payment method of choice
+ sell value-added content and services

Advertising

The general feeling is that mobile advertising is still in its infancy, but that it is bound to grow and become a significant source of revenue for the industry. Mobile web advertising spend in the UK last year was less than £10M. Brands and agencies want to spend, but they need the right data to support mobile as the channel of choice (although they seem to have little need for that when commissioning iPhone apps).

TeliaSonera are experiementing with content transcoding as a way of adding advertising to off-portal sites. The PR spin on that is that it enhances the user experience by allowing access to sites that would otherwise be inaccessible and providing a control bar (true in many cases). The real reason is that off-portal content transcoding promises 5-6 times more inventory than on-portal. 

Lift09 highlights

It's now been over a week since Lift, but a few of the thoughts and impressions from the conference are still in my head, at least in distilled format. So here is a 5 min keypoints report from the conference.

Talking about The Future.

"If the story is the laboratory [for design], then writing is your experiment." [when you read a story - even science fiction, you know when it feels right and human]
--- Matt Webb

Investigating new territories (concept development) is about looking 15-20 years ahead. Philips look for future Crisis and imagine what will happen after them.
--- Clive Van Heerden

Augmented reality

"Phisical and virtual are coming together, rather than one cancelling the other." [great visualisation of Rome with overlaied mobile traffic during and after the 2006 Italy-France world cup final.]
---  Carlo Ratti

...but also 'The world of MARIKA' for MVT in Sweden
20,000 Sweeds have vanished. Based on a true story? Created a conflict between TV station and individual blogger, but it was all put up. "
--- Nicoletta Iacobacci

"Work used to be very visible, how can we make invisible work visible?"
Why? Because visualising the result of activity can feed back into the activity
--- Dan Hill

The weather forecasting umbrella and the importance of periferal vision [we pull stuff, we get pushed stuff, but we also glance].
--- David Rose

"He owned their arse"
--- Lee Bryant  about the story of retired Marine Gen. Paul Van Riper winning a tactical exercise against the USA navy using low tech tactics.

Paraphrasing "Design has been taken over by usability but people take technologies and shape them to their own use"
--- Ramesh Srinivasan

"Make sure you leave a legacy"
--- Heartfelt appeal by Chris Hofmann  - Netscape developer and then at the heart of the Mozilla project

"There are 3.5B mobiles and 1B PCs"
"For many people in the world their 1st experience of the internet is through the mobile"
--- Vinton Cerf - the father of the Internet [it means a lot more if HE says it]

If you want to read more, I'd recommend Dan Hill's post on the conference.