A quick roundup of M-Days insights and highlights. Companies mentioned include: Ahead of Time, Rubberduck Media Labs, Service2Media, Out There Media, Fishlab Entertainment, Southend United Football Club, Fjord, Farm Town, Exbiblio, Gedda-Headz, Lufthansa and Velti.

I’m back and settled from M-Days in Munich. The two-day event drew an international and eclectic crowd, and presented a welcome opportunity to connect with companies and people from across Europe. A special highlight was getting the inside track from Eastern European mobile operators and leading content owners on the problems they face and progress they have made.  Specifically, Petar Pavic – Managing Director of EPH, Croatia’s biggest media house – and Jana Vyhlidalova from Teléfonica O2 Czech Republic had some excellent stories to tell about mobile usage and experimentation in their respective countries.

Fortunately, both have agreed to share them with MSG in a longer interview/podcast following Mobile World Congress. That’s also when MSG and M-Days organizers will formally join together to launch a new publication to raise awareness about mobile news and developments across continental Europe – so watch this space.

In the meantime, allow me to provide you with the key takeaways from the M-Days sessions I attended/moderated.

Mobile 2010 trends (via Christian Lindholm, Managing Partner, Fjord (digital design company): An awesome presentation with eight of the trends highest on Christian’s radar.

Among these:

• Dawn of divergence: Lots of devices with even more implications for personal mobility. But the real game-changer is the emergence of the “finger as a natural stylus.” This cleans up the user experience and opens up new possibilities. What about the iPad? There may a few design downsides with huge implications. The casual and natural way we use mobile touch devices such as the iPhone creates a certain lean-back-and-explore flow that may become disrupted if we have to “pull out a much bigger device out to do the same thing.” And another key question: will women buy new purses and handbags to accommodate a bigger device? Or will they opt for a smaller, sleeker iPhone-like device?
• Discovery is the new search: A welcome confirmation of MSG’s consistently sharp focus on recommendation and personalization. Search doesn’t work on mobile and people want to discover the wealth of cool stuff at their finger tips. Great news for companies in the space (and this survey and this guest column from Xiam underline the wider business case for recommenders). Christian believes NOW is the time is right to think through new approaches to encourage discovery. However, this could be quite a task since discovery takes a lot of screen real estate. Another issue centers on the best way to leverage social media and the social Web to “fuel the water cooler moments” of discovery.
• Facebook is the people, everywhere: However, Facebook no longer rules the roost. There are communities forming within this community that such as Farm Town, which counts 13,028,899 monthly active users. Could Facebook splinter and pin-out communities? Christian this is a distinct possibility and correctly warns Facebook to be “be fair” about the “tax” it charges communities (such as Farm Town) that use its platform to bump and connect.
• Physical goes digital: Look for 2D barcodes, coupons and all the cool tools and technologies we can harness to create “worm holes” in our daily lives at specific locations (shops, streets, venues etc.) to flourish. An awesome example he offer is Exbiblio, a company following a mission to bridge the gap between the paper and digital worlds without making changes to the printing or publishing of documents. It does this by allowing people to scan a snippet of text (about 6 words); it turns this snippet into an identifying barcode, identifying both the document and the reader’s location within it. From the company website: “This means that a reader can use any optical scanner – like a smartphone camera – as the point of entry for ExBiblio to find the corresponding digital version of the document. Once you can link a paper document to its digital version, the paper you hold is transformed into a physical Web page. It achieves this at a faster, more fundamental and transparent level of context than any conventional system of reference.” This is fascinating stuff and I’ll have more after a briefing with the company founders.

Mobile commerce (via Peter Broekroelofs, CTO, Service2Media): Don’t underestimate the outlook for paid content and commerce – if it’s done right. Peter offered several examples of content companies that have cleverly mixed freemium and subscription models. Take the Dutch newspaper Telegraaf, for example. It’s making money from subscription and experimenting with paid-apps to sell special issues on topics such as the Tour de France. Another one to watch: the advance of Elsevier, which is building a solid business on science and medical content via paid-apps. As Peter put it: “CPMs are down and so everyone is moving to transactions.”

More mobile operators embrace ad-funded (via Kerstin Trikalitis, CEO, Out There Media): It was a meting of the minds with Kerstin, so I will save the analysis for MWC, when the company announces significant news. A key learning she shared (and offered as a reason why ad-funded mobile operator service Blyk had to change direction) is the importance of the right incentive. Operators in Eastern Europe are not focused on giving away free service or minutes; they want to make the connection between customer segments and the advertising messages people in these segments will accept. To this end the mobile operators are creating opt-in databases, integrating with CRM and – more importantly – working TOGETHER to give brands reach and audience.

Brands/Organizations share cool CRM strategies (via Michael Schade, Managing Director, Fishlab Entertainment & Mark Davies, Marketing Manager, Southend United Football Club): Great presentations – with some excellent confirmations of mobile advertising/marketing concepts we assume should work… Is listening and caring the way to sell tickets to a game? During his presentation on mobile ticketing and other topics, Mark revealed that making the effort to really pay attention to people (and backing this up with database management) can achieve amazing results. In his case, a text message to people who missed the game (or several games), encouraging them to show up for the next game did the trick. In other words, a personalized SMS saying something like ‘hi [NAME] , you haven’t been at the last two games. Would be great to see you Saturday out there cheering for your team…” engaged people. Simple, elegant and effective. As a result, 750+ attendees at the games show up because their team told them they mattered. Another moment of clarity when Michael talked about the game his company created for carmaker Volkswagen. The game rocked – with downloads to prove it. But the real news in my book was the positive impact on mobile CRM. People played the game and were pleased to volunteer personal information and sign up for a test drive at a nearby dealer. More on that when Michael returns after MWC with the full case study and some exclusive stats…

Mocom 2020 trends (via Monty Metzger, Founder, Ahead of Time): Monty condensed his excellent mobile trends video down to 3 trends that top his radar.

• The rise of the “sensorconomy” – a new economy and ecosystem driven by the Internet of Things. Is this M2M on steroids or is it much more than that? Monty expects a wave of new company and business models to cash in one this.
• The impact of the emerging market – These fast-followers don’t “get” new mobile business models; they invent them. From the phone ladies of Bangladesh to the Internet ladies of countries across Asia, this region is bubbling with ideas. (I am reminded here of a recent interview with Susan Dray, an independent consultant who uses her abilities in interface evaluation, usability evaluation and ethnographic research to help develop solutions that increase benefits to people in emerging markets and the service providers that operate there. The upcoming Netsize Guide features an interview I conducted with Susan, one chock-full with examples showing how local communities are using mobile tools to achieve socioeconomic development goals.)
• The rise of the Digital Natives – This generation raised on the Internet is entering the workforce. Expect them – literally – to rock the globe.

Mobile TV (via Karin Du Rietz, Content Director, Rubberduck Media Labs): Drawing from stats on T-Mobile mobile TV usage and trends Karin confirm a trend to “expert-generated content”. At least in Germany and the markets Rubberduck serves people are more into watching regular TV shows than YouTube juggling-the-cat videos… People also prefer live TV over looped content.  Sports is the top content category, with 27 percent of viewers watching it on their mobiles (it was 5 percent a year ago).

Social connected gaming (via Frank Fitzek, European Director, Gedda-Headz): Frank provided an excellent deep-dive into the issues around cross-platform (Java, Android, iPhone and a bridge via PCs to Internet for users who don’t have a mobile flat rate data plan), location-based gaming and the importance of cross-media promotion. His team promotes the game using a professionally produced music video (where the rappers wear the heads/masks of the characters in the game) and physical representations of the characters that players (15-year old demographic) can pick up at selected retailers. The game is live in Germany and Asia, and counts 140,000 downloads (via GetJar since the holidays) and 50,000 active users. Viral marketing is key for commercial applications and Frank has identified and harnessed lead users or “seeders” to help new players install the game on their phones over Bluetooth and – so – spread the word. Players play the game for fun but also for their “respect” points. Frank – who is a professor, a social media enthusiast and a futurist – has thought this through to be sure it’s not just another game. I look forward to having him back on MSG in the next weeks.

The emergence of the meta-community (via Torsten Wingenter, Global Coordination Social Media Marketing, Lufthansa): Should companies seek to make social networks? Or should they invent new ways to harness them? In the case of Lufthansa, it’s the latter. Since we all fly/travel this soon-to-be-released app is all about enabling people to use their existing social networks to tell people where they are (on route to where, for example) and connect with the community to share taxis, get travel advice or other information. As Torsten put it: “It’s about connecting communities on our hardware (aircraft) and facilitating their conversations.” In short, Lufthansa is creating meta-communities that sit on top of other communities for specific types of conversations. A fascinating strategy and an even more interesting observation: people (in the focus group) like the idea of communities of purpose (everything around your trip, for example) and freely offer advice and information. Hmmm- will we see meta-communities harness the wisdom of their crowds (across social networks) to offer good advice and ever better experiences? Torsten’s case study will feature in the MSG-M-Days collaborative project I mentioned earlier in this post, so watch this space.

The evolution of customer loyalty (via Stephane Gantchev, Business Development Manager CEE, Velti): Mobile operators sit on a stockpile of data about their post-paid customers. But they have very little insight into the profiles and preferences of their pre-paid user base. It’s a problem for customer relations and a bigger issue for mobile operators (particularly in Eastern Europe) with mobile advertising/marketing ambitions. Velti’s solution focuses on the critical moment of top up, when the operator is delivering people an important message/service, to incentivize users to interact with operators and volunteer personal information. In practice Velti delivers pre-paid users a code on their mobile phones when they top up, inviting people to participate in a game (with instant win) on the Web. People like the instant win and play the games frequently, allowing operators to ask for more profiling data each time the individual returns. Stephane says the combination of instant gratification and repeat visits allows mobile operators to understand just who their pre-paid customer base is and communicate this to brands interested in advertising to customers on an opt-in basis. Velti counts several deployments in CEE and Stephane will be back on MSG in a few months to share experiences, stats and key learnings. One (sort of) data point he could share: the number of people redeeming the code and joining in the games has already exceeded operator expectation just 2.5 months after deployment.

My personal thanks to the organizers for asking me to participate and to everyone else for the invigorating conversations. Most M-Days presentations and speakers listed here will feature in MSG analysis and interviews/podcast over the next weeks.

Companies/individuals I didn’t meet or cover are welcome to reach out to me directly. I am always open to good ideas…

Disclaimer: Netsize and Xiam are MSG supporters.

Tags: Ahead of Time, Exbiblio, Farm Town, Fishlab Entertainment, Fjord, Gedda-Headz, Lufthansa, Out There Media, Rubberduck Media Labs, Service2Media, Southend United Football Club, Velti

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Data Points, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content, Mobile Research, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Personalization, Recommendation, Usability, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.