Observations from IIR's Mobile Content in London

I had the great pleasure of chairing at and presenting a keynote to the Mobile Content conference in London, arranged by IIR last week. The event featured a superstar lineup of top talent of the mobile content industry from analysts and pundits to operators and broadcasters to content developers and owners. And the days were littered with a slew of published authors in this space. A most stimulating and insightful speaker lineup.

I saw two full days and a couple of presentations on the third day, and obviously I have a ton of thoughts. I'll try to get to the most relevant ones now from my notes.

Jonathan J Mac MacDonald, my dear friend and formerly with Blyk, is now with Ogilvy One and he made several presentations over the previous event on Monday (Future of Mobile), his keynote to Mobile Content, and the closing remarks on the day I chaired Mobile Content - evolving his thinking about All of Us, and an army of fanatics. Brilliant stuff. I blogged about it at my Communities Dominate blog.

Com Healy at Xiam of Ireland showed a cool recommendation engine for mobile, that will boost uptake of mobile services by 20%. Its like a very intelligent mobile variant of the Amazon engine. After a company like Xiam shows that kind of technology (and as they have giant mobile operators like Vodafone, Orange, AIS and Globe as their customers already) - I always wonder, which moron mobile operator executive does NOT want to talk to these guys and test out their system. If you get 20% boost in mobile service adoption, then isn't the mathematics of our business so obvious, that this is a "no-brainer"? Luckily many operator people were talking with Colm and his people after the presentation.

Oh, Xiam was recently acquired by Qualcomm - and it was such a delight to see Joe Barrett there also at the event, unfortunately the organizers only put him on a panel - Joe is so knowledgable about our industry he'd deserve a keynote definitely - but yes, some of the readers of the blog recognize the name - yes this is the same Joe Barrett who co-edited my first book with me, Services of UMTS, back in 2002. Was great to catch up with Joe.

Jo Rabin from Dot Mobi did another excellent Dot Mobi presentation (and I was so delighted to observe they keep pushing the 7th Mass Media story there at Dot Mobi). He announced the Device Atlas, which includes a series of specifications on 4,200 handsets and other mobile devices. Wow, there are more than 4,200 mobile telecoms devices already (including all that are no longer made, obviously).

The Associated Press had Ben Mosse explain their moves into the digital space, and I found it amusing that AP never bothered to set up a website, now they have launched a mobile internet site. Ha-ha, that is right !  Skip a generation, go straight into the 7th Mass Media, yeah!   They have already 420,000 subscribers (mostly in the USA) and a typical user makes 60 visits per month to the site, ie 2x per day. They have advertising and get between 5% and 13% click-through rates. Biggest content is headline news (and the election was the big news in the USA this autumn obviously) but local news and sports are the second and third biggest content categories.

Ilicco Elia from Thomson Reuters had a great presentation about how modern journalism is learning to work with digital media, and their reporters say that the smartphone is a great back up to the digital camera, video recorder, voice recorder, even note-taking device. I was pretty pleased to notice that in the video he showed, where the journalist who had his professional gear stolen, was able to take some pictures in Africa from a war zone - and that the phone the professional used as his backup was the Nokia N82. Ha-ha. I have in my pocket a device some professionals use to post images that end up in newspapers... Not bad, Nokia, not bad (and I do so love the camera and flash on that phone..)

David Cushman (a fresh author, congratulations!) and a major contributor to the thinking in the 7th Mass Media space, the past Digital Evangelist at Emap (ie Bauer Media) who of course blogs at Faster Future and is now with Brando Media, developing thoughts of the 8th Mass Media space. That was the theme of his presentation and David's whole presentation should be carefully studied. A few tidbits - we as an industry cannot fine-tune messages to generate the granularity to "segments of one" - but we don't have to. The consumers will (that is why they are the 8th Mass Media). Lots of similar thoughts. Marketing is no longer done "to them", rather marketing is done by them. We get bigger benefits from talking with those who are against our brand, than for our brand, but we gain greatest use of our community if we give tools for our most loyal brand fanatics, and allow them to go and convert people to support our brand.

And so forth and so forth. Brilliant piece, David, brilliant. He also pointed out that the digital person is "Homo Mimicus" ie the copying man. Show it to me on a mobile phone screen, and I will learn and copy it.

Another friend, Peggy Ann Salz from M Search Groove did her thing about helping to make search on mobile more user-friendly, with lots of stats and examples. She echoed the theme that in Africa and the rest of the developing world, the mobile phone is not the fourth screen or third screen - it is the first screen. For most it is the only screen they have.

Christian Lindholm - yet another author - formerly of Nokia and Yahoo, now Director at Fjord - and a good friend of mine again - did a memorable presentation not only for its content but also in the way he presented. He had a professional illustrator draw up two giant whiteboards in real time as Christian spoke with all the relevant items, brands, logos, arrows, words, etc to make a thought-provoking final summary of what he had spoken about. What did he speak of? Well, of course it was all about design for mobile, how the iPhone has pushed the envelope, what are the physical limitations of our hands, development trends, etc. A fascinating topic and presented in a memorable way.

Vodafone's Ray de Silva talked about User-generated content and social networking on mobile, so no surprise, his presentation could have been taken verbatim from my writings. But funnily enough, even though Vodafone is a long-term public reference customer of mine, Ray and I had never met. I totally agreed with everything he said, still. I liked it that he said Mobile Social Networking is the long sought-after killer application for 3G. I also liked his thought that users want to liberate their pictures from their phones.

My friends at Changing Worlds talked about their intelligent analytics and segmentation engine which genrates automatically personalized content. Their impact with several major European operators - over 20% increase in (non messaging) mobile data ARPU (average revenue per user). Wow. This kind of numbers again should wake up every mobile operator.

Then we had Mark Curtis (yet another author) talk about Flirtomatic. I'll blog about his presentation separately.

and we had Luciana Pavan of MTV - a fantastic, deeply fact-filled presentation about where the most innovative TV broadcaster is pushing the mobile side of the envelope (MTV did invent this convergence area in 2001 as I write in the book). I'll blog about Lu's presentation separately.

And one more - there was a presentation by Partner Orange of Israel, about a mobile music campaign. I loved it. I'll blog about that also separately.