Some weeks ago, I spoke at the most excellent Mobile 2.0 Europe conference in Barcelona (I had posted a slideshow of the slides to the talk). Now the good folks of Dotopen, who organised the event, now made a video of my talk available. After watching it, I will say that one never stops learning 
. However, perhaps you will enjoy it anyway. Here it is:
Volker Hirsch from dotopen on Vimeo.
As now is good tradition, here are the slides to the talk I delivered at Games Convention Online last week in Leipzig. Have fun and remember that sharing is caring…
I stumbled across an interesting piece of intelligence today, which looked at the development of virtual goods in the market place. According to this, median spend on virtual goods by users in North America has climbed a whopping 67% year-on-year to $50 p.a.
Equally interestingly, males are the largest spenders and, broken down by ethnics, Asians (26%) lead Hispanics (20%) by some margin over whites (11%).
So far (sic!), most virtual goods (how many? I don’t know) are purchased from stand-alone web-based games (World of Warcraft anyone?) but 31% had bought items in social networks (that would be the Zyngas and Playfishs of this world) with 29% in “network-based games” (what are they, I wonder). Facebook credits were used by 16% of buyers. Mobile? No word. It’s coming though: do bear in mind that there are 3x more mobile subscribers in the world than Internet users! And, yes, that’s true…
Apple has released an App Store Facebook app (which was aptly tagged with: “there’s a Facebook app for that”). This is a nifty move as it allows Apple a canvas from where to make discovery of apps as well as features and promotions somewhat easier.
It is noteworthy though that Apple leaves its trusty closed environment (comprised of Apple hardware, iTunes at large and the App Store) to turn to another platform for help in resolving the increasing discovery dilemma. The (Facebook) app racked up over 85,000 in a few days already, which is already 10x the number the good folks of MPlayIt managed to assemble for their iPhone Arcade, which does similar things (and, yes, I am sure they won’t be too happy).
It also highlights the increasing shift towards social discovery, and Facebook is – in my opinion (but then, and this is a disclaimer, given the work I do with Scoreloop, what do you expect?) only a first (albeit good) step: people care about what their friends say, play, do, recommend. And it is this community you need to unlock to get closer to access the social graph in ways that are meaningful to the single person. Where better to do it than from within a game or app though?
But until then: good move, Apple!
The UK arm of Orange, the France Telecom-owned operator that is merging with T-Mobile’s UK bit, today offered a lot of news on the mobile games side. They made an announcement on the introduction of not less than 3 different gaming services that they will be launching over the next couple of weeks:
- Playtomo is a social gaming service to be used within the users’ social networks (e.g. Facebook; no others were mentioned). Users can download the app (?) from Orange’s portal and then share scores etc on the social network of choice. It sounds a little like a “posh Facebook Connect” solution (and this is not meant derogatory at all!). Friends can be invited from any UK network operator.
- Games Zone is a subscription-service where “just” £5 per month buy you two games and a 20% discount on all others. It also offers “exclusive competitions”.
- The third offering is a little unclear to me: Orange will launch the aptly called “Orange iPhone Games” offering, which will feature games that are “designed specifically or published by Orange for iPhone customers”. They say it will include a variety of game genres as well as the aforementioned Playtomo. Now, this one, I am not sure about… Orange clearly looks to bolstering their brand (or, perhaps, use their brand as a lever to lift otherwise unbranded games into the limelight) but this seems like a tough proposition. It is an interesting one, too, though as it would seem the first time an operator steps into the ring as a publisher amongst many. Watch this space…
The really uplifting thing about this is that Orange clearly recognises the significance of games to their overall offering and playful interaction is – as I have often pointed out – likely to be a driver for interaction between people in the mid- and long-term.
Finally: do you think this gives any hint as to which brand will survive the merger of the Orange and T-Mobile UK operations?
I know, I know, there’s a ton of conferences out there at the moment but this one has some real goodies to offer. The Social Media World Forum packs a lot of stuff into one by running no less than five different streams (next to mobile, this is the general one, enterprise social media, social TV, and cloud computing). There is a Facebook Developer Garage to go with it, too.
It’s running on 15/16 March in London (Olympia).
I’ll be speaking on mobile & social, making a case for the gaming side of things but there are some others, too… Companies sending top-level speakers include:
- Mercedes Benz
- Mars
- Mattel
- Orange
- Vodafone
- Yahoo!
- Cisco
- IKEA
- DHL
- StudiVZ
- Netlog
- CBS
- BBC
- Fremantle
- Endemol
- Beck’s
- Lufthansa
- Shell
- ING
- Marks & Spencer
- Virgin Atlantic
- TalkTalk
- bebo
- Ecademy
I actually feel quite small now! Come along, it should be inspiring and entertaining. Tweet me @vhirsch to meet for a chat.
It is this time of the year where people start looking forward (and back) and come up with clever analyses of things we have always known and those that we haven’t. And because Europe has always (?) been the thoughtful and fashionably skeptic part of the world, it is that one of the leading newspapers, the Guardian, posts an article querying, gosh, Twitter. The link actually contains the words
trouble-twitter-social-networking-banality
The proof? Iran is still not free (or so most of us Westeners think) and only 0.027% of Iranians use Twitter. There you have it. It concludes that it is all narcissistic navel-gazing. The comments, alas, are a delight to read… 
Where are we then? Is this true? It is – you may have guessed that this be my stance – not. And here’s why:
Social media (Twitter included) is nothing in itself, it merely defines a group of tools. Therefore, it is not the emperor’s new clothes, it is – if anything – the emperor’s new herald: if the emperor has nothing new, interesting, noteworthy to tell, it will remain as dull and meaningless as before but social tools actually allow you to filter, to focus, to spread noteworthy, sensible and truly good stuff to a group of people that is much larger than you could have reached before at a cost that is (per capita and in toto) much lower than before. And that means it is one cool tool!
There are a gazillion reasons to dismiss Twitter (or Facebook – although fewer people seem to do just that these days) on the basis of boring info about breakfast/lunch/supper/traffic jam on way home or to hype it up on the basis of opposition in Iran/arrests in Egypt/tsunamis in Thailand or a mere plane landing on the Hudson. The argument fails both ways. It is not that. It is the fact that it is possible to communicate at nigh zero costs with people that may be interested – and it is upon the people to find you but it is also upon you to find the interesting bits!
I am already slightly tired to refer to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody who provides us with some beautiful examples of this but the point is (and here Shirky’s academic background serves him really well): it is a tool, and a tool makes only sense (or nonsense) in the hand of its user. So here’s to everyone who complains about useless and redundant info over Twitter: choose better who you follow; you would not stick around some dinner party endlessly discussing the virtues of starching napkins either, would you?
As with every tool (say, a hammer), social tools are more useful, the easier and intuitive they are to use. If it is self-explanatory on how to extract something positive (e.g. to get that bloody nail into that bloody board), the better (and if you can do it without walking away with a bloody thumb, even better). At the moment, many people walk away from Twitter because of a bloody thumb. But would you dismiss a hammer only because you hit yourself? Probably not. Unless you find a better hammer of course…
Finally (and because I called this blog “on mobile”), here’s why the combination of social tools with this other tool in everyone’s hands, namely the mobile phone, is so powerful:
- Daily circulation of newspapers worldwide: 450,000,000
- Number of TV sets in use worldwide: 1,500,000,000
- Number of Internet users worldwide: 1,600,000,000
- Number of credit cards worldwide: 1,700,000,000
- Number of toothbrushes in use worldwide: 2,250,000,000
- Number of mobile subscriptions worldwide: 4,600,000,000.
Have a great 2010!
Cartoon credit: Hugh MacLeod (http://gapingvoid.com/)
In my last post, I hinted that the Google/AdMob deal might just not be the #1 deal of the week and, whilst one can of course dispute this, here’s why:
On the same day Google’s AdMob acquisition was announced, there were more guys walking to the bank, namely the good folks from Facebook games kings Playfish (well, joint kings with Zynga) who have been acquired by Electronic Arts for a cool $400m (incl. earn-outs).
Why is this more significant? Because it is (like Google/AdMob) a cross-platform play that (unlike Google/AdMob) also expands the basis of business models deployed. Playfish derives the majority of its revenues from so-called virtual currencies, and in particular also from lead-generation deals (which recently have become “a little bit” under fire for queries of their ethics). But ethics or not (and Playfish seems to have been fairly clean in this respect), the main point is that there has been a business model that is new, well -ish: it is not reliant on display ads nor paid subscriptions or download fees, etc. It is a new form of engagement there, crude in its beginnings but new no less: users are encouraged to interact with brands in exchange for personal details. Now, if done – as often – crudely, this has a bad feel.
But brands might also want to grab this with both hands because it offers unprecedented opportunities to truly enagage their users: interact with them and they will be more forthcoming. Behave and their sentiment will be positive. Be sincere and they will recommend your brand to their peers (which accounts for 74% of purchases online!). Check my recent keynote on this topic…
EA had changed the mobile gaming world when it acquired Jamdat by using a significant distribution footprint and leverage it with its own brands and the financial muscle only someone with its revenue HQ outside mobile could at the time. The acquisition of Playfish provides a similar footprint in the online world (do not forget that Facebook is “only” the largest bridgehead of online games).
As with Jamdat, EA is expanding the options of available business models and this is to be commended!
After much huffing and puffing, Vodafone unveiled yesterday what everyone had been waiting for for months and months: its new Vodafone 360 concept, which will replace Vodafone Live! It launches on – drumroll – LiMo-OS Linux phones from Samsung with touchscreen and GPS and, for the H1, AMOLED display (yum!), WiFi, HSDPA, etc, etc, etc. and also supports a fairly big range of Nokia (not on the N97 though!) and Sony Ericsson devices (although, judging by the screenshots, it doesn’t look as sexy on those).
The 360 thing is, according to the press release
a brand new set of internet services for the mobile and PC which gathers all of a customer’s friends, communities, entertainment and personal favourites (like music, games, photos and video) in one place.
It has an address book with nodes into Facebook, IM (Windows and Google) and will “soon” also cover Twitter, Hyves and StudiVZ (the German Facebook clone). Two tailor-made (!) handsets that use a proprietary (!) interface based on LiMo’s release 2 mobile Linux OS. Users can create groups across different networks (which is very neat!), an app store with 1,000 apps at launch (no word so far what this comprises) and syncing with your computer.
So is this the big thing then? Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly:
The Good
- The service reaches out. It acknowledges (this is a big step for most carriers!) that users have a life outside their carrier. Facebook, Live Messenger and Google Talk are a bit thin, I’d say, but let’s cut them some slack; the others will follow.
- It has a couple of neat twists built-in: I mentioned a few above but there is also a feature that uses some spooky thing called the “Vodafone’s proximity algorythm” and which basically automatically favourites your most-loved people: the most frequently contacted people (like your mom?) come closer to the front.
- At least on the custom-built devices, it looks much better than previous attempts by carriers to make something look and feel a little more user-friendly.
- I hear that the whole widget-thing should be really neat. Now, I haven’t seen any of it as yet but the concept sounds good.
- It works across different operating systems (at least LiMo and Symbian).
As a funny side remark, the PR blurb points out that
The beauty of Vodafone 360 is that all the services work together and they are easy to use.
So they weren’t before, huh? — sorry, couldn’t resist…
The Bad
Some commentators mentioned that the cloud-hosted address book and generally aggregation of contacts, networks etc through a provider rather than through the handset would tie people to the provider more closely (which might not actually be anything Vodafone would object to). I am not sure how tough it would really be (as you have your computer back-up), so easy on that.
It is still very much a closed-circuit affair: It is Vodafone and no one else. It is proprietary, tailor-made and not open. This is not good (and, yes, I know that the oft-cited iPhone is proprietary and tailor-made, too). Alas, its applications are not – unless your name is Spotify; then it takes a little longer…
The Ugly
The underlying proprietary thinking is nothing I can see working longer term. In a world that is (Vodafone press speak)
a substantiator of Vodafone’s new brand expression – ‘power to you’ – which is focused on putting the customer in control and enabling simple and easy to manage communications, both mobile and fixed
this is also a little bit of a contradiction.
But I will say that it seems to be the nicest operator-built environment I have seen so far. And for this to come from the world’s largest operator is no mean feat and might actually yield some results. Go on, guys, tweak it, improve it, show us!
Nokia struck again, it seems. This time? No, not another multi-billion dollar acquisition such as Navteq but another tiny start-up, namely the “boutique” travel social network Dopplr, which the Finnish telecoms giant allegedly gobbled up for anywhere between €10-15m. Hm. Hm Hm…
Dopplr’s Business Case
Let’s see what Dopplr does (besides its co-founder [and angel investor] being an old Nokia hand): the idea is to share trips with friends so that a) people coincidentally going to the same place at the same time (“what??? you will be in Barcelona in the second week of February, too???”) will find each other and b) they can share cool and “unique” tips from other travelers. It is (was?) one of the group of location-aware social networks that have been and are still waiting to come out of cover.
Nokia’s Master Plan
The deal is great for the Dopplr guys who seem to have made a nice return and the pieces of the jigsaw on a very, very, very high level seem to make sense: Nokia is assembling a location-based empire. They acquired Navteq in what was Finland’s largest acquisition ever, they bought German location social network Plazes, and now Dopplr. And it now all comes together at Ovi Maps (which looks quite good!). Makes all sense, huh? The rationale was – arguably – to do to sat-nav systems what they did to (small) digital cameras: kill them and incorporate it into their phones (or multimedia devices). When Nokia moved to Carl-Zeiss lenses, mobile phone camera were basically on par with low- and mid-tier digital cameras. Why carry 2 devices if 1 will do the same job. Easy! And boy did it work!
So, let’s do the same with maps. And, more importantly perhaps, do not maps (and location-awareness in general) find a completely new way of justification in mobile phones, i.e. in devices that are, well, intrinsically mobile? Yes, it does. When Steve Jobs premiered the original iPhone, he famously ordered coffee from the nearest Starbucks, using a maps application. Simple, right? Wooing the masses but nothing much in it, right?
But! On the maps side, Nokia competes against Google Maps (this is what Jobs was using), which is free (if one leaves aside the probably not insignificant investment that will have gone into this service with its various extensions such as Streetview et al). It also has an open API and many, many people use this. It is embedded on the iPhone (Jobs again) and most people I know use it on their Blackberry because it is better than RIM’s own offering. A free download to most phones, Nokias included.
The Impact of (Fairly) Open Networks
Now, I never got these highly specialized things anyway. I find them way to complex to handle: when I am going on a business trip, I am normally much too busy to feed data in some travel network or other. And when I am going on a personal vacation, I am a) even busier and b) want to be left alone (normally). Oh, and did you see that Twitter plans something like this, too?
But even aside from this, when it comes to “being found”, all my friends (real and virtual) knew through my blog, through Twitter and Facebook that I was going to France this summer. Do I really need another, specialized service for this, over and above the ones that can provide that information and also everything else? In other words: does it make sense to try and hone a super-focused service when similar (if not identical) results can – and already are being – achieved through smart filters on networks that have somewhat of a head-start when it comes to active users? I mean, Facebook has more than 300m users, MySpace – even if it seems to be struggling a little lately – will have more than 150m. And then you have Twitter, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, StudyVZ, etc, etc, etc. – that is more than Nokia sells all year.
Now, the existing players are adding geographical awareness as an additional feature to their services. I mean, even YouTube is doing it!
But the real point is: whoever uses one of these (say, when you are in Brazil, you use Orkut), there is a certain likelihood that your friends will, too. Otherwise, you would not be on it. Need more? I doubt it.
On top of that, it is – arguably – much easier to integrate a location-based function into a network that already has hundreds of millions of users (and I am not talking of hundreds of millions phone users because they only are potential users of any service that might come with the phone) than to build one. Nokia does certainly have a great starting point (it sells more devices per year than Facebook and Twitter users combined; see – old – numbers here) but they are not with Nokia because it provides such a great network but because their phones are good.
When it comes to services, it has become an issue of today’s mash-up world where access and resulting services go across a variety of – more often than not – open offerings rather than tight proprietary ones, and Nokia seems to be struggling of getting to grips with this. Some commentators compared it with Yahoo!‘s M&A swoop in order to try and grab back the love it lost to Google and others. Even if one isn’t so harsh, it seems obvious that the thought pattern behind Nokia’s thinking might be a little outdated. I stand to be corrected (and would love to be since Nokia has brought a lot of really great stuff to the world) but that is what is worrying me. So congratulations again to the Dopplr team again but, dear Nokia, for the time being I remain skeptical as to the commercial sense of it (and, yes, I appreciate that €10-15m is but a fly speck on your balance sheet if it fails…).
Orange UK, one of the large carriers in the country with 15.8m mobile subscribers, has released its “Fifth Digital Media Index”, containing a set of interesting numbers on the data uptake on their network, and it makes for intriguing reading!
- Music and video downloads increased both by 38%.
- Games only grew by 8% (but at least they grew; anecdotally, some other carriers recorded sometimes dramatic drops in take-up) to a total of 770,000 downloaded games, which equates to a market share of 23% of all UK games downloads (the total UK games market would hence be 3.35m downloads for the year with Orange claiming top spot). From the top 10 downloaded games in 2008, 8 were part of the carrier’s embed programme, which shows – again – that users appear more comfortable if they can try it out before (embedded games normally are trial versions).
- Social network use over mobile increased by 129% in page impressions per month and 48% in unique users. The monthly average number of pages per user was 397. In terms of popularity of social networks, Orange’s Mark Watt-Jones (@MWJ) fed us additional bits via the Twittersphere: Facebook dominates, Bebo is significant, MySpace less so and Twitter grows very quickly (what was the Oprah moment in the UK?)
- An average of 386,000 GB of data have been transferred via dongles and handsets per month.
- Mobile search grew by 120% with 45% of the results being “off-portal”, i.e. outside Orange’s domains.
- Good old SMS still looking good, too: 19% growth with 1.7bn sent every month.
Today, interesting reports surfaced (or re-surfaced?) according to which Verizon Wireless and Apple are in discussions about bringing the iPhone to the former. However, because Verizon runs on a CDMA network and Apple has only ever supported GSM, commentators reckoned that this deal might be for Verizon’s next-generation LTE network. And this is when one can start dreaming…
Blackberry maker RIM announced it had raced through the “epic” 50m device barrier. An honourable feat indeed! Symbian fired of a riposte (or was it Symbian-fan-boy-bloggers that did? I don’t know) that it had sold just under 80m devices in 2007 alone (with a total install base of 250m), and the Blackberry story therefore was to be considered as “how very quaint”.
