A fresh new year with the conference and rumour seasons already in full swing, 2010 promises to becoming an exciting one for all things mobile. So let’s be kicking off another Carnival of the Mobilists (it is carnival season, too, after all). What do we have this week?
Russell Buckley looks at the benefits but also disadvantages of a retail experience online, on mobile and on the high street. He looks at this from the perspective of search vs discovery and, alas, the mobile being, well, mobile, he predicts some impact. Suffice to say, it involves the renaissance of the (much beloved by me) local bookstore! Russell’s post is here.
Mark Jaffe has an almost lyrical contribution musing about “monetizing passion” (and he is quick to point out that, despite the closeness to that other show in Las Vegas last week, he is not talking about adult entertainment). It is an intriguing angle on a well-covered topic: he basically posits that the ability to digitally provide the immediacy of satisfying passion presents one of the greatest marketing opportunities around. I concur! His post is here.
WIP Jam contributes a very insightful guest post by Informa Principal Analyst Malik Saadi who suggests that the fragmented smartphonosphere (great word!) and resultant increasing costs of native development will provide a lever for the mobile web, and he reasons it well! He reckons that the low latency of next-generation networks (LTE et al) will make the web the new ubiquitous platform for app development. If the battery life of the devices holds up, I might add… Malik’s post is here.
The good folks at mobiThinking have a great overview of available mobile metrics reports from the various ad networks, and all of them in one place. A fantastic resource! Their write-up is here.
And, finally, Aviv Revach looks forward to the Mobile World Congress and the second most important thing (after actually finding a place to sit down for your meetings) and is assembling a compilation of networking events (and, well, yes, parties) in Barcelona. Make sure to check in on his post (which he will update) here.
Which concludes this week’s Carnival. Now get back to your work and if you are attending the Mobile Games Forum or the conference that starts the mobile build-up to this summer’s FIFA World Cup, namely M-Football (both in London), make sure to connect; I’ll be at both.
Image credit: http://cbertel.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/carnival-masks-2.jpg
The biggest event in 2010 is, distinct to certain fanboys opinion, the launch of the iSlate or new iPhone or iAnything nor, as Canadians will have us think, the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, but the Football World Cup this summer (and, no, my dear American readers, this is not the Super Bowl). And whereas one could already see mobile rearing its beautiful head at the last World Cup 2006 in Germany, many people think that South Africa 2010 will provide a breakthrough in mobile service provision around this.
and many, many more including yours truly (and as a licensee, I will be cheering the reigning World Champions, Italy, on this time, believe it or not!). Besides all that, the venue is the best: Arsenal’s home ground, the Emirates.
Retailing giant Tesco (where one in every seven pounds in the UK is being spent) has always been fairly active in mobile: it runs an MVNO (on the O2 network) and stocks lots of phones. It had also recently become a seller of the iPhone, yes, just in time for Christmas.
Alas, what was their bestseller? Not the iPhone but rather its opposite, an unbranded phone, the VX1 Party Phone (sic!), that retails for £18.99 and cannot do anything other than making phone calls and texts. It has a minute form factor though and, at that price, is nothing to collapse over should it get lost in the Christmas/New Year’s Eve party trouble. The phone comes SIM free but is unlocked, so everyone can use as a second one.
Gemalto, SIM card maker turned “world leader in digital security” (I wonder how many companies claim that title; it’s like boxing, it seems) 
Besides these points, cross-selling opportunities would appear to be fairly obvious, too. The only mismatch could be that Gemalto focuses on digital security (they list mobile connectivity, identity and data protection, credit card safety, health and transportation, e-government and national security). Alas, no messaging and entertainment here, the two main areas of Netsize’s business.
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, 
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!
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…