PSFK session: good ideas in 2009 – mobile

27Nov08

PSFK are running a series of panel sessions around the launch of their new book Good Ideas in 2009 – the session on 2009 trends in mobile was interesting and well worth the time (you could just listen, not much to see):

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Some very interesting stuff said. Some of the things that got me thinking:

• Steve Roberts (Shoptext): stop thinking about advertising in the mobile space as being little banner ads on your phone. the key is to have personal information stored on the phone, and to send this to advertisers, e.g. by texting to a shortcode allows the advertiser to receive your details without you having to do anything other than a simple one word reply. He talked about an interesting case study with V Fusion, where they did something similar, offering a voucher for a free bottle of the product. After texting, the user got a personalised voucher in the post. Much higher response rates than offering a mail-in redemption offer, and the agency can track the respondents much better. Critically, it’s also an easy process for the consumer.
• How phones are changing banking – although phone companies don’t necessarily want to become banks (i.e. process large volumes of purchases through your phone bill), the ease of purchasing through this channel makes it something consumers want, in some markets. In particular, youth demographics like the convenience on mobile banking, and (a really interesting one!) consumers in developing countries don’t necessarily have access to financial services because they don’t have a reliable and secure postal service – whilst mobile offers a direct secure channel. So, mobile financial services can potentially leapfrog other channels in these cases.
• Companies build mobile applications, but consumers don’t really care about ‘applications’, they just see the relevance of the services within context of something else that they are doing, e.g. communicating with their friends, shopping, finding the best route to where they are going. Someone made an interesting distinction between ‘where you are’ services and ‘what you are doing’ services.
• There’s lots of data being created bottom up by consumers – harnessing this data can allow us to create cool new stuff that wasn’t previously possible.
• GPS data was very tricky to get hold of and use previously – because the phone companies didn’t want to share it. Now that handset manufacturers (OK, Apple) have pushed this forward, there are loads of new possibilities.

We are starting to see user-generated content being overlaid on web content, e.g. running routes on Google Maps, through various sites, but what about if we could track people who are cycling home via passive monitoring of their GPS data (assuming you wanted to share the data of course)? If most cyclists avoid a certain route for whatever reason – even though it’s the quickest, you could benefit from that when planning your own route through town. The new data and functionality on offer through mass adoption of GPS-enabled devices seem to me one of the most exciting things to happen this year.

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Tags: GPS, iphone, mobile, planning, user experience