So today I attended the second day of the snappily titled
Open Software in Mobile World conference, or OSiM to its friends. It claims to be the world’s largest open mobile software gathering with 85 speakers and 400 attendees, 2010 being its 5
th year of operation.
Well, they struggled big time to fill the event. Today was very sparse and talking to a few people, day one was not much better. I had a quick head count and there were around 25 people in the room for the first session of the day. I guess there will be some post show soul searching, as it seems they struggled to attract sponsors as well. Only the “Bronze” spot showing as filled on the website (Texas Instruments & ST Ericsson) It will be interesting to see if there is any commentary on that.
I caught
Alberto Ciarniello presenting in the main track first thing in the morning. Alberto is
Telecom Italia’s Head of technical marketing mobile broadband & VAS.
Alberto spoke on the topic of “The Open App Store”.
He presented three key market trends:
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The App Market place - Apps going main stream – with consumers seeing them as a better way to deliver mobile and fixed services.
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Social Media – 500m Facebook users, powerful contextual and social enablers. Apparently according to Alberto, Italians spend the highest number of minutes per day on Facebook than anyone else in the world (no figure given though)
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Communication trends – social networking marketing, mobile ads, virtual mall, contextual web, telco 2.0
We then got some data on the Italian market:
There has been a x10 volume increase in smart phones in a stagnant device market driven by choice & reducing prices.
By the end of 2010 there will be 4.3 million smartphones, growing to 9 million by the end of 2013, compared to 17.8 million features phone by end 2010, and 13.1 million by end of 2013.
He made an interesting comment – customers are now used to apps, and are beginning to de-value “open” web access “I don’t really need the web, I’m just using Facebook”, which supports the recent
Chris Anderson Wired article “The web is dead”
Alberto pointed out the classic Operator dilemma; how do we turn this opportunity into a mass market game, by ensuring Telecom Italia deliver compelling services for the 68% of the Italian population that will not be carrying Smartphones in 2013?
Many (including myself) would challenge this as old school thinking, and say why worry?
That 68% represents the late adopters. Invest in the 30% where the usage and the money is at. The late adopters / laggards will eventually catch up, and they will catch up without the Operators having to spend money marketing to them. Adoption is mainly driven by family and peer influencers, reference grandparents texting and joining Facebook to see the photo’s of the grand kids.
Although a little old now (July 2009) this
post on Mashable powerfully illustrates it is the over 55’s joining Facebook in their droves – this has happened without Facebook marketing to them (or to anyone for that matter), and
newer data confirms the trend is continuing with social networking usage growing by 88% amongst the 55 – 64 age group, and 100% for the over 65’s between April 2009 – May 2010.
Alberto made the point that the rise of Smartphone drives complexity and increases the cost to serve, the challenge being on how to turn that into a profitable business. He also made the case for the Operator to provide the role of unifying services, providing trust via brand equity and opening revenue streams for the other players in the value chain.
He claimed customers; expect services to work on any device, demand convenience, security, and tight integration with other Telco services.
Closing, he made a good point that the developer and app store trend has brought tremendous value to the Telco world, however the ecosystem has to provide economic viability for all players, and that open is great, but there has to be some roadmap planning to allow full exploitation of new innovation.
The value of the open initiatives is also measurable in the way we drive them. We need predictable roadmaps to maximise opportunities
After ducking out of the main track to jump on a conference call I couldn’t avoid, I headed over to hang out with
Caroline and
Thibaut for the WIP Jam. Having seen the turn out for the main session, I was worried we would have no one to jam with, but they turned up.
The WIP Jam crew did a great job of injecting some much needed energy and fun into the day, which was getting hard going to say the least.
My notes from the “un-panel” which comprised of
First interesting point was “We hear web web web, but the reality is more and more native apps” It seems many are doing a little of both and mixing both worlds.
John described how mobile web development can provide some benefits; removing the headache of figuring out which platforms to support., and quicker and cheaper to implement cross platform solutions – much more reusable, especially around UI.
Alex agreed web technologies have sped up UI (3
rd of project time), but gave a Korean insight – brands want pixel perfect UI’s. Customers like banks want to specify the UI, and web environments do not provide that accuracy.
Blending of native with the cloud was becoming increasingly common.
Ben described how their apps take a meta data framework from their servers, and they also do a lot of public data screen scraping for analytical purposes.
A few example were given of native apps that have a client / server relationship, but there was the caution around planning for the situations when the client has no network connection, and to be aware of network latency issues slowing down the user experience of your app with the associated risk of putting off your customers.
The conversation moved onto planning techniques. The summary of that seemed to be a desire to adopt agile methodologies, but the reality for many is they are still operating in organised chaos. Ben gave examples of the struggle to manage high level objectives and low level tasks.
Alex said they had cherry picked elements of agile they like e.g. Scrum, and also had the luxury of hand picking their developers. He made the point that many of them are “rock stars” so there are only so many “processes” you can get them to follow before they get fed up and leave. They need room for creativity.
There was an interesting crowd exchange on the role of teams vs. individual coding. The straw poll of the crowd seemed to indicate many were “lone wolves”
Topics moved on to the “business” of apps. One or two were making money from app stores, but the general vibe in the room was they were isolated cases.
John was open that they were not, but app stores have represented a great leveller, providing visibility to companies and individuals that had been previously been locked out of the market
Caroline mentioned they now had 98 app stores in the
WIP Jam App Store directory, and the consensus was it will keep growing, at least for the time being.
The biggest eye opener for me from the session was the absolute importance of the star rating system within the stores. An Android developer in the audience mentioned that if one of his apps slips below 3 stars he de-lists them, despite pointing out himself, that kids & competitors abuse the system by giving a 1 star rating, which obviously brings down the average.
It seems astonishing to me that developers would gamble their ideas and business potential on such an arbitrary measure, but I guess that is a symptom of the current system.
Later I asked a question related to this point. I asked if with the maturing apps ecosystem, and vast choice facing consumers, are developers ditching the “launch and see if it sticks” approach, in favour of a user testing led approach.
Ben confirmed that they do take the time to release alpha and beta versions of their apps, and use the “technical community” to help refine them. He also described how they take the time to contact and work with ever person that leaves a negative rating or comment (1 x support resource, 4 hours a day) Whilst great advice, it did feel a little like closing the door after the horse has bolted. Why wait for a negative interaction before talking to “real” users?
I’m a big believer that developers can really make a difference if they beta test with “real” potential customers, rather than peers or friends ahead of launch. This will help iron out bugs that could lead to those dreaded one star ratings. Also it means you can build a loyal fan base before even entering an app store, so when you are ready to publish you have a bunch of people primed to give you glowing reviews.
<plug> With
O2 Litmus we pioneered the concept of match making developers with our customers to collaborate and beta test apps to avoid just this situation. We have over 8,000 customers sitting there as a free resource for developers to use. Clearly at the moment we don’t seem to be cutting through with the message, so that’s my homework from today – to figure this out some more. Any suggestions – please shout! </plug>
The topic of marketing apps also came up. Ben again came up with some insightful stuff. Reaching out to tech blogs to promote your apps, maintaining momentum is key – planning a monthly update, and as discussed investing in good customer support.
All in all, a great session.
Key personal take out’s
- How can we better promote that our customers are willing to help developers test their apps
- How can we help with the marketing challenges
