What we learned from Mobile World Congress

MWC 11 was a blast and threw up many interesting mobile developments. It was also timely, kicking of the day that the news broke that sales of smartphones have surpassed PCs in the developed world. We do now live in a mobile world. Capitalising on this, the halls of MWC were awash with the launch of new tablet – and to be fair many other novel form factors – all seeking to gain a slice of the emerging mobile computing world. In some of the more network tech based halls, there was much talk of 4G and LTE – both likely to make mobile networks truly broadband.

But with these network technologies not due on stream for at least another year in most parts of Europe (the US is storming ahead with mobile, 4G and smartphones as the ComScore survey in our story below reveals) much of the talk at MWC was just that: talk.

This is the perennial problem when the industry gathers en masse in Barcelona: 60,000 people become cossetted in a bubble of their own making and often loose site of what mobile is like in the real world. For instance, many of my colleagues (and myself) had to turn off the mobile data on our iPhones as it was just getting too expensive to run. I turned it on to look up the location of a venue and in doing so inadvertently downloaded a load of emails. I received a text from my operator telling me I had just spent £20. By the end of day one I was on £50 and I hadn’t done anything.

Similarly, all round the show the wifi was shonky – though free – and if you did want to make a call, the network was often jammed.

This is the real world of mobile – long on promise, not so hot on delivery, connectivity or indeed affordability.

With that in mind it is interesting to review what the key things that tickle the interest of the telemedia community actually were. While there was a lot of emphasis on new devices, the key themes for me were mobile advertising and marketing, mobile health, m-finance, banking and billing and machine-to-machine (M2M) services.

The fact that this year appears to be the ‘year of mobile advertising’ surprises no one, but is it really? There seems to be an ever growing roster of mobile ad networks cropping up, all claiming to be second in the market behind Google, yet still with much to prove in click throughs and returns. Of course, consumers are starting to click on adverts on mobile, but as with the online world (only much more rapidly) they are demanding much cleverer forms of mobile advertising: it really does have to be content that can be shared, rather than just a banner ad. And guess who does this best of all? Yep, Google.

Mobile health is another interesting one – very much a technology looking for a market. With falling revenues in voice, SMS and indeed apps and other mobile data, the industry is keen to find something indispensible that it can make money from: and healthcare seems and obvious and lucrative choice. There has been much written about how the medical profession can use mobile, but now there are a raft of products being aimed at consumers. A lot of them target those with elderly parents who, rather than paying to put them in a home, can have them wired up to a mobile that sends regular updates of blood pressure and other vital signs, whether they have taken their meds and whether they are upright, breathing and so on. Its guilt based product marketing, but probably has, in the new austerity, a role to play. What the old people who are being wired up with all this feel about it is not recorded.

The other key trend at the show was much closer to home for most telemedia execs – billing, payments and mobile money. There are a wealth (geddit?) of mobile wallet schemes poised to enter the market and still much talk around NFC as a payment tool, but when you talk to anyone who actually routinely collects money through mobile for stuff, PSMS is still carrying the bulk of their billing.

Take someone like Flirtomatic: it is looking at how to integrate all manner of new payment tools into its revamped service and it knows that card and wallet payments will become commonplace eventually, but for now it still uses PSMS and operator billing for the bulk of what it does. No, most companies like this aren’t happy with the outpayments, but it is getting better slowly. So good news, PSMS is here to stay. For now anyway.

Mobile World Congress – M-payments ready to Ramblas?

I trust you are all packed and ready for Mobile World Congress? The giant mobile jamboree gets going on Monday (well Sunday night for most of us) and, even if you aren’t in mobile, some of the things that are going to be happening out there in sunny (hopefully) Barcelona are going to impact the telemedia business – or certainly the consumer facing end of it – with gusto.

While much hype attends the launch of new tablets and much attention will be focussed on the Planet of the Apps up in Hall 7, what is really the key theme for MWC this year – for our industry, at least – is the explosion of mobile billing, payment and wallets being rolled out at the show.

Since the start of the year the idea of mobile payments has shifted from being something that would no doubt arrive at some point, to being something that we will see this year. T-Mobile-Orange-Barclaycard’s promise to have a phone based, NFC enabled payment network up and running across the UK ‘by the summer’ was certainly the starting gun. Judging by the press material coming across our desks here at Telemedia-news in the run up to the show, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was Mobile Billing World Congress.

There are a range of NFC-based payment services being toutes, by operators, OEMs and platform providers; there are point of sales (PoS) systems that now take mobile payment through Bluetooth and even bump; there are a host of mobile wallet products aimed at everyone from apps builders and brands, to handset makers, to service providers, to network operators and on to banks.

Then there are the other, more traditional mobile payment tools, such as WAP billing products like the UK’s Payforit, as well as some companies even touting that PSMS billing has a place (well, it does, but do we really want everyone to know?). In short, by this summer – if not by the end of next week in theory at least – mobile devices will be payment tools.

This is all great news for the telemedia community as it once again puts what we’ve been doing for media, brands, service providers and content owners for years in the forefront of the world’s eyes. Get acceptance for mobile as a payment tool and the world is, to coin a phrase, your clam-shell.

The fly in the ointment is that many telemedia players are going to have to box clever to take advantage of this broadening of the reach of mobile billing. Clever get around such as using in-app billing as a payment tool, or apeing what Starbucks has done and turn an app into a barcode based payment offering allow telemedia billers to get some traction at the shop front.

But, while this opens up huge opportunities in the real world, many may find that their traditional home – the virtual online world – may start to see a plethora of competing, and often much more ‘mainstream’, billing options start to impinge on the traditional territory of PRS.  What the industry needs is to look at how to use what it does best to steal a march on the convenience of the mobile wallet or the mobile chip and PIN device. It can be done, and hopefully post MWC, we will start to see this is in action. We also hope that at Telemedia’s own ‘World Congress – T360 in Leeds and World Telemedia Amsterdam in May and October respectively – we will explore this brave new world. Happy shopping.

A giant leap for mobile

Mobile World Congress is just around the corner, and usually the giant mobile jamboree is where the trends for mobile emerge over five days of stand hopping, conference surfing and late night tapas-snorting networking. But I think that, with more than a week to go until we all decamp to Barcelona, the trends in mobile that will change how the telemedia business works over the coming year or more have already been established.

In short, mobile is going through a huge cultural shift. The ground work has of course been laid during the past few years, but we are now seeing it come to fruition and, as you will see in Barcelona later this month -- and at our own telemedia events in Leeds on 11 May and Amsterdam in the autumn -- how consumers use mobile and what the mobile industry has to do to meet their demands has shifted significantly and fundamentally.

A study by the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) mobile arm reveals that 27% of consumers are choosing their mobiles as the best way to access content and services, and typically they are doing this through their mobile browser, rather than clicking links, using shortcodes, or firing up apps. This is a huge shift. Apps have been seen as the great white hope for mobile and, compared to early browsing experiences, they were. But now people just want the web.

This is borne out by the three year deal signed between UK broadcaster ITV and MIG where the former is using the latter's new interactive platform start to offer apps and m-web based interaction. The good news is that money enters the system through PRS among other billing tools, but the picture is clear: how media interaction with mobile happens is changing. As is how people pay to do it is also shifting.

The IAB research also points to the fact that mobile marketing may also now be hitting critical mass. 40% of those surveyed reveal that when they see an advert they reach for their mobile to find out more.

While some agencies are starting to put QR codes in ads, most don't. Moreover, most companies don't bother -- yet -- to mobile optimise their websites. And they are missing a huge opportunity. Consumers want to come in through mobile, the brands aren't letting them.

And then there is billing. Contactless payments have been much vaunted and it seems that now they are on their way. Everything Everywhere -- the Chimera created by the splicing of T-Mobile and Orange -- has teamed up with card company Barclaycard to roll out a mobile NFC-enabled payment network across the UK, so that shoppers can start to pay with a card embedded in their phone.

Finally, proper mobile billing has arrived in the UK. But as we revealed two weeks ago, Starbucks has got there first with it's barcode based stored value app for iPhones. While it is likely that bank-backed NFC-enabled chip and PIN based mobile payments will eventually win out (once the redemption infrastructure has a been put in place) but for the rest of this year we are going to see an explosion in mobile payments in shops, stations, everywhere.

Naturally you won't find it on planes, the radio will interfere with the avionics, so it may well be that we will still have to have a payment card or cash if travelling by air, but everywhere else we will all be waving our phones about willy nilly paying for things.

There will be some great mess ups, there will be issues with chargebacks and there will certainly be some clever, well thought through new frauds perpetrated on the unsuspecting, but overall it will be part of the huge revolution how people use their mobiles.

And it will all form the central pillar of the next Telemedia360 event taking place on 11 May in Leeds. The conference will be taking shape over the next few weeks -- and we'll keep you up to date -- but never has it been more needed to get then industry together to look at where the next set of opportunities for the Telemedia industry lie.