Gaming needs to take the tablets

Not such a happy day for GAME, which has called in the administrators and 6000 UK jobs are on the line as the games store struggles to make any money. Interestingly, though, the gaming market and the gambling market are starting to thrive online and, in particular, on tablets and smartphones.

In fact, Juniper Research finds that tablets are making a huge contribution, pushing total end-user games revenues on tablets to $3.1 billion by 2014, up from $491 million in 2011.

In the gambling sector, tablets are also set to make a massive contribution to the growth of ‘mobile’ casino games and in game betting, but it is the smartphone – and lets not forget all those other connected devices such as iPods, games consoles and even wifi enabled laptops – that are really driving the sector.

In fact so big is the mobile gambling sector that Telemedia’s second annual mobile gambling event – taking place in London on 25 April see here for details – now has a line up of speakers that includes some of the biggest names in gambling, as well as big name brands and operators.

What is proving so appealing about the event is that it offers the chance for the mobile and gambling industries to come together and learn from each other as to how to make mobile gambling grow even further than it has in the past year and to start to leverage mobile not just across the gaming arena but also to use it as an acquisition tool, a marketing tool, a payment tool and even a tool to find casinos in the real world!

While Juniper’s report can put numbers on what they believe the market for gaming to be worth on new devices, what it doesn’t consider is this wider market for how mobile devices can be used around gambling and gaming services to make them more competitive and more efficient.

That is why M-Gaming Summit 2012 features speakers from Ladbrokes, William Hill, Bodog, Betfred and more AND speakers from Google, M&C Saatchi and Fetch Media. Of course, there are also all the key telemedia and m-gambling service providers at the show, but this wealth of gambling and marketing talent really hits home how much of a developed industry m-gambling actually is now.

A year ago when we launched the Summit, mobile gambling was at an early stage but had turned that corner of becoming a viable and exciting service. Less than a year later and it is a maturing and highly lucrative sector for telemedia. And we are have the perfect platform for you guys to reach into this sector, so sign up here today.

On the money

This week I have mostly been hanging out at a payments conference in London. While it was obviously very glamorous, this particular event, put on by banks for banks and merchants and corporates, offers a great insight into how the ‘other half’ thinks about payments.

The event, which I have been going to for about five years has morphed in that time from being about remittance handling to squarely be dominated by mobile payments. In fact all the big sessions this year were about mobile payments. And some of the top speakers were from the mobile industry.

What was particularly interesting is that banks still don’t really get it. They still think that without them, mobile payments – any payments in fact – won’t work. And that they can still take their own sweet time in developing services that will be bank branded and they will in effect own the value chain.

But they are wrong. There are already myriad ways of doing mobile payments from good old PSMS, Payforit, through a host of third party tools, right through to mobile wallets, contactless payments and bank branded e-money schemes.

The key thing is that none of these alone will win out as ‘mobile payments’. They will all get a look in and will all be used by consumers to do different things. More importantly, the consumers will decide how they want to use mobile to pay for things and how they will want it to work. They will be aided in this decision by the merchants and brands who want their money. Banks, much like operators, will become dumb pipes.

The one interesting thing to come out of all this is that O2 is poised to launch its own m-wallet scheme in the next month that will be open to all O2 and non-O2 users and will, in the words of the Neil “lover” Lover, head of business operations at Telefonica, “is going to transform the market for mobile payments and NFC”. When pressed as to how this is going to work in a pretty much non-NFC world (does he know something about iPhone 5, I wonder?) all he would say is that “something very very exciting is coming with the launch of the O2 wallet”. Everyone thinks it will be NFC stickers, but we will have to wait and see.

And the place to find out more about the impact of mobile payments on media, brands, marketing, advertising, live events and commerce is The CONNECTED SUMMIT taking place in London between 15 and 16 May. Sign up here to learn from the experts how mobile is reshaping these businesses and the role mobile payments is playing across them all.

Putting telemedia at the heart of commerce

Those of you who read my missive on Mobile World Congress earlier this week will have seen that payments through mobile had a very high profile at the show. Visa and Mastercard are both on board with mobile payments projects with with Vodafone and Telefonica respectively and many other bit part players were also on hand to offer their wares.

Now Visa Europe has invested in a 15% stake in our chums at Mobile Money Network.

Things in mobile payments are really moving apace. The move by these big brands to get on board means that very soon public confidence in mobile as a payment channel will go through the roof and we will really start to see this move as a market. Finally.

But what does this mean for the telemedia sector? Well its good and bad news. The big boys muscling in on mobile payments means that suddenly things are very competitive. On the Brightside though, there should be such an uplift in consumer confidence in mobile as a billing tool that direct to bill mobile payments are going to explode.

And there will very much still be a role for PSMS and payforit led microbilling for not just all the things that they currently used for, but increasingly for all manner of other micro-purchases around the social and retail sectors.

The growth in mobile payments for all manner of services – both digital and real world – is going to have a knock on effect across all manner of vertical markets: and it is within these that telemedia really has its opportunity.

The main areas are of course those that we are concentrating our events programme on this year, namely: gambling, sports, live events, media, marketing and commerce. While there is much that can be delivered with telemedia as ‘premium content’ across all these sectors (which the events will major on), the billing and payment side of things is, both figuratively and literally, where the money is.

Our forthcoming m-gambling event on 25 April and our Mobile Sports Summit on 26 April feature extensive sessions on billing and payment (featuring luminaries such as OpenMarket. WorldPay, Ukash, ixaris, StubHub, Consult Hyperion, Zappit, Sports Revolution and Oxygen8), but also aims to bring the whole telemedia family into these verticals, offering them the chance to parade their expertise and experience in front of dedicated audiences from the gambling sector and the sports business.

In May we are delving into the connected digital entertainment space, again bringing dedicated audiences from the worlds of TV, print, online, marketing, live events and commerce/retail to learn what telemedia – and payments and micropayments in particular – can do for their businesses.

Between them, these four events help set out telemedia’s table in some of the many vertical markets that telemedia can start to deliver benefits – not least through payments. Next year we hope to add more (why not let us know which verticals you’d like us to tackle?).

But the current mainstream interest in mobile as a payment channel – now on the mainstream news thanks to PingIt from Barclays and now Visa and Mastercard’s entry into the fray – creates the perfect environment to win new business and start to place telemedia where it should be at the heart of commerce.

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS shaping the future of payments and messaging

Many of you will have been out in Barcelona last week, pounding the Fira one last time before the show moves to the Catalan equivalent of the NEC out near the gas works and some of you may even have been caught up in the protests outside the main entrance/exit on Wednesday.

The demo was strangely fitting. The students burning bins and making me walk to the airport the long way round were in schtuck because the world’s banks f**ked up. Yet it was the banks that were on hand in the show pushing what, for me at least, was one of the key themes of this year’s show: mobile payments.

Now, anyone in the telemedia industry will tell you that mobile payments is pretty much our bread and butter. But what this year’s Mobile World Congress demonstrated is that 15 years of glacial negotiations and chatter between banking and network behemoths is starting to pay off.

In the UK Barclays Bank has already rolled out PingIt to allow peer-to-peer mobile payments to be made – and more tellingly have linked phone numbers to bank accounts and this set the scene nicely for what was happening in Barcelona.

Visa has tied up with Telefonica to let the network operator use its payments network to make mobile payments a bit easier (and lending its well trusted name to the process too, making mobile payments seem all the more legitimate to the banking public).

MasterCard meanwhile were also on hand to showcase how it too is working with networks, device makers and others to roll out global mobile payments.

But aside from these established names, everyone from Facebook and Google, through to mobile browser maker Opera Software were also waving the mobile payment flag.

If all the talk at the show turns into action, we can safely assume that mobile as a mainstream payment and banking tool will be the norm by the time the next mobile world congress comes around.

While a lot of attention at the show was focused on how the ‘old guard’ of banks and network are developing (finally!) these services, the other theme that got everyone talking was that of Over the Top (OTT) services and the way the whole network messaging market is being shaken up.

SMS is still the dominant messaging technology, but increasingly IP-based services that run ‘over the top’ of the mobile networks – using up bandwidth, but generating no revenue for the operator – are starting to grow. And the networks are worried.

Services such as Pinger are coming to Europe and, in the wake of Apple’s inclusion of iMessage on iOS 5, suddenly the messaging market looks very interesting indeed. Not constrained to 160 characters and increasingly moving towards delivering multiple message types in one box, these chat like IP services are gaining a lot of momentum.

Now, in Egypt the state has banned them to protect the interests of the national carrier, but this approach is not really viable in the ‘democratic West’ and so operators led by Vodafone were at the show pushing Joyn – their own IP based OTT like messaging services.

A battle line has been drawn and there is now everything to play for here. This is one to watch as it has huge ramifications for the telemedia industry: could SMS be rendered obsolete or will it move to be just a payment tool? Interesting times lie ahead.

Of course there was much more out there in Barcelona than we can do justice here, but the twin themes of payments and messaging are, to my mind, the two most crucial to the industry and I look forward to seeing how these things play out in the coming months.