Mobile World Congress approaches

As February hoves into view our minds turn to Mobile World Congress and sunny Barcelona. But things will be different this year. Since Barcelona won the bid to keep on hosting the congress, the show is moving a few miles down the road to the other Fira, which promises, you’ll be glad to hear, better catering and greater ease of locomotion from stand to stand. It is also really hard to get to for all those that aren’t staying out there, in the wilds near the airport.

But this is only a small cosmetic change in what the new Mobile World City has to offer. BCN – for that is what the locals abbreviate it to, not Barca: that's the footy team – is to be the centre of excellent for mobile all year round. The plan is that congress and a mobile music festival in September will offer huge one off events for the business and the consumer, respectively, while the city will play host all year to a series of mobile development programmes and a mobile exhibition.

All this goes to make BCN the Mobile World Capital, in the words of the GSMA, and is a much needed boon to the Spanish economy. It also might shift the centre of gravity of the mobile world firmly to the Iberian peninsular.

But what all this really hopes to achieve is to create a much more co-operative ecosystem for mobile development, something that everyone in the telemedia industry should welcome.

For MNOs, the industry stands at a crossroads. The risk of becoming dumb pipes hangs ever present. Meanwhile m-commerce is becoming the real raison d’etre for mobile use among consumers – with payments set to be the real battle ground. But what is painfully lacking is any real co-operation between the operators to make it happen.

For a proper user experience, networks have to work together to offer seamless cross network services. For retailers looking to embrace mobile commerce, costs and prices and payments have to be the same across all networks. Yet agreement is so very slow.

And the result is that other third party services are coming along that are going to steal a lot of this business from the operators. Hell, even the banks are working more closely together and more rapidly to make mobile payments works. One has to wonder what the role of the operators is actually going to be? Just maybe dumb pipes?

But the initiative in BCN aims to help put a stop to that, by changing the mindset of how the whole mobile industry works. It is, of course, a massive undertaking, but get it right and mobile could be transformed.

So, while you strap hang on a bus out of town to the new Fira with a banging hangover, just remember that it is all for a very good reason: the future of mobile.

The path of least resistance

Facebook’s been busy. While everyone in the telecoms media – and some of the mainstream press – got overly excited about what they all confidently predicted was going to be a mobile OS/handset/strategy announcement this week (then rapidly backtracking when it turned out NOT to be mobile, but search), everyone pretty much as missed that the social network has moved into mobile.

In Canada, Facebook is running a limitedtrial of voice calling over wifi between Facebook contacts. OK, so its hardly going to have Vodafone quaking in its superannuated boots, but it marks a big step. More and more people – there are more than a billion on Facebook now – use IM on the site to talk to each other. Adding voice is a natural progression and marks the start of a shift in customer usage.

Consumers will take the path of least resistance when it comes to, well, anything pretty much and if it slowly becomes easy to make calls to all intents and purposes, across Facebook via wifi, then people will.

And while many of you are now sniggering and my niaivity, bear in mind HMV. In 2002 it was a £1billion business, surfing the boom in CD and DVD purchasing and the rabid hunger for computer games. Just ten years later its shares are worthless and it is likely to go to the wall. Why? It didn’t understand that consumers want the easy life. Music, film, books and games are all digital content that can be downloaded wherever and whenever the user wants.  And it was cheaper, but that I think is red herring. It's the simplicity and how the medium suits the content.

Apart from purists who want something to hold and sleeve notes to read (and I was one, and I love vinyl), why would you schlep to a shop buy a CD and schlep home to listen to it when you can pull it out of the air, track by track if you want, and listen to it there an then.

It killed HMV, Blockbuster Video and Jessops. It will kill others. Several are dying as you read this.

And the same could happen with Facebook’s little trial in Canada. Make something easy – and in this case free – and people will use it. With a social media generation coming of age, how long before paying to make calls on a mobile is viewed as something your old dad does?

AS HMV et al have proved, the pace of change of technology drives the pace of change of consumer behaviour and this change is becoming increasingly rapid. Businesses die very quickly these days, especially ones with high overheads.

The launch of Facebook graph and its lean into search also plays a role. It could act like a really deep directory that allows you find people and talk to them – not just your mates, but businesses and more.

It is an interesting time in mobile telecoms: OTT services are at a very early stage and they will ravage the industry. In ten years, as with the music industry, the movie industry, the retail industry and so on, the names of the companies that you make calls through will be very different to the ones we lionize today. Things are changing. The revolution has begun.

Micropayments in Online & Mobile Games: a Growing Industry Opportunity

There has never been a better time to be a gamer. As we move into 2013, gaming technology, the devices we play them on and games developers’ business models all now concentrically focus on satisfying the consumer demand for high quality, addictive games and making sure these are seamlessly available, whenever we want them. Of course, this also means that the gamer has developed extremely high expectations from games, conversely making it increasingly difficult to be a games developer. The ‘freemium’ model has expanded exponentially, especially throughout the mobile and online gaming industry, with many consumers now regarding ‘free’ as the staple requirement for most pick up and play games.

So if this is what the gamer wants; free, fast but increasingly fun games on both mobile and online platforms, then how can developers make sure they are getting their just, financial reward for all their hard work? The perfect recipe for a successful, ‘viral’ game is often debated, but how much consideration is put into the best way to gather this financial re-numeration once a game takes off?

In-game purchases within the freemium game have redefined the way that consumers engage with games content, with 40% of those who have played a freemium game having made an in-game purchase (IYOGI) and a staggering 51% of revenue from freemium mobile games coming from transactions over £12 (Flurry).

Freemium games are also now pulling in wider demographics and also presenting new challenges for content discovery and billing on the move. It is now essential to consider and understand a fast, constantly developing suite of micropayments, as well as consider how consumers find and engage with games content and the different monetisation strategies available for Games Developers and Publishers.

Taking a quick look at the available payment options, it’s easy to draw out the main benefits behind each one, seeing why it is so crucial to choose the right payment mechanic, as well as developing a high quality game. Card payments, the stalwart of the payment industry, offer developers wide access to the market and a robust, trusted infrastructure to go with it.

But what about that margin of unbanked customers who fall within the demographic that many Games target? Considering the benefits of using a Prepaid solution would help Games Developers and Publishers to access this untapped demographic of gamers, with Prepaid enabling the conversion of cash into online payment and potential for the use of Prepaid cards as an outsourced gift voucher system. And what if the game requires a snappy, seamless payment mechanic to minimise abandonment of an in-game purchase? Well then it may be useful to consider direct-to-bill payment mechanics, whereby gamers could make the decision to purchase in-game and have the charge put directly onto their phone bill, all in just a few clicks.

Of course, this is a simplified view of the payment mechanic spectrum and there is a much deeper discussion needed to iron out which payment mechanic would be best for freemium or even premium games developers.

If you are a Game Developer or Publisher and interested in entering this discussion about which payment mechanic is right for you, then AIME is running a joint panel event with Games Industry trade body UKIE, which will focus on this discussion and answer other crucial questions such as:

What best motivates a premium purchase; removal of ads, additional features, more rapid in-game advancement, or prestige items?   

Is the freemium model working and will there be a return to upfront paid content?

The event takes place at UKIE’s central London premises on 24th January, 2013. To get involved in this Industry debate and or if you have any questions, please contact David Ashman by email on davidashman@aimelink.org. 

2013: the year of mobile payments?

With Christmas now safely tucked away behind us, everyone connected with mobile commerce is pouring over how well or not mobile retailing did. While High Street stores didn’t do very as well as would be hoped, online commerce had a very good yuletide. And mobile made great strides within this.

Some 20% of online sales came through mobile channels this year as consumers demonstrated just how much they like the ease and convenience of doing it. But mobile’s influence didn’t just amount to cannibalising high street sales, in many cases it actually drove a large proportion of those sales, with more consumers than ever using mobile to research products, respond to ads, use vouchers and generally start their shopping sprees on mobile.

This is all good news for the mobile sector, which I think can now finally say that 2012 was the year of mobile. We have talked for many years about when the year of mobile will arrive (since about 1992 in my case), but now it has.

But it hasn’t panned out quite how many thought. A lot of the mobile sales that did happen – both of hard and fast goods and digital ones – happened on tablets, most commonly the iPad.

The tablet, it seems, is shaping up to actually be a rather good way of shopping, creating what is being hailed variously as ‘couch commerce’ or t-commerce.

But what does this mean for telemedia and in particular the payments side of things?

Well, tablets offer that excellent mix of being able to use apps and websites and so there is slowly emerging a split in payments. Apps are getting all manner of cool in-app billing tools – not least Payforit4 – and so there are many opportunities there for the sector.

The m-website side of things, however, still offers something of a conundrum. Most websites still rely on card payments or PayPal and so it is anyone’s guess as to whether micro-payment technologies can muscle in on this. That’s something for us all to work on in 2013.

In the digital content ecosystem, direct operator billing is coming to the fore and we are going to see a lot more of this over the coming months. As this week’s top story shows, O2 has signed a deal with MACH to make this even more prevalent and the launch of O2’s Charge to Mobile platform is a welcome step forward for consumers at least who are increasingly buying digital content.

This is going to be one of the key areas of development through the year as more services are rolled out that can exploit this sort of technology to deliver great and simple ways to buy things on phones.

And who knows we may yet see this sort of thing start to make some headway in turning mobile into a ubiquitous payment mechanism for anything. 2012 may well have been the year of mobile, but I am now waiting for the year of mobile payments to really hit the mainstream.