What retailers really want from mobile telemedia

Last week saw the massive Internet Retailing Expo take place at the NEC in Birmingham, which once again featured a huge mobile spin off conference that grows and grows year on year. And jolly interesting it was too. But there was something missing: operators. Not for want of asking, but they were a bit thin on the ground – especially given that the 4000 people who came along were almost all retailers charged with developing their omni-channel retailing.

In was great to hear so many ideas from top retailers about how they are using mobile and about how, to them, mobile is no longer just a channel but part of the whole way they interact with consumers across all channels. To them mobile is not a platform, just part of what they do and how they build a cross-channel customer experience.

Funny how there was no mention really of network operators, nor indeed of the network operator joint venture Weve, set up to bring mobile marketing and payments expertise to the retail and brand businesses.

Only this week, as one of our main stories reveals, Vodafone UK CEO Guy Laurence laughingly told a gathering in London – in a somewhat confused analogy – that “brands and retailers not signing sign up to Weve, will be like not signing the Beatles”.

On paper Weve looks like it might be quite an interesting proposition. Born out of project Oscar, it could well start to make mobile payments easy to do for retailers and it could well help with some joined up mobile marketing. But as important as not signing the Beatles? I don’t think so.

In fact, to any old lags from the mobile industry it is all very reminiscent of the thinking behind operator portals back in the mid 2000s (BA – before Apple). Back then the operators moved too late and too slowly to try and tap up the then burgeoning content business which had, until that point, done nicely through independent providers. It was all part of the plan to stop operators becoming dumb pipes. That, as is easy to see today, didn’t work. MNOs aren’t quite dumb pipes yet, but they certainly don’t really have much of the content market do they? As Juniper Research found, they account for just 6% of content sales worldwide.

Likewise, Weve appears to be a similar land grab – this time for the retail and brand space around marketing and payments.

Of course, there are many people already doing mobile marketing and payments quite well. They don’t need the operators. Weve aims to stomp into this market and soak it up for the operators. Will they succeed? Given past operator form no. It will be too big, too didactic and move too slowly. The operators are up against Google and Facebook here. These two giants of the new economy already have mobile marketing in their grasp. Google has the ability to to make a good play in mobile payments. It's a tough scene to muscle in on.

As with the content portal days, MNOs have the idea that their brand identities are revered by consumers: they are not. Google and Facebook, while not revered, have a certain cache with consumers. They certainly are revered by other brands, retailers and the companies they face. Vodafone and O2 et al don't have that.

They need to woo retailers and brands. They need to come up with a better name than Weve to do it. It will be interesting to see how this ends up, but I am prepared to make a small wager that in five years time youngsters will wonder what you are on if you say “remember Weve?” 

Betting on sports

Mobile gambling and sport are both growth areas for the telemedia industry and our annual events – produced in conjunction with iGaming Business and Sporting Business – are set to take place at the Brewery in London on 24 April. Their timing could not be more prescient. Gambling, especially sports betting and ‘soft’ services such as bingo and lotteries, are rapidly becoming mainstream services – and its all thanks to mobile and tablets.

The growth in mobile bingo is being driven by the services also featuring chatrooms, and much of the experience of going to ‘real bingo’ is being replicated online – something that has driven these services to become very popular with female smartphone and tablet users.

Sports betting is also seeing continued growth. Sports bets has really been the proving ground for mGaming over the past five years and this is set to continue. Again, the addition of social media elements is also driving its use. Only this week, pro footballer – with York City, it still counts – Dave McGurk has launched a socially driven mobile peer-to-peer betting service called Bets of Mates (who said footballers weren’t clever? Though would you have got that from Rio Ferdinand?) which is being pitched as a social ‘bet-work’.

This enabled friends to bet with each other in a fantasy football style league on footy games. While it may not give the big gambling operators sleepless nights, it does show that gambling is becoming ever more acceptable and that mobile social is proving to be a key platform.

While these soft games have started to make mobile gambling ever more widespread, proper gambling has also seen some key developments. No longer viewed as the poor relation of online, mobile is now becoming the proving ground for many new start ups and services.

Real money casino gaming is growing in popularity, and it can be no coincidence that former Betfair kingpin Gerard Cunningham, who founded virtual currency casino Koolbit has launched the first real money poker offering – on mobile.

Hot on the heels of this, Glu Mobile in the US has also rolled out real money gambling on mobile. I smell a trend. Glu partnered with probability late last year and this is its first offering. It plans up to 15 more real money mobile games through 2013.

So why all this attention to real money casino games on mobile? Games – and gambling games in particular – are becoming big money spinners as this is where the consumers are. The UK market allows real money gambling on mobile, so why not? It is what consumers want – from bingo through to ‘proper’ games.

And this is what mGaming Summit seeks to capitalise on. Mobile gambling is established – now is the time to make it grow. And these mobile first offerings are an encouraging sign that mobile’s time has come.

BOOK YOUR PLACE AT MGAMING SUMMIT at http://www.mgamingsummit.co.uk/register

Will gambling be what makes m-payments fly?

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.

NFC debunked in its own showcase?

Well that’s another Mobile World Congress done and dusted – my 15^th. God I am a glutton for punishment. It was striking this year, however, that it was a bit like some of the early Barcelona events in 2004/5 when the thing was dominated by Nokia and Sony (in partnership with Ericsson back then) were offering cool new handsets. There was a distinctly ‘old skool’ feel to proceedings here in 2013.

The problem (well one of the many) at this year’s MWC was that Apple and Google weren’t there. OK, so Apple never is, but Google used to have a stand so big it had a slide on it. This time out no big stand and, perhaps more tellingly, not Eric Schmidt giving the keynote.

On its own this wasn’t such a downer – Android probably no longer needs to really blow its horn loudly in the mobile world to get noticed. But taken all together, these omissions marked out the show as pretty second rate for me.

It also left the way clear for Nokia and Sony to hog the limelight. Where once these two companies were cutting edge behemoths that had the show in the palm of their hand, these days they are very much the also rans of the mobile world. OK, so they got a lot of press coverage, but they don’t really bring anything new to the party. Worse, they give a twisted view of the industry to the outside world.

Aside from this, there was one interesting phenomenon at the show: payments. Mobile payments was everywhere. Visa and MasterCard became the doyens of the show – trying to fill Apple and Google’s golden slippers – with their announcements and pronouncements on mobile payments. Visa is very much in the NFC camp and is hoping, I think, to force that on us all whether we want it or not by sheer pressure. That and getting it installed in Samsung’s next gen handsets.

MasterCard is taking a more delicate approach, extending its PayPass mobile wallet to be more secure and more useful.

All good stuff, but is it a threat to telemedia? It is interesting that these two giants of the financial services industry now appear to be really driving mobile payments. Operators at the show seemed to just lap it up, finally grateful for some leadership on this. But could these bank products for mobile see things like Payforit take a tumble?

The general consensus at the show was ‘Payforwhat?” Of those that had heard of direct operator billing, most foresee a bright future in microbilling and beyond (see our lead story). It will be years before NFC-enabled mobile wallets will be ubiquitous. For now direct operator billing has the chance to make a killing.