Telemedia360

Capitalising on a connected Christmas

2012-01-20T10:28:00.000Z

While Christmas may now seem like a distant memory, lost in the fog of being back at work, drizzle and cold weather, it has been hard to escape Yuletide tales this week, as everyone and his dog with an interest (and some without!) release their figures as to just how mobile this Christmas was.

No longer is there any debate that mobile commerce is a cornerstone of the festive season, but more it is a race now, each January, to get the figures out there as to just how mobile it has been.

And it seems that it has been a festival of mobile-ness – most notably on tablets: but more of that anon.

According to IBM, mobile shopping grew by 186.5% between December 2010 and December 2011 as people found doing their shopping while slumped in front of the TV very attractive.

Adobe meanwhile has suggested that, in the run up to Christmas, tablet users were the biggest online spenders. No surprise there: you have to have wonga to have a tablet in my book.

Adfonic found that clicks on its adverts – which it uses as a lose way of measuring mobile browsing – grew steadily in the first half of December 2011, then took off from about the 11^th, as people panicked and started shopping.

The biggest ‘surprise’ was that Adfonic saw a peak on Christmas day from 10am until 3pm. This was put down to people getting devices – iPod Touchs, iPhones, iPads, games consoles and similar – for Christmas then mucking about with them until sitting down to a boozy lunch.

So what does this tell us? Well it shows that mobile and tablet commerce is here to stay and is slowly becoming the preferred way of consumers buying things. But longer term – such as the rest of the year ahead that isn’t Christmas – it means that we now have a substantial user base of consumers that are now m-commerce savvy and this is what the telemedia industry needs to exploit.

We need to look at how to tap into this growing enjoyment and understanding of how to use mobile to consumer and tap into that. A good first step would be a visit to the excellent Mobile Retail Summit at the Victoria Park Plaza in London next Thursday (26^th Jan) (http://mretailsummit.com/)

Then look at how the wider world of mobile commerce – that exploits the whole commercial potential in any vertical market of mobile – can impact your business at Telemedia’s own series of Connected Summits taking place in April and May at the Kings Fund in London.

25 April: MGambling Summit

26 April: MSport Summit

15 May: Connected Media & Entertainment Summit

16 May: Connected Marketing & Commerce Summit

Details to come soon...

Jumping the gun on Mobile free phone

2012-01-13T09:28:00.002Z

One of mobile’s biggest shortcomings is that, while more and more people use them, no one can call a free phone number. This has gone from being a bit of a pain in the butt to now becoming a business critical issue for everyone from TV shows to call centres to everyday businesses.

The prospect, then, of the ability to finally make free calls – paid for by the recipient – from mobile is one that has everyone in the telemedia industry and most people in any consumer facing vertical market jumping up and down with excitement.

So imagine everyone’s delight when MIG and Orca Digital both announced at the top of the year that they were now ready for business with five digit voice shortcodes that would let businesses have easy to remember numbers that callers could contact them on using mobile, for free.

But to truly work it has to be a cross network solution: each operator has to allow it to happen via their network so that the business offering the number to the punters can be called by anyone with a UK mobile, regardless of the network they are on.

And this isn’t in place yet.

Claims that these services are live and work cross network are simply not true right now. Everything Everywhere, the UK’s biggest carrier by user numbers, and Virgin Mobile, which uses Everything Everywhere’s T-Mobile network, are not on board with this yet – and are furious.

There is no big issue with the carrier: it will be signed up to free phone voice short codes by, it says, the end of Q1 and thenceforth these services will run and be cross network. But right now claims that it can be done are, to put it euphemistically, economic with the actualite.

Now a few calls to those concern finds that their exuberance to get these services out there has seen them jump the gun. Speaking to them they say that they are just announcing that they will be able to run these services once EE is on board and are just priming the market.

But since this is a business that every aggregator is going to look to get into because of the massive potential it has, many noses have been put out of joint, not just at EE who had to field calls from aggregators and customers as to why they weren’t told.

Moves like this, while not born out of malice, are very damaging to the industry. Telemedia already has ‘issues’ with mainstream business: this sort of premature marketing doesn’t help mend that.

What is surprising is that it came from two very well respected companies who don’t normally go in for this sort of thing.

Anyway, enough finger pointing. No one meant any harm, but it serves as a lesson in making sure you are clear with what you say you are doing. Many publications fell for it (including me, earlier in the week) and helped create this storm. Let’s hope this isn’t a taste of the tenor of the year ahead or people like me won’t know who to believe.

2012: the year the dots got joined

2012-01-06T12:12:00.001Z

2012 promises to be the year that everything gets connected. Mobile devices have not made everything mobile, but rather have made the internet portable and personal. And this means that suddenly everyone is connected to everything, offering all manner of opportunities across all facets of the consumer world for telemedia companies.

While this move towards a connected world has been evolving slowly, 2012 is going to be the pivotal year when this interconnectedness takes the online world to new levels.

So, for starters we are changing our strap line to Connecting Consumers to Content, Media and Entertainment. While many may see this as just a cosmetic change, it really reflects the role that telemedia plays in the digital world. While it centres around payments and content delivery, what you chaps have is the ability to monetise this interconnected world and help both consumers and content providers create services.

So how will this new ethos be reflected in what we do? Our media products – this weekly newsletter, our monthly e-zine, our magazine, blog, TV channel etc – will be available across platforms and will continue to cover all that is happening out there in connected world and what opportunities there are and who is exploiting them.

On the events side we are revamping and extending what we do to connect the telemedia industry with the key vertical markets that need your help and input. Kicking off on 25 and 26 April in London we have the second outing of the mGambling and mSports Summits and a new event focussed on the opportunities for mobile and telemedia around sports.

This two dayer will be followed on 15 and 16 May, again in London, by the Connected Media, Entertainment & Commerce Summit, which will bring together the key elements of previous T360 elements to put media companies, broadcasters, publishers, web companies, events companies, and other commercial entities in front of the telemedia industry to create new services and new deals.

These UK-based events will be followed up on 17 to 19 October with the International World Telemedia Event in Marbella, where the industry can deal with its own issues and network amongst itself – hopefully in some late summer sunshine.

Details will be live online soon, and we will push out the URLs when the sites have been polished and tweaked following their Christmas break and we will of course make sure you are the first to know as the details take shape.

This panopoly of events reflects how what we are now dealing with is a connected world of entertainment and services – both on screens, in papers and at live events – and promises to be an educational rollercoaster ride of a year. To get involved drop me an email paulskeldon@me.com and for sales information contact jarvis@telemedia-news.com and we look forward to seeing you throughout 2012.

That’s so 2011 – what’s going to be 2012?

2011-12-06T12:05:00.000Z

Happy old year! So that was 2011? Urrgghhh. Well, there is a recession on and things are a bit bleak right? Well, 2012 looks no brighter for the wider economy, however I think the telemedia industry is set to be OK. Already we are seeing more people spending on small treats – a bit of adult here, a spot of mobile gambling there, a load of social networking everywhere – and this trend is set to continue.

While people can’t afford to go on holiday or buy a new car, they want some joy (that hasn’t been ban yet has it?) and so turn to the myriad services offered via telemedia. So for 2012 we will see a load more mobile gambling, mobile gaming, social voting and TV interaction.

These little treats of services will help at least maintain the industry and help development of more low budget, small services for mobile. It will also be driven by the developments we are going to see in other, more high tech sectors that will have a direct impact on the telemedia sector as they get reverse engineered back into what you offer consumers.

Driven by the tidal wave of development this year, we will see huge numbers of people using mobile payments in everyday activities. M-payments is the topic du jour and so much work is going into it that we have to see some sort of full commercial, mass market deployment early in 2012.

Everyone from PayPal to Google to The Mobey Forum to even (perhaps) Apple will be on board with this. Retailers such as Starbucks have already made forays into letting consumers pay using mobile phones and it alone has seen 20million mobile transactions in the US. The consumer hunger is there.

The only thing that needs to be decided is how it will happen. NFC is on everyone’s mind as the way to make mobile payments work, but it is just a platform really – and the tech isn’t there in enough handsets yet. Yet.

There are still many hurdles to overcome with getting m-wallets and cards and so on working and trusted, but personally I feel that the weight of marketing behind this and the curiosity of the early adopter brigade will make this happen in 2012.

Fears over security – largely groundless – will evaporate as it is used. It only remains for the banks and operators to work out how they will work together and it will fly. In the meantime we have telemedia micropayments. In fact, even if mobile wallets and NFC do take off, there will be a growing thirst for micropayments on mobile and this will be filled by you guys. The mobile payment revolution starts here.

In 2012, we will also see a great deal more augmented reality services. This Christmas has seen many come to fruition and its my hunch that we will soon see AR as a much better alternative to barcode and QR code scanning – and becoming mainstream as result.

Right now you can use your phone to conjour up dancing characters around your coffee or chocolate bar, you can turn your ketchup bottle into a recipe book (albeit recipes that use ketchup) and you can even win a Mercedes playing a game based on AR. But this is just the start. AR has been grasped by the marketing world as it near enough delivers magic to users – images that just appear around what you point your phone at: it is mind bending. But its application goes much further. There is no reason why we won’t be wanting to augment everything we do.

And it will happen in 2012. In February 2010 I saw Layar demo-ed at Mobile World Congress and was blown away, but it seemed like a technology that was (1) in search of a market and (2) expensive and hard to do, so someway off delivering. November 2011 comes around and its so prevalent that its free to the end user via Blippar, Zappar and more.

This is extraordinary and will propel AR into the mainstream very rapidly. I believe that we won’t be scanning QR codes in June 2012 to buy something in the eBay pop up shop, we will just point our handset at the item, get all the details and buy it.

But there is more. We will be using it to enhance reading the newspaper (even on an iPad – you will double screen: read the paper on the iPad and use your smart phone to call up the AR). It will change how we watch TV and will totally alter everything from shopping to advertising to adult and beyond.

Finally, I believe that the tie up between mobile and the real world will be the big thing of 2012 – starting with live events, it will flourish everywhere and augment life. Live events already feature heavy mobile components and we will see more and more of this – with AR and with other services – as 2012 progresses.

Mobile will become an integral part of doing anything. It will be how you pay, your ticket, your programme at the theatre or cinema, art gallery or classical concert. It will let you get content from the performance you are watching, it will let you buy merchandise and it will let you order your interval drinks.

It will also be the conduit through which artists and promoters, venues and ticket sellers stay in touch with you, build a relationship with their customers and turn a one off experience – a concert, play, exhibition, football match or whatever – into something that lasts for days, weeks or months after the event.

The London 2012 Olympics will of course drive a lot of this in the sports space this coming summer and will be a proving ground, but expect it to creep into every facet of life.

So, while the world’s economies goes to s**t, there are some fun things to look forward to. I can’t wait for a virtual riot AR app so I can superimpose rioters on rich people’s cars or find the best escape route when the kittling begins in earnest.

Happy new year!

Is Apple sniffing around m-payments with iTunes tweak?

2011-11-18T16:01:00.000Z

It is certainly a happy day for those that set up MIG – I love the sound of money being trousered somewhere out there in telemedia land. I remember when the guys left O2 and set MIG up. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and so it proved. Good enough for Velti to stump up the readies and build it in to its burgeoning portfolio.

And with the whiff of nostalgia swirling around me as MIG sort of leaves home, I turn my attention once again to mobile payments. Things really are hotting up and again NFC doesn’t figure. Last week I marveled at how Starbuck’s was doing 20million mobile transactions through its payment app over the pond. This week, I am drawn to look at a minor tweak Apple has made to iTunes that may yet be the beginnings of the company’s foray into mobile payments. And, love them or loathe them, what ever Apple does has the potential to reshape a market. Or even define it.

Its latest wheeze is this. As part of its upgrade to the Apple Store app, Apple introduced a new service called EasyPay. The service itself is simple enough: it lets a user photograph a barcode and then look up information about the product based on that barcode. It then lets a user charge that product to his iTunes account.

EasyPay is still a very limited service: it is currently only working in the US and only works for in-store purchases of “select accessories” sold in Apple’s own retail operation. That does not even include the purchase of big-ticket items like computers or phones. And according to this article in the New York Times, doesn’t look like it will add them in the future.

And yet, and yet… Apple has 225million iTunes account holders (as of June, and since then at the very least my wife as also signed up); it is a very powerful proposition getting them to use iTunes to start to buy things, even if it is with barcode scanning.

What I like about this is what I like about Starbucks’ approach: it is simple and effective and doesn’t involve too much fancy pants technology being retrofitted. It also fits in to what people already do.

The threat to the telemedia industry is that its billing tools get shut out of the loop, but Apple won’t run the mobile payment world – it may pioneer some interesting aspects of it, possibly even things we haven’t yet thought of – what this does do however is start to get people paying with mobile and, perhaps more importantly, getting brands and retailers thinking about how to use mobile payments and not be put off by all the guff about NFC.

The retail industry is still wrestling with how to use mobile and closing the circle with payments is a key to not just getting people shopping on mobile, but the retailers themselves thinking mobile. And once that happens then the opportunities for telemedia services and telemedia billing are enormous.

Starbucks bucks the m-payments trend – to the tune of 20million payments

2011-11-11T11:11:00.001Z

As 2011 draws to a close – well there are only seven weeks until Christmas, eight until 2012 – I am already ready to dub this year the year of mobile payments. In reality, I should be calling it the year that everyone started seriously talking about mobile as a key payments channel for online, on mobile and retail payments as we are still waiting for many of the mobile payment tools launched this year to become mass market.

But while the world and his dog have been postulating how mobile payments will work, coffee giant Starbucks has quietly turned its app into a very successful mobile payment tool.

I wrote about this in this esteemed organ back in January when Buckies launched th payment app in the US and, to blow my own trumpet, I did say how significant it was. And so it has proven to be. As of the end of October, Starbucks has processed 20million payments through its mobile payments tool. That's pretty impressive.

While many people have been (over) excited by NFC as a payment enabler and while the arguments over how to power various kinds of mobile payment, Starbucks has snuck a simple barcode based system into its loyalty app and, latterly, it's ordinary app. And people have been using it with alacrity.

So what does this mean for the Telemedia space? Well, I think it offers a massive opportunity. For sure, eventually we will be using mobile as a means of paying direct from our bank accounts, probably over NFC, but for the short term at least, brands should be looking at how they can make their apps and m-web sites and mobile-based loyalty schemes transactional. Not transactional in the sense of being ale to by something from a site, but in using them to pay in stores.

Starbucks has the advantage that it's loyalty scheme works by storing up points on a card that can be used to get money off, so they sort of had the plan in place already. Even so, the coffee company has made a simple way to get its customers using mobile to pay - 20 million times in 10 months.

For Telemedia companies, the opportunity lies in convincing other brands -- particularly in the retail sector, but not exclusively -- that the kind of tools on offer around Payforit, pSMS, PRS and the many alternative billing tools available can sit behind apps that allow consumers to pay for things with mobile.

It is a stop gap, but it is potentially a huge one that is really where the mass market for Telemedia payments exists.

This Christmas will be a mobile one in the retail space, with customers researching what they want to buy, being marketed to by people wanting to sell them things, people comparing prices while in stores and, in my case, sitting on the sofa late at night, a glass of wine on the go, and actually doing the entire christmas shop via an iPad.

I will be using Amazon, where possible, so will be paying by one click (so a kind of mobile payment). Next year, assuming the collapse of the Eurozone leaves us with more than just some sticks and a cart full of manky turnips to eat, many people will be using their mobiles to pay for things. Many of them will have been using NFC enabled Droid phones running Google wallet for months by then, but there will still be a Telemedia opportunity, so go grab some of the action.

And I am doing my bit: my book -- M-commerce -- is aimed at explaining how mobile can change how all businesses operate, and payments is a big part of that. Buy it here in good old fashioned paperback or, if you are thoroughly modern, get the electronic version here – it'll make a great real or virtual stocking filler!

World Telemedia Amsterdam triumphant

2011-10-21T15:48:00.001+01:00

Those of you who weren’t in Amsterdam between 12 and 14 October at WORLD TELEMEDIA missed a great event. The old vibe that makes an overseas telemedia event go with a swing and a bang was back in spades. Great venue, great exhibition and great conference – with some excellent speakers, thanks everyone – and, despite the mock-groaning, everyone was secretly glad to be back in Amsterdam. Even the Europub.

The show was particularly interesting as it offered the chance for the industry to come together not just to network and do deals, bit to also start making in roads into some of the key issues that are impacting on it.

Most notable was the upshot of the fraud seminar session on Wednesday 12 October, which not only saw a number of key industry players discuss the issues of fraud – and indeed of arbitrage, more of which anon – but also several of the leading companies in the industry decided at the World Telemedia meeting t form a group to start working to lobby the major networks around the world to start to do something about traffic hijacking.

Hijacking has long been a low-level problem for the industry, but in the past three years it has grown exponentially and is now taking up to 50% of revenues away from some services, according to estimates by the panellists. The ad hoc grouping, which had its inaugural meeting at the show, is set to detail its modus operandi in the coming weeks.

Elsewhere at the event, we saw the usual round of lively parties and drinks receptions – though is it me or is everyone better behaved these days? – and a conference that brought in a host of telemedia favourites and some interesting newbies to debate everything from interactive services, to billing and m-payments, to marketing to chat and dating and telemedia essentials.

One of the most surprising upshots of opening keynote from SKOPOS was that, while most male orientated mobile services are hung around sport, a study of male mobile users found that only 37% of them liked sport. SKOPOS’ research of consumers also found that the web and mobile web use was normalising risqué behaviour among adult users – which has to be good news for the telemedia sector.

The adult worlds of chat and dating – along with horoscope and psychic – are also blooming, our panel found, with users growing despite the recession. Hard times usually bring out the small spends, so traditionally telemedia services do well and this seems to be being borne out. According to AIME’s David Ashman’s presentation flirt, chat and dating has grown by 35% year on year to £37.4million in the UK in 2010. Tarot, psychic and astrology is up 23.1% to £21.4million in the same period.

According to Ashman, virtual gifts is the star player right now in premium rate, growing an eyewatering 438% to £8.1million in 2010 – with even more expected from 2011.

So from a purely telemedia point of view, there is much to be cheery about.

FOR FULL REPORT FROM WORLD TELEMEDIA SEE TELEMEDIA-MONTH OCTOBER ISSUE OUT ON 31 OCTOBER

Cornering the m-payments market

2011-09-09T12:00:00.001+01:00

Payments is very much the top of the agenda this week, with not only news that txtnation will be presenting Transactional SMS (TSMS) at World Telemedia Amsterdam (12-14 October), but that the world and his wife are all getting their mobile payments products lined up and ready for the build up towards Christmas.

Forget NFC and, I think, we can also try and forget the O2-Vodafone-Everything Everywhere tie up to develop cross platform payments and marketing offerings (we can forget that for now, unlike 3 UK which is trying to take the big three to court for leaving them out. Aww, bless). What we have on our hands is a radical rethink in payout rates on PSMS – dressed up as TSMS and direct operator billing – sweeping the US, Europe and Ireland (and coming to the UK real soon).

The move to put PSMS on a 90% payout rate and hide it behind a one click payment button is just what the world needs and will be the thing that makes mobile a mass market payment tool.

Direct operator billing is going to corner the market in mobile payments for digital goods, while TSMS is going to see PSMS essentially being used to buy real things like cans of drink from vending machines and tickets from ticket machines (which are then virtualised and put on the phone, but they are then used in the real world, which makes them tangible enough for me).

This is a magnificent step forward and I think places telemedia right at the heart of m-commerce, where it should be.

And that is reflected in the seminar programme for World Telmedia Amstedam, which while it seeks to uncover the best in interactive media, marketing and commerce, always circles back to payments. Mobile payments is going to be the cornerstone of the m-commerce and m-media worlds once it gets going as it encompasses everything that you want consumers to do.

Getting them to your site, store or service is essential, and this can be done by offering special offers and money of if they use mobile to pay. Once they are engaged with you, you can again get them to do things that require micropayments and you get them to use mobile to pay. While they are chatting, or on social networks or interacting, voting or doing anything else around TV you upsell them and use mobile to pay. If they are in a shop and want to buy something – use mobile to pay.

You see mobile payments is the core of m-commerce in all its forms, and the telemedia industry owns microbilling – you know that together these things are awesomely powerful. So get yourself along to World Telemedia Amsterdam and get the inside track on where m-payments is going.

Will my TV vote go to Facebook?

2011-07-22T14:42:00.001+01:00

In a no-shit-Sherlock moment of clarity, MIG has proved that people want to interact with TV using mobile. And there was me thinking that is what they had built their business around – shows how much I know. Anyway, the findings of MIG’s study are interesting in that they show that much of this mobile interaction with TV will be carried out through social media portals (for which you can read Facebook).

MIG believes that interactive events run via Facebook will generate $51.7 million (£32.04 million) in the UK by 2012 and $2.9 billion globally by 2016. All very good and I am sure there is something in this. But the findings seem to be at odds with what is actually happening on the ground with businesses and social media.

Retailers – who I know are not TV companies, but I am sure there are parallels in terms of how a commercial business looks to using social media – are flailing and failing to leverage the power of social media right now. Research by One iota finds that of the top 100 UK retailers, only one – ASOS – offers a fully transactional facebook site. On mobile, the study finds that a third of retailers now do have a transactional mobile site.

This disparity between mobile and mobile social shows that there is still a very long way to go within businesses to create a proper social commerce eco-system.

Now you could argue that its because retailers just don’t get it and those stubbly, retro-spectacled ‘dudes’ in TV really understand social media. Or you could look at it that usually canny retailers are simply not embracing social media because they don’t need to and don’t see the point.

On the fifth birthday of microblogging social site Twitter last week a study by Virgin Business Media found that only 9% of the UK’s top 500 businesses had used Twitter in a business context.

Why not? Well there are many reasons: there is no real business case for using Twitter (and only a very limited one for Facebook, I believe – its just a website that hosts you); there is a distinct flattening off of Twitter, Facebook and other social network use amongst consumers; and there simply is no need to run things over these services. Yet.

To my mind, no one is using Facebook or Twitter commercially because there isn’t the need to: the consumers are there, but there are many other ways of buying – not least through transactional mobile sites and apps – and so social media is not there yet.

I think the same applies to TV interaction and events. However, they do lend themselves more to social interaction. If I am watching TV – mainly the news about News International’s slow unravelling – I like to shout at the TV and my family and friends. Facebook lets me do this both quietly and remotely. So I can see that there is a role for mobile social interaction around TV; I just don’t get how it will be monetised. And that is what will ultimately bring all this in to question. If its free and easy then great for consumers, but bad for everyone in the value chain. I am watching and waiting keenly to see how this pans out in second half of the year when the massive interactive shows return to out TV screens for their autumn runs. Will my vote go to Facebook?

We don't need such a smart world

2011-07-15T15:49:00.000+01:00

So the sales of smartphones in the UK are slowing down? Can’t say I am surprised. When the iPhone launched it was a luxury item and penetration was – as every old skool mobile company wouldn’t stop telling me in 2007/8/9 and even 10 – tiny. But Android came along and made them cheaper. Nokia had a stab at smartening up and prices fell (and user experience) still further. Operators now bundle even the lesser-spotted white iPhone into £40 a month bundles.

But for many people, a £40 a month bundle is still too expensive and so, naturally, given the price point we are at, smartphone penetration has slowed and might even plateau – until of course iPhone 5 suddenly makes all other iPhones all but worthless.

This slowing in smartphone penetration is being trumpeted as being really bad news for m-commerce, as it means we are at the limit of users and so what we have now is what we will be stuck with in terms of m-commerce use and revenues.

Au contraire! You don't need widespread smartphone penetration for m-commerce to grow. All you need are the simple things such as text and voice shortcodes, some basic banner ads and Payforit and you have the perfect 100% m-commerce penetration rate.

As our lead story about Orca Digital points outs, voice shortcodes are a force to be reckoned with, offering a great alternative to 08 and 09 numbers on mobile – and giving consumers clear pricing – so that things can be sold and billed for via mobile without having to have web-enabled smartphones and tablets. And Orca should know: it leads the pack in revenues generated in telemedia from voice shortcodes.

Of course, as smartphones do slowly become the norm (the Nokia-Microsoft tie up is likely to create a raft of cheap smartphones) then perhaps other forms of mobile payments – which is really the essence of mobile commerce – will come to the fore, but for now you need nothing more than text and shortcodes to create a thriving marketplace that everyone can join in.

I think that, after something of a false start, we are going to start to see a lot more of Payforit across the spectrum of mobile devices as it becomes an easy to use payment tool. There is even research out there that the Payforit brand isn’t even that important – so long as people trust that the micropayment will be successfully completed. So am I bothered that smartphone penetration is stuck at 35%? Not really. Are you?

Selfridges charity network clears up a cloudy issue

2011-06-24T14:30:00.001+01:00

News that Oxygen8 is helping to build a bespoke network in Selfridges so that consumers in the store can text charity donations to the store’s Project Ocean campaign is great news for the world’s fishes, plankton, sea cucumbers and whales. It is also good news for everyone smart enough to look at how to monetize in store mobile action.

While much attention has been focused on how mobile is a tool for retailers to sell stuff via transactional mobile sites and apps, the real benefit mobile technology brings to retailers is in what it can do in store. And what retailers manage to cook up around in store mobile services is also something that other organisations that have groups of people all in one place at the same time – shopping malls, sports arenas, airports, clubs, music festivals and even schools and colleges – can also look to turn to their commercial advantage.

Mobile’s real strength lies in the ability to bring the internet to where the mobile user is. It makes the web personal, rather than just mobile and that personal touch extends to where a person is and what they are doing.

The simple examples so far have been things such as bar code scanning in stores to get more information about products and services, see videos and read reviews. There are also examples of how, at sports events, users can find out more information about players, stats about the team, purchase merchandise and so on. At music festivals, there is a growing move to sell content over the air while bands are playing – rather smashing the ‘sticking it to the man’ ethos of Glasto, but there you go, that’s progress.

The more forward thinking out there see mobile as bringing all of this and much more to the bricks and mortar commercial world (and the muddy fields of the music festival circuit). Adding the idea of augmented reality and the like to all this – so that you can add the web to the real world to enhance one’s experience of it – means that many things are possible.

Each of these things adds huge potential commercial opportunities. Directly selling things using all this tech is just the tip of the iceberg. The potential to revolutionise marketing and the whole ‘consumer journey’ is huge. And it all hinges on the idea not of the mobile web, the web or any other hyperbole doing the rounds but on the personal web.

And that is all brilliant, but…. There is always a but and here it is a big one. Networks. Mobile networks – both those run by operators and public wifi – are, to be blunt, shot to shit. They are stuffed with traffic, poorly powered and frustratingly slow if you do manage to connect. Oh and they drop out half way through doing things. In short, they aren’t fit for purpose.

This is why the Oxygen8-Selfridges network is significant: while it is all being done for “charadee, mate” it is a proving ground for building in store networks and seeing how consumers use them. Taking this technology – and the inherent investment – forward will yield a much richer in store experience that will, in short, let retailers sell more. Rolling it out at other events will increase this personal web engagement and sell more stuff – which is good for us all.

Oh, and while we wait for iCloud and marvel at the new range of Google Chrome netbooks, only this sort of investment will make this cloud idea for consumers take flight. If any of you have tried cloud computing recently you will know what I mean.

Care to take a punt on the mobile future?

2011-06-17T12:00:00.002+01:00

This week saw the inaugural mobile gambling summit, organised by your intrepid Telemedia360 team and the lovely people at iGaming Business and what a triumph. A whole day of thought provoking presentations, intense questioning and a palpable air of learning at the Kings Fund in Mayfair.

As opening keynote speaker Dr Windsor Holden, principle analyst at Juniper Research suggested, there have been a number of false dawns with mobile and gambling, but the iPhone and subsequent smartphone penetration that we see today makes it highly likely that mgambling is going to boom this year.

“The JRA in Japan and the huge boom in mobile gambling in China are set to make mobile gambling commonplace in 2011,” Dr Holden told delegates. “And UK gamblers are already voting with their thumbs and playing gambling games. Brands have to sit up and take note of this.”

Backing this up, Darren Mark Noyce, founder and MD of mobile tracking company SKOPOS, told the conference that consumers are already expressing a hunger for mobile gambling products, with 24% of those surveyed by SKOPOS saying that they were ‘accepting of’ m-gambling. While this means that three quarters aren’t, it indicates that a very sizeable chunk of the market – around 15million mobile phone users in the UK alone – are keen.

“And this number is growing,” says Noyce. “We are already starting to see that more people are interested in mobile gambling in the first six months of 2011 than they were at the end of 2010. We expect our next set of data for the end of 2011 to show that this percentage of acceptors of mobile gambling will have risen.”

Dr Holden also suggested that in many people’s minds ‘mobile gambling’ means casino games, slots and sports bets, while a huge number of people – more than half the population – would be happy to play the lottery on mobile and not consider it gambling.

SKOPOS went on to point out the demographics of the consumers that do gamble on mobile as being 70%, 50% 16 to 30 years old, and 71% fully employed. “These are typical smartphone users and comfortably off,” Noyce said. “They are also the same demographic that uses social media extensively and are not typically people who use betting shops.”

Talk at the show’s after party, however, centred very much on how to use mobile more adaptably to try and cover as many people who want to gamble as possible, looking at how to use apps and mobile web for high end casual gamers, simple text based services to cater to the other end of the gambling community. “After all,” as one anonymous source said, “poor people who don’t have iPhones gamble to get rich so they can afford iPhones”, showing that the gambling and telemedia industries have to work together to look at how to fully exploit all facets of mobile technology to deliver mobile gambling products and to mobilise existing online and bricks and mortar gambling offerings.

The interesting thing is that, as with many other sectors – such as retail, travel, banking, payments to name just a few – the gambling industry (both online and bricks and mortar based) knows it needs to use mobile. The issue is how. The general perception of people walking through the doors at the summit was that “we probably need to learn how to build an app or m-website”, but I hope that by the end of the day they were all thinking much more holistically than that.

Mobile in gambling, retail, travel, payments or any other vertical market isn’t an end in itself, but rather part of the whole. Gambling companies should just think about how they can directly mobilise what they do, rather look at how they can use mobile in its many forms to make what they already do better.

It makes perfect sense for an online slots company to build a lovely looking iPad app that delivers the beans on screen for slots players. It is also great that sports betting companies are looking at how to use mobile to take live bets. But that is just a very small part of what mobile offers the world.

For instance, a betting shop on the high street of Rotherham is not going to be full of people with iPhones and iPads. Its typical clientel don’t fit into that demographic at all, and nor do they want to (even if they win big, they probably won’t become Apple Heads). But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing mobile can bring to that group of people. They will all have mobile phones and so you need to look at how you can use what those phones can do to get those gamers more engaged with you and spending more money.

And the key, as with all things mobile I believe, is text. While those of us in the industry look to all the advanced stuff we can do with our phones, most people out there in the real world know how to use text and, more importantly, can afford to use text. So suddenly the mobile becomes not the gambling tool (or retail tool or payment tool), but a piece of marketing and communications collateral.

This serves to get mobile established as a something non-mobile savvy gamblers and consumers will trust and with this ground work done, you can then develop more mobile-based versions of what you do.

But again, this needn’t be anything more sophisticated than text services if you don’t need or want it to be. Look at The International Sports Betting Company, who spoke at the event in London. Its business is centred around Latin America and Africa and it uses just text to get people betting on sports matches. It is simple, effective and easy to use. It also has the added advantage that it gets black market cash into the official money system, but that’s another story.

What I am trying to say is that simple may be the way forward with all this. Let’s revisit text and see how we can reapply it to services to engage consumers in all channels and give brands in whatever market they operate in a simple and easy way to start on the mobile telemedia journey and then build on that.

A Defining Moment

2011-05-27T11:44:00.000+01:00

When the current Communications Act in the UK came into force in 2003, it was already old and pretty much not fit for purpose. Sure, it cleared up a lot of confusion by bringing together a number of, until then, disparate regulatory bodies under one roof, but by the time it came into force, things had moved on. That’s what happens with what I now call the digital industry: it develops and changes very rapidly.

Look at what is happening in the microcosm of the strange legal wrangles in the UK over celebrities with superinjunctions that are being breached by ordinary people on social networks. This has thrown the government, judiciary, media and social media into a tailspin: there simply are no laws, rules or regulations governing what is happening.

So the fact that the government is now proposing bringing in new communications regulations (see my EXCLUSIVE STORY HERE) – and for communications, read digital industry – seems apt. I think the social media/superinjunction debacle is timely, but unconnected to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) issuing an open letter to the ‘communications’ industry stressing that, in the interests of growth, the regulatory regime around all things content needs to be rethought.

And yes it does. But, do they really realise what they are seeking to do? The open letter is heavily focussed on content – across many platforms – but really what they are getting into is a total rethink on the regulation of, for want of a better word, ‘digital commerce’. And this is a very broad brief.

I am the first to admit that the regulatory framework we have in place currently is no longer up to the job. Look at PRS: we have a very clear and, now with the new PPP Code, pretty effective and fair way of regulating PRS. But, while all this has been happening, many new ways of doing microbilling have popped up, which aren’t covered by the code and so we have a situation where we have great regs for one thing, but not for another.

The same applies across all facets of the connected digital industry, especially as it all starts to meld into one multiplatform consumer eco-system. This throws up massive issues with anyone seeking to apply old, or indeed create new, regulations to tame its worst excesses. You have now the chance to find something you want to buy on one platform that you pay for on another and consume on a third or in the real world. You have potential situations where people are using mobile to interact with advertising on TV to buy something that will be delivered to their home. How do you regulate that?

What I suspect will happen will be that ‘self regulation’ plays a key role in this. To me it is the only sensible way you can regulate such complex interconnected interactions and future proof those regulations for the ten years that the UK government wants any new rules to apply for.

At least the powers that be seem to recognise the enormity of the task at hand and have put out a request for feedback at a very early stage. But many people may have missed the open letter sent on 16 May and may not have made the 30 June deadline for submissions. And you MUST take part. This will change everything globally and there is everything to play for. As the MEF’s Suhail Bhat tells us: “This is probably the most important and significant change to most people’s business they will see in their business lifetime. You have to make sure you have your say.”

Beware: new billing kids on the block

2011-05-20T19:21:00.006+01:00

With another Telemedia360 event under our belts, many of you who were there will have got a great insight into where the business is going. There are many new kids on the block and the world of content interaction and billing has changed. There is still plenty of room for IVR and pSMS billing services, but as media companies evolve what they are doing with mobile – particularly with tablets – then these old ways of doing things face growing threats from other payment tools.

Print media companies love tablets as a tablet app suddenly gives them something they can legitimately charge for to make up for all that free stuff that is on the web. With this comes the huge opportunity for billing for these services. But, while pSMS and WAP billing play a role in getting money into the system, most consumers these days don’t trust operator billing (a recent Kony survey finds that only 25% of people do) because operators are not known for getting their ‘normal’ bills right, let alone handling any other billing on top.

So what’s happening? Well services where cards are registered at leisure on line then used as part of a one click on mobile, tablet, or in-app are pretty popular in the UK, but these models don’t scale in Europe and further afield where cards are not so well used. Here pSMS and traditional billing tools do have a role to play, but they are then not used as the front line payment brand. That is handled by the new breed of payment companies.

In the retail and m-commerce space, things are tougher still for telemedia billing. There is a huge opportunity for mobile as a payment tool for both in-store and m-retail purchases, but that opportunity is slipping away from operators and telemedia companies on a daily basis. Orange and Barclaycard have rolled out a trial for NFC based mobile micropayments in store, but frankly who needs the hassle of an NFC enabled phone, chipped with bank chip and limited only to stores that can afford the redemption equipment and POS integration?

Like media companies, though, retailers are even more reluctant to use operating based billing as the operators want too big a cut of the transaction to make it viable, they don’t see them as reliable enough and operators still slave under the misapprehension that their brand owns the customer and so are reluctant to give ground to retailers.

So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us once again with the likes of SagePay, MGt, Boku, Zong, OpenMarket, MIG, Google and Facebook – not to mention banks and card companies – delivering the payment tools that people will use in the retail space: people trust these brands and retailers trust them too.

There is, of course, a very viable marketing for operator-based billing solutions and they are not going to go away in a hurry – not everyone has a smartphone, so pSMS is pretty much all they have to pay with – but my argument is that we are already seeing a shift in how mobile as a payment tool works and what the brands, media companies and retailers want from it. It poses a massive opportunity to the telemedia sector, but one that to my mind no one is really grasping.

One area where there is still huge opportunity for telemedia billing lies in mobile gambling services. Those of you at Telemedia360 last week will have noticed that mgambling was conspicuous by its absence. Well, that’s because we are running a dedicated show on mGambling – the mGaming Summit – on 15 June at the King’s Fund, in Central London, in partnership with iGamingBusiness. Details are here and it promises to be a fascinating event at the nexus of gambling and mobile. See you there.

Social networking checks in as the key platform for telemedia 3.0 at TELEMEDIA 360 LEEDS

2011-05-17T09:51:00.002+01:00

If there was one key take away from Telemedia360 in Leeds on 11 May, it was that, if mobile marked out the advent of telemedia 2.0, then now we are witnessing the birth of the next generation of telemedia services – telemedia 3.0 if you will – with social media (namely Facebook) at its heart.

Session after session at the show revealed how social media is proving the key target for getting everything from apps to media content to interaction and advertising moving. It also has huge implications for telemedia billing, as new third party payment providers enter this new world as the hunger for virtual goods – and real world shopping – on Facebook grows.

According to Miles Ross, head of mobile at publishers IPC, Facebook is “critical.” Ross says that IPC uses Facebook to “drive interaction with our products and our Facebook products themselves and we are fairly advanced in social games, because that is where our readers are. The hunger for virtual goods is also going to be avid”.

And this means that there is a whole new opportunity for billing and payments, but it remains unclear as to how the telemedia sector is exploiting this currently, leaving the way open to a raft of new players such as Boku, Zong and OpenMarket.

Twitter is also playing a huge role in the media sector, forcing media product brands to sit behind unified URLs so that they can be tweeted and found on multiple devices and through many channels, not just online and mobile, but apps, on tablets and across the social media sphere.

Social media is also playing a vital role in the development of m-commerce and m-retailing, with new ventures such as Whatser and Frooly – who both debuted at Telemedia360 Leeds on 11 May – to create compelling new mobile based services that not only allow people to be ‘social’ but also to fill a novel niche: the small retailer and the high street.

It is interesting to note that at the last Telemedia360 event in Manchester, the m-retail talk was centred on the opportunities that surround major retailers. This time out – just six months later – we are seeing a propensity to target small, independent retailers with mobile as a quick step into mobile commerce.

But its not all one way traffic to social networks. Many are starting to look to some of the key ‘old skool’ telemedia services to drive users in an ever more competitive environment. Friends Reunited is adding dating services, to pull together the ideas of finding ‘people you went to school with’ and ‘people you went to school with who you fancy another crack at’. Around this the social network is also adding in horoscopes from Russell Grant to help guide users as to how well their potential dates might shape up.

This example, delivered by Russellgrant.com’s Kevin Parker marks how social networking is now becoming entrenched in the telemedia world. The question is, does the telemedia industry recognise this? We’ll have to see at the next telemedia event.

TELEMEDIA360 LEEDS Stellar line up complete as industry readies itself for debate

2011-05-05T17:57:00.000+01:00

With just days to go until the next Telemedia360 event – 11 May, the Loft, Leeds – the final speaker schedule has been unveiled and the show promises to offer some great insight into the next stages of development in European media interaction, m-commerce and premium rate telephone services.

AIME chairman Edward ‘Bod’ Boddington and social and digital media expert Darren Mark Noyce from Skopos, kick things off with two keynote presentations that paint the current a future picture of both the media and interaction industry landscape and the needs, likes and dislikes of the digital consumer respectively. The show then moves into session format offering a variety of debate on the new digital media and device landscape and how to engage and monetise consumers therein, A look at how ‘traditional’ telemedia services are evolving in this world and where their opportunities lie, m-commerce, billing, CRM and data gathering and how it can all work at live events.

There is are also two special workshops – one in the morning and one in the afternoon – looking respectively at PPP’s new code of practice and a special crowd sourcing workshop from Noden Dot Net.

The overall programme of the event is designed to lead the audience of brands, retailers, media execs, telcos and service providers through the high level view of what the new digital media landscape looks like – a mass of new devices, new social media tools and new marketing channels – and how to bolt that together with the proven money making ideas that have powered the telemedia industry for so long.

The afternoon sessions reflect how telemedia is becoming the cornerstone of the broadening m-commerce marketplace and so we look at how the tools used in telemedia are starting to play a wider role in the m-commerce and m-retail environment: taking in m-commerce services, billing and m-payments, CRM and data gathering.

We finish off with a look at how telemedia will play out at live events – not least the London Olympics in 2012.

The two workshops also fit nicely into this, offering a much more in depth understanding of two vital side issues around servicing this marketplace: regulation and crowd sourcing.

PPP, the premium rate industry regulator and the part of Ofcom charged with overseeing how this interactive digital world is policed, is introducing its new – and significantly revamped – code of practice in September, so it is taking the morning to talk to interested parties about what the changes mean in practice for companies that will seek to work within the new rules.

The afternoon sees a change of tack in the workshop room with a detailed look at how social engagement through crowd sourcing and other techniques, delivered by Noden Dot Net. In this modern world there is more and more pressure to reach out to your “community” via the internet. There is also your own need to drive innovation, resource new content and drive down costs whilst improving your brand profile. Crowdsourcing allows you to engage the internet connected audience by asking them to supply you with ideas & content. At the same time you are effectively reaching a larger community using the principles of social media and viral marketing

· Getting web & mobile users to upload video and audio content to your website.

· Normalizing and formatting for best site integration

· Moderation, content approval and publishing / broadcasting

· Capturing UGC through promotion and social media

· Creating competition online

· Legal requirements and management levels

For more details and to register to attend go to www.telemedia360.com

The speaker line up delivering this is below:

9.00 - 9.15 Opening Keynote:

Telemedia’s role in the new interactive landscape

With TV interaction turning to social media and apps, and with publishers embracing online and digital publishing with alacrity, our panel sets the scene for the day exploring how the telemedia industry can lead the chase for eyeballs and earlobes.

Ed Boddington, Chairman, AIME

9.15 – 9.30 Mobile users and the digital society

An statistical overview of the digital society and what opportunities lie out there for brands, media companies and the telemedia sector

Darren Noyce, chief analyst, Skopos

9.30 - 10.15

The new digitized media landscape

New devices, new operating systems, apps stores, m-web and social media: today we operate in a very different media world. Our panels and presenters explain how Telemedia services can continue to add huge value to media, brands, broadcasters and retailers

• What services are the best fit for what devices

• Mixing interaction and monetisation

• Working with the new platforms players – getting Facebook, Twitter and the myriad of app stores working for your content

• What value social media

• M-web, apps or both – what works best for media

• Increasing importance of loyalty and CRM

PANEL

Mark Challinor, Head of Mobile, Telegraph Media Group

Miles Ross, Head of Mobile, IPC

Carl Costa, Songhi

Matt Baskerville, Shortlist

CHAIR: Adam Maxted, Square Media Consultancy

10.15 - 11.00

Engaging and interacting in a multi screen digital world

Whether you are a media company, broadcaster, retailer or a brand, the new landscape for media delivery also affects how you market your services and how consumers interact with you. Our panel and presenters show you best of breed solutions to win in these battles

PRESENTATION 10.15-10.25 in-SMS ads

How to use consumers to spread your message with in-SMS affiliate services

Efe Udugba, CSO, GText

PRESENTATION 10.25 – 10.35 What about Wifi?

With up to three quarters of mobile ad traffic coming through wifi in the past year, it looks like its time to rethink business and billing models; is PSMS no longer fit for purpose?

Sebastian Garel-Jones, Admoda

10.35 – 11.00 PANEL DEBATE

• How social media, apps and new channels are affecting the interaction paradigm

• What solutions are there for broadcasters, media companies, brands and marketers to generate incremental new revenues?

• The role of telemedia in this new landscape

• Where does fixed line fit?

Todd Green, FreMantle Media

Stephen Petheram, MD, MGt

Sebastian Garel-Jones, Admoda

Efe Udugba, CSO, GText

CHAIR: Paul Skeldon, Editor, Telemedia-news.com

11.00 - 11.30 networking with tea and coffee

11.30 - 12.30

Traditional Telemedia service update

While the media landscape may be crowded with new devices and business models, consumers still love the same services – they just want them delivered in different ways. Our panel and presenters take a look at how the telemedia basics are shaping up

• Latest developments, products and services in Psychic, horoscope, life coaching, chat and dating

• Issues affecting the market, including regulatory updates

• Creating effective services for brand and media clients

• The impact of new devices, new delivery channels and new media

• Exploiting SMS, MMS, Video and social networking

• Monetising through add ons

Kevin Parker, Russellgrant.com

Danielle Morgan, Sales & Marketing Manager, Flirtomatic

James McNab, Sprint

Taya Bose, Com&Tel

CHAIR: Paul Skeldon, Editor, Telemedia-news.com

12.30 - 13.00 CASE STUDY

Where traditional services meet new media and brands

FMCG brands are using Horoscopes/Psychic for PR, CRM, editorial content and incremental revenue. We find out how brands, including Asda, are using bingo, dating, horoscopes rather than the traditional "in print" models.

Kevin Parker, Russellgrant.com

13.00 - 14.00 lunch

14.00 – 15.00

M-Commerce – so more than just retail

SPONSORED BY NET-MOBILE

Mobile is the ideal sales tool, offering a channel and billing – as well as today total broadband web connectivity. So what are the main games in town for m-commerce?

PRESENTATION 14.00 – 14.10 Social shopping

A look at how social media and mobile together are revolutionizing mobile commerce, with a case study on fashion retailer Republic

Damian Hanson, One iota

PRESENTATION 14.10 – 14.20 Local m-commerce

A presentation looking at how local markets are being serviced by mobile

Michael Ord MD Frooly (leo Kellgren email)

PRESENTATION 14.20 -14.30 Local social shopping

Whatser

PANEL DEBATE

• What is being bought on mobile – real, virtual or both?

• What can we teach tangible goods retailers about mobile commerce?

• Turning mobile marketing into mobile commerce

• Drop charges, telemedia billing and the new world of retail

Justin Richardson, MD, Net-Mobile (UK)

Damian Hanson, One iota

Michael Ord, Frooly

Colin McCaffrey, 2Ergo

Colin White, Netsize

CHAIR: Paul Skeldon, editor, Telemedia-news.com

15.00 - 15.45

Billing & payments – the options to consider

SPONSORED BY OPENMARKET

Making all interactive and m-commerce services work relies of collecting money and extending that to allow for payment through device in stores and online. But the billing and payment landscape has changed radically in the past two years.

PRESENTATION 15.00 – 15.10 In-app billing

The try then buy app model is a staple in the games industry, and ripe for media subs. We offer a masterclass in working with Android and Ovi on technical and regulatory intergration of in-app billing with case studies

Presentation by OpenMarket

PANEL DEBATE
The panelists will then discuss:

• The rise of Apple, Boku, Zong and the others

• The role operator billing might yet fulfill

• How 90% payout transactional SMS billing is becoming reality

• What NFC and other mobile payment tools bring to the party

• Refunding to phones and accounts – a new opportunity?

• International billing and payments come of age

PANEL

Stephen Petheram, MD, MGt

Danny Marino, txtNation

Speaker from OpenMarket

CHAIR: Paul Skeldon, Editor, Telemedia-news.com

15.45- 16.15 network with tea and buns

16.15 – 17.00

Telemedia CRM & DATA – the marketing department’s dream come true

SPONSORED BY NETSIZE

Both fixed line and mobile services generate extraordinary amounts of detailed data about the consumers’ behavior interacting with your brand. . But how do you harness and monetize this data from marketing and commercial perspectives?

• Creating data and using it as a marketing tool

• CRM best practice & Data Protection Act main points to watch

• Comparative studies of how well CRM generates repeat calls and up sell across media types

• CRM, data and Age Verification – protecting consumers and your business

• The role of delivery through SMS, MMS, Apps and M-web

• Collecting and re-using data through new channels – how do apps, m-web, social media and wifi change the data game?

PANEL

Stephen Upstone, Velti

Kate Atkin, mLaw

Colin White, Netsize

CHAIR: Adam Maxted, Square Media Consultancy

17.00 – 17.45

Telemedia and Live events

With the Olympics just around the corner and sports clubs all getting on the mobile bandwagon, we wrap up the Leeds show with a lively debate about how best to put all that we have learned today into practice around live events.

• Opportunities for telemedia in live events

• Opportunities for media, brands and retailers around live events

• Cementing the two with mobile, kiosks and more

• Challenges of making it work

• From marketing on page to ticket on phone – the complete journey for the modern event

• Case studies and demos from around the world.

Panel

Luc Jacobs, TeamBlogger

James McNab, Sprint

CHAIR: Paul Skeldon, Editor, Telemedia-news.com

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME

10.15 - 12.15 PPP 12th CODE WORKSHOP

On 1 September 2011, a new Code of Practice and industry-wide Registration Scheme will come into force for premium rate services (PRS).

· The new Code contains rules that apply across the whole PRS value-chain. Information/content providers will be responsible for consumer protection for the first time.

· The Registration Scheme is mandatory for ALL providers in the PRS value-chain. You will not be able to do business in the UK market unless you are registered.

14.45 – 16.30 CROWDSOURCING WORKSHOP - SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT IN A CONNECTED WORLD

Hosted by NODEN DOT NET

In this modern world there is more and more pressure to reach out to your “community” via the internet. There is also your own need to drive innovation, resource new content and drive down costs whilst improving your brand profile. Crowdsourcing allows you to engage the internet connected audience by asking them to supply you with ideas & content. At the same time you are effectively reaching a larger community using the principles of social media and viral marketing

· Getting web & mobile users to upload video and audio content to your website.

· Normalizing and formatting for best site integration

· Moderation, content approval and publishing / broadcasting

· Capturing UGC through promotion and social media

· Creating competition online

· Legal requirements and management levels

Social refinement – all thanks to mobile

2011-04-21T15:49:00.001+01:00

While we are tooling about town in the sunshine, we will mostly be making good use of social media to get the most out of our time off from Telemedia Towers. And how social media has changed. Refined from being just a series of check in services that let you win badges, or shoot birds or whatever, social media now uses the tools of location, recommendation and peer group pressure to create services that actually enhance your life.

The launch this week of Whatser – a Dutch location based service that lets people collect bars, restaurants, shops and places and share them with their friends – marks a sea change in how mature social media, especially on mobile, has become. No longer the stuff of kids, it is now shaping up to be a serious business tool.

In the case of Whatser one that allows smaller, local businesses to grow organically and gives such businesses a valid and workable alternative to coupon services than can, for the smaller business, actually cause a lot of bottom line damage, rather than boost sales.

For the bigger brands, companies such as One iota are opening up the joys of using Facebook – which to all intents and purposes these days is a mobile social network – to create a new way of selling.

Together these two services mark how social media services are becoming the back bone of m-commerce, especially in retail. They are also becoming increasingly embedded in TV and media interaction services thanks to the work of companies such as MIG.

We touch on how social networks are becoming something of a new 'OS' for many developers, but this belies what social really offers; these services are using mobile technology to refine how people use and interact with the vast amounts of data coming their way from cyberspace. This is the true power of social media and how it will shift how money is made around the digital environment.

And that is why social media sits at the heart of the seminar sessions being undertaken at Telemedia360 in Leeds on 11 May, sponsored by Core Telecom. There will be a range of companies that are harnessing social media to create new revenue streams around media and commerce on hand and much of the debate at the show will centre on how to operate in this brave new world. So, before you tuck into your pile of chocolate Easter eggs, sign up at www.telemedia360.com

Mobile payments set to fragment?

2011-04-18T00:01:00.002+01:00

Mobile payments, especially around retail, is becoming a very hot topic. The idea of using NFC for contactless payments from phones is gaining pace, even though bar one Nokia handset and some stickers, no one is doing it. It has, as ever, all been spurred on by rumour that Apple is going to build NFC and a card chip into iPhone 5 (well it was, then it wasn’t, now it seems to be on again). Google is also looking to do the same.

But with no hard evidence that any of this is actually going to happen any time soon, where does that leave mobile payments? As we saw last week, PRS revenues are growing, spurred to some degree by people using PSMS to buy Facebook credits to interact with TV shows, but when it comes to the real money pot – the retail sector – nothing really is happening.

Operator billing, as we all know, is too expensive for retailers to consider using. Then there is the problem that a growing number of people are accessing retail sites from mobile devices but using wifi (as many as 75% according to one company), so any form of operator billing becomes clunky at best if plain irrelevant.

Then there is the issue of consumers themselves. A study by Kony Solutions, which builds apps management platforms finds that only 16% of consumers would prefer to use operator billing to pay for things, with the majority (75%) wanting it to be something directly linked to their card or their bank account.

The reason? They don’t trust the operator to get it right. Too many people have problems with their mobile phone bills as it is without having to trust it to cover other purchases.

So does this mean that telemedia billing as we know it is doomed to never get a slice of the retail space? Well no, but it is likely to be limited to the sub £10 mark. That said, however, that is a potentially very lucrative space in itself and, handled correctly, could well be a nice niche to carve out for that kind of payment – especially for those without credit and debit cards, or who wish not to use their cards for some purchases.

Mobile payments are meant to make things easy and simple, but the fragmentation that this turf war will bring could see it consume itself. Having one set of payment tools for low cost items, another for in store buying, yet another for online purchases – as well as having to have cards and cash for those places that won’t be doing contactless mobile payments – makes for a more problematic world for the consumer than we have at present. Progress this ain’t.

The debate will rage on for many months – not least until iPhone 5 arrives – but to get a clearer understanding of how the changing landscape effects mobile payments, our panel at Telemedia360 in Leeds on 11 May is set to at least try and clear up how the billing landscape may work in 2012 and beyond. Register here to learn more

PRS starts to grow again driven by virtual goods on social sites

2011-04-11T00:01:00.002+01:00

PRS in the UK is in recovery mode – well unless both PPP and AIME have gone, as my Belgian friend says, “complete banana” – with the sector recording some modest growth in 2010 and with more to follow in the coming year. The growth has been driven largely by media interaction, where PRS calls to vote are starting to make a huge impact, along with social media on mobile seeing a rise in people using PSMS based services.

But it is the growth in the purchase of virtual goods that really tickles my telemedia taste buds. Up 400% on the same period the previous year, it has become a market worth in the UK alone £8.1million in 2010.

Virtual goods include virtual currency to spend in games on social networking sites, ‘virtual gifts’ such as virtual birthday cakes and, more recently, virtual charity badges with a donation going towards the consumer’s good cause of choice.

According to figures from Analysis Mason, 8.5% of consumers have bought a virtual gift or object related to a social networking site using a phone-paid mechanism, while 19.4% of 25-34 year olds and 16.5% of 18-24 year olds have bought a virtual gift using PRS in the past six months. The average micropayment per transaction for virtual goods is £2.41.

This is all great news for the telemedia industry as it shows that, while more traditional areas of revenue generation are plateauing or even tailing off, social media is starting to offer some real openings for new business.

Another element of this that is encouraging is that consumers are once again trusting phone-bill based micro-payment tools. Complaints to PPP fell to unprecedented levels in 2010, with just 3% of people saying that lack of trust in phone paid services stopped them using them.

While the general economy may be in turmoil – I would cry “up the workers” at this point, but I don’t want to get hurt as the health service won’t be able to look after me – the PRS sector is again bucking the trend. The old adage that these services always do well in a recession as people seek some cheap comfort and joy was ringing a tad hollow.

But social networking, smartphones and a general embracing of a new way of interacting with each other and brands, has seen consumers resurrect the PRS sector and offer some rays of hope.

This is why the timing of Telemedia360 in Leeds on 11 May couldn’t be better. Featuring a line up of media, service provider and operator speakers, the sessions all look at how the digital ‘media’ landscape is shifting and how media companies, brands, telcos and service providers need to think in new and agile ways about how to engage consumers and offer them the kinds of services that they will pay for.

Some of it centres on new things and new ways of thinking, but a lot will really just involve putting well understood practices onto a new platform: the social media platform.

To learn more about getting involved sign up at www.telemedia360.com

Billing branches out

2011-04-07T11:12:00.000+01:00

Billing company MGt has secured £5million in funding to expand its frankly excellent PayWizard billing tool for it to be used around things other than content, opening up the vertical markets of travel, gaming, gambling and more to this highly flexible billing tool.

This move towards cornering multiple markets, especially hitherto untapped verticals such as travel and healthcare, should mark MGt out from the crowd, but instead is another exemplar of how micro-billing has evolved from a niche tool used to charge for some of the more exotic things on the web to something that is going to sit at the very heart of the mobile-commerce dominated world of tomorrow (which sounds like the strapline for a really bad 1950s B-Movie, if you say it in a gravelly voice).

And this is why billing still sits at the heart of our telemedia events. Telemedia360 in Leeds on 11 May is designed to be the event that not only offers some specialist insight into billing and payments, but also shows how, at the heart of the digitally connected world we live in, has to lie the ability to easily, quickly and securely pay for things.

MGt’s PayWizard has set the bar high, but all the other payment tools – including SMS, WAP billing, PRS and others – all have different things to offer different services, circumstances and budgets. And this is what Telemedia360 in Leeds will be seeking to lay before its media, brand and commerce audience. The days of trying to persuade media types that mobile and PRS had much to offer them is over… they get it. But there is still a gulf between what the likes of our supercool sponsor Core offer and what many businesses are actually doing; its time we showed the some really cool stuff.

For example we can help media companies overcome some of the more onerous things about running subs services through certain apps store billing mechanisms. We can unveil the use of PSMS as a proper commercial tool with great payouts. We can line up some of the key players in media, brands, retail and content commerce to show you how they have started to make things reall happen in the multiple device digital landscape.

We are finalising speakers and panellists as I type, so keep checking in at www.telemedia360.com through coming days for more details.

Telemedia360 is set to be the thought leaders’ thought leader, using all our expertise across the interactive market to pump out a raft of new ideas.

And to gear up for that, we are also having a golf day.

Like I say, the thought leaders’ thought leader.

T360 Leeds leads the way

2011-03-17T18:01:00.000Z

And we are off… the run up to Telemedia360 on 11 May has begun. We have a lead sponsor – Core Telecom – in place and the conference schedule is shaping up nicely to reflect how the print, broadcast, online, advertising and FMCG sectors are all once again looking at how to use the good old telephone to drive interaction and engagement.

And while much attention has been placed on how to develop apps and in-app interaction with TV brands, and while many FMCGs have chased the allure of social networking, the fact remains that the good old premium rate telephone market still provides a sure-fire way to engage consumers while creating revenues directly.

Don’t get me wrong, the apps stuff and all the social glue is also key and will become ever more prevalent over the next couple of years, but they still have yet to find revenue generating business models that stand the test of time. PRS doesn’t have to worry about that and, judiciously used, can generate all manner of valuable consumer data to boot.

At a time when regulator PPP is poised to publish its next Code of Practice – which will make up one of the key workshops at Telemedia360 on 11 May –featuring a landmark shift in how it apportions blame (sorry, I mean ‘responsibility’) as well as seeking to make it plain that it is in this to make things better, not to screw cash out of PRS companies and aggregators, T360 hits Leeds (Core’s home town) at a time when PRS is likely to see something of a resurgence.

And we hope to be playing an active role in making that resurgence happen. By getting leading media companies, broadcasters, brands, ad agencies, operators and telemedia companies together under one roof for a day and a night of full-on networking, chin-wagging and knowledge transfer, we hope to kick off the renaissance of PRS as an interaction and engagement media.

The event will of course look at how ‘old favourites’ such as chat and dating, psychic and horoscope can work for media and brands through PRS. We will also be looking at how, thanks to the new device landscape we find us in – and a world where comsumers value advocacy, interaction, but are reluctant to pay for anything – we can develop services and business models that have worked so well in PRS to drive revenue and engagement through these new channels and new devices.

We are also looking to run a series of special workshops at the event, drilling down into specific areas. Details to follow in the coming weeks. For now though, keep an eye on www.telemedia360.com for the latest news and developments of this key media interaction event and book your place.

Core Telecom announced as lead sponsor of Telemedia360 in May

2011-03-07T15:19:00.000Z

Core Telecom has been unveiled as the lead sponsor of Telemedia360 (T360), which is taking place in Leeds on 10 and 11 May 2011.

Core Telecom is an independent network operator, providing a full range of 07, 08 and 09 numbers, coupled with industry-leading call management solutions and ultra-reliable outpayments.

T360 was established in 2009 but this is the first time it has been held in Yorkshire and Leeds-based Core Telecom was instrumental in bringing the conference over the Pennines from its previous incarnations in the North West.

Jarvis Todd, Director of T360 said: “Core Telecom is the ideal partner for T360. Not only are they based in Leeds but are also one of the rising stars in the telemedia industry thanks to their growing reputation for service excellence. We are absolutely delighted to be working with them”.

Mahmood Mazhar, Core Telecom’s Chief Executive added: “It was a natural fit for us to get involved in T360 as it brings together media companies, network operators, service providers, billing experts, trade associations and regulators to discuss, in a dynamic, interactive one-day forum. We know that we offer an unbeatable telecoms proposition for the creative industries and are proud to be associated with many of the resellers and service providers who will be delegates at the show, so this is a fabulous way to promote our services and put Yorkshire on the map at the same time”.

Apple taking a bite too far?

2011-03-04T07:34:00.000Z

This week, we have mostly been at the FT Digital Media & Broadcasting conference, and have mostly been hearing everyone berating Apple – and now Google too – for “skimming” 30% off the price of everything and, Apple in particular, trying to control everyone and deny users choice.

I have to say as a consumer of digital media, content, music and so on from many years and having done it all almost exclusively through Apple I used to think its was just sour grapes: we didn’t think of it , and they did and its just not fair.

But I am starting to come round to the idea that actually, while iTunes was great at seeding the market and did the necessary in shaking up the moribund mobile content market, it now wields too much power, tries to control too much of what the consumer can do and is, frankly, a bit old hat.

But could it all be set to change? Independent apps store GetJar – the second largest apps store after Apple’s – is seeing some surprising results from letting users buy apps with one click billing and is getting rave reviews from developers about how it is making apps fun again – and not taking such a hefty cut.

Amazon is also planning its own apps store and rumour has it that one of its USPs will be that it won’t be taking as big a slice as Apple and Google.

And then there are the UK’s mobile network operators. I have written already this year (and at the tail end of last) that they are widely tipped to start offering much better revenue shares on mobile billed sales – partly to start making mobile billing seem more attractive to the vast number of retailers who want to see mobile become a payment too, but also to apps and other m-commerce related vendors, who are crying out for a better payment tool that delivers better revenues.

As the video on TelemediaTV suggests, this would give them not just the icing, but would give them the cake.

The idea is that developers could benefit so greatly from, say, a 90:10 split (rather than Apple’s 70:30) that they would do all in their power to plug operator billing as their preferred payment channel. This, in turn, would give operators and massive new revenue stream. Enough to more than make up for the historically high payout rate.

It would also open up operator billing – and related telemedia add ons – to a much wider use in retail and other m-commerce arenas. It would also be a massive boost to stopping MNOs becoming bit pipes. Not that I think there is anything wrong with being the pipe: we all need pipes.

Forget trying to be content providers, the networks can become the billing and payment channel – as well as being the delivery pipe. And the developers, SPs, telemedia companies, media players and brands – as well as the consumer – all win. And Apple looses. Surely that cheers all you Apple haters up?

What we learned from Mobile World Congress

2011-02-22T10:56:00.000Z

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?

2011-02-10T19:29:00.002Z

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

2011-02-04T10:20:00.002Z

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.

Starbucks brings M-Payments to market – and no NFC in sight

2011-01-25T19:22:00.001Z

If you aren’t reading this in Starbucks right now, there is I’ll wager, every chance that you will be recharging your batteries in said coffee emporium at some point today. Its has become part of the nomadic life of us telemedia people: we all moved to the country, but find ourselves trying to have meetings in London, so we head to ‘Buckies… you know how it is.

Ironic then that, while we’ve pumped so much money into the Seattle giant’s coffee coffers doing our business, they are leading the revolution in billing and m-payments that doesn’t use any of our billing tools and certainly marks another milestone in the shifting fortunes of operator billing.

Starbucks in the US is pioneering the use of mobile as a payment tool, harnessing the power of the company’s existing loyalty-cum-payments card and making it mobile. Unlike other coffee houses that offer loyalty cards that veer between the slick (Costa’s electronic credit card stylee offering) to the utilitarian (Café Nero’s cardboard number – frankly my favourite, its so low tech its cool), Starbucks has always taken a different tack, offering loyal users a charge card that they can load up with money and get more credit put on it as they loyally get fried on caffeine.

Whether the long term plan has always to be to turn this into a mobile or even multichannel payment tool is a moot point; today they have seamlessly got their be-chino-ed denizens to start getting their iPhone scanned to not only get loyalty points, but also to pay for their coffee.

This is remarkable and I think is the breakthrough moment for mobile as a contactless payment tool. I was holding out for iPhone 5 with its built in NFC and probably some sort of chip-and-PIN chip in April, but I think Starbucks may have stolen a march.

OK, so the payment tool uses a barcode that the barista has to scan – and there are many inherent problems with that, not least ear goo smears – but the whole thing is based around web enabled app on the phone. This is genius. No need for built in chips, no need for special readers and all that, it's a goddam app.

This changes everything. In app billing is exciting and has multifarious uses in our world, but using apps as a stored value gateway looks to me like a pretty simple way of turning all the smartphones already out there into payment tools – and if we are relying on barcode scanning technology, then the investment for the merchant is similarly small.

The upshot for telemedia is profound. Getting people – even geeky people – to use their mobiles to buy everyday things such as cups of coffee cements the role of mobile in consumers’ minds as a payment tool. That can only enhance the uptake of other mobile payment tools.

But there is a danger: increasingly on my travels around the offices of media companies, games and gambling firms, content providers and retailers I am getting a strong message that operator billing is not for them. While reverse billing has been extremely useful in many markets for many years, the rise of online-registered cards, the proliferation of debit cards and even the rise of things like Ukash are seeing PRS being eroded. Operator reluctance to improve payout rates isn’t helping much either.

But with Starbuck’s payment app comes home: it shows how smartphone tech can be used to create payment tools, and with the coffee house leading the way, telemedia players have a huge opportunity to deliver new billing tools that any merchant, selling any thing, can use.

2011: the year of mobile gambling – finally

2011-01-25T19:21:00.002Z

Where 2010 certainly became the year of m-commerce – especially in retail – 2011 is already shaping up to be the year of mobile gambling.

OK, so various analysts, journos and other great thinkers of the age (and me) have been calling it the year of mobile gambling seemingly since Jesus was a boy (or at least since Justin Beiber was a boy – not that I think he’s the second coming or anything: check out the reviews of his ‘autobiography’ on Amazon if you want a laugh), but this time it feels different.

The swell of interest in social gaming and interactive mobile game play driven along in 2010 by Farmville et al on Facebook and by the explosion of smartphones across the handset market has seen a renewed interest in gaming generally. 2011 looks poised to become the year when this enthusiasm for interactive social gaming tips over into punters placing a small wager on the outcome. And from there we will see an explosion of gambling growth.

The other key driver is the boom that I believe will happen in in sports mobile interaction. Football stadia across the world are all looking at how to move from their week-day mobile and online offerings into compelling – and premium – services they can offer in game (and by that I mean while a real game is going on). Part of this inevitably will be betting.

And it doesn’t end there. The rise of interaction with TV talent shows is likely to spill over into how gaming and gambling can be added to programme formats. As our top story this week reveals, FremantleMedia has brought its nascent gaming division into the core of its business and is looking at how to create really interesting new formats (watch out for news of this, including an exclusive TelemediaTV interview with Simon Murphy coming up at the end of January).

Bringing these to strands together, 2011 has all the ingredients to make mobile gambling not only an acceptable way to while a way a few minutes, but an increasingly integral part of social networking, game play and enjoying sporting fixtures: both live and on TV. It will also become part of the whole media consumption experience.

And Telemedia-news and our associated products are here to guide you through this brave new world. The one issue facing all gambling protagonists is getting the money in (and occasionally getting money back out again) from punters. Online, gambling sites offer a panopoly of billing tools; mobile will be the same. And that means that it won’t just be pre-registered cards, but the whole gamut of alt.billing payment tools perfected by the telemedia community. This is a huge opportunity for the industry. Are you ready to take it?

TELEMEDIA360 MANCHESTER – Moving the media on

2010-11-12T10:44:00.000Z

November 16 and TELEMEDIA360 Manchester draws near and, with the line up complete, there is much to look forward to. As you will see from our round up of the week’s news (below) there is already much discussion about the issues tackled in the conference as the media and telemedia industries look at how to embrace m-commerce and start monetising what they do across all media platforms.

The among the key things that the event is looking at are how print and TV companies need to look these days at such a complex array of options when looking at how to exploit new channels.

From a print point of view, delegates will hear from Inge van Gaal from INMA that newspaper publishers are still locked in some old ways of thinking and that the market is moving on.

“In general the main problem for at least the newspaper owners is that they still think of their newspaper as a product to put online, on mobile devices and get money from it,” she tells Telemedia-news.com ahead of her keynote panel appearance. “This of course is the old way of thinking and it doesn't look into the real problem: what is it that they offer that would create unique value people want to pay for?”

In van Gaal’s view its not just about sticking a paywall in between consumer and content, but is a complex balance of what people will pay different amounts of money for and on what devices.

“The coming of smart phones and the tablets have changed people's behavior but also have and will make them more and more demanding. And many more of these devices will come into the market next year. The smart phones have showed a radical shift in how people are using their phone. Many of the tasks done via smart phones used to be done via the computer,” she says.

“The content providers will soon have services related to where you are with your smart phone. Question is how will we pay for that? Will advertisers see a use, maybe.”

From a broadcaster and wider media point of view, fellow keynote panellist Stephen Petheram, marketing director at MGt, it’s not just a question of how do you monetise multiplatform, but how do you first create a homogeneous view of your content and services across devices and platform.

“Once this is in place the services are much more compelling and you can look at how to monetise them,” Petheram says. But here there is also a challenge: “there is no compelling micropayments system that can handle subscriptions and one off micropayments across all these channels”, he says.

This will be a bone of contention at the show and is why TELEMEDIA360 MANCHESTER exists – to bring together media companies and billers who do offer the kind of payment and micropayment tools that will suit the complex array of pricing and business models a pay-for-content environment will unleash.

That is why the event on 16 November not only features seminar sessions on monetising media, the impact of new devices, the role of gaming and social media, as well as the opportunities in live events for cross platform, but also it has in depth drill down sessions on billing, payments and m-commerce that will show the media industry that the tools do exist to monetise complex cross-platform media and content business models.

Featuring a stellar line up that includes:

THE TELEGRAPH MEDIA GROUP ▪ TALK SPORT ▪ LIVERPOOL FC ▪ ENTERACTION ▪ MGt ▪ RUSSELLGRANT.COM ▪ INTERACTIVE NEWSMEDIA MARKETING ASSOCIATION ▪ O2 ▪ ASSOCIATION FOR INTERACTIVE MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT ▪ MOBILE INTERACTIVE GROUP ▪ SPONGE ▪ BEMOKO ▪ FUSION TELECOM ▪ QUESTICO ▪ ORCA DIGITAL ▪ INTERACTIVE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES ▪ OXYGEN8 ▪ STAN JAMES ▪ ATLAS PREMIUM BRANDS ▪ OPENMARKET ▪ BOKU ▪ TXTNATION ▪ NETCOLLEX ▪ ZED ▪ ROULETTECRICKET.COM ▪ M LAW ▪ MAKE IT RAIN ▪ MONTY MUNFORD ▪ GUAVA ▪ GP BULLHOUND ▪ 2EGRO ▪ MBLOX ▪ OFCOM ▪ C3 ▪ WIN ▪ GLOBAL TELECALL ▪ MOBILE FORMATS ▪ PHONE PAY PLUS ▪ ADVERTISING STANDARDS AUTHORITY ▪ RIBOT ▪ NET MOBILE ▪ TELEBILLING ▪ BCH DIGITAL ▪ ADVANCED TELECOM SERVICES ▪ KCOM ▪ SQUARE ONE COMMUNICATIONS ▪ CELLCAST ▪ 24SEVEN

TELEMEDIA360 MANCHESTER is the one-stop-shop boutique event for uncovering the true meaning of m-commerce and multi-platform content monetisation. Book YOUR PLACE now here

Text for success – its the consumer lingua franca

2010-10-20T10:25:00.000+01:00

The launch last week of O2More, the carriers location and time targeted advertising service marks something of a watershed in how mobile marketing works. Now consumers can, when they enter a ‘geo fence’ around a brand offering something they have pre-opted into, will get a message offering money off or other inducements to engage with that brand. Such offers can also be targeted around time of day also and are showing how mobile in retailing and commerce isn’t just about buying stuff via the mobile channel, but is also about retailers using mobile to drive footfall into the stores they have already heavily invested in.

But what makes it all the more exciting for the telemedia industry is that it uses text. Yep, good old SMS. OK, if you are a smartphone user you get a graphically enhanced MMS, but the service is designed to use SMS wherever possible as that is useful to the vast majority of people with mobile phones.

This move ‘towards’ SMS in retailing and marketing is clearly driven by expediency among those wanting to reach the widest audience possible. It is also the lingua franca of the people right now.

A survey by mBlox has found that 71% of consumers in the UK want mobile coupons sent to their phones while they are out shopping and 59% wanting retailers and brands to contact them using SMS.

Looking specifically at the role of SMS for business communications, 59% of UK and 17% of US consumers surveyed stated SMS as their preferred choice when being contacted about appointment reminders.

“More and more people are turning to SMS for important communications because emails can easily get lost or overlooked in an email inbox,” says Brian Johnson, senior vice president of sales and marketing for mBlox. “Mobile phone penetration in the US is now catching up to the UK and mBlox is experiencing a hockey stick effect in growth for business-to-consumer messaging. Businesses are beginning to give their customers the option of how they want to communicate with them and increasingly consumers are realizing the power of mobile messaging.”

For payment reminders, such as credit card and utility bills, the consumer research showed that more than one in three consumers chose SMS as their preferred communication channel in the UK, but just one in 10 chose SMS in the US.

“To stay ahead of our clients demands in key verticals such as Finance, Communications, Pharmacy and Travel we will launch 15 unique SMS programs this year,” agrees Jennie Hanson, SVP of West Corporation’s Alerts and Notifications business. “We see many companies adding SMS to their customer contact strategy for payment reminders, order ready notices, appointment reminders, customer care, promotions and a variety of other notifications as consumers begin using text messaging to communicate with businesses and not just family and friends.”

So text is firmly on the agenda again driven by retailers. But it is also looking likely to gain credence in the business sector too and, should it ever return to TV, in the voting stakes as well.

Personally I use text all the time and think that its an easy and cheap way of marketing and of developing communications between business, brands and consumers. We don’t need all the flash ‘flash’ graphics; we need simple messaging. It is also cheap to do and everyone can do it.

In these straightened times we are likely to see a lot more text based services happening as brands reach out to the maximum number of people with the minimum amount of outlay.

Find out more on how SMS and MMS marketing are going to effect the market at Telemedia360 in Manchester on 16 November, when we have keynote presentations from mBlox and OpenMarket.

Lipsmacking thirstquenching acetasting motivating goodbuzzing cooltalking highwalking fastliving evergiving coolfizzing IVRdriven mobilemarketing Pepsi

2010-10-05T18:16:00.000+01:00

In this day and age of apps and mobile web, canny cross platform marketing, multimedia video downloads, social media and all the other things that gets people in the telemedia space hot and panting, you’d think that there wasn’t any room for such prosaic services as IVR and ringback tones – they are so 90s and early 00s.

But you’d be wrong. IVR and ringback tones look set to get a new lease of life. Both technologies are still widely used, but both have lost their sex appeal years ago. IVR in particular is like death and taxes, boring but important and totally unavoidable (unless you are Tory donor Lord Ashcroft, in which case you can safely dodge one of them, if not the other). Ringback tones are up there with Strictly Come Dancing as the king of cheese.

But they both have a hugely important role to play in the development of mobile marketing, as ably demonstrated by Pepsico (makers of, to my mind the far superior of the colas) Pepsi in Turkey.

Cola wars are intense in all regions and Pepsico, having seen its market share hit by a new kid on the block – Cola Turka – in 2003, looked at how it could use the then nascent mobile marketing – among other things – to take on this rival and to try and chip away at Coke’s lead in the market too.

Fast forward to 2009 and the company had seen off Cola Turka, and was gunning for the big red ‘un and was seeing some stunning results with mobile marketing campaigns that offered those that texted or called the numbers inside the lids of Pepsi bottles free mobile minutes and the chance to win prizes etc.

So far all pretty standard. But Pepsi had a challenge on its hands. Between 2003 and 2009 it had successfully used mobile to target youngsters. Now it wanted to use mobile marketing to get itself in front of the primary shopper – mums. And this was a whole different ball game.

So the company turned to Turkey’s answer to Oprah to start getting the message across to this crucial, multipack buying demographic. And how did it do this? Well it used TV ads of course, but it also used IVR and ringback tones. When anyone entered to get free minutes, they got an IVR call back from Turkish Oprah telling them how great it was to get free minutes and to tell their friends a number to call to also get free minutes. When the friends called they got a ringback tone message from Turkish Oprah telling them how great Pepsi was and so on.

Thanks to this canny use of IVR and ringback tone advertising, the offer spread virally like wildfire, notching up 25.8million calls, more than 5million of them uniques. Pepsi even claims that it out performed Coke in the market in the Spring of 2009.

Pepsico upped the ante again in 2010, using IVR, ringback tones and MMS videos to create an even more in depth – and totally mobile – spring marketing campaign (it saved money for the big summer push, when cola wars are at their height, by not investing in TV ads). This time it used the star of Turkey’s leading soap to do the IVR and ringback tone message and to create an MMS video advert too.

Again the campaign spread virally like, well a pretty contagious virus, and soon the company was again getting more than 6million unique interactions and sign ups and sales went through the roof.

And it is thanks, in part, to the use of IVR as part of the marketing mix. This lesson, learned today at the MMA Forum in London from Ugur Oglu, marketing director at Pepsico Turkey, shows how mobile marketing is a mixture of channels, technologies and some good old fashioned outside-the-box thinking. It also shows that IVR has a huge roll to play in turning static mobile marketing campaigns into celeb driven interactive campaigns that can spread, if you get it right, like the plague (well, they do call it viral marketing).

So take heart IVR providers: the future is yours to take – just get your message out there to those brands and mobile marketing agencies and show them how its done.

BlackBerry comes out to play

2010-09-29T13:08:00.002+01:00

Apple has, until now, held all the cards around tablet computers, the latest device sub-genre to get developers excited/overworked. Then came Samsung, with some shortlived fanfare. Now BlackBerry has joined the throng with its delightfully named PlayBook (not BlackPad as most of the media called it) and the game is truly on.

The device is highly capable, looks good and, like iPad and GalaxyTab, does loads. There is no denying that it is a superbly engineered bit of kit. All that the media can find to knock it on is the choice of OS – not really something that impactful so long as it works.

But perhaps this device long tail that is emerging is something of a phoney war. There is no shortage of hype around tablets and how they are going to revolutionise the media and content market, but will they?

OK, many will be sold on the back of the hype and there are always enough people out there with money to chuck at the latest fad, but, once the dust of publicity has settled, will people really actually use them or will they be dug out in five years time when people start moving house again to the bemused smirk of “Darling, do you remember this?”

The experts thing that tabs are here to stay. The newspaper barons think so too. And the content providers really hope so.

Already these devices are having an impact.

Research by eMarketer suggests that these devices – along with the wealth of music players and games consoles now getting wifi and smarts – are making the content market, especially for games, music and movies, boom, hitting $1.54billion this year in the US alone.

“The continuing advance of smart devices—including tablet-style computers, led by Apple’s iPad—and the growing ubiquity of mobile broadband networks mean that consumers have to make fewer compromises when it comes to the consumption of games, music and video,” said Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Mobile Content: Games, Music and Video Take to the Cloud.”

eMarketer estimates combined revenues from three principal streams—subscriptions (streaming music and mobile TV services); direct and pay-per-view downloads (full music tracks, games and TV/movie/event programming); and advertising-supported (games, music services and video)—will more than double from 2010 to reach $3.53 billion in 2014.

Gaming is by far the leader in terms of usage and revenues: The number of US mobile gamers is expected to reach 64 million in 2010, driving revenues of $849 million.

Meanwhile the number of US consumers who watch mobile video or television on their mobile devices is expected to reach 23 million this year and draw revenues of $719 million. By 2014, however, mobile video revenues are expected to reach $1.3 billion.

The main factor driving revenues to game, video and music publishers is still paid or subscription-based content, though ad-supported revenues are expected to grow at more than double the rate of paid mobile content through 2014.

“The rules have not been written—yet,” Elkin said. “The ongoing digitalization of media and the increased emphasis on monetization spells opportunity for mobile game and music publishers as well as producers of video content.”

But there still remains a niggling doubt in my mind that as the phone gets smarter, the need for tablets starts to disappear. Couple this with web enabled TV hitting homes now – and that all new TV’s will be wifi enabled by 2013 – and the role of the tablet as a media and content consumption device starts to look really shaky to me. It just doesn’t fit anywhere.

I am sure millions will be sold and used, but in a few years time this market segment will be dead and buried and we will be back to looking at the TV screen, our laptops or our phones if we want to engage and it will all depend on where we are.

This will be one of the key themes at Telemedia360 in Manchester on 16 November, where we will have a panel of experts, lead by Sponge and Bemoko, to talk about what impact new devices will have on the market and whether we are right to get in a lather about tablets.

Book your place now at www.telemedia360.com

Practice what we preach

2010-09-22T18:18:00.001+01:00

I, like many of you, went to Ad:tech at Olympia this week and was surprised. Yes, I was pleasantly surprised that it was a lot busier than last year and really pretty up beat. Surprised too that there was a lot of emphasis on mobile, which until this year has tended to be something of a curio rather than part of the main event. But I was most surprised by the fact that, for a show about electronic marketing – taking in mobile and social networking – no one was actually using any of the tech available to get through to people on the show floor.

I was expecting Bluetooth shots from stands. I was looking for some SMS and MMS contact from exhibitors. I was hoping for some sort of in-show social network that took the meeting system idea to the next level. What I got was a trade show. With stands. Often empty stands. With some poor signage.

Now, to be fair I did learn a great deal from the on-floor seminars and I did meet some really interesting people and got some real insight in to social media marketing, where mobile marketing is heading and some great stats and stories. They even laid on the sponsored airship to cruise majestically about the hall. It was on this level a great show.

But for an advertising/marketing event, especially one that is aimed at the e and i sectors (e-commerce and i-whatever) the overall display from most of the exhibitors was awful. Stand after stand with nothing more than a pop up featuring way too many words. Many with no staff on them. Others that had no branding to speak of at all, just a few flyers (again, generally pretty poorly designed). Very few had any gimmicks.

I know times are tough and, as David Cameron and Nick Clegg make us all embrace dour economic realism there is no space for showyness and extravagance, I was really amazed to find that no one Bluetoothed me with a teaser, or used bump to give me their details, or had QR codes on their stands so that I could get some bumpf from them electronically.

No one was there collecting my data either apart from the organisers. Hats off to DMG and the Ad;tech team for getting their electronic badge scanner to work. I was mightly sceptical as I stood in the queue on arrival with my ‘badge’ on the screen of my iPhone waiting to scan it and get my proper badge, but lo, it worked a treat. I even used the e-badge on my phone for the data gathers at the door.

But that was it. Why weren’t any of the exhibitors actually using what they sell to not only demonstrate that it works, but to get those that are visiting from the ad industry and from the brands to buy into what the technology companies expect consumers to adopt?

While there was so much going on on the show floor and it was a really great show, the exhibitors let themselves down. I signed it with FourSquare when I arrived and got my Swarm badge as there were more than 50 other people logged in. I fired up Facebook places and saw quite a few familiar faces come up on that. But no one thought to leverage it at all.

And this isn’t just me whinging. A survey carried out by the MMA last week found that, across Europe, 25% of consumers want to have a mobile response channel to adverts in any medium – and if they had it, they would use it.

A quarter of consumers out there WANT to get in touch with you from your adverts using their mobile phones. Its doesn’t even have to be a QR code or anything fancy: an SMS shortcode is all they are looking for.

So with this in mind, it is doubly disappointing that the industry can’t even be bothered to use mobile cleverly to market to itself at its own event. What hope giving consumers what they want?

So I am going to do it. It’s time that we in this industry practiced what we preach. Trade shows are social gatherings of a finite number of people interested in the same thing – they are a social network. So Why don’t we treat it as such and harness all the powerful marketing opportunities social networks offer? Anyway, I am going to make this happen, so watch this space. Trade shows will never be the same again.

TELEMEDIA 360 MANCHESTER Gearing up for social gaming and drilling down for facts

2010-09-16T16:02:00.006+01:00

Telemedia360, the leading event for the interactive media, marketing and online industries, has revealed the conference programme for the forthcoming event on 16 November in Manchester, and is looking heavily into not only media monetisation through alternative channels, but also the role of gamification, social media (and social games) and the device long tail.

The conference is split this time into three parts: an interactive seminar programme covering all the main media interaction issues of the day, a set of drill down seminars that will look in depth at key telemedia topics and a series of expert workshops that look at a range of regulatory and industry issues with panels of experts.

So what’s lined up on the seminar front?

INTERACTIVE SEMINAR SESSIONS
T360’s in depth, panel lead, case-study heavy seminars put the media, marketing and branding experts at the centre of our multi-media learning experience, offering insight and debate into key areas of the tie-up between media and telemedia that brings about money making new channels and better audience interaction. These will cover:
• MEDIA MODELS
Everyone’s talking about monetising media content, ads, classifieds and call TV services, but what’s the secret? Discuss the pros and cons of three accepted models – Freemium, paywall and ad funding and build a framework for making the right decision with a panel of experts.
• ESSENTIAL TELEMEDIA IN THE DRIVING SEAT
This well established industry has long been the source of valuable incremental “premium rate” revenues. Traditional services such as chat, dating, psychic, horoscope and infotainment can perform very well in a multiplatform / multimedia environment and have also never been more important to new market entrants.
• SOCIALISING MEDIA
Its not about how to make money on Twitter and Facebook anymore, it’s how to turn TV shows or channels, brands, products and interests into commercial social groups that demand value added services and content; with subsequent advertising potential it’s “the inch wide sectors of the long tail that are a mile deep.
• THE CORE: ALL APPLE?
With a “long tail” of devices it’s not just about making money online or on mobile and there is more to it than Apple’s App Store and iPhone. With smartphones tablets, consoles, feature phones, old phones, laptops, desktops and TV boxes. Media and content owners must maximise the opportunity of reaching customers wherever their eyeballs happen to be.
• PLAY TO WIN: “GAMIFICATION”
Everyone wants to turn content, ads, marketing and services into games these days! But how can they be leveraged to generate eyeballs, brand awareness and sales? So what should you develop, how do you develop it and how do you turn it into a viable premium strategy?
• A NEW TELEMEDIA AGE Innovative new services and technology plus the latest incarnations of popular media formats will certainly improve the opportunity to generate additional revenue streams in this ever changing media landscape. On the agenda: the future of call & quiz TV, taking print “multichannel” and how to make ads and marketing interactive.
• OPEN FORUM & SURVEY RESULTS - DRINKS
This informal session brings together all of our panellists and delegates to reveal the results of several live mobile polls (taken throughout the show) providing a unique “finger on the pulse” of our industry and hopefully some clues as to what the future might have in store.

TELEMEDIA DRILL DOWNS
For the hardened telemedia exec, or for those in the media who really want to get under the skin of new channels and revenue generating opportunities, our unique Telemedia Drill Down sessions offer a deeper look at the key issues and developments around key telemedia markets, channels and technologies. These drill downs will dig into:
• CASH UP: BILLING & M-PAYMENTS
The key to monetising media services and content IS of course billing and collection. We set the established world of WAP and PSMS billing against the latest “young pretenders” that can offer one click, credit card and other creative new ways to pay for mobile, online and real world goods and services.
• CHECK OUT: M-COMMERCE
With a specific targeted and profiled audience the media has an incredible retail opportunity through m-commerce and social networks combined. Here we take a look at the mobile retail applications for both digital and real-world goods and services – it’s “shopping from the comfort of your own phone”.
• CUSTOMERS: WHO? WHEN? WHAT?
One of the key advantages with mobile is that it is personal and that personal information can be gathered seamlessly as part of providing a services or transaction. This customer data should be a valuable asset, so here is where we discover how to collect it and more importantly how to monetise it within the current rules and regulations.

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME
Run in association with some with key partners and led by leading industry specialists, preregistered delegates will really benefit from this “up close and personal” range of practical workshops.
• AGGREGATOR FORUM
Details to be announced
• M-WEB & APPS WORKSHOPS
Want to go down the m-web route or perhaps develop a killer app for any mobile device? Don’t miss these two workshops which include live demos and an opportunity to discuss the specific issues associated with both these red hot commercial areas.
• RULE OF ENGAGEMENT - REGULATION FORUM

It’s all change for the regulation of premium rate and interactive services in the UK, with some very different definitions of editorial and advertising. As media outlets go cross platform, this is an opportunity to understand how to work within the latest rules whilst generating important new revenue streams.

To find out all the latest speaker detailers, events details and to register to attend this must see event, go to http://www.telemedia360.com

Media firms’ systems are unable to support more interaction with readers and viewers, Oracle warns

2010-09-16T14:11:00.003+01:00

Media firms focused on deepening customer intimacy and richer content are being hindered by lack of insight into customer behaviour and overlooking smart billing. So finds a study by Oracle and revealed at IBC in Amsterdam this week.

Oracle’s research reveals that while the vast majority of media companies are focused on developing deeper relationships with customers, the systems they have in place are currently unable to support these goals. The study, entitled State of Readiness, also found that while media firms had plans to create richer and more specialised content, they were overlooking the management of the resulting complex revenue streams.

According to the study, the top five priorities for media firms all revolved around providing a reassuring and compelling customer experience: information security was highlighted as a major focus by 76% of respondents; fostering deeper levels of trust with consumers (72%); providing a compelling user experience (68%); tailoring offerings to customers’ needs (66%); building value-added services around content (62%).

The study goes on to suggest that fewer than half the firms surveyed (48%) were able to monitor customers’ interactions with the organisation across all channels. Only one in six (16%) media firms is able to provide insight into individual customer behaviour while less than a fifth (20%) are able to provide recommendations to customers based on their interactions across all digital channels.

The report revealed a huge appetite for providing customers with richer content through partnerships and the introduction of new offers – 72% of media companies are currently developing new areas of content around their core specialism.

However, while media firms acknowledged the importance of being able to deliver this content across multiple channels with 78% currently taking steps to do this, there was less of a focus on the systems involved in managing the resulting multi-channel revenues – only just over half (56%) had developed billing systems to collect and allocate payment for additional content provision.

Indeed, the research revealed that a large number of media firms lacked the capability to bill customers for content and value-added services when the opportunity arose - 46% of media firms were unable to process micropayments, 26% couldn’t cater for subscriptions and 18% couldn’t handle one-off payments.

A quarter of media firms (26%) fully lacked the agility to respond to rapid change in business models and accommodate new revenue streams.

Gordon Rawling, Director of EMEA Marketing, Oracle Communications, told delegates at IBC: “Media companies appreciate that it’s no longer enough to put the content out there and trust that people find it. The results show that they’re taking very seriously the need to get closer to their consumers. While they have the right intentions, it doesn’t seem they have the building blocks in place to provide the personalised service they’re hoping for. Media firms need to move quickly to remove the barriers to gaining deeper customer insights.”

Rawling added: “For media firms, content is of course king and the report shows a great deal of ambition in developing richer, more compelling content and extending its reach through partnerships. While this is of course the very core of their business, they should also take care to prepare for the additional complexity that this approach entails. If you have the chance of encouraging consumers to spend money on your value-added or specialised content, you need the systems in place to collect and manage it”.

Commerce crazy

2010-09-13T10:41:00.000+01:00

I hope you all enjoyed your summer sebatical, though I suspect many of you have been beavering away pretty much all through ‘le grand vacance” much as we have here at Telemedia Towers.

So, before we get on to what we’ve been doing, let’s have a look at what some of you have been up to. If a trend has emerged over the summer within the telemedia sector is that everyone has, while not dropping interactive media, gone m-commerce crazy.

Industry body AIME, in conjunction with the IMRG and IAB, put out a lengthy bit of research on the subject, Sponge conducted a survey with Internet Retailing magazine and now Netsize has conducted its own poll on the subject.

In fact, m-commerce and in particular, m-retailing, have become the growth areas for the mobile telecoms and telemedia industries, powered by more and more consumers coming in to retailer and brand websites via smartphones and looking to shop.

So what have these in depth surveys of the m-commerce landscape concluded? Well, unsurprisingly they have all concluded that there is big business to be done. I won’t bore you with the figures here, you can read the stories for yourselves below (I don’t write them just for fun you know!), but chief among their findings are that retailers are lagging behind consumer demand with their m-retailing offerings; consumers are tending to want to have mobile-optimised websites, rather than apps, as the way into retailers; retailers are failing to understand the difference between apps and m-web; and that almost all consumers are willing to pay at least €25 through mobile for goods and services, provided the billing tools are there.

All this adds up to one big opportunity for the telemedia community. Billing tools are not being picked up by retailers and many commercial organisations are still floundering trying to find someone to help them make sense of the m-web vs apps debate.

PayPal and Amazon are poised to grab a huge slice of the nascent mobile billing market, but there is still room for the innovative billing solutions offered by the telemedia community to get some traction in this huge market. You just have to get yourselves in front of retailers.

Which brings me neatly on to what we’ve been up to over the summer. Among the usual tanning, beach volleyball and embarrassing swimwear parade, we have been putting together our next event: Telemedia360 in Manchester on 16 November. Taking place the day before the Manchester Media Festival, T360 is looking to bring together media companies, brands, marketers and advertisers with the telemedia community to explore how telemedia can bring innovative services and exceptionally good micro-billing to these communities.

And in line with the huge move towards retailing we are also bringing in retailers to discuss their needs and to help them finds the solutions they are looking for.

Details of the event are here http://www.telemedia360.com/ and the conference programme and speakers will be finalised and present by next week – and there are some corkers, I can tell you. So why not come along: in this climate you can’t afford to miss it

Counting the cost of regulation

2010-07-30T09:17:00.000+01:00

It should be happy days for the PRS business, if PPP is to be believed, because its consumer survey – carried out independently by ThinkTank – finds that consumers welcome the new code of practice on PRS and that having a clear and fair regulatory regime will give people the confidence to spend more money through such services.

Just as well really, since PPP’s annual report also seen by Telemedia-news this week reveals that the PRS sector in the UK is currently worth £730million: 11.4% down on 2008 and a whopping 54% lower than the industry peak in 2006, when it was worth an estimated £1.6billion.

The annual report puts this drop down to the recession and there can be no denying that it probably has had some sort of an impact – but to see the industry cut in half in three years is really quite something.

Industry body AIME, which has assessed PPP’s figures in detail, has found that the cost of regulating the industry has gone up from £3.6million in 2006 to £4.8million in 2009. That’s a doubling in cost to the industry per £1000 of revenue from £2.25 in 2006 to £5.28 in 2009.

AIME’s study of the numbers also suggests that despite the reduction in revenues from PRS, complaints have dropped even more dramatically – representing about one compliant per 50,000 PRS transactions.

Now, you could argue that its money well spent as the complaints to PPP are falling dramatically: something seems to be working. However, you could also argue that, while the cost of regulation has gone up, the value in terms of revenues from services that it has delivered to consumers and the industry has, in fact, gone down.

Of course, this is all under the old, 11^th Code regime, so I don’t think its right to be too critical. PPP is shifting how it regulates the industry and is embracing many of the ideas put to it by industry body AIME over the past four years into its new code of practice – we may yet see a shift towards the nadir of light and fair regulation that delivers value to the industry and encourages consumers to use the services.

The new code, as most of you know, will see AIME suggestions of a much more proportionate apportioning of blame along the value chain, a more open approach to trying to correct errors in services, rather than let them run then instigate actions, and the introduction of a registration scheme come into play.

All great news for the industry, in theory, and it has being warmly welcomed – not least by the public if the survey is to be believed. But the proof will be in the pudding. PPP believes that the new code will have a soft launch early next year and will be properly in force – all teething troubles overcome – by the summer of 2011. I guess we won’t then know until the summer of 2012 how well it has worked.

But those teething troubles, many of which will be thrown up by the overlap from 11^th to 12^th codes are already causing headaches for some in the industry. As we reported in our monthly Telemedia360 newsletter last month, there are concerns as to how the registration scheme will work long term. PPP is confident that it is listening to these concerns and adjusting how systems will work as we speak and it would be foolish to assume that they won’t get it right for the soft launch.

But what no one can foresee or answer now is whether it offers better value for money regulation or not. The PPP survey suggests that consumers welcome clear, yet not overly nanny-ish, regulation and that this would persuade a significant number to use PRS than do at the moment.

Whether this comes about or not remains to be seen, but for now the traditional two way tug of war between PRS industry and the regulator has now taken on a new dimension – consumers pulling in a third direction. Watch this space (or at least watch out for the July issue of T360 which will have an in depth look at the how the new code is shaping up and what it all means for the industry).

iPhone 4 bad, World Cup good

2010-07-21T10:20:00.000+01:00

Suddenly not being bothered to queue up like a mug for an iPhone 4 seems to be one of my better decisions: it looks like they are going to be recalled anyway. OK, this means that it will be even longer before I get my grubby paws on the new ‘Jab Screen’, but hey, I am still enjoying my old iPhone to be honest. It fits better into the curve of my hand and I think it looks more stylish – the new one looks like something Nokia might come up. I am disappointed.

Anyhoo, enough about the travails of Apple and my Pyrrhic victory over its idiotic strategy of making their devices so hard to come by that, rather than creating a fervour of desire they just p**s off their loyal fan base. What is really more intriguing is how the World Cup played out on mobile.

It seems that, after all the hype, this World Cup did indeed turn out to be ‘the mobile world cup’, with mobile broadband use rocketing upwards by 24% during the tournament, web browsing on mobile during the games growing by 35% and YouTube hits looking for the goals and highlights post-match scoring a whopping 32% rise.

The study by Allott Communications (who, it has to be said, does provide mobile broadband equipment – so something of an own goal? Did you see what I did there?) backs the notion that more and more people are watching TV (or ‘event TV’ as some would have it) with their smartphone clutched in their hand and are using this extra screen to interact with friends and content and services while watching programmes.

Some of the games at the World Cup were so dull that the numbers may admittedly be skewed (I am sure a lot of browsing went on during England’s dismal display), but the findings demonstrate that the way people are using mobile and interactive technology around TV has changed.

While there is much to be said for PSMS text voting coming back to our screens – and its return still seems to be set on ‘imminent’ as it has been for nearly two years – things have moved on. The smartphone – and even the iPad and similar – mean that the role played by ‘small screens’ while watching the telly has become one of constant interaction and idle surfing, texting, social networking and even shopping.

People who vote on Britain’s Got Talent will of course continue to do so, but what the World Cup has demonstrated is that many more people will now interact in some way using the mobile web while watching stuff on TV. And this presents a huge opportunity. We have already in these hallowed pages reported on how ITV sees mobile as a brilliant way to sell ads and content while matches are on, because the game itself only allows for ads at the start, half time and the end.

I think that now we have seen how people behave with their mobiles during the World Cup, it is time to totally reappraise media interaction and look at how they can shape programmes, view adds and content and even buy goods and services all targeted around what they are watching and who they are talking to.

It’s the idea of social TV, that I know companies such as Starling is looking to exploit. The World Cup, while a disappointment for 31 of the 32 countries involved, has certainly been a revelation to the media and mobile industries. All you guys have to do know is work out how to monetise it.

Media paywalls – really such a great idea?

2010-07-13T18:56:00.000+01:00

This week is a very special week for the industry as the Times and Sunday Times have finally gone live with their paywall. It was meant to happen in May. Then June. It finally came to pass on 2 July and, one amusing upshot has been that none of the staff at News International were given any way to by-pass the paywall, so they have all been having to register their credit card details to access their own site.

And they might well turn out to the only ones who do, since most users of online news are likely to not bother. I mean, why would you? For starters at £1 a day and £2 a week it is very expensive (the newspaper itself costs £1 a day). Also, there is plenty of free, quality news out there on the web, so brand loyalty is likely to go out the window. Couple this with the fact that, had you been a loyal reader of the Times online for many years, the affront that they want to shake the lose change out of your pockets irks somewhat too.

And this is backed up by research too. A study by Sixth Sense finds that UK adults do want to pay for quality journalism, but are more likely to do that in the form of buying a newspaper than pumping cash into the web, which they still see as a free medium.

The fact that the web is still largely free for all other news outlets – and is likely to always be free for BBC news – and that many newspapers, such as the London Evening Standard are also free, means that as Rupert Murdoch tries to charge for content, everyone else is giving it away. And it won’t wash.

The newspaper industry really needs to think again about how it operates. I have absolutely no doubt that they have to charge for content and believe that quality content can carry a fee. But it is all about looking at the platforms available and how consumers use those platforms and THEN looking at how to monetise them.

It’s the old Free-mium model again. Only this time, things like the iPad mean that there is finally a platform the rival good old fashioned paper – and that means that a charge can be levied.

As a news consumer I have no interest in plugging paid for media, but as part of the telemedia industry I do – we need new payment models for content to be developed so that our billing tools can be put in to play. My biggest fear is that the News International experiment, that will end in no one reading the Times online in my view, will put consumers off paying altogether for online news content and we will have lost a huge revenue stream opportunity.

Time to stand up for freedom on the web – what Skype is saying about the open internet

2010-04-22T14:56:00.000+01:00

Jean-Jacques Sahel, Skype’s European Director of Government & Regulatory Affairs, has caused something of a stir around network operators looking to charge internet companies for using the web... here is what he is saying:

You’ll be forgiven if you missed a rising stir in recent weeks about freedom and choice on the Internet as it becomes something used on mobile devices.

In essence the French and EU authorities are havingformal consultations around the open Internet. We’ve long talked about this and share many of the same views asNeelie Kroes, the EU commissioner for the Information Society, and her predecessor Vivian Reding: that EU regulations should (and now do) protect net neutrality and net freedoms.

What’s worrying us is that some very large telecom companies are starting to say Internet, especially when accessed with mobile devices, is a drain on their networks and they want to charge Internet companies fees to run its data on “their” network.

As we’ve made some major steps to bring Skype to mobile users recently you’d expect we object to that. And we do. Here’s why:

The first point is that not ‘their’ network - the Internet does not belong to anyone – it has grown thanks to more than 40,000 networks voluntarily interconnecting to form an open, decentralised network of networks. The operators making the complaints right now only carry the data for a small part of its journey around the web. The rest of the Internet ecosystem is based on a successful business model that does not and never had such subsidising of infrastructure companies by content providers. Should water companies be allowed to charge garden centres, pasta makers and coffee producers for encouraging demand for water consumption?

Second, and we think more worrying, is that this idea of charging online companies threatens the very innovation that will drive people and businesses to start using the Internet on their mobile device. In Europe and across the world there are teams of software developers creating apps and services that will drive demand for data plans sold by operators. These are not get-rich-quick-teenagers making millions of dollars every day. They are hard working small and mid-sized companies that are fighting for survival in a tough environment.

Alongside these heroes of the (mobile) Internet are thousands upon thousands of companies, big and small, who rely on the Internet to distribute their goods and services.

It is an affront to ask all these engines of economic growth to pay a fee to large multinational telecommunication companies.

The last point to stress is that mobile customers are already paying operators for Internet access. There has been a big increase in sales of data plans, thanks only to the appeal of all kinds of online content, services and applications like Skype, Wikipedia, Spotify, or Facebook. Innovative content and app developers are the raison d’être for the mobile Internet. Without them operators would not sell a single data plan. Smart operators like 3 in the UK get this and it is proving to be a successful business for them.

At the other extreme, we are baffled to see that many of the operators that supposedly ‘allow’ VoIP on mobile at last, such as Orange in France, actually reserve the use of VoIP only to those consumers with the most expensive packages, or require payment of a VoIP-specific prohibitive charge in addition to a user’s basic ‘Internet’ fee, which seems to imply a double-payment by consumers for their Internet use. That’s not the way to ensure rising consumer demand for mobile Internet packages and customer satisfaction, but a sure way to kill off European SMEs by making it artificially difficult and expensive to use their innovative content and apps.

We should be encouraging entrepreneurs and innovators so that Europe can be globally competitive, with high and rewarding employment. It makes no sense to threaten an entire ecosystem with artificial barriers and a (private!) tax affecting innovation and entrepreneurship.

If you agree it’s important to join us in putting this case to the regulators. Here are the links to the French government consultation (PDF): Discussions are also heating up in the Netherlands where the draft revised telecoms laws put forward by the outgoing government do not contain a clear principle protecting net neutrality apparently. Please subscribe to this blog (links to the right) if you want to hear more on this and we’ll send through details of the EU consultation when it starts so you can express your views and help protect the open Internet in Europe and ensure jobs and innovation are fostered and protected.