Commerce crazy

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