Apple taking a bite too far?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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