Get your selves Connected

Against the backdrop of figures released by Strategy Analytics that show that mobile media consumption globally has topped $150billion dollars – and is worth in excess of £2.5billion this year alone in the UK – we here at Telemedia Towers are very happy indeed. For vindication is in the air. For it’s this massive mobile media and content market that the telemedia industry can truly unlock – and vindicates our decision to put on the mGambling, mSport and Connected Summits between now and end of May (there is more to come later in the year – but I’ll tell you all about that in a few weeks).

Next week sees the gambling and sports industries gather in London for out MGaming Summit and MSports Summit at the King’s Fund on Cavendish Square to talk about how mobile is now becoming a central pillar for both these communities.

Featuring speakers from all the leading gambling operators, network operators, Google, The Football League and ESPN alongside all the key telemedia players, these two events cement telemedia’s role in connecting consumers to brands and monetizing the subsequent interaction.

The events will showcase the best of the best in terms of what is being done here and now and will provide a fantastic opportunity for telemedia players to network and engage with some of the key brands in these two industries.

But our commitment to getting telemedia technology into vertical markets doesn’t end there. Next month we are running the Connected Summit, which does the same as the Gambling and Sports Summits, but with print media, TV, brands, marketing agencies, retailers and live events organisers.

This event will also showcase how telemedia technology connects these industries to their consumers – and how to turn that engagement, directly and indirectly, into revenue streams.

And this week’s top stories, which show that mobile media consumption globally has now passed the $150billion mark and how Channel 5’s groundbreaking TV show last week used augmented reality to make the TV programme’s set a 360º experience shows just how far the technology has come. Adding this sort of novel experience to a traditional medium is fun. But it has a serious and potentially hugely disruptive impact on traditional media offerings. While the augmented reality app for Channel 5 works with TV, its potential stretches into any kind of media into a much more immersive experience.

But as the figures on mobile media consumption from Strategy Analytics attest, it is more than just AR. All the other really exciting interactive technology out there – which is the backbone of the Connected Summit – is where consumers and brands are going and we can help them monetize it.

So, while I hope to see you all at the gambling and sports events next week, I hope that we can also start to look at how we extend the reach of telemedia technology beyond where we have so far confined it and start to really look at where all this can fit, not just in entertainment, but also the corporate world and beyond.

So you need to get yourselves connected – and as luck would have it the early bird discount for the event runs until the end of TODAY. So sign up NOW, here

Making a connection with gambling and sport

We are less then two weeks away from the telemedia Mobile Gambling and Mobile Sports Summits in London (25 and 26 April) and less than five away from our Connected Summit (15 and 16 May) and the timing of these four boutique events couldn’t be better.

The gaming and gambling industry is now fully mobilized and our line up of speakers – not to mention our massive array of pre-registered delegates – for the M-Gaming Summit is testament to how much the industry is ready to learn. Similarly with sports, we have hit the nail once again on the head, offering an event that pulls together the best from the world of sport, sports technology suppliers and the telemedia business to showcase to an audience of sports professionals just what they can do when they connect with their audience.

And that is the key to all of this : connection. Where many events look at mobile this and mobile that, we offer a much more holistic view of how to engage with connected audiences on any device and through a range of channels. Of course much of it is on mobile devices, but the lines are blurring. Really we are looking at how the consumer of today engages through the web. And how brands can monetize this.

And that is where the telemedia community comes in. Research carried out by AIME using figures from PRS regulator PPP finds that, while the use of PRS around things like adult, DQ and chat are still very high, they are slowly shrinking (well, they have between 2010 and 2011). However, the use of PRS – particularly mobile payments – for things like gambling, gaming, interaction, content, charity donations and media are growing. In the case of charity, at a staggeringly rapid rate of knots.

Of course these sectors have started from a low base, but they do show that PRS is becoming a trusted and well-used micropayment channel that consumers now want to use.

The purpose of the events we are putting on – and the reason we attract such a high calibre of speaker: Google, PayPal, The Daily Telegraph, O2, Ladbrokes, Betfred and the football league to name but a few – is that a much wider circle of vertical markets now recognise the power of PRS as a quick and easy billing tool. A lot of the work by the likes of AIME and, if I can blow our Telemedia-news trumpet, our events has made this possible and stretched the reach of telemedia technology out into this wider world.

So, if you are looking to learn, meet potential new clients or have a great story to tell you need to be involved. Below are the URLs for the events and you all have my email address if you want to speak, so come on, join us as we make telemedia a real force to be reckoned with out there. The verticals we are targeting – gambling, sport, media, TV, marketing, commerce and live events – are just the start. There are opportunities aplenty in other sectors (not least healthcare, automotive, transport, and even the enterprise market) and these are all areas we are looking to move into. With your support and input we can really start to tell the telemedia story far and wide. So come on, let’s do it.

M-gaming summit

M-sport summit

Connected summit

World Telemedia

Gaming needs to take the tablets

Not such a happy day for GAME, which has called in the administrators and 6000 UK jobs are on the line as the games store struggles to make any money. Interestingly, though, the gaming market and the gambling market are starting to thrive online and, in particular, on tablets and smartphones.

In fact, Juniper Research finds that tablets are making a huge contribution, pushing total end-user games revenues on tablets to $3.1 billion by 2014, up from $491 million in 2011.

In the gambling sector, tablets are also set to make a massive contribution to the growth of ‘mobile’ casino games and in game betting, but it is the smartphone – and lets not forget all those other connected devices such as iPods, games consoles and even wifi enabled laptops – that are really driving the sector.

In fact so big is the mobile gambling sector that Telemedia’s second annual mobile gambling event – taking place in London on 25 April see here for details – now has a line up of speakers that includes some of the biggest names in gambling, as well as big name brands and operators.

What is proving so appealing about the event is that it offers the chance for the mobile and gambling industries to come together and learn from each other as to how to make mobile gambling grow even further than it has in the past year and to start to leverage mobile not just across the gaming arena but also to use it as an acquisition tool, a marketing tool, a payment tool and even a tool to find casinos in the real world!

While Juniper’s report can put numbers on what they believe the market for gaming to be worth on new devices, what it doesn’t consider is this wider market for how mobile devices can be used around gambling and gaming services to make them more competitive and more efficient.

That is why M-Gaming Summit 2012 features speakers from Ladbrokes, William Hill, Bodog, Betfred and more AND speakers from Google, M&C Saatchi and Fetch Media. Of course, there are also all the key telemedia and m-gambling service providers at the show, but this wealth of gambling and marketing talent really hits home how much of a developed industry m-gambling actually is now.

A year ago when we launched the Summit, mobile gambling was at an early stage but had turned that corner of becoming a viable and exciting service. Less than a year later and it is a maturing and highly lucrative sector for telemedia. And we are have the perfect platform for you guys to reach into this sector, so sign up here today.

On the money

This week I have mostly been hanging out at a payments conference in London. While it was obviously very glamorous, this particular event, put on by banks for banks and merchants and corporates, offers a great insight into how the ‘other half’ thinks about payments.

The event, which I have been going to for about five years has morphed in that time from being about remittance handling to squarely be dominated by mobile payments. In fact all the big sessions this year were about mobile payments. And some of the top speakers were from the mobile industry.

What was particularly interesting is that banks still don’t really get it. They still think that without them, mobile payments – any payments in fact – won’t work. And that they can still take their own sweet time in developing services that will be bank branded and they will in effect own the value chain.

But they are wrong. There are already myriad ways of doing mobile payments from good old PSMS, Payforit, through a host of third party tools, right through to mobile wallets, contactless payments and bank branded e-money schemes.

The key thing is that none of these alone will win out as ‘mobile payments’. They will all get a look in and will all be used by consumers to do different things. More importantly, the consumers will decide how they want to use mobile to pay for things and how they will want it to work. They will be aided in this decision by the merchants and brands who want their money. Banks, much like operators, will become dumb pipes.

The one interesting thing to come out of all this is that O2 is poised to launch its own m-wallet scheme in the next month that will be open to all O2 and non-O2 users and will, in the words of the Neil “lover” Lover, head of business operations at Telefonica, “is going to transform the market for mobile payments and NFC”. When pressed as to how this is going to work in a pretty much non-NFC world (does he know something about iPhone 5, I wonder?) all he would say is that “something very very exciting is coming with the launch of the O2 wallet”. Everyone thinks it will be NFC stickers, but we will have to wait and see.

And the place to find out more about the impact of mobile payments on media, brands, marketing, advertising, live events and commerce is The CONNECTED SUMMIT taking place in London between 15 and 16 May. Sign up here to learn from the experts how mobile is reshaping these businesses and the role mobile payments is playing across them all.

Putting telemedia at the heart of commerce

Those of you who read my missive on Mobile World Congress earlier this week will have seen that payments through mobile had a very high profile at the show. Visa and Mastercard are both on board with mobile payments projects with with Vodafone and Telefonica respectively and many other bit part players were also on hand to offer their wares.

Now Visa Europe has invested in a 15% stake in our chums at Mobile Money Network.

Things in mobile payments are really moving apace. The move by these big brands to get on board means that very soon public confidence in mobile as a payment channel will go through the roof and we will really start to see this move as a market. Finally.

But what does this mean for the telemedia sector? Well its good and bad news. The big boys muscling in on mobile payments means that suddenly things are very competitive. On the Brightside though, there should be such an uplift in consumer confidence in mobile as a billing tool that direct to bill mobile payments are going to explode.

And there will very much still be a role for PSMS and payforit led microbilling for not just all the things that they currently used for, but increasingly for all manner of other micro-purchases around the social and retail sectors.

The growth in mobile payments for all manner of services – both digital and real world – is going to have a knock on effect across all manner of vertical markets: and it is within these that telemedia really has its opportunity.

The main areas are of course those that we are concentrating our events programme on this year, namely: gambling, sports, live events, media, marketing and commerce. While there is much that can be delivered with telemedia as ‘premium content’ across all these sectors (which the events will major on), the billing and payment side of things is, both figuratively and literally, where the money is.

Our forthcoming m-gambling event on 25 April and our Mobile Sports Summit on 26 April feature extensive sessions on billing and payment (featuring luminaries such as OpenMarket. WorldPay, Ukash, ixaris, StubHub, Consult Hyperion, Zappit, Sports Revolution and Oxygen8), but also aims to bring the whole telemedia family into these verticals, offering them the chance to parade their expertise and experience in front of dedicated audiences from the gambling sector and the sports business.

In May we are delving into the connected digital entertainment space, again bringing dedicated audiences from the worlds of TV, print, online, marketing, live events and commerce/retail to learn what telemedia – and payments and micropayments in particular – can do for their businesses.

Between them, these four events help set out telemedia’s table in some of the many vertical markets that telemedia can start to deliver benefits – not least through payments. Next year we hope to add more (why not let us know which verticals you’d like us to tackle?).

But the current mainstream interest in mobile as a payment channel – now on the mainstream news thanks to PingIt from Barclays and now Visa and Mastercard’s entry into the fray – creates the perfect environment to win new business and start to place telemedia where it should be at the heart of commerce.