Posted by Paul Daly, Director of Innovation
The mobile phone has become incredibly pervasive. Leading research company Informa has announced that there are now 3.3 billion active mobile accounts in the world. This means that there is approximately one mobile phone account operating for every two people on the planet! There are now 59 countries where mobile penetration exceeds 100%, with a significant number of people maintaining more than one mobile account.
The mobile phone has joined keys and wallet/purse as one of those things that one simply does not leave the house without. Indeed, there has been some speculation about its potential to replace those other two must-haves in the future.
In this–my first post to the m.Net blog!–I aim to discuss some of the things that differentiate the mobile screen as a new medium for content, and acknowledge some of its limitations.
Here at m.Net have identified the following differentiators for mobile: omnipresence and accessibility. Very soon the mobile phone will be everywhere, and everyone will have access to one. However these are not the only differentiators!
Other differentiators include:
- The mobile phone is more personal. There is a much stronger level of assignment between the consumer and his/her mobile phone than exists with a home phone or an Internet connection, where other users in the family may share the same connection or device. There is also an expectation on the part of subscribers that messages they receive will, in general, be of higher relevance to them.
- Meaningful context as a result of location. For many years there has been talk of location-based services for mobile phones as a possible killer application. Finally, the pieces are beginning to fall into place for new services that take advantage of the user’s location in order to provide value.
Telstra has a model that allows service providers to provide access to information and other services based on the location of the handset. The subscriber must have opted in to this service and Telstra charges a fee to the service provider for each location request.
Google has just announced a feature in Google Maps that allows a mobile subscriber to locate his or her own position within an on-screen map. If the handset has GPS capability it will source the location from there and, if not, it uses an algorithm that calculates approximate position based on signal strength from one or more mobile-phone base stations. While resolution is not perfect, it is certainly accurate enough for many applications.
Today, the Google system only works with certain handsets; however it provides some really interesting insights into the scope for location-based services in the near term.
- Value added by other elements of context. The use of location as a variable is just one form of context that makes the mobile experience more interesting and relevant. If we know that the user of a particular mobile is unique, then we can assume that their browsing and purchasing behaviour provides a more accurate view of their preferences than it does when several people were sharing a connection to the Internet (e.g. from a home computer). This allows us to improve the relevance of the information and services that we offer them and provides a greater return on investment for our promotional spend. Our ability to leverage contextual information is very important in providing access to a better user experience. The better we handle this context the more likely it is that we will maintain an effective relationship with the consumer and the easier it will be for them to navigate to information and services of interest to them.
- The ability of the mobile screen to complement existing media. Because of its portability the mobile screen provides an ideal way for consumers to maintain a connection with sources of news entertainment and information while they are on the move. This is best implemented as a complement to their existing patterns for consuming content – via television, radio, print and the Internet. Early work in using the mobile as an interactive back channel for television through voting applications and the use of SMS response for participation in competitions and other forms of product promotion has been remarkably successful. The most successful campaigns involving a mobile element have been complemented by promotion in other media and this is certainly the way we at m.Net see the landscape well into the future.
Of course mobile does have its drawbacks as a medium for content. We speak of mobile as the very small screen and although the quality and resolution of mobile displays is constantly improving, it its still a much smaller window for navigating and viewing content. For this reason, we develop mobile Internet sites in ways that are significantly different from those used to develop traditional Web Internet sites. We also pay particular attention to the size of graphics, videos and animations so that screens of varying size can render them well. We also aim to keep page size down in recognition that until the tipping point for mobile data arrives, the carriage cost of data can be a major issue for consumers of mobile Internet content.
Perhaps the biggest problem faced by people developing and implementing content on mobiles is the lack of any real standardisation for access devices. Mobile phones have screens of all shapes and sizes, wildly-varying resolutions, different models for accommodating input from the user, different operating systems, and different amounts of memory.
The job of delivering content that renders consistently-well across a wide cross-section of the most popular handsets has become an area of specialisation. It is an problem to which companies like m.Net are able to provide an effective solution, removing a major headache for people looking to the use of mobile as an exciting new medium for content. With this type of specialist help mobile can become a powerful complement to traditional media in extending brand relationships with consumers.
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