SoMoLo - The Retail Perspective

Forbes has an excellent piece on SoMoLo and the importance of this to retailers.  Naturally we're in full agreement, but would extend that to all types of information and content that people want to get out to their customers.

​Viafo's Service Gateway's core functionality is to make it easy and cost effective to integrate Social Mobile and Location services into your existing mobile apps, but we're starting to look at wider use cases than that, as the solution we just delivered for Classic Accessories up here in the Pacific Northwest shows. 

In that project, we've used our gateway and technology not just to deliver SoMoLo content direct to people when they go shopping, but we also integrated into their BazaarVoice CRM system and also provided a complete, hosted solution for delivering HTML5 micro-apps for any smartphone.​

The future is going to be about giving customers and consumers all the information they need, in an interactive and viral way straight to their phone or mobile device!​

Drop us a line if you're interested in learning more or having a demo of our technology for retailers.​

Is your app relevant?

We've been saying for a long time that Interactive Features are what make apps relevant.  But you don't need to take our word for it.  Dick Costolo said the same thing at Mobile World Congress in his Keynote, and comScore said as much last year.

We're in the process of working on and then releasing a survey we've conducted of the leading brand apps and how they use interactive media, which has led to a lot of thought here at Viafo about how brands and consumer facing applications are making use of Social, Location and other web services.  Naturally, our goal with this is to get people using our Gateway to make it easier to manage and control these services, but without giving our conclusions away, I did want to outline some things that we believe everybody should have in their mind as they're getting apps created for them.

1. Social Networking is core to most people's use of the web.  comScore found last year that Social Networking on Mobile was the fastest growing use of mobile applications.  So why is it that many, many apps aren't taking advantage of something core to most peoples' lives?

•  It's not about sharing that they have an app - who cares?
• It IS about sharing that something in the app interests them - a feature of a car, a new dress, a type of bag - make it easy for users to share that across multiple networks, sure, make sure that it is tagged as coming from YOUR app, but people want to read about interesting things
• You're spending a small fortune on your social presence?  You've got people full time on Twitter and Facebook managing your tags, @messages and wall - are you sharing these into your mobile app?  If not, why not?
• If a user posts from your app, do you know about it right away?  If not, why not?

2. Location

• Location is much, much more than "Where's my nearest…"
• Are you using location to deliver coupons and offers?
• Are you letting users Check-In to their favorite check-in service from inside the app?
• Are you letting users share their thoughts on where they are and what they're doing?

3. Uploading

• Can users easily share images of your product?  Are you running contests for them?

4. Protecting your brand

• Are you letting people share from inside your app and sending that straight to the web?
• Do youhave any control over what people are saying and how?  If not why not?

Obviously, this is a slightly loaded set of questions because they're all core to what Viafo's Gateway does.  But if you sit back and think about it, are you really taking full advantage of the power of social and location services?

While our goal is to get the Gateway in use with as many people as possible, we're also happy to help people understand the impact on their retail and brand experience.  So do feel free to drop me a line: david@viafo.com

Twitter Needs Viafo...

We were pleased to see Dick Costello trumpeting the need for our solution at his speech last week.

Surfice to say, we're 100% behind Dick in this.  The point of social networking, location and other web services is that they should be an integral part of the app you're using and not something you have to go somewhere else to do.

I hope we're going to be able to meet with Twitter soon to pitch our vision.

Meet Viafo - New Year, New Look

As some of the more observant of the few readers we have will have noticed, we've got a new look.  It comes with our new focus for us around the Viafo Services Gateway.  Over the last year we've been out listening to developers and customers about their real needs and challenges, and looking at the technology that they need to help them with their work.

Key to the Services Gateway is the ability for application and solution developers to make it easy to add all the web services that you need to make your apps relevent and useful to your customers, without having to learn, manage or maintain all the different APIs.

We're currently working with a small number of lead partners in a private Beta and taking on new partners as we can.  Our goal is to open this up to general developers in the very near future.

It's been an exciting year, and we're looking forward to our second year by providing our gateway services to a wide range of developers, solution providers, platforms and brands.

Getting There - Web Side...

I mentioned a while ago that writing copy for what we do was like looking at the screen until your eyes bleed.  Hopefully my eyes will be starting heal up now as we're getting close to completing a lot of our V1/Beta messages.

I've had the complaint a few times now that people get what we do when they see if but struggle from the website.  We're planning to add some informational videos shortly with working demos of our technology.  But in the meantime we've been busy putting together a better series of explanations for the technology and just how it helps put solutions out there.

We'll probably write up a short case study of our 72 hour app development cycle for the Mix10 Application too.  

Anyway, we still are preparing for CTIA so must be going.

CTIA - Meetings

Informational update.

We're going to be at CTIA from Monday to Thursday next week.  Monday is already booked up as is Tuesday afternoon.

I'm still open Tuesday morning and all day Wednesday for meetings - if you want to catch up, then let me know.  

We're hoping to put some news out about a big new customer next week.

We have an Appz for that...

It's been an interesting weekend as we fiddled with the Mix10 Appz and had a think about what it is we had done with it.  We've had some positive feedback from a couple of trial users who liked the general approach and were extremely impressed with the speed at which we'd put the complete application together.

The question they asked, and I suppose one we need to think about is what we do with that? 

Our business goals are clear, we still intend to license the technology to third parties and provide hosted solutions for some of our services.  However, the tactical appz like the MWC App and the Mix App have given us a boost in the web traffic, if nothing else.  To whit, as of this morning the Viafo website has had as much traffic as our previous record breaking month...

With this in mind I think we'll do a CTIA app - it's in keeping with ViaEventz anyway.  But what else should we do?  The World Cup (Soccer, you know the one that practically everybody in the world plays) is coming up in June - should we build an app for that and have it on our main platforms, which should, by then, include WinMo, Bada, iPhone and Android?  Or does that become a low revenue time sink for us?

To be honest, I don't know at the moment.  I'll let you know when we make the decision.

Back in the saddle...

Mobile World Congress was it's usual mad-house, spoiled slightly by the inclemant temperatures this time around.  Freezing rain, cold winds and grey skies aren't a typical feature of Barcelona at this time of year and it was a little disappointing.

Still, we had an excellent show and gained lots of good traction.  There's also a lot going on at the moment and we've some exciting new product annoucements we'll be making shortly along with, we hope, a couple of new customer annoucements.

I'm also working on some other mobile related Blog posts which fit into some subjects that are on all our minds at the moment.  The first one will be some thoughts on what the Facebook and Apple patent annoucements and spats are about. 

Anyway, it seems to be quite spinglike here in Seattle so we'll continue to get the website updated and our new range of services in place while we can enjoy the weather.