Get SOCIAL!

More evidence this week of the link between a strong social engagement strategy and device use.  In the Business Insider they've some interesting data points on the impact of social on mobile use patterns. 

• Users of social media mobile apps spend an average of 9 hours a month (about 18 minutes daily) on the services, according to recent Nielsen data from March 2013.  That monthly time-spend climbed by about 13% in eight months. 
• By comparison, desktop and laptop PC users of social media spend about 6 to 7 hours a month on social networks. That time-spend hasn’t budged for about two years. 
• Finally, users spend a little over 1 hour a month visiting social media sites on the mobile Web (HTML5 pages in their mobile browser, rather than stand-alone “native apps” written specifically for Android and iOS phones).  

Making sure you have a clear and focused mobile strategy is paramount and the Viafo Services Gateway ensures that you maximize this way to engage with your clients.

Twitterpocalypse Round 2

A couple of years after the first Twitterpocalypse, here comes the second.  Twitter are moving everything over to a new API and thus will be breaking a bunch of stuff buried in native applications.   

Of course, in true, tried and tested Twitter style while they've been running the old and new APIs side by side, they weren't all that forthcoming over the date they would switch off the old one.

Apparently it was a few hours ago.  Of course, anybody using the Viafo Gateway is completely insulated from the change, we already had made the switch over, and any applications using our APIs will continue to work as expected.  But how prepared were you? 

Mobile World Congress 2013

So, this is going to be an interesting one.  While it's back in it's home of the last decade, Barcelona, they've moved to a new location, so the first day is going to be even more confusing than usual.

But what to expect?

Well, in some respects, from a purely mobile perspective, CES this year was, to put it bluntly, a bit poor.  Very few interesting devices on display and no real phone announcements.  The consensus was that the phone companies with the exception of Apple were keeping their powder dry.  Apple being a special case who don't bother to do things with the rest of the industry.

The definite feeling I'm getting from the preparation work we've been doing is that the industry has really evolved in the decade I've been attending.  For my early Mobile World Congress events (back when it had just become 3GSM) the focus was very much on the handsets - form factor, color screens, cameras and the like and data speed.  This year, I think I can comfortably say is all about the apps.

From our perspective we'll be showing 3 new things to the public and over the course of the next few days, we'll be posting more details.

Just contact me if you want to meet up next week and see you all in Barcelona!

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.​

SoMo - Saskatoon

"Would you like to speak at a Social Mobile event in Saskatoon?" I was asked.  I blinked.  I had to look on a map, sorry Canadians, I really didn't have a clue.  

Due to our interest in APIs we're currently helping the GSMA evangelize the launch of the OneAPI gateway in Canada and they wanted somebody to talk about their new cross carrier play, meanwhile, they also suggested I give a talk on the subject of if Mobile and Social are so important why are their so few Socially enabled Mobile apps?  I'll post more on that later.

It's an interesting event, focused more on the concepts behind mobile and social than on the technology.  This made it something of a bust from the perspective of getting developers aware of Viafo, but it was certainly extremely interesting in terms of content and what companies are doing with Social.

Most interesting was a talk by Dave Carrol of 'United Breaks Guitars' fame on how his viral video came about and the impact this has had on airline customer service.  This followed on nicely from a morning talk by Darren Hailes the head of Social Media at Canadian Low Cost airline Westjet about how they use Social Media and the web to engage their audience.  Having spent 5 hours in Calgary on the way here due to weather this was a subject dear to my heart.

My main takeaways: people are starting to grasp the importance of social, but they're still failing to put it front and center of their web and mobile planning - in the long term that's going to be a huge mistake for any brand.

Viafo Services Gateway at AT&T Mobile App Hackathon

Come and join us this weekend at the AT&T Hackathon!  Viafo are going to be showing how our gateway can be used to simplify the integration to AT&T's carrier APIs.

We're providing some simple reference code and access to some of AT&T's APIs like Location, SMS and the mHealth service.

Welcome Google Plus AND yet more reasons why you should be using Viafo...

I will admit to being slightly taken aback by how quickly I've seen Google+ go from something that arrived in my inbox, to something that I'm using more than Facebook and where I already have a non-trivial part of my social graph on already.

And this highlights I think, the need for our gateway.  Here's a new social network, it's rapidly growing, but it's by no means a sure thing that it's going to be a success.  So, what a sane mobile or similar developer would do would be to wait.  Of course, by waiting you might miss out on a new service or a new feature or a new way of interacting with your users.  So should you really wait?

Then again, if you're on iPhone there's a built in wait for you anyway.  You're not going to have Google Plus integrated instantly.

Whereas, with our gateway, the moment that we get access to the Google Plus API then you'd have access through the same set of APIs you're using to talk to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn - now, doesn't that make sense?

We're looking forward to welcoming Google Plus into the fold.

Developer Product Launched!

Well, let's be clear, the Alpha interface for developers building HTML5 apps got launched at the WIP Connector "Muther" event last weekend at the Computer History Museum.

You can try it out at our developer site: http://dev.viafo.com

The UI isn't quite ready yet and we've some features to add.  But our reference apps, like "Kittens!" will get you on the way.

The winner of our $500 prize for the best app using Viafo's Gateway, Wombat Mobile's DVD Collector, was quite clear that this was the easiest way to add social and location features to an app that they had come across.  It took about an hour to integrate and get Facebook working and then Twitter just worked to!

That's what we planned from the start, and it's awesome to see it working like that.

What is ROI for a Mobile App?

I was on a panel on monetizing mobile  at CTIA last week and somebody asked the following question:

"How do I justify the ROI on my mobile spend?"

This is actually something we've come across quite a few times now.  Mobile application spends are currently much lower than they need to be.  At the same panel Christian Lindholm of Fjord complained that companies were routinely trying to get apps built on a shoestring when a comparable design project should have a budget of at least $250,000.  The reason for the difference was put starkly by the CEO of Newser last year when he remarked that they hadn't see the return that justified building a mobile app in the first place.

My response at the panel, and my response now, is that this is exactly the wrong way to be looking at mobile, and this is exactly the wrong time to be trying to work out these numbers.

My first point is simple: mobile apps are here, but they're new.  Asking what your ROI on your mobile app is going to be is rather like asking what the ROI would be on your website in 1998/99 - the fact it you don't know.  But if you don't have something, you've a hole in your marketing strategy.

My second point is more complex and really at the heart of this issue.  People aren't sure what mobile can be yet, but we are getting a really good idea about what it shouldn't be.

Mobile apps are not mobile web sites, and they're certainly not web sites circa 1999 when it was, even then, barely, acceptable to stick some brochure-ware up and call it a site.  In our brand app survey which we're working on at the moment, we're seeing some of the largest brands in the world, ones who have stunning TV, Print and Web campaigns building the most embarrassing apps possible.

The mobile device is unique in how personal it is as a means of accessing data and information.  The web browser, described the other day by Sencha's Developer Guru, James Pearce, as our generation's "Box Radio", is an impersonal "window" onto information.  For most people their phone, especially their Smartphone is an extension of their personality - they have the things they want right where they want them.  They also have access to their friends, their social networks, location information and a host of other things too. 

Consider watching TV.  While the rise of the DVR is impacting how we watch TV, the nature of Twitter is going to save scheduled TV for years to come.  Twitter is the water cooler of the modern age, except you don't have to wait until the next day to discuss what Flynn did on Glee, when you're already following the stream, interacting with  new friends and following new people on the #glee twitter feed. 

The marketing possibilities for the TV companies then become enormous.  That feed and that conversation should be part of your app experience; eyeballs on that feed, should be a part of your app, and the traffic from that app should be fed directly back to you either to come up with new ways to watch - i.e. delivering the best and most interesting of the feeds onto the show in real time, or by creating a social feed later for fans to watch again and follow the conversation they may have missed.

The ROI isn't about the app itself, it's about the opportunity cost of having those eyeballs and fans interacting with your show, brand, organization OUTSIDE of the app experience itself.

Anything else is a wasted opportunity.

Coming soon to Nokia

It's been a busy month here, after our win at the Amazon Funding Universe event, we were asked to pitch at the Open Angel Forum event here in Seattle.  It was another great evening, and watch this space for news about it.  Sadly the Poker Game was more than a little rich for this start up...

We've also closed some new customers.  The most public we can discuss is with our good friends at Nokia where we're working on creating a travel app for them based on our partner, TripIt's services, and also we'll be delivering our News Application, ViaNewz, to the OVI store for QT enabled devices.

We're also working hard on our own partner program to enable 3rd parties to use our backend server system for their own apps.  More on that later!

The Challenge of Retail

As I mentioned a few months ago, the problem of building interesting Retail Solutions isn't going away, in fact, if this article from Advertising Age is to be believed, it's becoming a serious issue for all marketing departments.

This is great news from our perspective as more and more potential clients realize that mobile isn't just about getting content out on the device, but figuring out what you do with it when it gets there.  We've been putting a lot of thought into this over the last few months and we're close to releasing a Case Study on our findings, where we'll consider how any modern retail strategy needs to have a Tripod of supporting online services.

The three legs of the tripod are:

• Conventional Web
• Social Networking Tracking
• Mobile Delivery

The issue isn't having all 3 of these, I think that most retailers now have that, or are aiming to.  But how you connect them.  Users with web access want what they look at to seamless sync with their phones, you want users to interact with Social Networks from your web and mobile properties and be able to easily track what they're doing and you want your apps to maximize your penetration into geographies and markets, and, ideally have a location component.

At the moment, only Viafo have a simple solution for this, in my next post I'll aim to talk about that more too.

Phones are consumer electronics...

Many people didn’t think the iPhone would be a success.  Myself included.  Or rather, I thought it would be a cool device, I was concerned from the get go that it would be a dreadful phone.  Having had one for a year or so now I can confidently say the following.  It's a cool device AND it's a dreadful phone.  So, two out of three ain't bad.

Part of the problem with the iPhone  is the architecture they have to use to keep the cost down and to avoid doing a deal with Qualcomm.  So you've the radio modem sitting separately to the application processor.  This isn't just a plumbing nightmare  but leads to huge bottlenecks in internal communication around the phone itself.  Add in the "extra" fun of AT&Ts network and you've a perfect storm for a bad experience.

But, regardless of the short comings, the dropped calls, the hung data stack, the weird battery issues, it's a lovely piece of kit and I like mine.  But the thing is, it's a piece of consumer electronics and a short shelf life one at that.   Even with 2 year contracts phones get swapped out and what's hot now, hasn't proven to be a guide for what's hot in a year, let alone two.  Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola have all had their spots as top selling "shiny" providers - Apple is having their run at the moment but drawing any conclusions from that, or, for that matter, drawing a linear upward curve of sales is a huge mistake in the phone business.

Which, via a roundabout route, brings me to my point.

Don't define your strategy around the current shiny consumer must have - because consumers are fickle and will change their minds.  Sure, Apple will have a die hard fan core of users, but that isn't necessarily the market you are going to be needing next year, or even now.

We've been working with Samsung on the BADA platform.  BADA is a real gamble.  It's YAMOS (Yet Another Mobile Operating System) running on Linux with a C++ application layer.  But that's not the thing which interests me.  The Samsung Wave, the first BADA phone is shiny.  It's actually a lovely piece of kit.  Great screen, amazing camera, simple and clean  UI, and, more importantly, it's cheap.  On Vodafone in the UK they're offering them free with a 25GBP a month contract.  Oh, and it runs apps…

Samsung want to sell 20M units this year.  And, with the quality of the device, the scale of Samsung and price point - they probably will.  Or, to put it another way - they're planning to ship in 6 months more than Apple shipped in 2008.

The App market is changing as smarter phones work themselves into the market place previously only served by fairly crappy Java based games.  That's a potential game changing and are you ready for it?

Building that 1st iPhone app might have been easy.  The 2nd generation one, after you realized what you wanted, probably was too.  The 3rd one might be becoming an irritation.  What's the plan for all the other platforms that will be out there in millions of teenage hands, or their parents - the people who wouldn't spring for an iPhone but will for a Wave?

It's worth thinking about.

For my next trick I'll also show why Web Apps really aren't the way to go either :)

ViaFo Update

Getting a new solution to market is always an interesting experience and at the moment we're in the middle of a significant number of core engineering tasks and have started the work on our non-Windows Mobile clients.

So, I'm looking at a number of interesting options for both funding and our public beta launch.  It's not clear at the moment if we're going to do that in July or wait until the autumn - there's a significant strategy decision we have to take, so keep watching.

We can be followed on Twitter (ViaFoCEO) or you can follow my personal Twitter (daveon) where I discuss a lot of mobile and wireless issues.