Diffusion Mobile

Last night the Diffusion team was out in force, supporting the wonderful guys at GoMo News with its annual networking ‘Blender’ event at MWC. In what is now a regular highlight of the show’s party calendar, well over 400 plus people from right across the mobile industry came along to celebrate and talk all things mobile. Covering a wide range of companies like Orange, Navteq and Alcatel Lucent, there were experts in attendance from advertising, marketing, blogging, development, operators, infrastructure and more, and they literally drank the bar dry!

A big thank you to the lovely guys from GoMo News for setting the event up in the first place, and another thank you to one of mobile advertising’s finest Smaato, who also sponsored the event with Diffusion. A really great time was had by all, and there was some very lively discussions being had throughout the night. If you made it down yourself, thank you as well for helping to make last night’s event one of the most successful MWC parties at this year’s show. If you didn’t make it, well, we’ll have to see you there in 2011!

Mobile World Congress kicked off its first day in style, with the big exciting news of the day that got everyone talking being . . . well, not much really. A couple of new handset announcements by Samsung and Sony Ericsson on Sunday failed to get attending media and bloggers going, whilst even the announcement of Windows Mobile 7 (just a year after 6.5 and still remarkably similar to HTC’s skinned version of Win Mo) has not exactly caught the eye. Granted, its generated a lot column inches already, but when you bring Steve Ballmer to town that’s almost a guarantee.

The most interesting announcement so far has been a new agreement by the newly formed Wholesale App Community. Unfortunately known as WAC,  the group is made up of 24 global mobile carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile and Vodafone, as well as handset manufacturers LG and Samsung. The announcement has been touted as a way for the operators to regain control of the mobile apps market, which up until now has of course been dominated by Apple’s iPhone and its iTunes App Store.

Anyway, tomorrow is another day and we’ve got my fingers crossed for something really cool. HTC are said to be announcing a couple of handsets, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is in town and it’s the Global Mobile Awards in the evening. Most importantly, the Diffusion Mobile sponsored GoMo News Blender takes place tomorrow evening at Barcelona’s Incognito Bar, and there’s bound to be plenty of interesting tit bits of news flying around there! If you’re at MWC and fancy joining the fun, please check out the event page for more details.

So, with just a few more hours until this year’s MWC gets under way, your Diffusion Mobile team have gone all covert and snuck their way in for a pre-glimpse of exactly what is what. Okay, we used our press officer passes to claim we were exhibitors, but it worked!

One of the first things we noticed was that the big gaudy advertisements that adorn every building outside the Fira itself are gone. A sign of the times and prudence of many companies that are still investing greatly in exhibiting, or perhaps the local Catalan Government has had a word in what is potentially MWC’s last year in Barcelona? We’d imagine, the former.

Otherwise it seemed like business as usual inside as exhibitors busily rushed around, trying in vain for a decent broadband connection and hammering things that looked like they needed it to get stands and conference suites together in time for kick-off tomorrow. The upper floor of Hall 2 however has been more or less culled, and all that’s left to see up there is the media centre. If the GSMA have struggled to fill exhibiting space, or simply just put more of a focus around the newly created App Plant in Hall 7, they’ve wisely cut away the part of the congress with the least passing footfall. Although, with media attendees of all kinds who could potentially write something anywhere prominent about this cutback wandering through several times a day if not more, perhaps they’ve not been that wise after all!

A touch under 50,000 attendees are expected this year, and like last we expect it will be noticeably quieter than when the event first moved to Barcelona five years ago. However, we can certainly still expect the same fun of the fair as ever with some very interesting announcements from the world of mobile over the next four days. We’ll keep you posted with the cool stuff!

So yesterday Apple finally put the gadget loving masses out of their misery and unveiled its latest creation, the iPad, to the world. It’s a pretty impressive piece of kit, aesthetically pleasing and seemingly with the potential to be a bit of a game changer in the way we consume media, especially with its iBooks proposition (Amazon and its Kindle are surely looking over their shoulder). But, despite yet another well oiled launch by Steve and the team, I’m yet to be convinced on several things.

In Europe how will the cheaper, Wi-Fi only model fare? Put simply, not well. Without 3G, what’s the use?

And does an already saturated market need another category of device to choose from? I don’t feel that normal consumers think there is this gap between smartphones and netbooks that urgently needs filling, and the high cost (especially for the 3G version) will put most consumers off. Beyond the early adopters and Apple fanboys, I struggle to think where the demand for the iPad will come from. Netbooks have proved to be hugely popular amongst a wider consumer market in the past year, and for the iPad to come in and usurp that will be a big ask.

Still, it’s going to be interesting to see how people take to the iPad when it does arrive, and at least now the months of speculation and ridiculously over-hyped news stories are behind us. I can’t say I will miss stories such as ‘Apple delays new product that’s not even launched yet’!

In conjunction with GoMo News and Smaato, Diffusion will be hosting the GoMo News Blender at MWC 2010, Tuesday 16 February

With just under four weeks to go until Mobile World Congress 2010 officially kicks off, Diffusion Mobile would like to invite those of you attending this year’s event in Barcelona to a very special networking party taking place during the show, The GoMo News Blender!

Back for another year, the event is being hosted by the GoMo News, Smaato and Diffusion teams at a brand new venue, Barcelona’s exclusive Incognito Bar, on the evening of Tuesday 16th February.

You can bet that 2010 will be another exciting year for MWC, and with the first ever App Planet there’s going to be some big developments for people right across the mobile marketing, search, app and web spaces.

So, if you’ll be in Barcelona for MWC, and you’d like to attend for a little time away from the rush of The Fira, please sign up on the GoMo News Facebook page. We look forward to seeing you in Barcelona!

Where: Incognito Bar (www.incognitobarbcn.com), Calle Fusina 6, 08003 Barcelona, Spain
When: Tuesday 16 February from 6.00pm CET
RSVP: david@diffusion-mobile.com

If you will be at the show and would like to meet one of the Diffusion Mobile team, please drop us a line on +44 (0) 207 025 1500 or email david@diffusion-mobile.com.

It’s January. That means it’s that time of year where operators and handset manufacturers start to bring out the big guns and unveil the first batch of hero handsets for the coming year. The usual January fandango from Apple for the latest iPhone is decidedly Tablet shaped, whilst Google has just announced its first own brand (albeit built by HTC) device, the Nexus One.

The Android OS has been the darling of the smartphone world in the past year, with huge acclaim for the likes of the HTC Hero (scooping several awards en route) and fantastic buzz for the Moto Droid. The Nexus One however, is already getting somewhat of a kicking. With Android devices now numbering in their twenties, there is a real sense of disappointment from the mobile community over what it deems to be yet another plucky but unsuccessful challenger to Apple’s iPhone.

Personally I’m keen to get my mitts on one as soon as possible and try it out for myself, so I will reserve judgement until then. For me though, the biggest point of interest from this year’s first big device is Windows Mobile, and more specifically what it has up its sleeve for 2010. HTC used to be its darling, but with its focus now firmly Android, whilst the likes of RIM and Nokia are also making great strides to emulate the iPhone, the Seattle giants need to make some big waves this year if it is to remain competitive in mobile.

And a happy New Year! See you all in 2010.

It’s December, and that means we are already hearing that next year is the year of mobile. Which was the same for 2009, 2008, 2007 . . .

In part, this is being fuelled by recent announcements such as Google’s $750m acquisition of AdMob, not to mention the plethora of new entrants into the mobile market in the last year, such as Dell and Acer with their handset offerings, to name but a few.

However, after a decade or more of unfulfilled expectations, it goes without saying that (Google or no Google) mobile marketing is not going to ‘explode’ next year, or even the year after. Instead, mobile will continue to grow incrementally as a viable marketing channel as more brands and agencies fold it into their marketing mix. Coupled with a significant growth in both mobile internet usage and more advanced behaviours such as video, mobile search, and UGC, the continued evolution of mobile will require the industry to proactively provide consumers with services that are easy to access, relevant, and entertaining.

Mobile has made some big steps in 2009, but let’s build on that momentum, as there’s still plenty of work to be done. With much on the agenda, we’ll say developments right across the industry in the next 12 months, so it’s safe to say that 2010 promises to be yet another exciting year for mobile.

It’s official. Mobile advertising is now big time. Well, that seems to be the consensus since Google’s announcement on Monday that it has acquired mobile advertising network AdMob for a costly $750 million in precious Google stock.

The investment by Google shows their faith in the potential of mobile advertising, and the company continues to aggressively take advantage of the strong growth opportunity in mobile, being fuelled primarily by smartphones.

They’re already competing in mobile with Android, which in my mind is now very much a worthy if not an equal challenger to the iPhone. If you’ve had a chance to play with devices like the HTC Hero, I’d expect you feel pretty similar about its OS’ credentials.

What many people still seem to ask however is can mobile advertising actually cut it? For a long time now we’ve had analysts predicting it will amass to billions in added revenue within a few short years, so it’s hard to fully give ourselves to this week’s Google inspired hype for mobile advertising.

Mind you, with CEO Eric Schmidt saying that mobile advertising is a key to the company’s growth strategy and has the potential to be as big as Google’s core PC-based business, you wouldn’t want to bet against its future success just yet.

Would you believe Apple has hit another big milestone for its App Store, and in usual fashion its being particularly coy about the whole situation.

Mobile users are still downloading in their droves, developers keep on developing and yesterday Apple announced they have now hit the 100,000 approved apps on the App Store.

100,000 apps in one app store. Where one earth does someone begin searching through that library? And just imagine how many more apps there are that have been developed that didn’t make the grade.

Following the usual media frenzy that tends to proceed an App Store based landmark, the most interesting news from all this comes courtesy of app tracking and sharing service AppsFire, who has said that only 20,000 apps are actually downloaded and used (meaning installed and kept on people’s iPhone).

So, that’s another 80,000 applications that aren’t being downloaded. Even when it comes to the biggest selling apps, by the time you get to the 1,000th most popular app only 1.76% of iPhone users own the application.

The biggest challenge for anyone with an application store strategy, is content discovery. Currently there is an information overload, with a poor discovery process where only the best sellers are really making it. It’s an issue that won’t be solved overnight, but the industry is all too aware it can’t expect users to willingly trawl through 15 different menus to access their desired content.

Personally, I’m hoping to see a lot of movement around mobile search in the next year, with greatly improved distinctions for users between local search, portal search and mobile web search, helping them to find the content they really want.