Mobile Fix: MWC – “nothing that exciting”
Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, on new partnerships, the Mobile World Congress, and Apple Vs Google…
Oddly, the Mobile World Congress seems to us to have been a little flat, with all the big news released before hand. But that may because we chose not to attend this year…
But before we look at what did happen, some news from us;
A new partnership
We’re delighted to announce a partnership with Pontomobi, the biggest, smartest and best mobile agency in LatAm.
Whilst we’re confident that we can deliver the very best insight and ideas around mobile and social, our architect builder model for implementation wasn’t quite as sorted.
But we’re convinced that the Pontimobi team is the best collection of tech talent around and we’ll now use them for our tech development. So we now have on our team, around 100 of the most experienced mobile and Facebook developers in the business – and with a really competitive cost base.
We’ve talked with lots of tech and development talent around the UK and Europe – and whilst we’ve met with some smart people, we were concerned that the good talent was overworked (and consequently somewhat overpriced) and under resourced. One of the issues holding mobile back has been the friction in getting stuff done; small teams with limited skills – usually just iPhone apps – have created a market where getting stuff done is often quite slow and usually quite expensive.
With this partnership with Pontomobi we can now move quickly and at a price point where brands can combine reach and richness, rather than spend the whole budget on an iPhone app.
MWC
Most of the big stories at MWC broke before the event so the keynotes from Steve Ballmer, Carol Bartz etc were long on mobile is going to be huge and short on new news. Eric Schmidt was probably the best.
There were lots of new handsets and tablets but again nothing that exciting.
The keynote from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was interesting, as he stressed how Twitter and mobile were intertwined. He makes a good point about their ambition for deep integration with devices – so if you take a photo on your smartphone the option to share with twitter is built in, rather than you having to come out of one app into another. Just like Touchnote as we mentioned last week.
One question that kept coming up at different sessions was around the Twitter valuation but no-one really said anything.
There was quite a focus on mobile advertising with Martin Sorrell and Michael Roth of Interpublic talking about how important mobile is going to be – but both were light on details of how they plan to react to this change.
Apple
The details on the Apple content tax became clearer last week – with Apple insisting that content owners have to offer iTunes as a payment option for subscriptions and downloads, with offer at least as good as those available direct to consumers.
And in return for making the iTunes option available, Apple will take a 30% cut of those revenues – and will only share subscriber data with the content owner if the customer explicitly gives their permission.
Cue outrage from content owners.
And, cue, an alternative from Google. They announced their own One-Pass content payment system this week – where they take only 10% and where the subscriber data is passed on unless the customer explicitly says no.
Of course content owners are used to paying a tax on their revenues – the retailer takes a huge proportion of the cover price of a newspaper, magazine or book. Which is why direct subscriptions are so much cheaper.
But as the new ecology emerges everyone is nervous about allowing distributors to tax their revenues. And of course things are starting to look like the bad old days of the operators when Vodafone and Telefonica insisted on taking 30% or 40% from anyone wanting to distribute their content on deck.
The advantage Apple have is they deliver big volume, so many people will decide 30% is a price worth paying to access the big audience. But as Android grows, will some people decide to walk away from Apple? And what does that do to Apple is the long term? As we asked last week, who is the loser if Amazon were to walk away from Apple?
One more thing – Google are making search more social…
Content shared by friends on Flickr, Blogger, or Twitter will be woven in among Google’s main search results, to give users “even more information from the people that matter to you”.
Of course the nice peope at Facebook haven’t come out with a tax – yet. The emerging F-Commerce and deals don’t require any payment to Facebook.
But just as Zynga saw, when Facebook mandated their credits as the only acceptable currency for games on the platform, it can be dangerous to assume things won’t change.
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