|

Mobile Fix – Those that evolve & adapt face a bright future. Those that don’t, don’t.

Mobile Fix – Those that evolve & adapt face a bright future. Those that don’t, don’t.

Simon Andrews

Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, on Mary Meeker and the latest updates from Facebook, Apple and Google…

We missed last week as we were on a ship moored off Guernsey with 300 marketing directors, no phone signal and the worlds most expensive WiFi – £18 an hour!

So there is lots of news to catch up – but it’s worth taking a moment to consider just how central technology now is to marketing. The new Mary Meeker deck is just as thought provoking as those in the past;

  • More smartphones now ship than feature phones in Western Europe and the US
  • The iPad is growing much more quickly than the iPhone did over its first 6 quarters – and Android adoption is even faster than the iPhone
  • More people use social media now than used the internet as a whole in 2006
  • The biggest growth in internet penetration over the last 3 years has been China (who added more than the total of US users) India, Nigeria, Russia and Iran

The deck is a must read as it paints a similarly positive picture around ecommerce and advertising. And if you have some time, watching the actual presentation is worthwhile too.

As people come to rely more heavily on the web for everything from shopping to social networking, they need access to computing power in many more places. And as the line between their personal and their work lives has blurred, so demand has grown for devices that can be used seamlessly in both…

So the challenge for us marketers is how we adapt to our customers’ new behaviours. We still need to acquire customers, maintain a dialogue and build our brand – but we now need to learn how to do it differently.

Those that evolve and adapt face a bright future. Those that don’t, don’t.

Facebook

Whilst it’s been a little overshadowed by other news we still think the most significant move in the last couple of weeks is how Facebook is evolving to make the mobile experience match the desktop one. With 350 million mobile users Facebook intends to make the new Timeline look pretty much the same whatever device you use. So the big change is that apps will now work on mobile.

The Facebook CTO talks eloquently about the challenges of embracing mobile – but the scary thing is that lots of Facebook apps just won’t work on mobile as they are developed in Flash. Brands now have the choice of developing (or adapting) iOS apps to work in Facebook for iPhone and iPad users and/or a HTML5 one for everyone else. Some wonder if this isn’t a compromise to appease Apple.

Our take is that developing an HTML5 app for Facebook is now essential – with the benefit you can take that work and use it as a hybrid mobile app and also build a modern site that responds to whatever device is being used. The developers resources on Facebook give lots of advice on what to do.

Apple

After all the ‘disappointment’ over the iPhone 4GS, it’s gone on to be the most successful Apple launch ever – selling four million over the first weekend. Smart commentator Ben Evans points out that the revenue from this ($2.6bn) is around the same as Apple earn from the app store over a year ($2.8bn) and close to what Google expect to make from mobile advertising over a year ($2.5bn).

As well being popular with punters, the 4GS has also gone down well with pundits – David Pogue in the New York Times loves it, as does Stephen Fry. Both rave about Siri and it’s clear that voice is going to be a big deal – Mary Meeker talks about that too.

No wonder iPhone users are the most satisfied – scoring 8.6 out of 10 versus an average of 7.8 in UK research.

Google

Seemingly delayed out of respect for Steve Jobs, the new Google Samsung phone, the Nexus, has now been launched. And it looks really impressive. But the new version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich) that powers the Nexus is equally newsworthy.

Whilst the Google results announced the other day are very impressive, it’s the mobile element that is very exciting. A year ago they predicted a run rate of $1 billion – one year later they’re talking $2.5 billion.

At the results they were also bullish about Google+ – talking of 40 million users. If you talk with anyone at Google they will tell you that Google+ is seen as central to everything they do – and they are excited about the traction its seems to have – with 3.5 billion photos uploaded already. One bit of evidence we noticed was that a recent Seth Godin post had around 500 Facebook likes and around 50 Pluses. The next addition is Google+ apps – due in the next week or so.

Click here for your full Mobile Fix (complete with links to background articles).

Media Jobs