Author Archives: kirstystyles1

Guardian is UK’s Top Mobile News Outlet

The Guardian has come out on top in an analysis of the mobile-readiness of the UK’s biggest national newspapers. While all of the publications analysed have an iPad, iPhone and Android app, the Daily Mail, Daily Express and the Times all lack a mobile website – meaning they all scored less than 50 per cent.

The Guardian, which has made a public commitment to being a digital first news outlet, was praised for ‘impressively fast browsing’, easy navigation and its new mobile citizen journalism campaign, GuardianWitness. The Independent and its concise sister paper, the i, came in joint second.

The assessment criteria, which also included having an option to visit the desktop and having a unified look and feel across different products, were based on the results of a OnePoll consumer survey into expectations of mobile news. Despite its lack of a mobile site, the Daily Mail’s online platform, MailOnline, is the world’s biggest newspaper website – with a whopping 126m monthly unique users across the globe in January, according to ABC.

At this time, the Guardian reached 77.9m, but its ease of use on mobile hasn’t translated into profit. The Guardian had a pre-tax loss of £75.6m in the year to April 2012. Bottom of the pile, The Times , likewise saw a pre-tax loss of £21.4m in the year to July 2012.

Scores of the top ten UK news publishers:
1. The Guardian – 87 per cent
=2. The Independent, I – 82 per cent
4. Daily Record – 80 per cent
5. Daily Telegraph – 79 per cent
6. Daily Mirror – 78 per cent
7. The Sun – 64 per cent
8. Daily Mail – 49 per cent
9. Daily Express – 47 per cent
10. The Times – 47 per cent

Percentage score out of 410 different metrics across mobile web and apps.

Written for Mobile Marketing Magazine and published here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/guardian-uk%E2%80%99s-top-mobile-news-outlet#8Vjtk3dSjbVMA4FS.99

London Event App YPlan Raises $12m to go Global

Leave a reply

London’s spontaneous events app YPlan has announced that it will open its doors in New York after receiving $12m (£7.8m) in Series A funding. US VC firm General Catalyst Partners, investors in Kayak and Airbnb, led the round, along with YPlan’s initial backers Wellington Partners.

The company has attracted an impressive range of co-investors, including Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade, early Facebook employee Kevin Colleran and David Morin, founder of Path and serial angel investor. Shakil Khan, investor and advisor to Spotify and Summly, also joined the round.

The start-up, which curates 15 last-minute listings per night, has offered tickets to more than 2,500 exclusive events, including a Beyoncé show and the invite-only Sofar Sounds, since it launched in November last year. It passed 200,000 downloads in April and is present on more than 10 per cent of London’s iPhones.

We spoke to YPlan last year about how they find all the weird and wonderful stuff that London has to offer. Its executive team boasts some of the brains behind toptable, GetTaxi, Songkick, Airbnb and lastminute.com, with the former digital director of Timeout in charge of picking the best events.

The YPlan team has already opened its New York office and is currently hiring for a growth hacker, a product manager and marketing staff to support the official launch in H2 2013. More European cities and an Android app are also on the way.

The company received its seed funding of $1.7m in July 2012, a round led by pan-European Wellington Partners, investors in Hailo, and UK-focused Octopus Investments, which invested in SwiftKey. We’ll be speaking to YPlan to find out more about how they’re going to spend the next $12m.

Written for Mobile Marketing Magazine and published here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/londons-mobile-only-event-app-yplan-raises-12m-go-global#pa0aGpFLhHTJARrW.99

It’s a Girl Thing: why are there so few women work in tech and what can we do about it?

Leave a reply

Veteran mobile journalist Tim Green called this year’s Mobile World Congress “so ludicrously mono-demographical it’s almost funny”. And the most largely represented group, in case you were wondering, was “middle-aged, white males”.

Look within the tech industry, and at leadership roles across other sectors, and funnily enough, this story isn’t unusual – LadyGeek calculates that the number of UK technology jobs held by women actually dropped from 22 per cent in 2001 to 17 per cent by 2011. Only 22 per cent of MPs are women, and despite a drive following the Davies Inquiry to reach a pretty reasonable target of 25 per cent female directors in the FTSE 100, the number is stubbornly stuck around 17 per cent. Six of the FTSE 100 boards are still all male.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook, and clearly one of the most powerful women in business, has caused a stir that even she says she hadn’t expected on the launch of her book, Lean In. Pragmatist and feminist, she argues that often women hold themselves back, uncomfortable with the decisions they make in their career. You cannot wait for the institutional barriers to fall down around you, she says.

A year ago, and before Sandberg’s book had even gone to press, Women in Wireless (WiW) London launched to promote and develop female leaders in the UK’s mobile and digital industry. The four founders, Jen Macrae, Rimma Perelmuter, Rhian Pamphilon and Jen Hiley, have a formidable combination of expertise, killer contact books, drive, vision and a bit of humour between them.

Today, the network has more than 700 members, and within its first year, hosted eight events across its Connect, Develop and Promote streams within its first year. The London branch was established after Macrae, who is currently working as VP, digital wallet market development, at MasterCard on the UK deployment of its Masterpass payments system, was approached by one of Women in Wireless’ global co-founders about setting it up. “Although there were many networking organisations, there was an opportunity to create something member-led, targeting career development needs, and serving to promote and support the development of women to more senior roles,” she says.

Things kicked off with a launch led by former Nokia CMO Jerri DeVard, followed by an entrepreneur debate hosted at Telefónica’s Wayra Academy, and then an international careers event with leading female executives at QTel and Microsoft. At the end of last year, WiW London commissioned its first (if not the first) survey into women working in wireless in the UK, with the help of Telefónica and Diffusion PR. The study sought to understand the barriers and opportunities for women in the industry, to raise awareness of diversity issues, and set priorities for their work. The survey garnered more than 600 responses.

Mobile is a young industry, with, the survey found, many younger women working in it. 43 per cent of those surveyed were aged 25 to 34 and a further 9 per cent are in the 18 to 24 age group. Just 14 per cent are 45 to 54 and only 2 per cent are 55 to 64. Not surprisingly, as stereotypes go, the most popular career for women in wireless is marketing – while just 5 per cent work in product development or innovation, 4 per cent are engineers, and only 2 per cent have financial roles.

While there are many initiatives to encourage more young women to get coding skills and take-up STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects, Jen Hiley, who is currently a senior consultant at Infosys Lodestone and social coordinator for WiW, says it is the myth of all tech jobs being “techy” that can deter women in the first place. “There is a mystique of it being a very technical field, whereas, in fact, there are so many non-engineering career paths in the industry,” she says. “Today’s marketplace for technology is no longer about meeting the internal needs of big business. It has shifted to meeting the ever-growing demands of the everyday consumer, which in turn is driving innovation and creativity, and opening up masses of new opportunities.”

Many of the women surveyed are yet to make it to senior roles – just 15 per cent currently hold one – fewer still – just 10 per cent – have directorships. Rimma Perelmuter, who has worked in mobile for 13 years and is now CEO of MEF and co-chair of the WiW development stream, believes it is imperative to have a clear understanding of the causes of why women are under-represented in senior industry roles. “The survey reveals some surprising results,” she says. “83 per cent of respondents between 35 and 54 believe that it is harder for women to succeed in their careers than it is for men, with 36 per cent identifying ‘a male dominating culture’ as the reason they are under-represented at senior levels. While culture is clearly a challenging issue to address, the survey is a wake-up call to the Industry to take action.”

“The survey shows a stark reality,” says Dereck McManus, COO of Telefónica in the UK and board lead for diversity and inclusion, who helped to analyse the results. “The majority of people we spoke to believe it is harder for women to succeed in their careers than men, and two thirds seeing culture as a barrier to the progress of women to senior positions. I believe that businesses have a responsibility to do more to ensure that women are represented at all levels in business. At Telefónica, we’ve launched a number of initiatives, including our Women in Leadership programme, to do exactly that. “One finding that I found interesting, but perhaps not that surprising, was the fact that flexible working was seen as one of the top ways companies can support women in their career. Just last year we ran the biggest ever flexible working pilot, with 3,000 of our people working remotely for a day. It sounds ambitious, but the pilot showed what’s possible when flexible working is done properly.”

While some businesses clearly see the benefits of helping employees manage their career and busy home lives – just 11 per cent of survey respondents said they have an excellent work/life balance – Yahoo’s first female CEO, Marissa Meyer, recently banned her staff from working at home. All of the WiW founders emphasise the need for personal initiative as a means to success – whether that’s finding mentors, sponsors, networking opportunities or going to educational events. 52 per cent of those asked said they had never tried to find a sponsor, while 41 per cent had not identified a mentor.

“At our inaugural event, inspirational speaker Jerri DeVard made a poignant remark that’s stuck with me: ‘We all stand on someone else’s shoulders’,” says Peremulter. “It speaks to the importance of going beyond ‘superficial’ networking to building relationships with mentors, sponsors and colleagues that you can learn from and that are there to support you.
“Equally, it is important to take the time to share your experience with others and give back. I’d like to see more leaders in our industry take the time to live up to this ideal regardless of whether they are women or men.”

It is natural networking abilities, Jen Hiley believes, that should bring success to younger women. “We are widely recognised to be more empathetic, task-orientated and extremely thorough. Women are born networkers, with the ability to forge strong and lasting relationships, seeking out opportunities and alliances. Creating groups like Women in Wireless will hopefully inspire more C-level women to share their extensive knowledge, whilst providing a forum for ladies who can feel comfortable asking for support.”

Self-belief and confidence was highlighted in the survey as one of the top enablers to support career progression. But what happens when that takes a knock? Jen Macrae says: “Our survey respondents have told us, and we have all experienced it, that when personal initiatives fail, it can have a negative impact on career opportunities and confidence. Our challenge now at Women in Wireless is to provide a support structure that helps those wanting to progress to overcome their own internal barriers.”

Telefónica’s McManus concludes: “As an industry, we need to do more to turn this around. Whether it’s running mentoring schemes to support women throughout their career, or using positive role models of successful women in the industry – all businesses can make a difference. If we don’t take action, we run the risk of missing out on the vital skills of a generation of women.”

Written for Mobile Marketing Magazine and first published here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/it%E2%80%99s-girl-thing#KLXduxDsrktJQkfx.99

Spotlight: Fairphone’s Crowdfunded Ethical Smartphone

Leave a reply

While you now touch your smartphone more than your partner, you’ve probably made less effort to find out any more about what’s on the inside.

If you found out your husband or wife was involved with child slavery, you’d certainly have to reconsider your relationship. I don’t know how you pick your partner, but your smartphone, your real best mate, actually probably is.

We don’t really know anything about where our handsets come from or who made them. George Monbiot, environmental columnist for the Guardian, recently did a report into the ethics of the industry. “There are dozens of issues,” he said, “such as starvation wages, bullying, abuse and 60-hour weeks in the sweatshops manufacturing them, the debt bondage into which some of the workers are pressed, the energy used, the hazardous waste produced. But I will concentrate on just one: are the components soaked in the blood of people from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo?”

He found that Nokia appears to be the manufacturer most conscious of its ethical footprint, in terms of trying to get the precious metals that it takes to build a smartphone, tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold, from legal sources. He found the policies of the operators who sell smartphones and other manufacturers to be less convincing. Scenes of riots in Apple’s factories in China have been beamed around the world, while Samsung recently admitted after another Guardian investigation that its phones contain tin mined from an area that uses child labour and where 150 miners die every year.

Step forward Fairphone.

FairPhone‘s sleek Android handset has been three years in the making and it has now gone on pre-sale. The company needs 5,000 buyers of the £275 device in order to get the first batch out the door. The company says it has created an alternative for the “thing we can’t live without” with a transparent supply chain and ethical principles built-in. All the metals it contains come from conflict-free mines and the company says it has focused on improving the wages and conditions of its factory workers it China.

For every Fairphone sold, €3 goes to removing e-waste from Ghana and in September, a shipping container filled with 100,000 phones and batteries will head to Belgium to be safely recycled. They encourage people to sell their old phones to recycling services, something they will introduce for Fairphones. Among their mantras is “reduce, reuse, refurbish, recycle”. “Our end goal is fewer phones in circulation – not more!” Which is a probably a scary prospect for our throwaway consumers and manufacturers.

But what about the specs? It is the running the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean, and its chipset is up there with the Samsung S4 as a 1.2GHz quadcore. But its 1GB of RAM and extra 20g doesn’t quite match up. Other than that, it has the full front/back camera, glass frontage and 16GB of internal memory.

And there probably ain’t anything quite like the feeling in your heart when you can pick up your best friend knowing that you won’t get blood on your hands.

Written for Mobile Marketing Magazine and published here.

What are EU on about?

Leave a reply

You’ll know the Conservative grassroots member by their swivelling eyes and lunatic-type behaviour, according to an as yet unnamed senior Conservative member whose unattributed remark has been splashed all over the papers like a kiss and tell in the Sun. They might be shouting gay people out of their church or terrorising European economic migrants in your local Polski Sklep.

And senior Conservative members, when they aren’t undermining their own supporters, are confusing and berating the general public in equal measure. They’re about as inclusive as the aristocracy.

Boris Johnson wrote a piece for the Telegraph last week that went thusly: “As a British diplomat once languidly observed, the trouble with the whole debate on Europe is that there is too much religion and not enough politics. It is like the feud in the early Christian Church between those who believed that Christ was of the same substance as the Father, and those who said He was of a similar but not identical substance. Was He homoousios or homoiousios? You might say it didn’t make an iota of difference – and yet that iota was the cause of strife that cost thousands of lives.”

You could probably express this same argument by saying: “The trouble with the whole debate on Europe is that there is too much religion and not enough politics. It is like the feud in the early days of Coke and Coke Diet. Does it taste the same? You might say it didn’t make one iota of difference – and yet that iota was the cause of strife that cost thousands of lives.” Ok. Maybe the last bit doesn’t work. And Coke obviously isn’t religion – although it is more popular – the only countries that it isn’t present in are Cuba and Syria. And likewise, Europe also isn’t a church. But in one fell swoop, Boris alienates anyone who hasn’t closely studied the Crusades, while a simple fizzy drink analogy would have made the same point.

So why would the Boris-friendly Torygraph, along with Murdoch’s Times, seek to stitch up the Conservative aid by reporting on his comments in the first place? Perhaps they are all FT subscribers, which this weekend reported to its wealthy readers that the EU is going to put a €500,000 pay threshold on bankers’ bonuses. Perhaps this is actually a double bluff by the right wing press and the Tory part itself to make the whole EU exit thing sound rather like a good, homegrown idea and not one imposed by friends of those at the top.

There are people – many of whom are members of the Conservative party – that wholeheartedly believe that we should leave Europe. There are many, much less well heard, who believe that we shouldn’t. So far, we have received little actual information on the topic, save that 100 Conservative MPs are very keen for us to have a referendum, they say at the behest of their members. But anyway, no one actually has any idea what the UK would look like after the event. So whether it’s because of Romanian immigrants, ‘elf and safety’, or because it’s going to hit their considerable bank balances, the anti-Europeans can’t be as sure as they sound. So let’s have another costly public vote on something that few people really understand, yeah? Because the Eurovision Song Contest clearly isn’t enough.

Intuitively I believe that Europe is a good thing. I think we are stronger together, weaker apart. And Barack Obama has expressed the same sentiment, whatever that means. The UK just isn’t that big a deal anymore. I like Europeans and I can’t understand why languages aren’t as valued in the UK as they are elsewhere. I feel impotent on the continent. Which gives me some idea of how impotence can actually feel. We have also seen the longest period of peace in the region under the European Union. Which is probably a good thing? An interviewee in the recent Ken Loach documentary The Spirit of ’45, made the rather grisly observation that if we could make killing Germans a legitimate industry, the UK would be thriving.

Some people reckon that with this piece BoJo was positioning himself to be the post-EU UK PM. ROFL? Might I suggest that our exit from the EU could be a long-term strategic plan to break that peace pact and get Britain working again? I can almost see Boris, Churchill-like, wearing a onesie (check it out at the Cabinet War Rooms museum), with a long stick in his hand directing the Boris Bombers. We can just ignore the people, doctor the evidence and send some brave people to their untimely deaths. And then the government will change and everyone will have collective amnesia. We’ll see.

One of his key points was that we are all actually pretty rubbish, with or without the EU. He said if we left we “would have to recognise that most of our problems are not caused by “Bwussels”, but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and under-investment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure.” Not sure how much of this can be laid at our door… Or even that of Bwussels.

Meanwhile, gay marriage has also become a sticking point for the Conservative party. I’m not quite sure why such an unpopular club would like to alienate willing members who want to give up their individual freedom in the ‘eyes of God’. Likewise, I wouldn’t be so keen to join a club that didn’t want me, although if it was my religion… I guess I’d just want it to be cool to marry the person I love.

So. This week, Conservatives are yet again trying to change the rules of a club that doesn’t really need us to be members while also refusing to change a club that they don’t really want other people to be members of.

Perhaps it’s all these little clubs – much like the ones where swivel-eyed loons of the journo-political variety hang out together – that are the problem.

::

Smashing illustration of BoJo by Dale Edwin Murray, created for the Sunday Times

Written for and first published here: http://www.letsbebrief.co.uk/what-are-eu-on-about/

Vogue and Maxim are UK’s Best Cross-Platform Mags

Leave a reply

Vogue and Maxim are the only UK-based magazines that are fully-optimised for a multi-platform audience – with iPhone, iPad and Android apps, along with sites specially designed for iPad, Nexus 7 and smartphones – according to research into multi-screen advertising experiences with publishing companies by BrandPerfect.org.

The survey of 100 popular consumer-facing magazines in the US, the UK and Germany found that 93 per cent don’t offer their readers a fully cross-platform experience. 83 per cent of the 78 consumers magazine brands surveyed from the US and UK have an app. 65 per cent of these have an iPhone app and 40 per cent have Android. Almost all – with notable exceptions like the BBC’s Radio Times – have a separate iPad app. But, the report says: “Without satisfactorily audited audience circulation figures available, especially where app are bundled in with print subscriptions or availabe for free, how [do we know] many people are seeing them?”

Fewer mobile sites despite easier targeting

46 per cent of the UK-based magazines assessed by the company and 45 per cent of the German publications did not have a site optimised for smartphones. Just 25 per cent of the US ones were in the same position. The report says: “While many publishers have invested heavily in apps, website readerships are much larger, targetable and easier to analyse.”

Many of the publishers offer a scaled version of their desktop site to tablet and smartphone surfers, with varying results. Glamour magazine in the UK scaled to fit the smaller screen, although the writing becomes rather small, while Wired magazine readers in the UK have to move their screen from side-to-side to read full articles on the scaled site.

Vice and Marie Claire were missing just one of the seven criteria used each – an Android app and an iPad-optimised site respectively.

Written for Mobile Marketing and first published here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/vogue-and-maxim-are-uks-best-cross-platform-mags

IBM Creates AllAboard Travel Optimsation Tool for the Ivory Coast

Leave a reply

Researchers from IBM have created a map of potential bus routes for the Ivory Coast’s largest city, Abidjan, using data collected from more than 500,000 cell phone calls.

Today, 539 buses are supplemented by 5,000 mini-buses and 11,000 taxis to take people around the city, which has a population or more than 3.5m. The AllAboard team believes that re-designing the infrastructure around people’s movements could cut travel times in the notoriously busy city by 10 per cent.

As many phones in use in the developing world do not have GPS functionality, the data gathered from phone calls or text messages, which register with a nearby mobile tower. The person’s movements can be ascertained as the call is transferred to a different tower or a new call is made near another tower.

The anoymised data from 2.5 bn calls made by 5m phone users was gathered by Orange between December 2011 and April 2012 and released for use in its Data for Development project. This is the largest data release of its kind, according to MIT, which is hosting the NetMob conference where the rest of the projects will be showcased.

“This represents a new front with a potentially large impact on improving urban transportation systems,” said Francesco Calabrese, a researcher at IBM’s research lab in Dubli and a co-author of a paper on the project. “People with cell phones can serve as sensors and be the building blocks of development efforts.”

David Talbot, chief correspondent at the MIT Technology Review, said: “Cell phone data promises to be a boon for many industries. Other research groups are using similar data sets to develop credit histories based on a person’s movements and phone-based transactions, to detect emerging ethnic conflicts, and to predict where people will go after a natural disaster to better serve them when one strikes.

“While in a number of past studies mobile phone data was used to infer travel routes and demand, IBM says this was the first time such data was used in an effort to actually optimize a city transit network.”

Written for Mobile Marketing Magaizne and first published here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/ibm-creates-allaboard-travel-optimsation-tool-ivory-coast

Will I be pretty, will I be rich?

Leave a reply

If, like me, you aren’t wealthy or sexy, last week really wasn’t your week. But when is it ever your week? That’s why fashion and adverts were created right? Shoulda, woulda, coulda etc etc etc.
While you’re checking your back fat in the mirror I know your mind has been wandering back to the inevitable question… “WHO IS BRITAIN’S SEXIST WOMAN?

Worry not. It’s Sexy Week at The Sun. Which means our British beauties have been adorning the paper’s pages for your perusal. “Britain has indeed Got Talent – just look at those endless legs!” the piece assures us when commenting on pop idol and BGT on Ice judge Alesha Dixon. Does Arctic Monkey gf 34B Katie tickle your fancy, or good old blonde Rhian Sugden, 26? Both were huge hits on Page 3, if that helps clarify your thoughts. Whose assets do you most admire? With your crucial decision made, you can pop along and vote for your Brittiest Brit on The Sun’s website.

Yet you can’t vote for your Brittiest man, lest he feel ogled and ashamed like the first in the queue at the wedding buffet. Rather unfair I hear you say. Fortunately another ‘who’s who’ went live recently, the Sunday Time’s Brit Rich List. Unfortunately, this is less of a democratic, participatory process, more of a cold hard numbers game. But if you have a penchant for unattractive, older gentlemen, this is your lucky day. STOP PRESS. BALD AGING MAN HAS MORE MONEY THAN YOU.

The top 10 is notably absent of women, much like most who’s whos as we calmly demonstrate our way through the glass ceiling, a former Miss UK makes it in at number nine with her monied hubby. And another rounds of the shortlist along with Mr Rich having both inherited her father’s Heineken fortune. I’m sure he loved her for her great sense of humour and not all the money and free booze. Unlike The Sun’s list, just one of the top 10 rich Britons is British born. And they’re all pretty not-sexy; apart from their wallets.

The Queen (wealthy winner of the Rich List when it started in 1989) isn’t a noted GILF, so she hasn’t even made the shortlist of 50 British fitties. She even slipped down the wealth rankings when they decided not to count her land. Coz as her loyal subjects we really all own her land and can run rabid at Buckingham Palace just like Prince Harry. Wait…

So do you fancy yourself as a regular Billie Piper in a cocktail glass (see image) or are you and your brother just dying to be the next Sri and Gopi Hinduja? They’re billionaire exporters, if you’re into that… Well here’s the disheartening bit.

The BBC notes that in 1989 you would have need ed wealth of £30m (about £65m today) to make it into the Rich Lists top 200. Last year, to get into that same 200, you would have needed £450m. In 1989 the wealth of the top 200 amounted to £38bn. Last year it added up to £289bn. And you actually have to be ‘sexy’ to get into the Sexy Week list. While mere mortals can only learn from Gok Wan one series at a time, it actually turns out that having a bit of dollar isn’t too bad for getting into the fit list either. There’s a Jagger on both. Handy if you’ve got genes like Jagger; less so if you can’t quite afford Jagger’s jeans.

The moral of the story…? Wealth doesn’t guarantee attractiveness, but it can’t hurt. And being hot might make you a bit rich, à la Knightley and Middleton, but you might have to suffer loads of blokes – and even women – staring and judging you for the rest of your life.

Just remember, many studies have shown, that there is no direct link between wealth and happiness. Yes, that is probably just what a poor and unattractive person would say.
::
Illustration by Ben Rider

Written for and first published here: http://www.letsbebrief.co.uk/kirsty-styles-will-i-be-pretty-will-i-be-rich/

MRS 2013: “Next Five Years of Innovation will be Frightening” says Forrester

Leave a reply

While the earliest communications innovations had tens and even hundreds of years between them – from the invention of the telephone in 1897 to the first WAP-enabled handset – innovations in smartphones have only been gathering pace.

Addressing the room at the end of the Mobile Retail Summit 2013, Martin Gill, principle analyst for Forrester, said we wouldn’t have even been talking about this at a conference in 2007. “The pace of change is getting faster and faster. That’s not going to slow down. 39 per cent of UK adults now use the mobile internet on a daily basis. If your core customerbase is under-25, that figure reaches 60 per cent.”

“This is not limited to the UK. This is the way in which everyone across the world is using mobile – not just talking but communicating, searching and changing the way they interact with brands.”

But he said this new world, where over half of all searches are mobile and most of those are local, is increasingly difficult to keep up with and manage. In the past, he said, when a customer was in your store, you could be certain that they weren’t on your website, on the phone to your call centre, watching your TV ad or browsing a competitor’s site. “There are mobile specific behaviours that you can’t afford to ignore.”

90 per cent of purchases are still in store

But he highlighted that only 12 per cent of UK consumers have actually bought a product on their mobile phone – including downloads and other digital content. “Only 11 per cent of purchases made in the UK are online. That means 90 per cent are still in physical stores. What people are doing,” he said, “is using their mobile phones to interact with the physical environment.” The top activities are locating a store to check opening hours, researching a product and taking a picture. “People are not in a massive rush to buy on mobile – what they want is help with their physical purchase.

“Whatever you call it – a game changer, the glue or the link – mobile is bringing the best of the physical world and the best of the digital world together to influence consumers in different ways. Brands have the opportunity to touch every different aspect of the customer life cycle.

So what does Forrester predict for the future?

“The future of mobile is absolutely about context. Brands can create mobile unique experiences that only exist because of what the person is doing and the fact that the phone can interact with their environment.” He outlined that the controls, displays and opportunities for data collection will only get smarter, offering the potential for things like biometric security, image projection and chemical sensors for food.

But he said there are simple bits of context that can be better used today. Location, time and making use of user set preferences can all help create a personalised experience. “Are they in store, are they in a competitor’s store, are they about to get on a flight?” Walmart, for example, delivers an app customised for when a customer is in store with content relevant to where they are. Distance, depth, aisle, floor, direction and what time of day it is could all be put to use in the near future.

Next five years will be frightening

Although he said it might not be that useful, he highlighted that the Converse AR app actually works and does what it says – which is a start. “Whether they buy something I don’t know but it’s a vision of what’s to come – what does it look like when I wear it? How does it look or how does it feel?”

“If you were IKEA, you could already know the colour scheme or a room – what colours match? How big is the room? How much do I have in savings? When can I have it delivered? Which stores deliver to my house?

“What we do know is it’s coming at such a fast pace that the level of innovation that the next five years is going to bring will be frightening. And the mouse is dead. There are new ways of interacting with technology and we are not tied to the old user input. We can deliver new user experiences, mobile user experiences.

“If you remember anything, remember mobile is the glue – it brings the best of digital and the best of physical together.”

Written for Mobile Marketing Magazine and first published here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/mrs2013-next-five-years-innovation-will-be-frightening-says-forrester-analyst

iLove Interactive Women’s Magazine Drops onto Your Door Mat

Leave a reply

A women’s consumer magazine with mCommerce built in has been unveiled in the same week that Bauer has closed the doors at print magazine More!.

Digital Space has announced the launch of the free iLove interactive women’s magazine and app, which will be delivered direct to a selected audience of 700,000 households from July.

The editorial content and advertising in the monthly mag will all contain multimedia elements, with a particular focus on driving women to download the app, scan products and buy them on the spot. The company has used data modelling with the help of Royal Mail to identify women who like fashion and beauty and also own a smartphone to ensure that the people targeted will be keen to purchase the products. The company will be able to track scans and purchases made via the app, making them directly attributable.

The audience will be more than double those of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, as well as the free magazines from Stylist and ASOS. Will women be able to argue with a free mag with interactive content selected with them in mind delivered straight to their door?

It is also available to a wider audience online and in email editions.

Written for Mobile Markeint Magazine and first published here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/ilove-interactive-womens-magazine-drops-your-door-mat