Between Brackets

40+ people gathered last Monday to talk about publishing and marketing on the mobile platform.

Some interesting figures and facts were given by the speakers:

• The iPhone app from the De Standaard didn’t cannibalize the site, it added to the traffic (something that a Le Monde speaker also mentioned on a IFRA talk in Amsterdam)
• From an Orange study: using the classic internet and mobile internet channels combined to create brand awareness is the way to go. Brands can benefit greatly from the combination.§
• I’m not sure who said it, but apparently younger people tend to buy Android based phones (instead of an iPhone)

more to be found her: http://www.mobilemonday.be/event/publishing-and-marketing

Next week Monday March 1st it is Mobile Monday Brussels time again.

The theme for this evening is Publishing and Marketing, a joint networking event between IAB and Mobile Monday Brussels.

You can find program details and register here, make sure you’re there.

No, it’s not George Clooney’s own vanity website It’s a site that’s about sharing your medical data with other patients like you.

In the traditional healthcare system: you feel sick, you go to the doctor, she prescribes you some drugs, you go to the drugstore, you take your pills, and you -hopefully- get better.

PatientsLikeMe.com works around the notion that getting yourself involved in the process of listening to your body and symptoms, thinking about how and what you feel, makes you more conscious about your illness. Recording your medical data and sharing it with others, makes it possible to have a better view on your symptoms to yourself, others and doctors. Instead of going to the doctor and having a fuzzy description of what you feel, you can give the doctor a detailed description of what you have been feeling over many days, weeks or months.

The internet makes it possible to create bigger communities of patients suffering from the same disease than in the physical world. Often the small communities on peoplelikeme, are even bigger than the groups of patients that were followed during the clinical trials of drugs that treat their diseases.

People record all kinds of daily habits: what did I eat today? How do I feel today? …? And because they record it regularly, they have a lot of information when they go to the doctor.

Business plan? Peoplelikeme works together with pharmaceutical companies.

There’s many reasons why an organization could delay investing in their mobile presence. Compared to the internet 10 years ago, one can argue that penetration of mobile internet is still relatively low, so there’s still not that much people that would come by on your site.

Except that, different from the early internet days, there’s other forces at work this time: Facebook Mobile: 100 Million and Growing

Now that’s 1 in 4 accessing Facebook via mobile. And what happens if those people try to link through to your brand via a Facebook fan page, a friend’s link, or anything ?

Maybe it is time to re-consider the urgency of your brand’s mobile internet presence.

Nick Hunn worked on the new low energy bluetooth standard that -according to him- we will see implemented in hundreds of millions of devices as soon as the beginning of 2011.

His presentation revolved around the central question: what if everything were interconnected?

Not only your TV-set, your computer, your iPhone/iPod, digital cameras and the likes. But also door-knobs and handles for instance.

And what if these door-knobs and handles were fitted a sensor to measure your pulse, or the pulse of elderly people? This could vastly improve the collection of data.

Nick Hunn also gave us his thoughts on mHealth:

• mHealth won’t make healthcare less expensive.
• doctors don’t want it, nor do patients.
• mHealth is not about curing disease. It’s about how much people want to pay (to improve their quality of life…)

So how will we change society so that it wants to improve health care?

Well, to get mHealth going: stop thinking like doctors, start thinking like patients.

For the statisticians among us: the average person takes 50000 pills in a lifetime (200000 in the US). I put my spreadsheet to work and this is the result: if you reach the age of 70, you’ll have ingested an average of 2 pills a day.

Read up on more of his thoughts here.

Here’s an interesting (albeit a couple of months old) youtube short about VISA’s mobile banking work in progress.

Nothing revolutionary if you’re used to the Korean way of living I guess But VISA is a big player, with the capability of rolling such solution out worldwide. So it’s good to see.

Another Mobile Monday Amsterdam is in the can, this time in a new venue: De Duif. Not a bad location at all.

Topic: mHealth. What is it? What’s its state? Where are the opportunities?

Bart Collet (owner of an Elderly Home, and mobile addict) gave us his view of the subject. I summarize very lightly:
there are two opportunities for cost savings in the health industry:
appointment alerts: please don’t forget your dental appointment tomorrow.
Treatment alerts: did you measure you blood pressure today? Did you take your medication?
developing countries are making a lot of progress in mHealth. They have limited budgets and therefore think differently. They also have more spotty networks and must therefor make their software very reliable. Finally they have less regulation, less lobbyists than in developing countries.
‘Normal’ device manufacturers (like Nintendo) are starting to enter the medical market as well. These are potentially disruptive forces in the medical appliance world, because these new players are agile, have fresh ideas, less legacy. Of course they don’t have the maturity and experience in mHealth yet.

Interesting opening presentation.

The people at Nokia must have read the WWGD book not so long ago, since this is exactly what Google would do (or did some weeks ago): offer free turn-by-turn navigation.

I must say that this was also the biggest disappointment when I first used my N900 (in fact it forced me to use my old phone again).

And now my next wish is for Nokia to make it possible to sync my N900 with OVI. But that won’t keep me from using my N900. What now still keeps me from using it is that I can’t make a Wi-Fi access point of it, but once Joiku solves this I’m back to using it again.

Actually it’s pretty amazing how these days I tend to find it normal that software updates can be easily installed on mobile phones, and how they -more often than not- really improve the device’s capabilities.

DM2PRO and Quattro Wireless (the last one recently taken over by Apple) published an interesting study (via Mobile Marketing Watch) end of last year that reports on current strategies and future plans of advertisers, agencies, and developers with respect to mobile and social apps in the US.

Interesting to see is that a significant number of parties plan significantly more mobile apps in 2010 as well as an increase in budget reserved for launching apps. As preferred platforms, both RIM and Android are mentioned, but iPhone still leads the pack in everything.

As the report concludes correctly, this flood of extra apps will mean that promotion of an app will become more and more essential in order to stand out of the crowd.

After a lot of speculation Google finally announced its own Android phone today, the Nexus One. Yet another Android phone, and this time from the Android makers themselves. Especially this last point is not unimportant, since it displays that Google considers Android and mobile phones to be important and that it will use its considerable powers to provide more and more useful apps for the Android platform. The Android platform grows a bit bigger with this announcement.