Between Brackets

If you’re interested in meeting mobilistas and you enjoy marketing, do join us at the Mobile Monday Belgium meet-up in Brussels November 11th 17th.

You can register here.

Agenda

• 18.30 Welcome – Wim De Waele (IBBT)
• 18.40 Mobile Advertising what can we expect in Belgium- Fabian Tilmant (Cleverwood)
• 19.00 Start-up case – Jean-Paul de Ville (Pumbby)
• 19.20 Debrief of MobileMonday Stockholm session – Tanguy De Lestré
• 19.30 Drinks and networking

Venue

SMIT Research Centre
Pleinlaan 9
1050 Brussels
Belgium

How to get there

Recently I had a conversation with someone who just moved house a couple of weeks ago. This person did not yet have an internet connection in the new house. Several people their mouths fell open. A house without internet, that sounds impossible these days. This made me wonder when we reach this situation in mobile (and we will), that people in a conversation say to each other: a phone without mobile internet, unbelievable.

Yet the figures denote that we’re not there at all: FierceMobileContent discusses a consumer survey of end 2007 that around 80% of consumers never use internet. Lucky there are positive trends reported as well: Juniper (via FierceMobile) expects around 1,7 billion mobile web users by 2013.

Engadget and others report the arrival of an interesting device: a basic phone called the INQ1 (made by Hutchison subsidiary INQ) that is pre-configured with access to Facebook, Skype, Windows Live Messenger and many other mobile applications. It comes with high-speed internet capabilities (HSDPA) and will be sold cheap, apparently less than 150 euro in the UK.

There are many interesting things about this handset.

First and foremost that it will allow having Facebook on your mobile far more affordable to the masses who cannot afford smartphones but would like to use Facebook on-the-go, thereby helping the adoption of the mobile web significantly.

Second, it will push forward the move towards having one central address book both on your phone and your PC. Nowadays, people are confronted will all kinds of ugly synchronization issues in order to have all their contact information handy.

Third, the phone will have presence as built-in feature. Presence (off-line, on-line, budy, etc.) has been an hard-to-get functionality on mobile phones, although it is a real good match. Now people can communicate their correct (presence) status easily all the time.

Finally, companies like Facebook and MySpace can make these kinds of deals with handset manufacturers, while (new) mobile social network start-ups cannot. So this will increase the tendency of people to move to mobile with their existing social network as we wrote earlier. Something that needs to be seen later on is whether or not this phone will provide any openness, such that others can add applications, or that the Facebook platform offers a way to add applications especially for mobile.

New competition for the iPhone and Android has arrived.

Beginning of the week I attended the Mobile Marketing Association’s event in Budapest.

A number of interesting cases were presented and many speakers shared the same concerns.

I’ll make a couple of small posts about the event (instead of one mega post) and I’ll start with the shared concerns:

• The value chain is too long
• Operators need to get moving
• Shortage of case figures to convince brands

The value chain is too long

One big common concern is that the value chain is too long and it isn’t clear as to how to split the pie among the different players. A consolidation is probably needed, or at least one kind of agency should take the lead and offer integrated campaigns.

Today many brands still work with smaller players because the bigger agencies are often not taking up on the mobile revolution fast enough. But in the end the brands want their agencies to integrate mobile in their campaigns (as they did with the web years ago).

Operators need to get moving

Operators sit on a ton of incredibly interesting customer data. Using this data to drive very targeted data would allow marketers to create incredibly well targeted campaigns for their brands.

Everyone agreed that the operators must play an important role as enablers. This said, it is clear that some operators will become data-pipes (which can be an interesting business in its own right) other will mover more into the content space and still others will wither away slowly. There isn’t one clear-cut path for all operators.

Shortage of case figures to convince brands

The industry is very young, therefore there aren’t a lot of cases and figures to show for to prospects. But the MMA is playing a good role here: bringing people together, gathering best practices and figures from the field.

ABI Research reports (via Marketwatch) that MySpace and Facebook are getting more and more traction in the mobile space. Analysts believe that a significant group of people will chose not to select a new mobile social network, but will use the mobile offering of the network they are already signed up to and in which they have already invested significant time to build relationships. This may result in fewer opportunities and become a big hurdle for newcomers that hope to build a new general mobile social network. Specialized mobile social networks based around a specific theme or interest, or new mobile social networks that include a killer location-based feature, will still have a good chance to build their own audience.

It will be interesting to see if such observations translate to similar movements for European social networks such as Netlog, Hyves, and Skyrock, to name a few. Some mobile operators offer the application to access Facebook on Blackberry pre-installed (e.g. Belgium’s Proximus corporate offer), which helps the uptake of Facebook mobile even more (although one can expect Blackberry users to be more interested in LinkedIn Mobile pre-installed).

In Sint Niklaas near Antwerp (but in another province) Newtec Cy develops satellite broadband solutions for (among others) broadcasters and telecos.

The people at Newtec developed a platform that enables Television Networks to easily broadcast, share and monetize their content with other Television Networks around the globe via Satellite. Their solution offers capabilities ranging from “a satellite solution as simple as connecting a remote site to your main studios or as complex as implementing a full exchange system for a broadcasting union“.

They can count A2, ABC, ARD, BBC, CBC, CBS, CNN among their customers.

MENOS (part of the platform) was installed at ASBU for millions of people in North-African countries to enjoy the Olympic games.

At the Open Company Day today they showcased Satellite TV. Their technology is ready to broadcast DVB-H, handset manufacturers are shipping DVB-H handsets, customers are ready to watch TV (I certainly am). When will the Belgian broadcasters be ready?

Newtec Cy deliver their hardware and solutions to Alfacam, another Belgian innovator with offices close to Antwerp (Lint to be precise). If you watched the Olympics, you did thanks to Alfacam.

Now, NewTec Cy hopes to bring satellite internet, tv and radio to the consumer market: Sat3play. Sat3play is broadband satellite terminal which -according to Newtec Cy- is easy to install. It’s not yet widely available yet, but I’m sure going to try it if I can get my hands on it (btw: The product won them an innovator award).