Mobile Content & Applications
Key talking points at Informa’s Mobile Financial Services Conference
Informa Telecoms & Media is holding its annual Mobile Financial Services conference on March 9-10 in London. The conference presented a good opportunity to hear views of leading industry experts on the status of the mobile banking and payments industry. It was interesting listening to the discussions and opinions of the speakers and attendees on how they feel the industry evolved in the last year, what has changed, the success stories, failures, key issues and concerns, and what’s needed to drive the growth of mobile financial services over the coming years.
The following issues were raised by many at the conference as being the key concerns and barriers to the growth of mobile banking and payments
- Ensuring security of transactions.
- Having to work with multiple partners and vendors to deploy services.
- Massive barrier to NFC at retailers’ level.
- Lack of a pan-European agreement.
- Long wait for ROI.
Also, here are some key talking points from the various presentations and panel discussions on the first day of the conference.
Highlights from Day 3 of the MWC in Barcelona
RIM champions BlackBerry traffic efficiencies
In Asia-Pacific markets, operators are putting pressure on Apple to address some of the signalling issues made increasingly worse by continued growth of smartphone adoption, in order to reduce the iPhone’s impact on the network. We’re hearing from the operators we speak to that the device is proving more inefficient in the way it handles signalling versus other competing devices. Somewhat controversially citing BlackBerry devices as a solution to the capacity crunch, RIM CEO stated that ‘you could carry five BlackBerry devices for each iPhone on the network’. Whether true or not, this bears no relevance to consumer purchasing decisions – whether it convinces operators to push the BlackBerry more aggressively is unclear.
Highlights from Day 2 of the MWC in Barcelona
Voice takes centre stage
It’s the end of day two here in Barcelona and despite the wind, rain and the long queues at the entrance gates (not to mention the food halls), it’s been another overwhelmingly positive day. The hustle and bustle in and around the stands here at MWC is obvious and there’s clearly an upbeat mood generally, a marked contrast to last year’s event.
Perhaps one reason for the general positive feeling is that operators have remembered just how big this business is. There’s a lot of talk about the importance of data and whilst it will, of course, be the main revenue driver in the future, it’s worth taking stock of just how much the mobile industry has grown. Informa’s latest forecasts suggest that more than US$700 billion will be generated in operator service revenues from voice in 2010 alone.
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Highlights from Day 1 of the MWC in Barcelona
An agreement between 15 of the world’s largest mobile operators to combat the dominance of Apple in mobile applications dominated proceedings on Day 1 of the Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona.
Other highlights in Barcelona today included Microsoft’s latest attempt to build an attractive, user-friendly operating system for mobile phones and Ericsson’s entree into the already-crowded mobile applications space. Read more »
Qualcomm’s smartbooks: I think I get it - but will the consumers and the carriers?
Qualcomm has been promoting the Snapdragon chipset for several years now. In 2008 they keenly publicised the processing advantages that Snapdragon had over Intel’s rival embedded processor for portable devices, the Atom. Yet 2008 became the year Read more »
US mobile subscribers’ response to Haiti appeal sets a high standard for SMS donations
The earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12 is a tragedy of devastating proportions. The official death toll stood at 111,500 as of Jan. 24, according to the Haitian government officials, with another 200,000 people reported injured. Just 132 people were pulled alive from collapsed buildings in the past two weeks. In addition to losing their loved ones and their homes, millions of Haitians also lack the basic necessities of life: food, water and clothing among them. It is a desperate situation.
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Virtual Goods turn into Real Revenues for Mobile Social Networks
You know that funny little picture of a sword in the hand of your avatar? Or the animated graphic of a glass of champagne which you received on New Year’s from a friend? What about the kitten which is purring and acting cute next to your girl friend’s name in the new mobile phone book? Have you considered sending out a big bouquet of virtual roses for Valentine’s Day? Read more »
Google has issued a wake-up call to the mobile advertising industry by highlighting the fact that it doesn’t yet have an SMS advertising capability
The mobile industry is buzzing about Internet giant Google’s proposed US$750 million, all-stock acquisition of mobile advertising network AdMob, which was announced November 9. It is a huge deal, and seemingly an acknowledgement by Google that it has not been able to sufficiently develop its own mobile advertising capabilities internally, even though it has been offering mobile display search advertisements for some time.
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Mobile standardization headache could stall the future
Operator and vendor frustration with the European mobile standardization environment seems to be coming to a head.
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Keys to success are elusive for iPhone apps developers
IPhone application developers don’t need to offer an inexpensive iPhone app in order to make a dent in the marketplace, but, that said, it’s sometimes the simplest applications that derive the most high-profile attention.
Those were two of the lessons I learned at the 360iDev conference last week. The 225 or so attendees at this event, held in Denver, appeared to be acolytes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs (though that is exactly how one attendee said he did not want to be described). For the most part, they didn’t seem interested in developing apps for Google’s Android OS, Windows Mobile, Palm’s webOS or anything without the Apple brand on it. Read more »
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