Dec

Mobile internet services you want in your mobile life

Filed Under Mobile Music, Mobile Search, Mobile TV

: Image by RTPeat via Flickr

Mobile Internet services are seldom as well designed as its more grownup equals. This is a strange phenomenon since it should be the other way around. Your mobile is always just a few seconds away and is constantly a potential channel for a service. The task of delivering a service in the mobile channel is not taken seriously, maybe it is due to a classic catch 22 situation. The mobile version of a service has fewer users than the web version so it gets less attention. The mobile version gets less attention so it never reaches its full potential and don’t attract enough users.

Mobile TV

Take TV in the mobile as an example. You never accept being fed commercial spots on the mobile in the same way as you accept on TV. Sitting in front of your TV set you either endure the spot, leave the room with the spot running in the background or you switch to another program. You never plan to watch commercials, but still many companies feed you their message every evening. In the mobile it is a different challenge. You will never accept being force fed commercials in the same way. Delivering TV in the mobile channel needs mobile thinking combined with core knowledge of traditional TV business. The best Mobile TV solution I have seen so far is the 3Mobile-TV but even that struggles with content rights and a traditional mindset in the TV industry.

Mobile positioning

Another example Nokias efforts in the world of GPS and positioning. Really cool technology but not nearly as user experience as a specialized GPS service provides. It is obvious that Nokia has a deep technical knowledge but lack expertise in the positioning field. Being a company used to deliver quality they realized this and bought the map company Navteq. For the same reasons, I suspect, Vodafone put down the money(239 million swedish kronors) for Wayfinder. We are in for an interesting fight in this field as the giants(Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nokia, Vodafone, Garmin) fight to define the mobile trends. It will put you, as a user, in the focus.

Too Techy

The technology develops fast. It is hard for the “soft” market people, with business minds, to understand the possible and impossible of mobile Internet services. Things change every day. The challenge is to make “soft” people work closely with technology people and force them to communicate. Finding a balance between tech focus and business focus is difficult but if the tech people continue to rule, the mobile Internet services will not.

Time to service is of essence

You get irritated at slow services on the web that forces you to slow down in your mobile life. The same things applies, naturally, on the mobile. I read a survey claiming that “Users of mobile services are not as sensitive and are willing to wait a bit longer than on the web” This might be true, you don’t abandon the service directly, but you still want it to be as fast as possible. You will abandon the service if another service is faster and equally good. It should be a given that you use Wikipedia on your mobile instead of making a call, to cheat on the traditional quiz-walk at the Swedish midsummer party.

That it takes longer to do a search at wikipedia on the mobile than on the web is not good promotion for using that service in your mobile life. Sure you have some delays related to networks and you always have the starting of the browser as a consumer of time but apart from that, what is the problem? Picking on Wikipedia is not my goal, it is just an example of not serving you as a customer in the best way in your mobile life.

Mobile music

In the case of mobile music services it gets interesting. I am very well aware that music in the mobile is a complex area due to copyrights and the high per-song-revenue the right owners combined with record labels want. It is obvious that users consume more and more music on their mobiles. The critical factor “time-to-music” on your mobile phone is as low as on your MP3-player and the mobile channel is winning that battle.

But anyone who has visited a music service knows that playing music is only the last piece of the puzzle. Discovering music and finding the music you are looking for are important pieces as well. This is an area with lots of more improvements to be made. The users are still stuck in the MP3-player habit of loading new music from computers, making computers the preferred channel for the service of discovering and finding new music. What will it take to change this to fit your mobile life? PlayNow from Sony Ericsson, Nokia Comes With Music and 3Music are good starting points.