Dec
16
Mobile Niche services
Filed Under Mobile Niche Services | Leave a Comment
- Image by Sigalakos via Flickr
It is important that mobile internet services that aims to support you or entertain you in your mobile life really fits in to your everyday life. We talked earlier about personalization of services and this a topic that borders that. If a service is to general you need to make lots of adjustments to make it fit into the task you want to use it for.
As an example, lets take Sony Ericssons Tracker application. It helps you keep track of your jogging times, rounds, positions and average speeds. This could be done by an ordinary positioning tool but it would take more work on your account.
Mobile services(apart from Iphone users) has not yet stepped into the world of niches, the ordinary web is full of niche services. Services that are really useful to a specific niche of users, and pointless to all others. There are a lot of mobile niche services to be discovered or invented in the mobile arena and this area is finally starting to evolve.
Luckily Apple saw the opportunity to take the lead in this race. The App store enables niche services on the web to enter the mobile arena in a simple way, this has woken the other players. Nobody wants to be left behind and we will see many more App stores arise in 2009.
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Dec
16
- Image via Wikipedia
You bring your mobile everywhere! Mobile service providers need to take this into account. You are on the move, at home, at lunch, at work, shopping etc. There are many mobile internet services that would benefit and serve your mobile life better, by taking into account the position and activity of the user.
I am well aware of the legal and technical problems involved in knowing where users are and how to use this. But there are always solutions and you as a customer get a better mobile life out of it.
Yellow arrow
The New york started Yellow Arrow art project, let you combine your physical position with your mobile. Uniquely-coded yellow stickers mark interesting objects, places or views. An SMS to the yellow arrow number with the code from the sticker give you as a user information about the object. This is a fairly low-tech solution for using location of the user to the users advantage but it is still effective for the niche it addresses. The fact that the you as a user choose when your position can be used to your advantage is crucial to avoid the feeling of surveillance.
Social networks and positioning
The social networks trend on the web has opened up a golden opportunity to take positioning to the next level, playing on the relationship you have with your friends and your curiosity. The Android applications like CompareEverywhere, BreadCrumbz and locale that take location into account in a smart manner will hopefully inspire other mobile service providers. We will follow this mobile trend with big interest.
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Dec
16
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The purpose of a mobile internet service is to serve you AND it should do so in the best possible way. The last part is seldom done. When you think about it, wouldn’t it be nice if a service learned from your behavior. for example, you probably know some services by heart, like you know your way home. You start the service, scroll down and click that link, wait for loading, scroll down again and click again, finally. This is your personal starting point of the service and the service should learn tat.
Classic personalization
Sitting at your computer you have access to personalized start pages on Internet and Intranet via Widgets, settings, RSS etc and even what your friends like. This is the type of personalization that most people think about. Don’t get me wrong I am all for that, but it does take time and effort from the user and that is one reason many people just don’t bother to personalize. The nature of mobile phones and mobile internet services call for more personalization but it is even harder to encourage that kind of effort from the user. One solution to ease things up in your mobile life, is to enable all personalization work to be done on the web.
Automatic personalization
The Mobile is personal which and all actions taken can be assumed is taken by you. This means that you are making patterns of usage on the server side of the mobile internet service you use. This fact is can be used to make the service better for you. Even in isolated applications and games, with no server connection, this approach could also be used. When you have answered “No, I dont want to play my chess game with sound” five times in a row the game should learn this, and make it a default setting to have at every time you start your game of chess.
This is simple and straight forward usage of your usage in a certain service, and there is no reason mobile service providers should not already have this implemented. For the mobile future there are lots of more advanced automatic personalization to be done. Yes, there is a risk that users get offended by the big brother approach so it must be dealt with gently.
Services that learn from user patterns and make qualified guesses to serve the user better exists on the Internet. Several success stories(Amazon, Google suggest, last.fm, pandora.com) bring out this as a way to serve the user better than others do.
This is a development born from competition and technology. In the mobile service industry, we don´t really see that level of competition yet. When that time comes, that is in 2009, you will see smarter services that adapts to your mobile life, as you use it.
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Dec
16
Mobile internet services you want in your mobile life
Filed Under Mobile Music, Mobile Search, Mobile TV | Leave a Comment
- 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.
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Dec
16
- Image via Wikipedia
Reading the specifications for phones today you realize that they are GOOD. Why are your mobile experience of services not as good as those specs? Phone manufactures publish specifications for their newest phones, the press use it to compare phones and declare winners. You read that and make buying decisions based on the information. You expect your mobile experience to live up to those promises but that rarely happens. That they wake up and start to deliver is one of the mobile multimedia trends i have on the wish list for 2009.
Sure, it might sound like a dream to have a service adapted according to your phone´s specifications but it is possible. With powerful server solutions available, at low cost, it is not that difficult to serve each phone perfect mobile content optimization , assuming this is a priority.
In the case of Iphone and Iphone services, optimizing for one device is a built in side effect, since there is only one device released so far.
Quick recap of mobile content optimization
In the beginning mobile service providers used an adaptation-to-the-worst-phone-on-the-market-approach. After a few years, with the growing size and resolution of screens on new phones, came the small-medium-large-approach. Serving different sizes of images and pages avoided hitting a user with tiny images. This is one solution to the problem, easy, simple and cheap, which is good.
Every mobile service provider built their own version of the small-medium-large solution, some smarter than other. Many years later, similar, but smarter categorized adaptation is built in to Portal Software. Advanced content and pages are adapted and served to your phone using off the shelf products. This is a good starting point. But it is not good enough to make your mobile the best channel to consume a certain service at a certain time.
Phone adaptation optimized for your phone is more than mobile content optimization
Phone adaptation is seen as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity. Mobile service providers solve the adaptation problem by installing an off the shelf adaptation platform. Once a week they download the new categorizations of new phones that has been released. Not realizing that only the first step has been taken, not the final one. Adaptation platforms is a tool to help in the adaptation work to make a mobile service optimized for your mobile phone.
Why do you get served a crappy movie clip to a HSDPA phone with a great screen or are forced to paging when your phone supports AJAX? The mobiles are so good and the opportunities to build great services exist. W3C group Ubiquitous Web Applications(replacing Device Independence Activity) are working on recommendations to address this area which shows the business are aware of the problem. Service providers that put in the work needed to optimize for your device will have a better chance to get you as a customer.
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