Tuesday 20 September 2011

What’s New What’s Next? Mobile News And Trends

As the name suggests, there is always a lot of movement going on in the mobile space. Mobile is said to be the fastest growing market in the world. Every moment there are new technologies, phones with new abilities, apps leveraging the new features, and much more.

Let’s have a look at what we believe to be the most important trends:

- Operators and device manufacturers launch their own appstores. Despite the challenges that many operators have faced there are some great success stories. For example, LG App Advisor, a hybrid solution that recommends the most relevant local apps for each market. Or Verizon vCast appstore, which achieved similar success. This shows that there is a demand for secure and trusted appstore providers.

- Mobile Advertising is becoming serious business. Years ago, telcos forecasted billions of dollars in revenue from mobile advertising. Now we finally see some results. O2 UK leads the way in Europe with O2 Media and their recently launched operator partnership. O2 Priority Moments is the first large-scale campaign leveraging permission based, hyper local targeted marketing.

- Near Field Communication (NFC), whose initial focus was on mobile payments is now shifting towards other utilities. App builders make use of NFC to simplify check-ins, execute marketing campaigns and drive the use of loyalty cards. Which is great since it is driving customer adaptation to the technology and paves the way for new forms of employment.

- Loyalty programs are married to hyper local offers. One of the greatest differentiators for telco operators is the knowledge of profiles such as the whereabouts of their customers. This gives them the unique opportunity to combine this with personalised offers. Great examples of this include the loyalty clubs by Turkcell, O2 Priority Moments and AT&T Local Deals. Though those are already incredible services, these are still early days. Programs and content will become even more sophisticated.

- Mobile self-care is a growing business opportunity. Several service providers like telco operators already have a substantial customer base that is accessing their account information through mobile apps and sites every month. Still, hardly any of those are leveraging this opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell other services to millions of subscribers. We are now finally seeing some interesting collaborations between the customer care departments and marketing.

For more insights and details on each of these trends please contact us to set up a call or workshop.

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