Tom Hume

MEX: Appstores and their consequences, Hampus Jakobsson, TAT

TAT: licenses UI software, does inspirational design. Kit ships on 10% of all devices 2008. 140 people, Sweden, US, Korea.

Apple and Palm are arriving and doing impressive things - this is frustrating for incumbents, but empowering.

How could it be improved?

• Context: location, time could be used to funnel users towards appropriate applications.
• Discovery is like Digg - the top apps get loads of traffic, it's hard for others to break in.
• No try before you buy.
• No tell-a-friend.
• No recommendations or discussions.
• Less uber-control by one player would help. How about co-branded stores (the MEX store)? There's no transparency.
• Categories should be premium ($4.99+), standard ($0-4.99) and free.
• Get What's Hot from derivatives.
• Measure and rate by value = price times volume
• Sort on ratings not volume
• Add 25% with few ratings to improve discovery of new apps.
• Why not friend-to-friend sales?

App stores will be just the start of advanced personalisation. When Apple released their phone there was no app store - the first ones were hacked-in.

History of personalisation: started out with contacts and SMS, then pictures/videos/music, now apps and bookmarks. Phones have infinite uses once you add applications.

We have to make the UI more dynamic (cough, says vendor of dynamic UI solutions). Apparently UI should be experience based and match the real world, anticipate your needs, etc.

Mobile phones "steal us from one another" in their attention-grabbing.

A lot of Apples innovation was around the payment experience, and is amazing.

So, the participation TV event we ran for Discovery in the US back in June is up for a few awards: Best Use of Interactive Television and Best Use of Mobile at the BIMAs, and the Eureka awards at World Telemedia. The latter is a particularly good fit, because it's for bizarre projects that actually have legs: precisely how we've always seen Ghosty. And behind the supernatural ghost-hunting front-end we think it demonstrates a few principles that really hold water:

• Broadcasters and programme makers want to interact with audiences, but find that SMS is limited in expressiveness, sluggish in response and not exactly trusted by consumers or regulators nowadays;
• Programme audiences enjoy getting involved with TV formats - just look at the rise of voting or of user-generated content over the last few years;
• Traditional red-button interactive TV has failed to deliver mass interactivity, is based on staid, fragmented and closed platforms, and mobile provides a much better hope for getting the public engaged with TV than iTV does;

So here's the bit where I blatantly start shilling: the Eureka awards are accepting public votes by text or on the web site. It looks like we're up against strong competition (hi Alfie!), but I can't see anyone coming close to us on the "wild and wacky" front. If you'd like to strike a blow for all that is ludicrous, please do head over there and vote for the mobile ghost detector :)

• Using Flickr for moblogging games: "...people are going to start moblogging their virtual worlds just as much as the real world."
  
• Balls from the Guardian blog, equating high ARPU with expensive. The analogy with petrol and cars just doesn't hold: high ARPU can be a result of extremely usable interfaces. For instance, I remember hearing a statistic a few years back that users of Nokia handsets texted twice as much as users of other handset - and this was put down to the usability of the product.
  
• The Friday-Ad (Sussex's answer to Loot) seems to get mobile. And their content is perfect: bite-size chunks of gloriously unsexy advertising that *really matters to real people*.
  
• The new game from Will Wright: "Spore could end up being quite literally the biggest and most ambitious game ever attempted. Although it begins at the microscopic level, with players taking control of a monocellular organism in a tidal pool, the scale changes as the creature evolves and grows. The end result: A massive adventure spanning an entire galaxy with player-driven gameplay and design shared seamlessly online among the entire Spore community."
  
• Changes in advertising: "they may well start to divert their advertising dollars away from TV broadcast if thet feel this medium becomes less effective". Presumably if an even half-effective, vaguely accountable form of advertising became available, it would get adopted in favour of some of what we have today.
  
• The US is ripe for mobile gaming: "(1) the larger population and (2) the percentage of game content is already much larger on mobile in the US than the percentage in Japan."
  
• Vodafone extends its mobile TV offering
  
• Approaches to handling multiple phases of development in Scrum.
  

Beautiful piece here on the problems of selling specialist software to oodles of tiny niche markets:

"You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day. Overture figured it out, Google perfected it and we all know what happened from there. "

Nice piece about the "subservient chicken" online ad campaign which Burger King ran a while back. But, lovely tho it is to hear that it's generated 396 million hits, isn't it slightly worrying that the guy behind the campaign can offer only anecdotal results as to whether it actually led people to buy more chicken?

As the franchise owner in this story puts it, "It's difficult to show a causal relationship between sales and the advertising"

Interesting interview with Kei-ichi Enoki, executive VP at NTT DoCoMo: "Videoconferencing--this is part of your job. There is no preference to it; you have to do it whether you like it or not. We think that there is a market there, but that market itself will be small. If it goes to the consumers, I think that means a greater expansion of the market for us. But one issue is that you don't always want to use a TV phone. It is not an issue about technology; this is maybe more of a psychological issue."

Smart companies are harnessing the creativity of their customers: "Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too."

Lovely stats from Mark: "...according to Unisys the banking and credit card industries claim that it takes an average of 26 hours for a user to (notice and) report a lost wallet. But the average time taken to report a lost mobile phone is 68 minute"

Lists of links, with perhaps a pithy piece of sarcasm or a quote appended, are all I have time for this week:

• "They Stopped Calling It Rendezvous" - or, Using iTunes Playlists For Communication.
• Infospace forms a mobile game unit
• A Force More Powerful: "a nonviolent strategic simulation game", which reminded me of this story.
• Two wonderful things from We Make Money Not Art: AudioCubes, and the MIDI sock puppet.
• Interview with Brent and Sheila of Ranchero
• More on casual gaming from MobileGirl.
• For Mr Walsh and Dr Dan, "Methods of Defense Against Brute Force", from an 1840s manual. Hmm... familiar?
• Lovely mobile car ad campaign. Kicking myself that we haven't been suggesting this...
• Massively Multiplayer Online Dating Games: "A game specifically targeted to dating and socialising: as a dating service. Not as a game. Not as part of a game (SWG's character matching, etc). Not as a chat room, not as a Metaverse, not There.com but as a direct and simple service. Using a game environment in a serious - yet playful, very necessary for dating - way. "
• Rag Doll Kung Fu

Hmm, 4 of the above directly relate to Stuff We Have On...

Wow - according to this interview with a guy at Nokia who's probably spent waaay more time thinking about TV content than I have, what people really want on their mobiles are not designed-for-mobile bits of video, but full broadcast stuff - what they see on their TV day-to-day.

That goes completely against what I've been anticipating, and whilst I'm suspicious that his view may be focus group-driven (asking people what they want, not watching them to find out)... he's seen the research and I haven't. Related Forum Nokia info lives here.