New era of Mobile?

Posted on | July 2, 2010

Bled
Image by tomazstolfa via Flickr

A very interesting thing happened yesterday (1st of July, 2010) - Slovenia’s leading mobile operator, Mobitel, announced (no English news available) that they will be cutting down the amount of data traffic available in its subscription packages. They have been offering packages including 1GB of data traffic for more than 12 months and got many new subscribers on board during this period.

Yesterday, Mobitel decided to cut down the amount to 100MB, 900MB less. Users revolted, filling Mobitel’s Facebook page with angry comments in addition to a huge amount of posts on Twitter.

It is quite clear why Mobitel had to do this - their network was hardly keeping up with the heavy usage induced by almost flat fee pricing as 1GB per user is a lot in mobile. Some users with unlimited, flat fee packages commented that they transfer almost 70GB of content in a normal month, combining mobile surfing and tethering, mainly using YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and other web applications.

From my point of view this shows us an interesting insight - apparently many, many common users (not early adopters/geeks/nerds) care about their online mobile services and that they regard mobile web/data access as something really important, as important as calls or SMSes.

This is quite exciting for those of us who are trying to be active in the mobile space, meaning that we can hope the mobile web will become as ubiquitous as the “attached to a wall” internet is, not only from the technology perspective, but also from the user’s perspective, thus forcing operators to adapt and provide an even better service.

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A Few Thoughts on App Challenges

Posted on | June 5, 2010

Ljubljana
Image by tomazstolfa via Flickr

In the last year there have been a ton of mobile application challenges. Mainly because other players in the industry want to compete with Apple’s iPhone ecosystem - the iPhone SDK and the Appstore being at the center. Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile and many others (including some local operators in the Adriatic region) have been trying to spur mobile development by pouring massive amounts of money into prizes for dev competitions. I firmly believe this approach is wrong and that it can yell no tangible results in the long run.

The problem(s)

App challenges are usually organized in order to convince developers to try a new platform. It is important to stress out “new platform”. This means that the skill levels of developers on these new platforms are usually low to medium and in very rare cases advanced. In addition to that app challenges usually target developers who have few if any mobile projects in their portfolio and are only experiencing the mobile world for the first time - lured in by technology that is similar enough to what they have been used to develop for in the past (Java in Android, C++ in QT, Objective C for iPhone).

Furthermore these developers (who are usually not mobile professionals) need some guidance and assistance, specially in order to avoid classic design pitfalls and in order to deliver a great user experience - let’s face it, developers need designers and vice versa.

Finally, many apps lack the business/marketing component that would make them viable in the long run.

The goal

Setting the right goal is crucial. Getting 101 amateur apps (remember the low/medium skill levels from above) is not really what you want unless you just want to crunch numbers. Aiming for a small number (5 is a nice number) of high quality apps is a better strategy (at least from my personal perspective).

The (proposed) solution

With the problem and goal in mind the solution offers itself. To solve the problem you need to bring those developers to at least a medium skill level to start with, help them build teams and monitor their work process in order to be able to help.

You can then help them get in touch with mobile experts, organize one on one sessions and nudge them in the right direction when needed.

Long term benefits

I fully understand that this kind of approach requires much more effort than just naming a large prize and wait for applications to start flying in, but I firmly believe that the results will be worth it.

With this kind of approach several long term benefits for developers can be achieved:

  • developers learn how avoid mobile design pitfalls  (always handy, no matter what the technology)
  • developers learn how to deliver a great (not average) mobile application
  • developers get to know designers, mobile experts and business mentors
  • get applications that can sustain themselves in the long run, so that their creators see the benefit to keep working on them
  • the contest organizer has the possibility to build up an organic community through long term interaction
  • the technology providers can build up a knowledge base about their SDKs - learn what sucks and needs fixing

In this spirit I will be joining the Nokia App Forum Slovenia’s summer Academy, where we (along with Matevž, Andraž and Žiga)  will try to take teams of young ambitious developers on a journey of mobile application development and teach them all the tricks of the craft in the process.

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{ Filed Under Business Models, Development, Mobile, Thoughts, Web Strategy | Comments }

Hello Mobile!

Posted on | May 29, 2010

Some friends from a digital agency in Ljubljana kindly asked if I could prepare a 40 minutes session about mobile and mobile marketing. This is what I came up with:

View more presentations from Tomaz Stolfa.

btw: the deck was selected among Slideshare.net’s featured presentations.

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{ Filed Under Business Models, Marketing, Mobile, Thoughts, Web Strategy | Comments }
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