MOMO London
I attended the London Mobile Monday yesterday. Christian Lindholm, VP of Global Mobile Products at Yahoo, gave a presentation on his vision of how Internet services companies will increasingly become as important as phone OEMs and network operators. The new Yahoo Go! services were shown as an example. Matt Miller, from Adobe, explained his thoughts on the ideal mobile user experience and demonstrated how Flash Lite 2.0 goes some way towards providing this. Finally, Antoine Quint gave a more technical roundup of the mobile SVG ecosystem. Tom Hume has posted a great summary of the sessions.
Things I took away from the meeting… (My thoughts in italic)
- Matt commented that services have to be compelling enough if they are to be used in preference to waiting until the user next has access to a PC.
I have believed for a while now that many mobile startups and even the likes of Google/Yahoo wrongly look just sideways for competitive mobile offerings. Instead, they should look upward to the desktop and ask if the services they plan to implement will be competitive, in terms of ease of use and cost, compared to the desktop.
- Much was said about ‘User Experience’.
However, two of the three demonstrations were of full screen applications with UIs that didn’t have any similarity to native phone applications (Series 60 in this case). If the user has to change mentally, the way they are interacting with the phone, is this a good user experience?
- Christian was asked about the business model for Yahoo Go! He said the aim was to build reach first then monetise later. There are ideas but there is more conceptual work to do.
Personally, Google and Yahoo’s rush into mobile makes me wonder where the money will actually come from. In the case of Yahoo, ‘Series 60 only’ won’t build reach - and doing the same in J2ME just wouldn’t be as slick or functionally complete. In the case of Google, I don’t know how they are going to apply their advertising business model to the phone without making the services much less compelling (see my first point above). Having said this, I have done work for more than one company where the introduction of an exciting, cutting edge ’mobile version’ has raised awareness to such an extent so as to significantly affect the sales of the more mundane ‘non-mobile version’.
12 Jan: Since I posted this, Mobilitee posted an interesting observation on Google’s patent for single click dialling. Maybe this has something to do with how Google intend to monetise mobile advertising.