Major Trends in the Mobile Industry

The past year has been very thrilling for the mobile industry, in particular for everything mobile apps. Every moment there are new technologies, phones with new abilities, apps leveraging the new features, and much more.

Here are the most important trends:

Mobile Advertising coming of age

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.

Loyalty programs become hyper local

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.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

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.

Mobile Self Care

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.

Operator Appstores

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.

The most frequent questions we get from clients and partners are:

What is the cost of developing a mobile app or mobile website? 

How do I port my iPhone app to Android and other mobile platforms? 

Should I go for a mobile app, a mobile website or both? 

How do I get social networking into my mobile strategy?

What are the most popular appstores? Read more

 

Magnus is the CEO and Founder of Golden Gekko, the largest mobile app developer in Europe. He started the company in 2006 based on a vision that apps would revolutionise mobile consumption in the future. He has over 10 years proven experience with mobile and broadband operators across the world with development and implementation of marketing strategies and due diligence of suppliers that have lead to the successful launch of industry leading products & services. Before leaving Vodafone Magnus was leading the development of the global product marketing strategy for Vodafone’s consumer team including services such as mobile TV, mobile music and casual gaming that generated more than €1.4Bn in 2006. Prior to this Magnus had marketing and strategy roles at Vodafone, Orange, Driftbolaget and Framfab. He is also the co-founder of three successful start-ups whereof one was sold in 2001 and the second one went public in 2003. Few other people in the mobile industry come close to Magnus knowledge, experience and network in the business.

 

Major Trends in the Mobile Industry