Again we have committed the cardinal sin and forgotten about the customer. The actual user of our services that in one way or the other pays our salaries.

At the Central European Mobile Media conference in Prague “everyone” was there. Great mix of people that was well spread geographically as well as industry wide. Interesting discussions but in most cases we forgot about the end-user.

I am still waiting for the conference where there is a panel of actual users of the services. We have to face it. Our industry is slowly maturing and so are we working in it. The average age among us in the room at the conference was far above the target group profile for many of the services discussed.

It is unfortunately also a too male dominated industry whereas there are more and more female users of the services. So the next conference organizer that has a panel of live users of mobile media I will buy a block of passes and give to all my clients and force them to come and listen. We need to get closer to the end-user!

Besides this my main takeaways were:

Advertising – Yes, there is a lot of talk about advertising and yes in some markets it will work. However it was deemed too early in Central Europe though where advertisers and ad agencies are deemed too conservative to start this now. Click through rates are very high in mobile advertising now. It was generally agreed that we will see these click though rates drop towards fixed Internet levels. We heard examples of 13%, 7%, 5,5% during the days.

Yes the market penetration of our industry is embarrassingly poor. Benelux 2.4% and UK 2.89% of mobile phone users respectively have downloaded a java game. The flip side is of course that there are 97% of the market still to develop.

Yes, pricing is important. It was interesting to hear Jan from Redboss mention that their portal entirely targeting the Czech market has 10% of its traffic from South Africa. Why? Wap browsing is more or less free there. There’s a market to tap for page view intense wap services with ad-support! Do the operators adopt a fixed internet ISP position with flat rate all you can eat for mobile Internet access? How do they handle the network costs when they need to upgrade capacity? It was stated that studies in Hungary shows that consumers seem to be willing to pay a premium for the mobility of up to 20% but no more. That’s an important fact to keep in mind in all pricing strategies we play around with going forward.

Mobile TV. The jury is still out. A few hurdles on the cost side needs to be solved. If TV companies treat this like a cable TV case where the distribution would pay a fee per user and if that is too high it is difficult to make it work. Then in a non-broadcast delivery scenario the issue of data traffic and pricing of that comes into play. The potential for interactivity should be one strong driver for mobile and TV. To be continued……