• 62% do not yet view their mobile device as an extension of their computer.
• Only 23% feel that they have more or the same level of control over their mobile device as they have over their computer.
• 70% have never downloaded an application to their mobile device.
• 67% want to be able to choose their mobile applications for themselves, rather than have their carriers choose for them.

So basically the consumer says: I know what I want, let me choose and make it much easier to use and earn the trust for me to spend time and money with you/your service.

Trust is a big thing here. The carriers have been shocking numerous consumers with data charges, content providers off-deck have been ripping off customers with unstoppable subscriptions schemes etc. This is changing to the better though. We are getting transparency in pricing and the scamsters are being reigned in. 

The play book going forward must be to offer choice, easy access and most of all “it”, the x-factor for the specific target groups. What can this service/product do for me?, is the question the consumer wants answers to. Fast. In about 3 seconds on your site/deck/ad they need to get what’s in it for them. There is no recipe for this part. Here the gap in conversion can be huge. My experience is that rapid prototyping and adjust as you is what works best.

Currently I am involved in launching Souldate (site in Swedish), a new mobile dating service with localisation. We are adjusting and tweaking the service daily. We started off with pretty scary conversion numbers. A few workdays later we have improved them substantially. In this case will market the service in multiple channels. TV is about all we are not using. Customer registration is done in any of three channels – SMS, wap and web. This means we have to constantly evaluate to see what we should focus on.

But all this work with constant improvements are lost if the  hygiene factors trust and transparency are not in place. Here we all have to pull together to change, blow whistles and make sure we earn the trust of our customers. Without it we can pack up and go home.

It is obvious and common sense. Not in the mobile industry though. I am glad to see there was a “whistleblower” in action at MWC09 the other week. Steve Bell ex-Motorola is pretty bold but right in his statements. Read them here. Thanks Steve!

I feel like broken record sometimes, but this _is_ important. I feel like tearing every mobile service I have been part of creating apart and start all over again. Not a very rational feeling I know. Better maybe to work with what you have and listen to your customers. Make sure to pick up the important hints and ideas they give.

At Acemob , one of my companies in this space, for the last 18 months all changes made to one of our key services Lifestylers are based on support mails from the users. Feels risky at the time, but it is quite satisfactory to be able to offer services our users actually want. Sure, we mess up sometimes and have to reverse some changes. But that is done quickly since we pick up that sentiments pretty instantly since all check customer support mails every day. One risk is knowing if there are enough users out there wanting the feature in question. But that is the smaller of the risks. It is far riskier to sit in your ivory tower and produce what you think is cool. That’s not cool.

So, FINALLY!, at the CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment 2008 event in San Francisco they brought seven youths up on the stage. They are between the ages of 13 and 19 answered questions about their mobile digital lives. Some nice factoids from this panel and a survey made by CTIA together with Harris Interactive:

- 1/3 of teens now play mobile games or browse the mobile web

- 1/5 use the mobile for social networking.

- 47% think their social life would stop without mobile communications

- 1/3 said they’ve used their phones to help others in trouble.

- Most desired features include shock and water proofing (81 percent), endless power (80 percent), privacy screen (58 percent), flexible material that folds into different shapes and sizes (39 percent) and artificial intelligence (38 percent).

Read the entire story over at Fierce Wireless.

I am pleased to see this happening. We are lucky enough to have a vivid dialogue with users in our services through the feedback function directly in the mobile interface. We owe much to our users for many of the great features in services like Lifestylers. It is frustrating to feel that we sometimes can’t keep up with the users comments and feedback though. The pursuit of creating great services and experiences is a job that is never done. Kids are the best source of inspiration and requirements here. Talk to them, sit with them, learn from them!

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……