Mubaloo predicts that in 2013 more organisations will be looking at complete mobile solutions with the development of bespoke mobile applications that are integrated into existing back office systems and, in doing so, push the boundaries of what’s possible on mobile devices in the workplace.

Often, organisations may have already modernised their back-end systems with a website or portal and the next step is to do the same with mobile. Businesses often know they need to use mobile but they don’t know how. We predict there will be more organisations asking for help with all aspects of their mobile roadmap, this includes integration with back-end systems, enterprise apps and consultancy about their entire mobile strategy. As companies start to recognise the significant benefits apps can bring to their businesses, the need to draw out more information from their back office systems becomes ever more important.

~Sarah Weller, Marketing Manager, Mubaloo

In this week’s episode, Weller expands on these problems by explaining why realistic expectations-alongside analytics-can help businesses use suites of apps to offer mobile ROI.

In this week’s episode, Weller explains how smartphones, tablets and, most importantly, mobile apps increase employee communication and global market competition.

Secondly, because of the increase in mass mobile device deployments across organisations, businesses at the start of this process are considering their entire mobile roadmap and ecosystem from the outset to gain the maximum return from these deployments. This involves considering the entire mobile strategy of an organisation and prioritising the development of various apps across the business.

Thirdly, businesses who had initially tried to develop one app to perform many tasks are realising that apps that try to do too much, end up doing no one thing well. We are therefore seeing businesses look at creating a number of simple apps that perform individual tasks really well.

Genentech is a great example of an American company looking at apps across their whole organisation. They have in place a crowd sourcing scheme whereby employees nominate their app ideas. The best ideas are then developed. They have apps ranging from expenses apps to meeting room booker apps. The internal apps are a mixture of custom-built and commercially available apps that integrate into their back-end systems.

We believe more businesses will start to develop suites of apps in order to adapt to the increasingly mobile workforce and the increase in BYOD.  With this comes the need for businesses to consider MDM and MAM solutions for the deployment and management of these applications. This is another area that we predict will grow in sync with apps.

~Sarah Weller, Marketing Manager, Mubaloo

With the mobile tipping point come and gone, it is now time to think of mobile in terms of investment opportunities. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Mobile Monday Global discussed several options at an exclusive event in the Theatre District of the Fira Gran Via. Jouko Ahvenainen, Co-founder and Chairman of Grow VC Group, delivered a presentation at the event highlighting the trials of startup funding, namely that as traditional VC funds start with $2 million in investments, fundraising has been difficult since 2008.

The good news is that declines in traditional fundraising have led to “open market places” that yield an increase in local business angel networks, capital efficiency, and incubator programs. Ahvenainen also discussed the opportunity for startups to pursue emerging market opportunities to drive the revenue and organic growth often associated with the U.S. market.

Ahvenainen encouraged the audience to conceive of investment as a language: “Read & write, participatory, conversational: markets are conversations, marketing is a conversation, business is a social science.” In doing so, he argued, networked economics creates communities of interest that denote powerful platforms from which to pursue innovation and commerce. Cultural challenges will abound, at the human level as well as governments and corporates. But Ahvenainen argued that failure to pursue peer-to-peer investment would only lead to financial and organizational exhaustion.

So how can P2P realize its full potential? Ahvenainen offered several ideas:

1)    Crowd Funding Must Work Alongside Other Investment Models
-Continuity for forthcoming funding rounds, co-existing passive or active investment models and cooperation with businesses, VC’s and incubators are all components of this idea.

2)    Co-Investors Can Be Diverse
-P2P partners do not often follow not automated investments; instead, they filter investment opportunities and offer enticing cases to the crowd. Syndicate, formalized co-investment models must come with pre-defined models, as well as shared responsibilities for both.

3)    Co-Investment Instruments Should Become the Norm
-Built especially for P2P co-investments, the forthcoming instrument from Grow VC Group is built to work with P2P models, which will then bring leverage for investments. Investors will be able to join the instrument online, defining investment criteria including diversification. Grow VC Group’s P2P instrument is set to launch in six months.

P2P investments are not going away, yet Ahvenainen was quick to point out that this does not mean they will replace all other models. The purpose of his speech was to discuss the need for a new financial ecosystem that allows diverse investment models—including P2P—to co-collaborate. In doing so, he argues, P2P will not only transform starting funding; it will improve the whole financial sector.

Which retailers “both retain and reshape their core proposition for the mobile customer?” Who has done the best job of linking the mobile customer journey? This week, Gault outlines how you can learn from the best and offers tips to shape your mobile loyalty scheme.

“The paradox of advertising is that we spend most of our lives ignoring ads while we also spend hours browsing websites, reading articles, using apps, and “consuming” other “content” that could not exist without them,” Thompson writes. “That’s why it matters that our attention seems to be moving toward screens where ad dollars are struggling to follow.”

A seminar at this month’s Mobile World Congress sought to address this issue. Chaired by AdMob founder Russell Buckley, “Marketing: How Not to Build a Mobile Campaign” featured several speakers who discussed how they overcame these pitfalls. Helen Thompson, Mobile Product Manager at BBC Worldwide, explained that over one third of monthly pages via BBC.com are consumed via mobile, and 4,000 devices access their mobile site per week. As readers consume news this way because “it’s easy,” advertisers have tried to follow suit—by using one advertising format across each platform.

This, Thompson said in his Atlantic article, is where the industry’s misguided. Rather than adopting one format across platforms—a tactic bound to fail due to screen size and a host of other issues—BBC Worldwide has focused on targeted campaigns that address audience behaviour.

Thompson, meet LoopMe. CEO Stephen Upstone co-presented alongside Thompson, explaining how their delivery of social ad inboxes into apps and mobile sites reveals a non-intrusive ad format. An “Offer” button in-app allows consumers to click as they choose, launching an Ad Inbox that presents multiple apps and offers. Interaction, browsing and buying all occur without ever re-directing consumers from the app—giving consumers control over the advertising they see.

Having successfully integrated into BBC’s Top Gear Stunt School app, LoopMe has now reached markets from the US and Brazil to  Russia and New Zealand. If no ads are present in a territory, the “Offers” button will not appear in-app, addressing the aggressive nature of many mobile ads. LoopMe’s research found that 47% of app users report clicking on mobile ads by mistake, yielding a low post click that negatively impacts consumers, publishers and advertisers alike.

By modeling one’s “Ad Inbox” based on their “Email Inbox,” consumers have control over the ads they interact with, even whether to  share or vote ads up or down depending on relevance. This yields higher CTR and engagement, leading to 5% ad interaction—10 times the level achieved from ad banners.
 
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has repeatedly cited Facebook integration as the genius behind his platform’s success. Similarly, LoopMe’s Ad Inbox, with its community feedback and social sharing capabilities—has thus far seen 50% CTR, using advertising as a “value added service for consumers,” rather than for advertisers. This is an exciting mobile space to watch. We look forward at AppBeat to reporting updates.

No one knows that more than Mobile Monday. Since starting in Finland in 2000, Mobile Monday has expanded to include 150 chapters across the globe and become an international hub of insight amongst anyone in the mobile space. Their presence at this year’s MWC was strongly seen and felt; from Tuesday’s Mobile Monday mixer at Rossini Restaurant to their presence in MWC’s Theatre District, chapters ranging from Tel Aviv to South Africa met under the umbrella that unites them.

With more than a decade of experience building their reputation, Mobile Monday’s next venture involves taking the local global. CEO Jari Tammisto told me their latest goal is to use various hubs to conduct research into topics ranging from African telecomm to peer-to-peer investments. Their conference in the Theatre District hosted presenters including Andreas Constantinou, Ph.D, Managing Director of VisionMobile, who offered his insight from VM’s “Developer Economics 2013” report. Some key findings:

*BlackBerry mobile mindshare is stable, but developers put iOS first.

The report, a survey of 3,460 developers across 95 countries, found BlackBerry’s mobile mindshare remains at 16% to anticipate BB10 sales—but 48% of developers use iOS as their leading platform.

*The third app ecosystem is a search in progress.

Despite developer preference for iOS, it saw a 5% point drop in Mindshare—compounded by Asian developers clearly preferring Android. The report also found that developer mindshare varies by region; Android leads in Asia and Europe, whereas North America shows platform parity. But with 47% of developers intending to adopt Windows Phone, there is serious interest in a third dominant platform.

*Consumer knowledge needs improvement

Only 24% of survey respondents design apps with user discussions in mind, showing the need for a two-way feedback channel like HelpShift between users and developers. That figure fails to change with development experience or proficiency, suggesting that the cardinal rule of marketing—to know your consumer—doesn’t happen often enough.

The full report on “The foundations of the app economy” offers additional insight, as do several forthcoming reports which maximise the Mobile Monday name. Following yesterday’s conference,Tammisto said Mobile Monday co-founder Peter Vesterbacka found his success by asking members from global chapters what they wanted from his app.

That app—Rovio Mobile’s Angry Birds—is one of mobile’s greatest successes, proving the power of how Mobile Monday’s local communities can have global impact. It is clear that their presence at this year’s MWC is the start of many more things to come.

The most notable change was the new venue, which did not go unnoticed on the 72,000 plus people that attended.  We all set about our business with the usual hustle and vigour of any MWC at the old Fira – but also with a massive skywalk, networking gardens, and space in abundance; space that was well used by the likes of Ericsson, Qualcomm, HTC, Samsung, and Ooredoo to name just a few of the incredible stands on show.

Ooredoo is the rebranded Qtel, which was the first big announcement to adorn the Congress during The Week of Mobile. And to show Ooredoo’s statement of intent, it has enlisted the world’s greatest footballer Lionel Messi as its global ambassador.

Not surprisingly, there were a lot of very big announcements. In MWCs gone by, the event would be dominated by a couple of major announcements and an overriding theme that would capture the imagination of the attendees for the week. Instead, this year the show was dominated by the sheer number of announcements rather than a few key ones.

The apparent lack of industry-shaping news is not reflective of developments of MWC, more a symptom of the mobile industry itself. Mobile has become a ubiquitous global platform upon which everything sits and all announcements incorporated. Mobile has become an integrated platform upon which other industries and sectors are converging. Pure mobile related announcements such as Ericsson announcing an LTE contract sit handsomely alongside news from Visa and Sony.

No longer is the big news at MWC generated just from the big mobile players. Mobile is an enabler for all brands and businesses, and that is why the actuality was that there were more “big” announcements at MWC than ever before, from a vastly expanded portfolio of major players.

So what were the announcements of note? To recap, handset manufacturers released more devices and tablets, turning parts of the Congress into CES. Mobile operators sat in front of a packed auditorium, while payments and NFC, LTE and new business models were high on the agenda.

Facebook confirmed that they are now a mobile company and will no doubt have Sony Mobile knocking on their door for advice after the Japanese giant once again promised 2013 would be a “breakthrough year” for the company in the mobile arena. If Sony Mobile start to target the over 65s they could be onto a winning formula. According to Doro, half of the over-65s want a smartphone.

As ever, MWC confirmed that it is, “The Week of Mobile.” Pleasingly, not one person said “The Year of Mobile”, or at least within hearing distance of my big ears. Let’s hope that trend continues.

Here’s to next year’s ‘The Week of Mobile’ – only 51 weeks of this Mobile Year remaining.

~Nick Lane, Head of Telecoms, Media and Measurement, Liberty Communications