ResonanceDesign

Albion Society : 8 March 2011

Breakfast talks at Albion Society. Notes:

Speakers:
Clive Dickens, Simon Andrews, Mark Curtis, Raam Thakrar
From my perspective 3 salesmen and one with a critical mind.

Too much bizspeak with ‘we invented that word’ ‘make our clients money’ and ‘engaging markets’, however a few utterings that are worth mentioning. Square is a new iPhone hardware/service to enable the iPhone to act as a swipe card reader. Neat. The main component is this card reader for iPhone and iPad and it looks so far like the smallest and cheapest available. Wonder what else one could do with that.

Clive Dickens phrases the term ‘time-wasting apps’, by which he means finding opportunities for people to spend waiting time using apps and finding app ideas for this. I am not sure how much I agree with the term wasting time, when I wait for people or in a queue or are by myself. One part of me doesn’t want to define a market like that, the other sees the term as a superficial interpretation of reality, which is easily destined to misinterpret situations in people’s lifes and their needs of actual services. But maybe that’s just me being grumpy again.

Mark Curtis had by far the best insights, by telling us what facebook found out that ‘(mobile) virals don’t work for them’. Given that especially mobiles have digital content split up in a thousand apps that can’t share data, viral becomes a bit impossible. There is a niche for a data standard right there… SharedXML? You heard it here first.

What he also points out is integration and multi-platform. Where multi-platform is still a cost and maintenance point and therefore a challenge, integration is what is easier available and everyone ‘gets’. If you can’t get your servic eon facebook or twitter, you will have a hard time gathering, reaching and maintaining users.

Mark is CEO of Handmade Mobile, who currently have 3.5 mill users for their dating service Flirtomatic. Which he describes is a service, which let’s you ‘find people you don’t know yet’. Which is what I see a huge market: Find people you don’t know yet. And I am not just talking dating, I am talking networking in general, geographical understanding, tourism, etc. Few people have understood this fact yet that the easiest way to grow a market and community is to break the network behaviour of constant easy indulgence of conversing with people who already agree with you and who you already know. I predict, if facebook doesn’t get that at some point, they will struggle in 5 years.(sorry early caffeine trip). Do I want my own project’s like Urban Eyes and 80Days’ theory not just be a theory, maybe.

What’s interesting about Flirtmatic that it is not a dating, but flirting service. Given the faster, shorter scenario of mobile communication, Handmade Mobile realised that the activity of flirting fits the platform and community better than the old dating frame.

The last comment on Mark’s talk was that he sees mobile being the only platform which can escape it’s own frame. Like cinema, radio and tv, had tried before to go into other areas, they eventually failed, even though leaving interesting exprimentation in it’s path, yet essentially kept within their boundaries. Mobile with AR and other technologies can escape that and will.

Now I would argue that mobile’s frame was never just mobile browsers and phone calls. These were only frames from classic platforms(web and phone) that first appeared on the mobile platform. I would rather argue that mobile is still finding it’s frame, it is just escaping it’s web andphone ancestry, just like web is still trying to escape it’s print ancestry.

An interesting thought nevertheless.

If you want to explore the same thinking, check out his book, Distraction. Its about from 2005 old but the approach is timeless.

And the coffee was very nice.

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