Here are my unedited notes from this panel session at SXSW.
On the panel as have:
Rob Gonda – Director of strategy;
Juan Morales – creative director, Sapient;
Ryan Stewart – Adobe platform evangelist.
3 times more mobile subscribers in the world than Internet users.
Japan: the phone is the core of all lifestyle activity. Only just getting this in the US with the iPhone. 93% mobile; 7% PC-based.
iPhone hasn’t taken off in Japan because it isn’t revolutionary to them.
80% of iPhone owners use the web every day.
Android hasn’t caught up with iPhone yet. T-Mobile is only 7% of mobile marketing in the US so Android penetration is still quite low, but 15% of TM users have G1. Since it’s an open platform, growth is set to explode.
Flash on the phone will change everything because you can use a single asset to publish to the web and multiple devices without having to redevelop. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have Flash video etc on the mobile.
Being able to efficiently view a ‘normal’ web page rather than special mobile version is key to iPhone success and must be emulated by other handsets.
500m iPhone app downloads. $1bn in sales. 93% iPhones have apps installed.
There are 20,000 apps in iPhone app store, but there should be 100’s of thousands if it wasn’t so controlled by Apple.
7-10m mobiles with Flash by the end of 2009.
Adobe bloke avoiding answering questions about when Flash will be on the iPhone. It’s above his pay grade apparently :)
Adobe reckon that Palm Pre will be an early leader in Flash on mobiles.
Microsoft claim that their app store will be as open as Google’s. The panel has its doubts about this.
Apple app store works neatly because it’s all Apple controlled. Microsoft and Google app stores will have to contend with lots of handsets but should get much wider penetration.
Apps are successful because the price e.g. 99 cents is a throwaway purchase, and the payment mechanism is very simple.
There’s a different culture around paying for apps on mobile. Unlike the web, we don’t expect everything to be free.
Monkey ball iPhone app is making $15,000 per day. Yowsers.
Augmented reality: Not a new concept. What’s new is doing it with real-time content from the web and on mobile. Cool demos of augmented reality on iPhone and Nokia N95.
Merging physical world with digital. Pointing your phone at food in a supermarket and you’ll be able to see recipes.
[it’s almost scary to think of the possibilities of this once we have video capability in contact lenses. Will try to ask a question to the panel about this]
Lots of these mobile developments aren’t new concepts e.g. augmented reality and location-aware (GPS) but these technologies are being given new applications and being made highly mobile with new handsets.
Logo recognition – take a picture and your phone will bring up info about the product or company.
‘Audio barcodes’ – using frequencies that can’t be heard by humans to send digital information. Like watching a film or listening to music. Your mobile will be able to record the sound and decode the extra information which could be URLs to information on the web. [cool! Never heard of this before]
Question from the audience about disruptive side effects of this technology:
It will be much easier for customers to compare products, customers and prices. Ultimate good for consumer so A Good Thing.
Question about the state of mobile advertising: Consumers say that they don’t mind seeing mobile ads.
Talking about new devices: LG watch phone with Bluetooth, video, MP3.
Asked my question about contact lense displays :)
Panel hadn’t heard about them so they don’t think it’s coming any time soon. I watched a documentary about this on the plane so I know that it’s in development. I wonder if we’ll be talking seriously about this next year.
Batteries: someone in the audience said that MIT have created some technology that can charge a mobile battery in 7 seconds.
Biometrics: we will start seeing retina, face and fingerprint recognition built into phones.
Skyhook: uses three ways to locate you: GPS; mobile phone mast triangulation and WIFI networks. So we can be location-aware even indoors.
