Mobile Internet World - Day 1 - Keynotes

There were two keynotes on day 1 of Mobile Internet World. First, Michael Bayle, Senior Director of Global Money Monetization at Yahoo spoke, and he was followed by Ian McKerlich, director of mobile web and content services at TMobile.

Michael's presentation was strongly focused on how to best advertise on mobile devices. It was certainly interesting, but I'm not really in the business of advertising. I did find that many of the topics he was talking about applied to general brand awareness on mobile devices, not just advertising. He first poses the rhetorical question, why aren't more brands on the go? Answers he posed are that the mobile landscape is too fragmented, the media is too small, and no clear definition of how start. On the otherhand, it's the perfect place to push your brand since it's hyper-personal. He cited that if you lose your wallet, it takes about 26 hours to completely report all stolen items. On the otherhand, lost cell phones are reported in an average of 68 minutes.

At this point, Michael made some joke about Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo email. I think it was funnier that the Yahoo employee was joking about this, rather than the joke itself.

Other stats on the hyper-personal nature of cell phones are:
60% of married mobile owners won't share the device with their spouses
68% of teens won't allow their parents to see their phone contents
And finally 6 out of 10 people sleep with their cell phone (maybe because they use it as an alarm)

Next, Michael covers various examples of mobile advertising, and how they take advantage of this hyper-personal nature of the devices. Nothing too extraordinary. While he was wrapping up his presentation, he mentioned a unique anecdote: the hottest venture capital topic is that of mobile analytics.

After Michael concluded, Ian McKerlich, director of mobile web and content services at TMobile was introduced. This was probably one of the most interesting presentations of the day. Besides the hot news related to Google Android lately, he described some other innovations from TMobile. The first thing that jumped out at me, was that he mentioned that TMobile executives are required to serve a specified amount of time in the actual store fronts assisting customers (just like the people who help you when you walk into a TMobile store). I found this very innovative on behalf of TMobile. I think this would definitely help keep the executives grounded and focused that the ultimate goal of the company is providing the best experience to customers, on all fronts.

While overviewing TMobile's recent work, he mentioned two unique contrasts between mobile devices and laptops:
Mobile devices have the permission to interupt you in a meeting, laptops don't.
Mobile devices have the permission to know where you are, laptops don't.

Humorously stated, but pretty profound in my opinion.

Next, Ian introduced the TMobile devPartner community. To me, this looked IDENTICAL to Apple's iPhone developer community. Well, not "looked" from a visual sense, but provided with the same intentions. It's a place for developers to gather, find documentation, and provide apps they write for TMobile to distribute to consumers, JUST LIKE THE IPHONE APP STORE! I should clarify, these aren't just Android apps, these are apps that would work on all TMobile devices. There's a profit sharing structure also similar to iPhone App Store.

During the Q and A, I posed the question to him, is the TMobile devPartner community a rip off (phrased a little more politely) of Apple's App Store? And what lessons learned has TMobile observed from the launch of the iPhone?

While he was responding, I could detect the slightest annoyance about being asked about the iPhone, almost as if he was thinking, "do I really have to talk about the iPhone again???" He indicated that TMobile has been working on this community for about a year and a half, that they were disappointed that Apple beat them to the market with the App Store, but also encouraged since the App Store's success has validated their approach. During his response, he also said, "Grandma doesn't know what an application is." almost degrading Apple's terminology while describing why TMobile's approach will be better for consumers at large. One nice feature that he explained will be part of the TMobile's version of the AppStore would be that when searching for "NY Times." Users will not only get a search result for the TMobile native app, but also a search result that would direct them to the smartphone designed website for NY Times. I would find this very useful on my iPhone. I'd really like a way to be able to find websites that are designed for the iPhone, maybe Apple should consider integrating this with their App Store???

That's it for the keynotes.