Social location and other stories...
The next session at Heroes Of The Mobile Screen focuses on the impact of context on the mobile user experience, with panellists from Vodafone, Orange, RIM, Rummble and Reputation Online.
So, what does context mean for the panellists, starting with Vodafone's Dan Appelquist. "We are still at the beginning of contextual-based services," he says, but thinks people are starting to get familiar with the idea that their phone can locate them - mapping and search, for example.
"People are starting to warm to social applications too," he says, before pointing out that "the challenge is still privacy".
Now Vikki Chowney, editor of website Reputation Online, who's looking at this from a branding perspective. "Brands are only just getting on top of things like social networking," she says, before saying mobile is still low on their list of priorities too.
Mark Watts-Jones from Orange agrees, and says that the number of customers using context-aware services on Orange is "very very low". Facebook is dominant on mobile, and Twitter on Orange is seeing "very very heavy engagement from some customers, but it's tiny in terms of the overall base".
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Now Andrew Scott from Rummble, who says the key to driving takeup of these new services is ensuring people know about them. "Services have to be out there, and data has to be shared for it to be engaged with," he says.
So what education is needed to get those services out there? How does data get shared by networks so it can be used by high-quality services?
Appelquist: "The ship has already sailed" for some types, like location, which he says is not under the control of the operators any more. "It's been an object lesson for operators on how to share other types of information, and I think we're going to see a lot omre context metadata being shared more freely by operators in the future."
Orange's Watts-Jones also thinks operators are opening up, "maybe not as quickly as you would like, but we are opening up" (that's addressed to the developers in the audience. He thinks there is a demand from customers for these context-aware services though.
"Facebook is part of people's everyday lives now," he says. "For mobile, I think that will start to bleed over. Facebook is driving awareness, people want to use it on their mobile, and then they try something else... and operators will try not to get in the way."
Mike Kirkup from RIM is on this panel too, and he says it's not just an operator problem. He thinks people can build services "based on the data that is there" rather than demanding operators open up more.
Rummble's Scott says some nice things about the operators too - specifically that they're not demanding the same kind of revenue shares that they were a couple of years ago.
"The idea that Android will not be huge is very difficult for me to understand. They are still iPhone-drunk on the West Coast of the United States, but that is going to change," he continues.
So what about users and control - are they in control of their information and where it's going? How can that control be best brought about?
"We believe it's in the platform itself," says Kirkup, citing BlackBerry as an example, where users can set whether they want to give an app access to 14 or 15 types of information. "There's a lot of movement towards some sort of standardisation of that process across mobile platforms," he says. Interesting.
Appelquist talks about recently putting some photos on Facebook of his children, designed to be shared with family. "As awarenss of privacy permeates, people will start to curate their information and who gets to see it more carefully," he says. "That's going to push people towards things like Facebook that have more complex privacy controls. But then the Facebooks of the world may become the new walled gardens."
Chowney chisp in, saying that most consumers are inherently lazy, and won't reach out to find new applications - hasn't the App Store proved that wrong? - but she also talks about the generation gap from privacy. Younger users don't care about privacy - "they don't really mind if they over-share, and that's something that needs to be taken into consideration".
Appelquist questions this - "isn't this just the extrovert youth?" - suggesting that you can't generalise and say that all youngsters don't care about privacy.
"It's a learning curve just like anything else," says Scott. "People are throwing everything up there, their girlfriend sees them with someone they shouldn't, and then they get in trouble and look for that privacy setting they haven't been using..."
So, location. People have been talking about location-based services on mobile for a long, long time. How is that evolving,and will it be more successful this time round?
"Location can be added as a contextual service across the whole spectrum of apps," says Kirkup. "It's really just a longitude and a latitude, which is more or less useless on its own. You have to turn it into data to make it useful."
Where's the money coming from? Watts-Jones says that from Orange's point of view, customer's interest in contextual services enhances its relationship with users - so it's about adding value, with customers spending a bit of extra money on their tariffs. Vodafone's Appelquist says Vodafone 360 is about the same thing - so operators using contextual services to keep customers loyal and sell them slightly more expensive data tariffs.
Kirkup chips in, saying that "contextual data today is a competitive advantage" for mobile developers. "Right now, contextual data and what you can then offer back as a contextual service is a huge competitive advantage."
And Rummble's Scott says he sees the money as coming from targeted advertising - and that the contextual data helps developers to make more money from advertising. "It almost goes against what brands and advertising agencies want to do though," he says. "The narrower you get, the harder it is to get them to engage on that micro level with consumers."
So granularity will help developers make more money from ads. But only when the people paying for the ads are more willing to pay for granularity.
Another question from the audience: what are Orange and Vodafone doing to share more data so developers can build services? Watts-Jones starts by talking about Orange's famous animal-related plans - Dolphins, Racoons and so on. He doesn't quite get to explaining how this data is being shared though.
