IGN, Microsoft, Somo, SoundHound and Scanbuy debate what's happening now and what's coming next.
The final panel session at ME's Monetising Mobile: Next Generation Search and Discovery event saw IGN Entertainment, Microsoft, Somo, SoundHound and Scanbuy discussing the topics raised by earlier speakers about new forms of mobile search and discovery.
IGN's Rich Keen kicked off with a digital publisher's viewpoint. "This technology is great, but what it needs is great content," he said. "The days when consumers need to come to a website to consume content - to a destination - are gone..." So he thought that publishers should be looking to work with technology companies to find new ways to get their content to people out and about.
Somo's Maani Safa admitted that his agency gets a lot of clients demanding apps. "What we need to try to sell in to all our clients is a real-world use case: something that actually connects that app to the real world." He also suggested that in a year's time, case studies at events like this will have a lot more metrics on what's been successful and what hasn't.
"Consumers need to catch up with the technology as well,' admitted Keen, pointing to barcode scanning growing much more rapidly than use of augmented reality at the moment.
Scanbuy's David Marutiak was asked about the explosion in barcode-reading apps. "We alone have 50 million customers out there using our client, but that's probably one tenth of the clients that are out there in the market," he said. But are QR codes here to stay, or part of a migration to more user-friendly image recognition?
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"I think they'll be around for the forseeable horizon," he said, pointing to their continued popularity in Asia a decade after they first appeared. "They're used to trigger things like AR too, so they can be a companion for these kinds of technologies as well."
SoundHound's Katie McMahon talked about SoundHound's campaign for Secondhand Serenade, who made a new song available through its app exclusively as a full stream, before it was available online. "On the day of the release... per unique device, 1.3 times that was listened to, which is a tremendous response rate. We repeated that with Pitbull's new release in June, and the stat was exactly the same: 1.3 plays per unique device. For us, that demonstrates really impressive, repeat engagement."
She was also asked if her company is looking beyond music: to games for example. "Yes, we are absolutely intent on growing Hound out into new vertical categories," she said. "You can think of the next icon that we could bring out, which is a contained category. Movies, your own contact base... it's content we know, and then it becomes very interesting for the studios coming out."
Microsoft's Nick Hedderman said his company is always looking to bring new technologies into Windows Phone, while Safa said this trend will be important. "The plate tectonics shift will come from the likes of Microsofts, Apples, Googles and Samsungs embedding these technologies into their handsets," said Safa.
What about the developing markets: Africa, rural China and other parts of Asia - places where feature phones still dominate. Will they be falling further behind the search and discovery technologies being pioneered on smartphones in the developed world?
McMahon said SoundHound has noticed someone in Kenya using its app to discover music, while Hedderman said smartphone sales are exploding around the world, including in developing markets - he mentioned Nokia's strength in this area. Meanwhile, Marutiak talked up the ability for barcodes to be scanned and sent (via MMS) by feature phones - as well as the fact that they're language-independent.
But the conversation turned back to Western brands, with Safa saying some big, multi-national brands are really waking up to the potential of the technologies discussed at tonight's event.
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