We have entered 2011 and I have to say the first decade did fly by rather quickly for us in the mobile industry.   I am a big fan of JWT and their things to watch deck.  I thought I would share it and highlight the top 10 in my mind for those realigning and creating a  mobile strategy this year.

As we all gear-up to fly out for the 2010 end of the year holiday season, are we grabbing that large guidebook and throwing into our suit case or travel bag? Are we getting the iPhone App, iPad App, or even Kindle version instead.

I saw this article on how Tourism Thailand ( TAT) is moving over to mobile and it brought back a nostalgic moment for me any my life.  In 1984 when  I was a third year Engineering Student at the University of Illinois,  I had the chance to study/ teach abroad in Thailand.  For me the Lonely-Planet Book for Thailand- written by Tony Wheeler ( at that time)  was a bit of  Bible  or sorts for my survival.  Back in the  Bangkok summer of 1984, it was like the wild-wild west for me.  I actually did contract Typhoid Feaver, and had many unique stories to tell, but that Lonely-Planet guidebook was something special in my overall discover and journey of the Thailand countryside.    The guide book lent it self for shoe-string travelers like myself to take notes, tear-off pages to share, and send in information that would better the book.  It was one of the first collaborative community projects of its time.  What happened Lonely Planet? I guess you lost the Tony Wheeler type characters of that day? Times had changed as well with global digital communications and the Internet of the 90′s, but it is something for me in my late teens to experience that was a slice in time right before the global World-Wide-Web.

Now as see all of this going Digital, that distant feeling of going to such a far away different place at that time has really changed as we  experience tourism/travel and back-packers of the day….  I remember reading about this unique noodle place tucked in the back-alleys off of  Sukumvit Road, and getting there with this diagram map to a Tuk-Tuk driver only to find the exact description of the Snake-charmer and old man siting on the corner adjacent to that Noodle shop.

Now we will be navigated with Google maps on our iPhone Lonely Planet App…. Not much Analog left in that experience…..:(

Amazon launched on Monday ( Nov 22) a new iPhone App for with advanced price comparison features on-the-go. Is this the straw that broke the camels back?  Will window shopping now be the only and main behavior for users shopping in the future? Has the Check-in replaced the Check-out?  Consumers look through the merchandise like they would through catalogs, but instead of buying it in that store, they hit the button on Amazon, buy it and have it delivered right to their home by the time you get there. This new change of purchasing behavior has evolved considerably with the growth of Smart Phones. Recently it was published that over 60% of users with Smart Phones will do some kind of product search in-store. Google recently launched its own new shopping product called Boutiques.com, and this wave of new eCommerce sites that incorporate mobile and offers is really exploding.

Recently, I have been seeing a lot of local supermarkets migrating to self-serve check-outs to cut the costs at the cash register  and make the flow quicker for people to move through the check-out lanes when congested.  It took me about 5 minutes to figure out how to use the automated system at Food Emporium and Home Depot, but once I figured it out, It found it quite convenient. But is it more convenient then just doing a quick product search, buying the product and having it delivered to my home.

Like many of the Retail brands, Food Emporium is doing its best to meet these online challenges with its own Online Shop, and FREE Delivery for sales over $75.  They have their own strategy for coupons and they have a great methodology of pick-up vs. delivery for making it convenient for their shoppers, but is it enough?

When I searched on Google for Home Depot and clicked on the link, Google kept me within Google’s index for my first couple of searches and clicks on Home Depot. I thought I was crazy when I was navigating within Home Depot’s site, but the URL string in my search bar was still Google? What does Home Depot thing of this? Google is now doing analysis of the users behavior in the site even after the search that is beyond just the lead. They seem to be pushing the envelop to gathering information that is beneficial for them. Google is trying to build deep information even before you can enter the online site of the Retailer for their own competitive advantage ( see diagram)

Retail brands are going to have to come up with new ways of assuring they not only have the right low price, but also the right “stickiness” in their apps to get users to use them over the Amazon’s of the world.  With Google running the search show, even when users go to the Retail Brand via the Web, Google is hanging on as long as possible to gather information on the user, making it potentially even more difficult for even Retail brands to understand holistically that first step.

In addition, this new era is one of optimized fufillment  where delivery and convenience is potentially the winning card.

2010 seems to be the year of the social promotion. 50% off for this or 90% off for that, if you register for the goods prior is the model that has worked so well for Groupon, but nitche players like Gilt.com, LivingSocial, Yipit and a variety of others are now making it easier for users  to find these promotions and coupons related to a location in real-time. This combined with the behavior of social recommendations and purchase history of your “Friends” will add even another unique dimension on the behaviour of online shopping on the go.

Even though Facebook seems to be quite quiet when it comes to eCommerce and one-click to buy shopping, they did have an unique release that better integrates the social graph as part of a sign-on process recently for mobile.  Once they also add this one-click to buy and make it easier to find products and services on-the-go, they will become another “Guerilla in the Room” that makes it more and more difficult for the Bricks-and-Mortars” to control that check-out experience.

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Amazon Price Comparison App Aims At Brick-and-Mortar Stores
by Mark Walsh, November 23,2010

Amazon will use the iPhone as a vehicle for snagging more business from brick-and-mortar stores this holiday season. With the company’s new price comparison app for the iPhone launched Monday, users can scan a product barcode, snap a picture of an item, or say a product’s name to find out if they can get a better deal from Amazon.

If they choose to go with Amazon, they can then make a purchase directly through the Price Check app and have it delivered to their home. That’s a clever way to try to take sales away from physical store rivals while shoppers are strolling down their aisles.

“For example, a customer may be shopping for a toy in a toy store and decide to compare the in-store price of the item to Amazon.com and other online merchants using Price Check,” explains Amazon in its announcement. But the third-party merchants online are limited to those that sell through Amazon.

That’s not the same as a popular app like Red Laser, acquired by eBay in June, which lets users scan a product barcode to compare pricing and stock across multiple online and physical stores. Amazon’s new app is essentially comparing its own pricing against that of the store someone is shopping at.

“While we love the search and quick purchase options, the [Amazon] ultimately isn’t that useful because it only allows users to compare a single store price with the prices of Amazon and its sellers,” noted Mashable. Once someone has already decided to brave the holiday crush by heading to a local store, there’s also a question of how often they would forgo an immediate purchase for a better price on Amazon.

The most likely instance for opting for Amazon would be where an item was out of stock and a shopper could use the Price Check to say the product name to find out if was available through the online retail giant. Or where the price difference was big enough to switch to Amazon despite adding in any shipping costs.

A report from research firm IDC Monday revealed that smartphones are changing consumer behavior. It found more than one-third of smartphone-carrying consumers (who represent 24% of all U.S. consumers) “are ready to use their mobile devices in ways that transform how they shop everywhere, and in particular, how they shop in retail stores.” That includes searching for price and product information, comparing prices at nearby stores, and buying things.

IDC projected that mobile-shopping “warriors” and “warrior wannabes” will account for 28% or $127 billion of the $447 billion the National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates U.S. consumers will spend this holiday season. Amazon itself said in its second-quarter earnings report in July that its mobile sales had surpassed $1 billion during the prior 12 months.

Brick-and-mortar retailers have released their own apps to take advantage of the smartphone explosion and aid in-store shopping. That includes major chains and department stores such as Target, which Monday was named “2010 Mobile Retailer of the Year” by Mobile Commerce Daily, Best Buy, JCPenney and Nordstrom.

Julie Ask, a mobile analyst at Forrester Research, noted that Amazon and Best Buy — which finished second and third behind Target as top retailer of 2010 — may actually have an edge when it comes to having more mobile-savvy customers.

“Both sell a lot of products that fall into the sweet spot for mobile — consumer electronics (one of the top activities for consumers on mobile devices around commerce is price comparisons — especially in the CE category) and books/DVDs,” she wrote in a blog post Monday. By creating an app patterned after customers’ mobile habits, Amazon is hoping to drive mobile revenues even higher.

There has been a lot of debate recently about whether Foursquare will truly become the main point of check-in’s around places in the future, or our others going to to be the next game in town ? With Facebook’s Places now extending to Blackberry’s and the roadmap growth process for the 600M+ users,  Foursquare only has 4M users is not even 1% the size of its Goliath predator. Foursquare has been growing with brands and starting to bring lots of new value with different promotional relationships and feeds to their platform, but can they grow fast enough as a company focused on local and is their growth  pace enough to be sustainable? Recently Foursquare was compared to Groupon in its efforts to bring value-added promotions around the community, and some say that Foursquare will need thousands of resources to keep the momentum going.   Even though advertising can be considered great content ( if presented in the right way)  is it the right content that will make Foursquare scale with user acquisition?  For some reason, I believe that it is a good direction, but I am not convinced it is really the right focused strategy as it is so resource intensive to do all those deals.  Groupon emerged with a very different business model for user attraction that has been very local, but not as hyper-local as Foursquare.

In my recent visit to conference around local advertising from the perspective of the local directory companies, Foursquare was a hot-topic, but they seemed to be working toward building their own anchor around local advertisers and Foursquare was not the centerpiece.  There was more debate and discussion around social media distribution in general around Facebook and Twitter.  Foursquare’s game got them out of the gate, and they have tapped into the behavior of the check-in, but others are fast to copy this phenomena.   I am really looking forward to seeing how they scale, but they need something more organic wow now to attract users like they did with the first game concept.   I am looking forward to this evolution and see how they balance user focus vs. advertising in the future, with or without that sales force.  My question is can they keep the game going to continue to game users? Can the game concept continue to grow at a local level?

Today Multipled Media announced their Gas Price Search Engine as part of their different search engined federated around a unique location based map application.   I saw this product at CTIA in Las Vegas in March and was very tickled on how local-local they have made this.  Is there room to compete against Google Maps or Bing Maps? According to Multiplied Media- Yes.  Create a deeper more relevant intimate user experience that refines more verticalized search engines around maps.  As Google only adds many new features and content at a National and Global level, can they keep up at a local level?   This Calgary based company ( funny that a lot of Oil for North America is also coming from their back yard) is finding a way to innovate at a local level.   As Search products grow organically, Google has looked at a media strategy at the Global => Local level, where as many of  these emerging companies are growing from hyper-local => local => National level.

As they build this local audience and grow, where does this position them with the Mega providers? Acquisition or fragmented marketplace?

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Multiplied Media Announces Addition of Gas Price Search Feature to Poynt Application for iPhone.

It was announced earlier this week that Facebook achieved their 500M User base worldwide.  In addition, it has been stated that there is about 100M of those users that are accessing Facebook via their mobile devices ( about 20%).

Moreover, when we look at the opportunity and potential for mobile, the global  market subscriber base has topped 5Billion strong thus indicating that Facebook is still only about 2% of the worlds marketplace for Mobile Social Media (or MoSo).

Repeatedly, Facebook has been one of the most downloaded Applications on the iPhone, Android, and even Blackberry devices with the amazing statistic of over 50% of all usage of content on the mobile tied to social media.   As the mobile experience has also been “coined” to be very location centric, there is another converging category called Mobile Local (or MoLo).   This is tied to Mobile Search and Location Based Services on the go.  As the Geo API has been made available via many application frameworks, it has also been available via certain browsers to bring Location-context to websites and web applications.   Twitter has included a location API recently to  their suite of unique modifiers for Twitter Search and the Geo API has been a strong debate in the developer community surrounding the iPhone in general for location based advertising.

( Picture and Statistics from Hitwise)

So with 98% of the Global Market in the Mobile Social Space and the amazing growth of Mobile Location Based Services, it is apparent that there is a new opportunity for the next Billion Dollar Company in this combined MoSo or MoLo…… or should we say MoSoLo.   The quiet battle ensues between the several mobile location based social networks such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Socialight,  and a variety of others, but they are still all less then 10M users, thus validating it is early days for MoSoLo.

Creating a compelling experience for end-user’s to “share their location”  for not only their friends but for a unique engagement with brands is now at a very interesting crossroads of growth and evolution to the next killer app ( or massive money making app- mmm ) .   Companies like Nokia, Google, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo have all been putting up billions of  dollars  into this new contest for the next holy grail of advertising and social media, but it seems like  this MoSoLo end-user mind share is with  these new nimble start-ups at this time

Skyhook wireless, a company that has been strong in providing location information as an API for developers,  handset manufactures and Operators had recently released this “heat map” of  real time location interactions.  It will not be long before the heat map itself may be sliced and diced into different behavioral segments for real-time viewing.

Imagine seeing clusters about town of where people that tend to like the same interests or are connected to you are gathering around town at a certain point in time.

So by 2012, I would not be surprised to see a new player, jump out of the blue and take this next wave of MoSoLo or will Facebook be able to take a big chunk of this remaining 98% of the  pie?

Holiday Inn just launched a mobile solution for room keys going mobile.  I spent a considerable time today on Foursquare and although I have been overwhelmed by the grown, what I found disturbing was the lack of content for each of the places.  Companies like Yelp and other joined the bandwagon of “Check-in” but they come with considerable content. Unless the Foursquares of the world figure out a strategy to get users to post more tips and content, I just do not know how sustainable it will be.

With that said, the concept and leadership they created with the concept of “Check-in” and the database of places is clearly the next wave in location based services and mobile.  Seeing Holiday Inn take this initiative to further the entire process and build a complete engaging solution around the entire concept of ” Checking-in” without customers even going to the front desk is the usage case of mobile cross-media that is where mobile is powerful.

eCommerce and other conversion techniques exist for mobile, but the creativity of taking a brand and enabling a “full experience” that is truly convenient is where I like seeing mobile going.

At CTIA I stayed at the Hilton Hotel Convention center, and there were Foursquare banners all over the lobby to “Check-in”.  The vision was there as well and seeing Hotels and the travel industry now embracing mobile in its full form shows the power of the mobile device.

As we all waited patiently for the Third Quarter of the Super bowl on Sunday to see for the first time Google’s brand ad as part of their media strategy, it dawned on me an interesting thought about how Google really does marketing in this Web 2.0 world.

We all know that after the Superbowl on the following weekend starts the Vancouver2010 Olympics ( #VO2010, #Olympics, #Van2010). Even though there is a usage case  for people  to use search the web during the superbowl, it may not be as much high-density searching as we we are going to probably see globally during the Olympics.  Google’s ad campaign was considered Brand building, but given the fact that Google has over 70% of the search penetration in most countries around the world and on average more then 50%, most likely people at some point during the Olympics are most likely going to be coming to Google and searching for an event information, results, etc… anyway regardless of brand building. Why was it so important to start this now when Google has made a statement they do not believe in this form of advertising in the past?

Up until now, Google has not been spending money on traditional media. Moreover, for an event like the Olympics,  sponsors are dishing out 100′s of Millions of $$$ for brand building. Google has traditionally used search and its own assets in search results at the top of the page as their form of marketing.  As they have said, “We are not keen on tweaking the organic results, but always like to follow their regimented strategic algorithms for determining what gets on the top of the pages”.  Some of the best marketing during the Olympics is going to come through Search during the weeks the events are live.  What I found interesting was that Google has really built up  its own strategy as a method to get the maximum exposure to their own properties without spending money on traditional media.    Have you seen their initiative around Google Earth and the 3D creations of all the different venues as a form of sponsorship?  Google offered to do these 3D models of the venues as a service for the Olympics Events.  I find this a very interesting offer, but can only imagine that the real reason behind this is to give themselves good ranking if the Olympics puts these links on the pages of Olympics site.  They become the masters of their own game, a way to use their own algorithms to finesse the system to give Google assets high-ranking during the events; thus driving traffic to Google maps for visitors to find local information on the go during the events.  With the billions of Dollars spent by the sponsors during the events, Google may have just again gotten away with a kind-of-freebie for its own marketing efforts to potential spoof the traditional marketing system.  This is only my guess, but it somehow makes sense to me. Would love the gamet of SEO experts out there to comment on this if you can?

Back to the Superbowl…..so then why did they buy advertising the week before?  Again I am only thinking and guessing and I do not have facts to support this, but again it makes sense to me in the greater scheme of things this kind of thinking:

If Google is getting all this search traffic during the Olympics for somewhat free at the expense of the traditional sponsors by leveraging their own algorithms to their own advantage, it might just kick-up a stir amongst traditional media  in the effect that Google using its own engine to get marketing value and  not spending money on traditional media.  ” Oh No”, they can say….. did you see we do spend money on traditional media as well. Did you see our ads that ran last week?  So by spending money on traditional media from time and again makes for a good balanced media strategy when the pundits start to sniff…..Smart I would think.

Again, I am only thinking from the standpoint of business strategy and it makes perfect sense to master mind the shell game of spending money on different media.  In this case for them,  the pea is under all the shells?…… for us, maybe there never was a pea?

mSearchGroove’s Peggy Salz presented a collaborative piece on how to best leverage location services on your business at the 2009 International Information Innovation Conference held on the 30th September & 1st of October 2009 at the George Hotel with the awards ceremony being held aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia in Edinburgh.

Now in its sixth year the directory assistance conference and awards supports the leading innovators and newcomers in the information services and search marketplace. To recognise the developments in the industry from 2010 the event will be called theInformation Innovation Conference & Awards.

ADObjects-Inc worked together with mSearchGroove to present real stories and solution for online directories to embrace a mobile strategy leveraging their content and location as a key driver for a syndicated business.  Here is the presentation from the event.

I am really excited about the App becoming a loyalty card and a payment mechanism. I was discussing this issue with the head of marketing from Blenz here locally in Vancouver about 6 months ago, and he mentioned that the real problem with using a phone to purchase in more creative ways beyond using it just like a regular card was to leverage the location of the individual.  He described to me that coffee shops all have to maintain there quality level and to keep the coffee fresh and hot. We discussed the possibility of using Geo-fencing technology of the user to recognise if they entered a certain location circle, the coffee could be made ready for pick-up.

This way the purchaser of coffee would only need to buy it and then pick it up.

In the picture below shows what a Geo-fence could look like…. Image buying a coffee like an Song off of iTunes  and the minute you entered the Geo-Fence they would start to make the coffee for pick-up!  You just need to show your designated ID off the phone and pick-up the coffee.