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.

We all have the pain of carrying around our wallets with multiple loyality cards and credit cards. This launch today of Starbucks iPhone App is clearing showing the new cross-media Analog to Digital world in the form of wallet for our mobile devices.

There are many companies focusing on the future of mobile payments and the wallet, but there is no better brand experience to be able to have the ability to buy from phyical retail from an application.  I see this as the start of a new phenomenal wave of retail convergence via apps that serve as our digital loyality cards.  Apps have really become the personal engagement mechanism beyond the rich multimedia and location based services for entertainment purposes to real mobile commerce.  I am excited to see how this will go cross-platform and even evolve into web widgets.  This is really a benchmark and taste to what will become a personal wallet of experiences in the mobile device and it is exciting to see Starbucks take the first step.  I expect to see lots more of this tied to all the loyality cards we have in our wallet today…

Despite the recent discussion that “WPP can not stop laying off people due to lack of growing revenues” http://networkedblogs.com/p12523536, there was a great inspirational session at the Mobile Ad Summit from WPP Digital’s Mark Read.  He said ” Mobile is not there year, but the key is for marketers to really look at the engagement strategies with thier customers and think of mobile as not the same, but Unique channel. With the explosion of Apps for dedicated experiences, the mobile experience is different and does require this kind of innovation.” When asked about convergence, he said” I beleive the opposite will be true. Marketers will continue to look for new creative ways to build relationships, and it is in the business model of the brand”

I have been a strong believer in a One-Web world where convergence will be the key. The reasoning is that the behaviors of Search and Social media link clicking is only growing and the glue for any digital strategy must be your website, untill all analytics of diversified customer engagement strategies can converge with analytics.  So even though there may be multiple different ways to market and build a media strategy, having cross-media analytics is going to be key.  There was not much discussion I have found so far on the Adobe-Omniture aquistion, but it is clear that the basics of analytics and search will be extended to widgets ( Air) and other dedicated marketing enablers in a site that need to be tracked in a systematic way.

My new interest in cross-media analytics has evolved to include a concept called ” Nested Social Media”.  We are starting to see where Facebook Connect ( by the way, of the Facebook users, 65% apparently access facebook from thier mobile), Twitter, MySpace, and the suite of mobile social apps are getting linked together for marketing delivery.  Twitter seems to be still lower in mobile access according the Jack Dorsey at the 140conf.com, but it is growing.  An example of this became very apparent to me when playing around with the mobile social app Foursquare.   I found it to be a prime example of a nested social application.   When I checked in using the app, and wrote a “status update”, it was spread to my Twitter, my Facebook and MySpace account.  Friends clicking on the link where then taken back to my foursquare webpage if they were not already users of foursquare.   This looping around between social media back to a landing page of the map and information on the club I was visiting became in my mind a nested social experience more powerful then just the Silo’d community generated site of Yelp……. So Yelp will as well need to become a Nested Yelp.

Martin Nisenholz, New York Times, gave a great presentation on “How to build a business model with their Developer API”. This again is another example of a brand that is driving distribution that nests back to the content and can be used in creative ways of linking to social media.  NYT has a great mobile strategy with their mobile assets, but still lacking a true one-web solution.

As the week is still just started, I am looking forward to the next couple days of mobile exploration…

Last year there was not much going on along Madison Avenue here in NYC during Advertising Week. There was a small mobile advertising event, but this year is a different year for mobile.  Regardless of what the economy did to the Advertising industry in general over the course of 2009, Mobile Advertising is big at Advertising Week.

Check out Microsoft’s Sponsored mobile website for on-the-go information  http://www.adwk.mobi.   ( Although it would have been better for the existing site to have gone mobile, it is a good start for anybody visiting the event to not have to carry around the large printed event book).

Also, there are going to be many panels and events at OMMA, MIXX and of course the MOBILE AD SUMMIT on Tues the 22nd.

ADObjects, Inc will be around and tweeting the event….

In a recent article by Fiercewireless’s Jason Ankeny, he describes first and foremost the cool things that brands have been able to do with Applications and mobile.  Even though I am a true beleiver in the real experiences that can be generated with direct brand engagment and applications, I still feel that there is a long way to go with the potential here. iPhones are still limited in market penetration and with the explosion of new app stores there is clearly a problem for cross-platform and distribution simplicity for a brand manager.  Nokia recently in it’s Monaco developer forum (last month) made it very clear they are working on leveraging thier ” widget” framework off the browser for developers and really showcased some cool things to come.  Although it is still early, I am quite interested to see where developers will continue to migrate to get the bigged bang for the buck, but with “brands” starting to also drive this process, there may be ubiquitous targeting of multiple platforms from the get-go with this sponsor making it all happen.  As they say, “Apple” blew a hole in the window and now all the flys can come through……

Just saw that Mozilla has Firefox has re-releases its Alpha 1 ( kind of like how they are moving forward but still not beta:). What is interesting to see that now that the Android, Nokia and Apple ( soon Blackberry?) have all moved with WebKit, the competition still is fierce for bringing the online web experience to mobile.  I could not stop thinking of all the possibilities withthe plug-in base online and how they would get extended to mobile.   These are some of the things that are new to the build.

• Tons of  bug fixes and performance upgrades ( 3 months worth
• Fennec UI have been rebuilt entirely in CSS,
  • This will allow the browser to easily be tweaked  different handsets without having to go in and change the hardcoding, making it easier to  port Fennec to different screensizes and resolutions.
• And last but not least Add-ons! Lets see where this goes with the compatibility for plug-ins. This will become quite dynamic for plug-in providors to start building different User Interfaces for mobile….

My key question is when all of the API’s that we normally see for applications all start to become part of the browsing experience. No longer will a developer need to create an iPhone app to do those cool things, but in basic CSS and with widgets.

Something to keep an eye on.

In the unofficial web blog from Apple, it looks like compatibility spagettii is about to happen, or not? Being in mobile myself for the last 15 years one of the greatest challenges with application development has always been with forward and backward compatibility. After Apple has now reached it’s 1billionth download with >30K apps in store and in the market for just over 1 year, compatibility-hell (CH) has started. As Apple is no stranger to this, I am sure they will do a great job in informing developers what to do about this, but what makes this interesting now is the cost to develop apps. As it will now become the responsibility for the developer to make sure that there is compatibility with the new OS3.0, New OS3.0 developers will now have to start looking at their apps for older versions potentially as well. As it is not cheap to develop apps, this is another factor that has made application development for dedicated platforms quite interesting. When there are standards around cross-platform application development, the same CH exists, but there is a bit more assurance on being able to have a product that works across multiple devices in the market.  As a developer, hopefully companies like Nitobi with PhoneGap will work out these issues and make it easier and cheaper to develop with CH.  I am particularly interested in how this will play out with the emerging App Stories of WinMo, Nokia’s Symbian, and Google Android.  Maybe it is time to just focus on the web?

This is week of digital convergence  us Vancouverites, but mobile is also part of the convergence of the event! VancouverDigitalWeek. Check out the three sites that have been Mobified by a local design agency using Mobify.  Even the Local design firm called NoshortCutsDesign has created a mobile view of their site….. I find this interesting as local interactive design firms embrace mobile.

http://m.popvoxawards.com

http://m.vipf.ca

http://m.vancouverdigitalweek.com

Robert Scoble with his 85K followers just made a statement that FriendFeed was growing faster then Twitter. I guess when you have that many followers you can create buzz, but as far as Compete.com goes, there is no match yet between the two ( at least from the standpoint of URL comparisons goes…. can not say about the API)

This evening I was out on the town and started to crave the Twitter Search feature that has now become front and center of my Twitter web app page. When Twitter adds this to mobile, it could really change the landscape of  local perspective search.  I can not wait to see the mobile twitter search come along…

In a recent blog post by James McQuivey of OmniVideo ( VP at Forrester Research), he mentions that the future of TV Remote is the mobile Web.  This is something I fundamentally believe in with the convergence of mobile with existing media platforms. As Companies like TVGuide, TiVo have started to release first release sites and products that have programing available via the site, the next phase will be to really change the channel from one piece of  Hardware in hand to another; total  access to content and hardware converged.

There was so much positive success by having an interative channel with American Idol with SMS thanks to AT&T with voting.  Can you image being able to be on the mobile-view of the TV Program American Idol at the same time, with the same services and more. Then being abile to change channels and make those EPG Settings.   Real time interactivity on screen will be a reality and the program themselves can control the back-channel for thier content programing and users.

There are companies such as Canoe, Back Channel Media that have been working on platform and technology solutions of interactive programing using overlays with the screen, but what they are missing are the core linkages to a mobile strategy and the power of having access via your mobile device simultaneously.

James, thanks for bringing this topic to surface as such a unique time.  In several years we will look back reflect at times when mobile devices and TV programs were not connected.