MoMo London Mobile Location Services Panel highlights : Show me the money

Stuart Dredge – Editor
Kate imbach – Skyhook Wireless
Jennifer Hicks – ink communication
Nic Black - Cloudmade
Roberta Lucca – Vertu
Patrick Weissert - Vodafone

The panel of mobile location was the best part of the evening at MoMo. It brought out a lot of insights and ideas on mobile location and the different aspects.

The most important aspect was the one of MONEY. Cash and how to make it was high up on the agenda.

Response:• Mobile Location apps such as street guides are not free and can cost over EUR 99

• Subscriptions for route finders and traffic planners are standard

• Mobile Advertising is the must have – but there is no inventory to make it effective enough for the consumer

• New business models need to be created, perhaps targeting very niche minorities to drive cash-flow.

There were a couple of case studies for mobile coupon and shopping companies. Apparently in the US some firms using Skyhook for location accuracy are delighted with a CPM of USD 24 or more. This is because the service is niche – right adverts or local city placements are becoming very very effective.

Mobile Advertising
The room was mixed on mobile advertising. Everyone said there was potential but the ad-networks were accused of being too greedy and asking for hefty up-front fees or selling blocks of space to small developers that stole 90% of all marketing budget. So far, the passion for advertising was there but the ROI was not.

Content for location apps
This was the second major topic. Everyone said that this was a double edged sword as there was either

• Too much content
• Simply not enough.

Roberta from Vertu made a point that her Concierge Vertu clients didn’t want to search for content they wanted their brand to find the apps and make them instantly available. But on the other side, nearly everyone else said that there wasn’t enough content to cater to niche tastes.

Nic Black from Cloudmate said the future was a location content service that they were working on providing that worked like a shop. There was one access point and portal but like a mall different services plugged into the network to deliver one app with many doors. This is interesting but again it sounds like a mobile portal or an ODP (both didn’t work).

FourSquare
FourSquare was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, especially Jennifer Hicks. Jennifer said that FourSquare was rocking Amsterdam with its game style mayor win win application that gave people free drinks. Everyone else seemed to be impressed with FourSquare as well ..

Walk past a shop and get a coupon?
I think it was the CEO of Rummble that told everyone to be quiet about walking past a shop and getting a coupon. He said he had been in the industry for a long time and this was nonsense. That wasn’t the essence of location and it shouldn’t be. (We agree fully!)

Privacy
When Daniel Applequist asked a question about privacy I rolled my eyes as I thought that we were passed that. I was wrong. Everyone got simply orgasmic about privacy and one heckler even shouted, it’s my phone bugger off from it – I don’t want to share anything with you or anyone. Apart from making me smile – I felt quite strange as I don’t mind who sees my location. I only care about location when I am roaming –but I need to brush up

Well done Stuart Dredge for keeping it real.