Multi-platform distribution, social media, mobile advertising and proximity marketing are only a few examples of the rapid technological and behavioural changes that are now the landscape for publishers, media and entertainment companies.
To keep pace and compete in an effective way, organizations must overcome cultural, technical and business challenges, align corporate strategy to this new scenario and focus on consumer needs and continuous product innovation.
As is becoming obvious, the iPhone and Smartphones experience is a unique one from both the user and Web development perspectives.
Companies have to make their Web presence iPhone and Smartphone friendly, since people buying these devices - well-heeled early adopters - are by definition high-value potential customers for most businesses.
By integrating proper design and mobile content distribution, companies such as publishers, banks, retailers, government or telcos, can leverage with mobc3 these new devices as the most relevant medium today, as well as benefit from cost-saving synergies and message consistency, while effectively reaching consumers throughout their purchase cycle.
mobc3 has been designed with these challenges in mind and developed to include a number of modules: mobc3 Content, Coupon, Loyalty, Virtual Personal Assistant, Payment, Social, Touch, which enable a set of outstanding solutions created to deliver rich media content and services to iPhones, iPod touch, smart phones and personal digital assistants.
The Mobile Media Landscape
The mobile phone is fast becoming the first screen for news and entertainment and this will reshape the newspaper industry.
We can see it happening: subscriptions to traditional print is down while Web sites and blogs are gaining readership.
Soon, more and more young people will leapfrog over the PC straight to mobile – a phenomenon already evident from Asia to Africa.
Companies and traditional media properties that delay in implementing a mobile strategy will most certainly take a hit; on the other hand mobile content, classifieds, listings and personals are a huge opportunity.
Teens and young adults want everything to be immediate and seamless: they expect access to information five times faster than previous generations.
The use of technology isn’t just a habit; it’s a reflex, as they don’t even think about it. All their news, entertainment, and communication come digitally.
But how can in example media properties stay viable on mobile? In the same way they have always been: advertising.
To this aim mobile business models supported by mobc3 are emerging, from banners to branded content.
During the past five years, mobile operators have launched content offerings exclusively available on their portals, but failed to generate significant revenues with their walled-garden approaches.
Strategic Priorities
Handset manufacturers and Internet players have invested in the space.
New entrants such as Apple are leveraging their brands and the side-loading phenomenon, with the iPhone providing the most significant example of a PC-centric mobile phone.
Internet and Media players as well as content providers are becoming aware of the huge opportunity in mobile Internet.
In addition, the emergence of new payment methods and networks will increasingly facilitate new entrants’ efforts to leverage the mobile revolution with a blended approach that includes online mobile access and side-loading via PC connected to broadband (e.g. by using iTunes and podcasting).
The digital market is expected to continue the trend upwards over the next years, but unless media organizations can transform rapidly, they will miss out new opportunities for revenue growth.
With this in mind, the key strategic priorities must be focused on executing a digital transformation towards mobile content quickly and effectively, aggressively pursuing multi-device, platform-agnostic distribution, understanding consumers and delivering on their needs.
The iPhone and Smartphones Opportunity
In particular the iPhone is a breakthrough innovation and an extraordinary marketing and media enabler.
As on the best mobile platform ever to involve and entertain customers, ultimately shaping the mobile Internet landscape, mobc3 on the iPhone is effectively and timely fitting to help companies gain a competitive advantage on this device as the new mobile medium, in coherence with brand and product strategies: from mobile CRM to loyalty, from couponing to proximity marketing.
Thanks to mobc3, companies can leverage the iPhone and smartphones to obtain relevant benefits, such as: Transfer of the symbolic value and uniqueness – from the iPhone to their brands – at the moment of the highest market consideration and interest High value and quality perception among the customer base and all enterprise stakeholders Mindshare and market share within the iPhone users’ community, as placement as “among-the-first” icons on the iPhone desktop.
More in general mobc3 allows the launch of a new generation of platform-agnostic content services.
Companies can stay in touch with their audience, operators, publishers and media companies can launch these services, based on advertising-based business models for consumers who are not ready to pay, as well as offer instant-purchase billing capabilities.
Operators can partner with media companies and third-party players to stimulate consumption based on their knowledge of customers.
mobc3 Content
The mobc3 platform was developed to enable content distribution to the widest range of handhelds devices.
Started as a solution for rich content mobile distribution and evolved over time to support interactive, data-driven, client-server mobile applications, mobc3 Content is currently used for both content- and functionality-oriented mobile applications and services by a variety of prominent customers.
The result and power of mobc3 is that customers can effortlessly and securely access the information and services, including full fledged e-commerce, on a company’s web site from whatever devices they are using simply by accessing the company’s web via handheld at which point they are seamlessly re-directed to a specialized mobile view that is provided by the mobc3-powered application.
Given the absence of standards in the fragmented mobile arena, mobc3 adopts a variety of state-of-the-art technologies and distribution strategies under a unified approach, to leverage strengths and mitigate weaknesses of different classes of devices, rather than adopting a lowest common denominator approach.
To this purpose mobc3 has been built as an industry standard solution on top of WebKit, the open source application framework originally derived by Apple for use as the engine of Mac OS X’s Safari web browser, and that has now been further developed by individuals from the KDE project, for Apple iPhone and iPod touch, Nokia (e.g. Web Browser for S60), Google Android, RIM and others, where it is used to render content within the device’s web browser and email software.
mobc3 removes the need to devote resources to creating and maintaining dedicated mobile web sites or applications optimized for the different handhelds.
mobc3 supports all devices and technologies eliminating the companies from having to react to every new device or browser launched on the market.
Mobile Advertising
Although
the easiest migration path for media companies looking to sell their
existing advertisers the same thing on a different platform is banner
ads, an array of new ad products represent the real growth opportunity
abound.
Most of these ad products are still in the stages of development, but responses that early adopters have been getting with mobc3 Content and mobc3 Coupon are outstanding, including a number of technologies such as:
Mobile coupons, that aim to replace cumbersome paper newspaper inserts and direct mail.
Like
QR codes, mobile coupons can deliver demographic information about the
users, on top of motivating them to come to a store and make a
purchase, leveraging the capability of mobiles to deliver a coupon to
the user exactly when and where it will do the most good, creates an
immediate and personalized “call to action” that results in instant
gratification.
Common Short Codes (CSCs), a short series of
numbers, usually five or six digits, to which a user can send a text
message that will trigger a response message from an advertiser sending
back information or content, or enter the user in a contest.
QR
Codes, that work in a similar way: each printed checkerboard-looking
code can contain up to 4,296 characters. Users with cell phone cameras
and the right software installed, can take a picture of the QR code,
which causes the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the URL
contained in the code.
The codes can appear on newspaper or magazine pages, signs, buses, business cards, or any printable object.
Distribution Strategies
Distribution across different mobile platforms is enabled and supported by a combination of high-level framework, low-level and platform-specific components, server-side services and a set of processes and production tools.
The mobc3 mobile framework supports a single-source and unified access among the different target platforms both at application and content level.
Depending on a given project’s nature and requirements, a single application can be generated that can effectively be used, with different technologies, on the target devices.
Alternatively, different standard mobc3 Content players can be deployed and fed with content information that is automatically generated from a single and common source.
The generated applications (or content players) can be deployed as standalone applications, capable of working in absence of a data connection, as well as browser-embedded applications.
One or both of these deployment styles can be used to target each mobile device class.
Stand-alone applications/players can adopt flexible content update strategies based on connection availability, content properties and user preferences, and different strategies can be applied for different data types within the same deployment.
Functions that are intrinsically tied to an online service can be inhibited when data connection isn’t available, or can work with local data, subsequently synchronized with the back-end server when a connection to the network becomes available.
Browser-embedded applications/players can, for specific targets, locally cache information in order to improve the user experience, decrease bandwidth needs and increase overall responsiveness; on specific platforms and browsers, services can be locally made persistent and be used, with limitations, even when data connection isn’t available.
According to each project’s requirements, a different combination of distribution strategies and technologies can be selected to optimize the scenario for each target device, up to providing cross-platform access to content at the users’ own pace, anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
Platform Concepts
The diagram depicts a view of mobc3 Content
Content can be imported into the system through a set of content adapters, according to their type, and processed, made persistent and delivered to the target devices through the platform’s data services.
Enabled handhelds can bypass the data subsystem and directly access specific content types.
Less capable devices rely on the data services processing in order to receive versions of the content that was pre-processed according to the deployment technology and strategy used for their class.
Each content distribution project can include specific application code to be executed on selected, or all, device classes.
Project applications are preferably defined using mobc3 Content framework’s high-level meta-code that the deployment services can compile into highly standard mobile platform-specific applications, using a range of implementation technologies behind the scenes.
That is the case for “App1” shown in the diagram.
Alternatively, a project can rely on the standard mobc3 Content players, without the need of defining custom applications, if their functionality meets its requirements.
A third option is for a project to provide its own applications, possibly in different instances to target different mobile platforms. “App2” in the diagram represents an example of this approach.
Each project also has a deployment description that can specify strategy and technology for each target platform. It is processed by the deployment services, generating a set of deployment configurations for the different mobile platforms.
Semantic data representation can be performed using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), a semantic mark-up language for publishing and sharing ontologies on the World Wide Web based on RDF/XML syntax.
A project’s applications are finally delivered to the handsets by the application services, according to the deployment configuration associated to their platform, leveraging all relevant Web 2.0 technologies, extending them as needed to achieve project objectives, and finally combining them in an end-to-end mobile content solution that is much more powerful than anything else that comes close to this vision and is available today.
User Interaction
In terms of user interaction and gesture support, mobc3 Content allows a consistent and seamless user experience across all handsets.
It also targets new innovative device concepts by introducing support for touch UI with tactile feedback and gestures and by supporting sensors that allow motion, orientation and further interaction techniques to improve the overall user perception, ranging anywhere from mass market to high-end multimedia or enterprise focused devices.
The presentation layer is based on the industry-leading open source Webkit engine that delivers full Web content (HTML, JavaScript) compliance and performance, providing users with an enjoyable experience optimized for each target device.
On the user interface mobc3 Content implements several innovative concepts allowing a desktop like user experience on small screen devices, by removing the hurdles associated with the poor experience of navigating the Web on a non-PC device, given the evidence that browser metaphor and Web pages are strongly tied to the current PC-Internet experience.
mobc3 Content relies upon a new presentation layer for information through interface tools based on widgets and RSS to define a new way of interacting with Internet content through a mobile device: dedicated and easy to use micro-services that deliver content in an easily consumable form for mobile devices, valuable to users, that have proven to go a long way in improving the mobile experience.
Extensibility, Connectivity and Standardization
To extend or specialize applications, mobc3 Content offers versatile support that enables clients and partners extend their service offer by developing applications in languages with which they are already familiar and choose the technology that best suits their needs in implementing new services or applications.
Supported developer technologies include powerful XML-based declarative environment, iPhone-specific Objective-C, portable mobile Java environment (Java ME) and efficient environments based on Web technology, including Web Runtime and Adobe Flash Lite.
This allows the creation of personal and context-aware applications that can access local device information and functions, such as the retrieval of GPS-co-ordinates, phonebook entries, click-to-call and messaging functionality.
Device-specific media players allow user to access all supported video files and are also used for media streaming.
The media playing application can be launched as a standalone application or as an embedded (within Web content) application for purposes and content formats to enable, for example, a preview of the content before purchase.
iPhones and Smartphones stream movies and audio pointed by mobc3 descriptors using HTTP over UMTS, EDGE, HSDPA and Wi-Fi networks, with native applications to play back video segments or streams which automatically expands to the size of the screen and rotate when the user changes orientation.
Controls automatically hide when they are not in use and appear when the user taps the screen or presses a menu key.
A Service Oriented Architecture paradigm is supported as a native functionality with a set of methods for systems development and integration where systems group functionality around business processes and package these as interoperable services.
Since Web services protocols (XML, SOAP, etc.) are being widely deployed for both enterprise and consumer mobc3-based services, it is possible to deploy client applications that use Web services protocols end-to-end, fully aiming at a loose coupling of services with operating systems, programming languages and other technologies which underlie applications.
In mobc3-based implementations this approach separates functions into distinct units, or services, which are made accessible over a network in order that services can combine and reuse them in the production of applications.
The main benefit is the possibility to respond more quickly and cost-effectively to changing market conditions and simplify interconnection to - and usage of - existing IT (legacy) assets.
mobc3 Social
A social network is a social structure made of individuals tied by one or more types of inter-dependency, as values, visions, ideas, friends.
Research has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.
As the future of media and advertising is about engaging customers as co-creators, rather than expecting them to passively consume, based on OpenSocial open source technology, mobc3 Social has been designed to allow mobile applications that easily interact with friends and colleagues, by providing access to three primary functions:
- People: information about individuals and their relationships to each other
- Activities: ability to post and view updates on what people are doing, which content they like, which brands an products they are interested it
- Persistence: a simple data store to allow server-free stateful mobc3 applications for items such as mobile loyalty cards, coupons, etc.
mobc3 is interoperable with most social network systems, including features on services such as hi5, MySpace, orkut, Netlog, Sonico.com, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo!
Additional services committed to supporting APIs integrated in mobc3 Social include Bebo, Engage.com, Hyves, imeem, NetModular, mixi, orkut, Plaxo, Six Apart, as well as business-oriented networking companies LinkedIn, Tianji, Salesforce.com, Viadeo, Oracle, and XING.
With more and more containers introducing server-to-server APIs based on the OpenSocial REST and RPC protocols (think MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, orkut, and iGoogle just for starters), it has never been a better time to jump into mobc3 Social.
These new protocols allow to write engaging social applications for these containers using the language of choice, being JavaScript no longer the only option.
To help using the OpenSocial REST and RPC protocols integrated in mobc3 Social, a set of client libraries for PHP, Java, Ruby and Python are also available.
Each library enables to retrieve profile information and persistent data from supporting containers without having to concern with managing network connections, signing requests, or other lower-level details, letting your company take advantage of the mobile social networking revolution.
mobc3D
Whether on a Pc, a Mac, on the web, on an iPhone or an iPod touch, with mobc3D you will be able to dazzle your audience with the most powerful and engaging immersive virtual or enhanced reality experience.
mobc3D computer-simulated worlds offer strong stimuli to the user, who in turn can explore the environment, products, manipulate elements and thus experience telepresence and the most powerful exposition to the brand ever achieved on any media.
mobc3D is positioned in the rapidly developing 3D web ecosystem.
Augmented reality enables the enhancement of real-world information through the confluence of the Internet, RFID, GPS, smart-tag networks and mobiles.
Modeled worlds may appear similar to the real world or depict fantasy environments.
The modeled world may simulate rules such as gravity, topography, locomotion and communication.
By leveraging mobc3D, organizations can incorporate virtual worlds as a new form of advertising both on the web and on mobile devices.
There are many advantages to using these methods of commercialization, i.e. to allow the users to explore the latest and most innovative products, while using virtual worlds gives companies the opportunity to entertain the clients, gauge customer reaction and receive feedback.
Using 3D virtual environments on the web and on mobiles as a marketing tool allows companies to test user reaction and receive feedback on products.
This can be crucial as it will give the companies an insight as to what the market and customers want from new products, which provides a relevant competitive edge.
The Mobile 3D Web
Immersive 3D environments provide the freedom of complete 360 degree field of view and movement, allowing the user to fully experience the space and the products to see them as if he was actually there.
Using the latest technologies included in multi-million dollars videogame titles, with mobc3D - the first immersive 3D solution ever available on mobiles - organizations can provide realistic experiences that seamlessly integrate into websites and mobile devices and stimulate the kinesthetic learning that takes place while carrying out a physical activity tied to the brand or product, rather than reading, listening or merely watching a spot or demonstration.
Among the key benefits provided by mobc3D: Deep and kinesthetic exposition to the brand and products Engagement and customer feedback PR/media buzz Market research and focus groups Furthering existing customer relationships and creating new ones Contextualizing peer-to-peer and group interaction User-driven innovation Deepening relationships
mobc3 Coupon
Companies such as publishers, retailers, media or telcos can capture this significant loyalty opportunity and influence migration and churn by as much as 20 to 30 percent by properly managing customer migration, discover attitudes, needs, and satisfaction to understand drivers of loyalty and migration, create and maintaining customer loyalty in novel and more effective ways.
To this purpose, mobc3 Coupon allows companies develop an innovative digital shopping system that transforms mobile phones into highly interactive personal shopping assistants for consumer’s everyday lives in a way that combines the advantages of e-shopping and traditional shopping.
To achieve this objective mobc3 Coupon leverages cutting-edge technologies and harnesses the potential of location-based services, so as to provide a solution that can address the spontaneous mobile user shopping requests by identifying the best shopping opportunities in a specific domain or area that match the mobile user’s specifications for a purchase.
mobc3 Coupon is built on top of the widely adopted mobc3 Content solution to deliver personalized coupons to handsets, and adds a standards-based Java EE client-server application, specifically designed to address coupon management functions for all of the processes and players among the m-commerce value network.
This approach allows for a highly scalable, portable, secure, interoperable, manageable and available system, that can be used both in a SaaS (Software as a Service) and in-house deployment contexts.
For the latter scenario, the adoption of the best open standards available guarantees customers full control of both operational and functional aspects of the system if needed.
The underlying Java technology is the less restrictive enterprise-level foundation as far as deployment environments are concerned, with first class support for all main Unix flavours and Windows server editions.
The same degree of flexibility is reached in the choice of RDBMS technology, thanks to the adoption of Hibernate in the system’s persistence layer.
In a SaaS scenario, the customer can act as a Mobile Commerce Enabler (MCE) leaving to mobc3 the responsibility of service operation and support.
Architecture
The key architectural component in the system is mobc3 Content that enables coupon content distribution to a vast range of handheld devices, for which there just isn’t any readily available standard counterpart.
Customers can however choose and deploy their own alternative content delivery channels, if needed.
Conclusions
mobc3 is the leading and standard mobile content platform offering a software base for mobile devices that is rich in features, includes best-in-class user interactions paradigms and advanced data capabilities.
By providing an integrated, multiplatform, customer-centric mobile content experience, with mobc3 media, entertainment companies and other kind of organizations can break out their siloed offering and abstract the content from the device, so that it can be leveraged cross-channel: mobile, web, web TV, internet-of-things, 3D immersive media.
mobc3 also enables companies leverage social media to interact with their customers in new and more meaningful ways.
In order to capitalize on the social media, companies across the value network first need to discern their ability to understand their consumers’ behaviour, preferences and consumption patterns. T hen by applying a comprehensive iPhone and Smartphone mobile presence and optimization strategy, they can take advantage of the mobile revolution.
Accompanying the mass market adoption of rich media on mobile devices will make these companies achieve the promise of the mobile Internet enabling a number of novel business models, including digital advertising and the possibility to monetize the power of multi-screen distribution and the effectiveness of rich media.
Brands who want to thrive must provide their audience with access to the brand through the screen and devices they interact with throughout their day.
A proper iPhone and smartphone strategy is a critical – and profitable – first step towards creating a digital marketing and content mix that makes a difference with the consumers who spend the most on being in touch with your brand.
Even taking the first small step of making your website iPhone- and Smartphone- compatible is a good starting point to begin understanding how your brand plays in this profoundly personal and dynamic space.
