Mobile internet vs Mobile apps – the great debate

Originally published on the DMA Mobile Messaging site, our Strategy Director Tim Dunn debates the merits of mobile apps and mobile internet with Marks and Spencer’s Sienne Veit (Social and Mobile Commerce Development Manager)….

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Dear Tim

My approach to the mobile web is shaped by our approach to our customers – we sell to everybody across Britain, young or old, techie or not. One of our great successes is Shop Your Way – a multichannel initiative that enables shoppers to cross channels, including stores, web, phone and, in the future, mobile. Our customers interact with us across a range of channels through the course of a day, and we want to deliver as continuous a journey across those channels as possible, so that a journey started in one channel can proceed and be completed in any other(s). Our customers are now familiar with the web and shopping on the web. So it makes sense for any mobile web experience we plan to replicate that in as far as possible while ensuring that we optimise the specific channel (mobile) to make that journey about the product and make the technology invisible (you shouldn’t have to download, update or have to go into and out of multiple apps or sessions).

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My O2 leads the way

There’s nothing more distracting than a new baby for taking your eye off the ball, hence no posts for over a month.

However, things move on apace in the world of mobile apps. Perhaps the biggest mover has been O2, whose myO2 app has finally been released to the App Store, meaning the getting on for 2 million UK iPhone users can now manage their accounts efficiently. While I have to declare an interest as we at MIG did the design and build, I have to admire its nice design and simple interface. Now that O2 have a really firm foothold in the App Store, it will be interesting to see how they go on to develop this: with such a raft of content and sponsorship opportunities just crying out for an iPhone execution, and the brand looking as good as ever, I would hope to see some updates to the app very soon.

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The mobile agency conundrum

A journalist called me the other day as he was writing a piece on whether brands are better off using their existing agency set-up to deliver mobile services, or to use the services of a mobile specialist instead. While I would have an obvious natural bias towards the specialists, having been in that field for nearly 10 years now, it’s not an open-and-shut case.

The argument for the specialists goes as follows:

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Oh, the Futility!

While going over a mobile application brief from a prospective client the other day with a technical designer, we were assessing the feasibility of the job on both iPhone and standard java phones. Unfortunately many of the features required just aren’t possible on one or both of the platforms. After stripping out all the unworkable elements we were left with a proposition that delivered much less than originally envisaged.

“If we deliver this, it’s an act of futility,” wailed the project manager. “Yes”, I replied instinctively, “but it’s an act of branded futility”.

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Home Office Beatz Knife Crime – with mobile…

While this blog, as with pretty much anyone dealing in mobile apps, is likely to be diverted for much of the time by the wonder of the iPhone, it’s well worth remembering that there is another 99% of the mobile market which is, frankly, non-iPhone.

So how do we address this market through mobile apps, and who out there is going to receive them?

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Taking out the Trash

With spring apparently just around the corner, I have the sudden urge to sling out loads of all junk and make things shiny and fresh for the new season.

Of course I could spend hours going through the attic and taking old carpet squares, dried up paint and more to the tip, but a much easier form of spring-cleaning is going through my old apps from when the AppStore was just a novelty, and seeing what horrors have managed to survive on my phone since then.

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It’s Art, but do we like it?

We all have preferences in art, and one man’s Picasso is another man’s Tracy Emin, so it’s nice that BMW went out on a limb to make art the focus of their recent campaign for the Z4. For those too idle to click the link, it features the boy-racer-mobile driving around a large blank canvas depositing paints of different hues from its wheels to create an auto-matic masterpiece.

But while the TV ad is disappointingly coy in not revealing a full view of the masterpiece, the iPhone app (search for Z4 in iTunes) gives you the final result. After viewing a tantalizing clip of the live car in action, you get to drive the paint-wagon yourself, and the results are captured as a picture for you to save to your phone and… well whatever you want to do with that image. I’m quite pleased with mine – maybe all those handbrake turns are paying off.

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Welcome to Beyond SMS!

So – welcome to Revolution’s new mobile apps blog! Here, I’ll be looking at the good, the bad and the downright weird on iPhone, Android, java, Blackberry, and the myriad of other technologies springing up, as well as the new app stores being launched by all and sundry.

As anyone who’s been in mobile for as long as I have (9 years and counting…) the fact that there are now not one but two mobile blogs in Revolution surely means that this is the long-heralded but often-delayed ‘year of mobile’? Right?

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