South Asia
mobile conference was an indeed success. And it was a great
opportunity to gather knowledge for all mobile application developers,
Telecommunication partners and also marketing people, business people, venture
capitalists to make their future decisions. At the conference there was lot of
discussions on mobile technologies using many different
perspectives and many sub topics. Modern world now focus on Mobile than
any other technology in recent past. What would be the reason for this? Well,
the opening key note speaker of the conference Mr.Tomi
Ahonen (Author, Consultant and Motivational speaker, Hong Kong)
answered this question very well. As he explained the fact “Why Mobile
takes this much attention these days?” He introduces Mobile as an
enormous filed of information under some facts, those include that it is the
7th Mass media of marketing, which defeats TV, Radio, Press, Cinema and most
surprisingly ‘The Internet’.
•1st
mass media Print 1500: Buy-to-Own, Advertising, Subscr.
–books,
pamphlets, newspapers, music scores, magazines
•2nd
mass media Recordings 1900: Sound
–vinyl, tape, CD, DVD: music, software, videogames, movies
•3rd mass media Cinema 1910: Multimedia, Pay per View
–silent, b/w sound, color, cinemascope: newsreels, movies
•4th mass media Radio 1920: Streaming, License
–AM, FM, stereo, digital: news, music, sports, drama
•5th mass media TV 1950: (no innovation!)
–b/w, color, cable/satellite, digital: news, drama, soaps, reality
•6th mass media Internet 1995: interactive & search
–narrowband, broadband: email, search, browsing, downloading
•7th mass media Mobile 2000: pers./always-on/carried/payment
2G SMS, WAP, 2.5G, 3G: messaging, browsing
(
reference : Mobile as the 7th Mass Media Channel by Tomi Ahonen)
And
also it is always connected through the sim card. And It has a built in payment
mechanism. Apart from this it gives a Digital interface to the user. All
these facts were focusing on whole mobile phone industry. Means all feature
phones, smart phones other phones. He points out a very interesting fact here.
That is marketing people should be aware of ‘i-syndrome’ (or we can use the
word Android-syndrome if we prefer), which is having the attitude, only smart
phone application are included in Mobile marketing. Or we might say ‘building a
smart phone application to each and every product is mobile marketing’ in
simple words. And he says ‘NO’ to this attitude. According to him
SMS, MMS, technologies are not dead yet. We could still use these to distribute,
market, even to buy a product. This became highly doubtable fact throughout the
day after that. As Mr.Harsha Purasinghe mentioned Samsung has defeated and
taken away the authority of the mobile industry that NOKIA had over a decade,
which implies Feature phones and other phones are dying, (with Nokia?). So
what are feature phones, what are limitations we have in feature phones and
what are smart phones what would be the Pros and Cons of a smart phone? Which
is the biggest market? SMS, MMS based applications or Smart phone applications?
Find out answers to these questions in our next Post.
Stay
Updated!
