Apps go social

Great success today at the Social Media Week for the conference titled “Apps go social” where our CEO Tom Smith presented the state of mobile applications with a preview from our wave 4 data which is due to be released in two weeks.

The main finding is the massive importance that mobile apps will continue to have in order to engage consumers. Access to social media on mobile is now on par with desktop access.

Mobile apps are changing the way people access web content linking content to people and location. (part of the “packaged internet” trend).

As opposed to traditional websites, mobile apps are easy to use for consumers and it’s easy to drive revenue from them. Also, apps are the only way to take full advantage of modern mobile phones features like the GPS, the accelerometers and the newly introduced Near field communication technology which according to experts will be the big promise of the coming years.

After the presentation, Simon Callan form Nokia and Ed Lea from Grapple Mobile shared their thoughts on the mobile applications business in an interesting debate moderated by Tim Green, editor of Mobile Entertainment review.

While there certainly are some so called “me-too” apps, Ed pointed out some success cases where the mobile app is part of an intergrated marketing strategy that provide a better product/service extending the features of the core offer and delivering value to the customer and revenue to the company like in the Premier Inn case.

Simon also reminded the wide variety of social networks other than Facebook that do exist in Asia and the importance of having offline functionality like in Ovi Maps.