London's mobile industry now has a monthly get-together, thanks to Mobile Monday London, aka momo london. I went to the first meeting Monday evening, which I enjoyed.

A show of hands showed the turnout to be roughly half and half techie/biz-marketing, with a fair chunk of designers (maybe 10%). Speakers were encouraged not to make a product pitch, instead there was a theme ("bridging the digital and physical worlds"), and the speakers oriented their talks towards their experiences and learnings that relate to the theme. Naturally they did mostly talk about their own products and used bits of what were obviously their standard presentations, but I think they did a decent job of not just coming in and pitching us.

There was a good bit of general discussion between speakers and audience. A common concern of the group that emerged was the difficulties of getting customers "into" a mobile product, in terms of the way platform incompatibilities, awkwardness of user experience, and legal and other obstacles that make barriers for users to register with and start using a mobile product and service. Since this is something that affects and requires all three of the types of mobile animals that came to this event to work together to solve, Mobile Monday has the potential to be quite interesting.

The organizer was Dan Appelquist, a technical manager of some sort for Vodafone. Russ Beattie also came in from Silicon Valley to attend. I was chuffed to meet him, since we've corresponded by blog years ago, and both still keep up with each others' blog. He prodded me to post more to my site, so here ya go Russ! I also met some other people, but I'm shit at remembering names, which is why I'm not a sales guy.

There were three speakers at the event, so I'll give a capsule review of each.

Dennis Hettema from OP3/Shotcode

Shotcode is one of those schemes where a visual code is put on a print advertisement, which users can point their mobile phone camera at to link directly to the advertiser's site. Hettema was the best speaker at the event, he was obviously more experienced at pitching than the others and so was more polished.

I have to say I'm not convinced that this kind of scheme is really likely to succeed. Hettema positioned this as a way to get around some of the limitations of the mobile platform, in particular the awkwardness for a user having to type a URL into their phone when they see an interesting advertisement. In reality though, this isn't how mobile advertising works, at least in the UK. Ads for mobile services ask people to send a text message with a simple keyword to a shortcode, a 5 digit phone number. When they do this, the advertiser can send a WAP push message, which is essentially a text message with an automatic link to whatever they like. This is a very widely used technique, and works on TV and other media where a visual code like shotcode would be difficult to use. Plus it doesn't need special software to be installed.

It was notable that when Hettema gave his stories of shotcode campaigns, talking about how successful they were, he didn't mention the total number of people that used it, which he would have if they'd had impressive results. Instead he mentioned how many times each user who did try it used the service. The one time he did mention how many people used it was a case where they handed out phones with their software preinstalled at a convention so exhibitors could scan shotcodes on attendees' badges to get their contact details.

Also, the speaker from the BBC gave figures for a campaign they did which used a shotcode-like scheme along with other ways for users to use their service, and the shotcode-like scheme got spanked.

Richard Jelbert from mTrack/KidsOK

KidsOK is a location-based service for parents to track their kids whereabouts. One tidbit I hadn't known is that there are location service aggregators that you can use instead of going to each operator. However, each operator still has to approve of every location based product, and they have different requirements, so it still sounds very painful. Jelbert is involved in a committee which is trying to come up with a standard Code Of Practice (COP) across operators. But it sounds like even with this, the requirements put up huge barriers to converting users.

KidsOK actually sell a product in retail stores, which is a registration kit. This involves getting a form by post, and
then going through a rigamarole with SMS messages to opt in. Jelbert says of the people who buy the kit and start the registration, 42% don't activate their account, and of those who do, 48% don't complete the opt-in.

The possibility of using a J2ME application to make this process smoother was raised, but Jelbert said this would make approval by operators more difficult. Basically, the standard Code of Practice outlines opt-in procedures using SMS, so if you follow that approval is easier, but doing something unusual means a lot of work to get the operators to sign off.

Location based services sound interesting, but very difficult to do in a way that is going to bring in the user. I think it's probably not worth doing unless you have a service that is killer.

Chris Yanda, BBC

Chris was a very non-marketing guy, but obviously into what he does. His story was about a project called "Coast", where they put up a series of signs at several hiking trails on the coast. These signs offered users several different ways to get information about their location via mobile, e.g. directions to other locations, trivia about the location, etc.

The signs were quite busy, crammed with various ways to access the service. The ways to access the information, and what I could gather about their level of useage, were:

• 4,000 Data code (a barcode type scheme like shotcode)
• 3,700 Audio calls (call up for a recorded message)
• 4,800 Web download (the same recorded messages, but d/l from web page, theoretically to load onto your phone and listen to on the hike)
• 137,000 WAP
• ? Text shortcode was the most popular, but no numbers given.

Interesting stuff!