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Mobile World Congress 2012

We are excited to be attending the Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona.  As well as soaking in the joys of the beautiful setting, we are looking forward to seeing some great exhibitions and sharing ideas with attendees.

Scribble: are a digital agency based in Brighton.  We enjoy seeking out innovative solutions for our clients and for our own endeavours in the world of apps.   Some of our main interests include creating cross-platform solutions that integrate apps, web and social media, 3D graphics, augmented reality and social media integration.

We love augmented reality and are really excited about what the industry will have to offer in the coming years, so it is nice to see that the conference will be enhanced by a number of augmented reality experiences to show people about the conference and to guide people to different areas.

The conference will host a pretty comprehensive list of players in the mobile world and will include keynotes from Facebook, Google, eBay, GMA, Visa and many many more.  As well as major keynote speakers and exhibitions, the conference has ‘App Planet’ a large section dedicated to mobile apps, where developers, operators, manufacturers and service providers will be exhibiting and sharing knowledge.

This year’s conference will be split up into a number of different ‘zones’, all related to different aspects of the mobile world, here’s what we are most excited about:

Cloud technology has been taking off over the last few years, and with demand for mobile services surging and 4G networks just around the corner, cloud technology is set to become an essential technology in the mobile world, so we will be taking a great interest in the exhibitors on the “Cloud Pavillion”.

We’ll also be checking out m-Commerce developments in the “Mobile Money Pavillion” – the coming years will see many big changes in this area as mobile banking, NFC and the like start to take off.

The “mPowered Brands Zone” will be dedicated to mobile marketing, and we will be interested to see how companies are making use of mobile technology to spread the word about their brands.

We love to share ideas, so please get in touch with us if you’d like to meet up at the conference, we look forward to seeing you there!

If you’d like to meet up at the conference, drop us a line at hello@scribbleuk.com and keep up to date with our tweets @scribbledigital

Check back here soon for our report of the conference!

Contactless payments are arriving.  The technology, Near-Field-Communication, can be embedded in a small chip or in a mobile phone, and allows messages to be quickly exchanged between devices.  This is one of the key technologies behind the vision of a ‘digital wallet’ that will do away with the need to carry physical cash to pay for things.

If you happen to have an NFC enabled phone, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, BlackBerry Bold or Nokia C7, you can already make small payments for things just by holding your phone near, or tapping, an NFC reader.  Or you may have a MasterCard ‘PayPass’ enabled credit card or key-fob, or a Barclays contactless debit card.

Many UK retailers are signing up, with 25% of stores trailing the systems now.  But you can already pay for purchases in McDonalds, Pret A Manger, EAT, Little Chef and Subway, just make sure your order doesn’t go over £15, the maximum payment you can make.

But before we fully embrace the digital future of mobile payments and liberate ourselves from heavy leather money-tombs we call our wallets, will we be able to do everything that we usually do with physical cash?

Things you will or will not be able to do with your digital wallet:

Buy a Twix from a vending machine..

Some of the first pilot schemes for NFC and mobile payments have been in vending machines.  Since many of these machines are owned by large snacks and drinks companies, there is a pretty good chance of a reasonably fast rollout.

Lend your mate 50p to buy a Twix

As it turns out, this is already very easy to do with NFC.  Paypal have already launched an app to allow users to transfer money between PayPal accounts just by entering the amount requested on the payees device and tapping the two phones together, simple!

Buy a pint of milk

The fastest proliferation of the technology will be across large chains: supermarkets and high-street retailers.  Many large chains already accept NFC payments.  So if you buy milk and bread from Sainsburys or Tesco, there’s a good chance that you will be able to pick up the essentials even if you’re short of change.

Pay for a parking space

There are a number of companies deploying NFC and mobile payment based parking meters and terminals for car-parks, but privately run car parks may be slower to update their systems without sufficient pressure from the market.

Buy a bus ticket

Various cities around the world, such as Milan, are implementing NFC payments into their public transport systems.  The City Of London will soon adapt it’s Oyster payment system (itself, a form of NFC) to allow NFC payments. It may take quite a bit longer for public transport systems around the UK to follow suit.

Play on the ‘Penny Shove’ machines on Brighton Pier

Many traditional games and attractions such as the much-loved (and hated) coin-shove games, of course, require the physical object of a coin.  It is very unlikely that mobile and digital payments will totally replace physical money.  But if the convenience of being able to pay for almost anything digitally outweighs the need to carry a wallet, the remaining services that still depend on notes and coins may feel pressure to update or retire.

Technology has been striving for many years to do away with the old fashioned paradigm of carrying around heavy wallets full of cash in the form of notes and coins.  But just as the arrival of the PC did not banish paper from the office as many had hoped, the adoption of online payments and plastic bankcards has still not replaced the need for physical cash.

 The extremely fast proliferation of mobile phones and smartphones has made them into a great candidate to become a ‘digital wallet’.   There has been much excitement in the field for some time now, but progress has been slow because of a struggle to reach a common standard and slow adoption rates from retailers and consumers.  Nevertheless, the reality of mobile payments is drawing closer, with major players such as MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, Intel and Google joining the race.  As well as offering a convenient alternative to cash payments for consumers, mobile payment technology offers an easy way for small business to accept payments.

 Visa has introduced a mobile payment system that does not require a bank account.  The system is a pre-paid account that allows consumers to withdraw funds from ATMs, transfer funds, and make purchases from online merchants who accept Visa payments.

These kind of mobile money solutions have been designed to work via the standard mobile network; no internet connection is required, maximizing the accessibility of the service as a leap-frog technology: in many developing countries, mobile phones are more available than many much older infrastructures such as, in this case, banks.

In order to replace the need for carrying cash, an infrastructure for enabling mobile payments needs to be rolled out across the retail sector.  One key technology in this area that is starting to gain momentum is Near Field Communication, or NFC.  Also known as ‘contactless payment’, the technology allows transactions to be processed just by holding a NFC enabled card or device next to a reader.  Nearly 20% of stores in the UK already have NFC enabled readers, and the NFC chips are being introduced in new mobile handsets.  Since the chips can be very small, there is talk of building them into SIM cards, and some banks already have them built into bankcards.  Public awareness of the technology is still very low, however, and confidence will need to be won before the technology is widely adopted.  NFC technology is currently limited to a maximum transaction value of £15, surely a reflection that the public will need to be eased in.

Whilst there is still fierce competition between the major players to produce a dominant standard, much of the technology and infrastructure is already well established.  Public awareness and confidence in the technology is still very low however, and will present the main challenge, but with such heavy investment going into mobile payments from major organizations the knowledge gap is sure to close soon – the reality of mobile payments may be closer than we think.

People are downloading apps to their smartphones and mobile devices more than ever before.  But with more than half a million apps in the Apple App Store, and more than 200,000 in the Android Marketplace, it can be hard to make an app that stands out.

As well as making an app stand out, it is important to ensure that users will keep using the app once they have downloaded it.  Here at Scribble, we know that getting users to keep coming back is of the upmost importance, and we are always looking at ways to keep users engaged and to create apps that last.

Loyal customers can be an important revenue stream.  More and more developers are exploiting in-app purchases over app sales as the main income from apps.

Make it usfeul

The apps that stand the best chance of staying on users’ phones are the ones that serve a specific purpose, and do it well.  If you can find a niche and create a useful app, then your app has a good chance of success.

This is useless, however, if your app does not find it’s way into the hands of your target audience of ‘organic’ users.  These are the users who will seek out your app themselves and are the most likely to keep using it.  Advertising, of course, is important, but it is also important to make sure that your app is easy to find in the online stores – this can be as simple as giving the app a title which is self-explanatory and search friendly (ie the app title contains words that users are likely to type in when searching for the app they need), and making sure the app is in the correct categories.

Make it fun

With so many choices, users are likely to lose patience quickly and look for an alternative app if they become frustrated while using your app.  Conversely, if the app is fun and enjoyable to use, they are more likely to keep coming back.  This can be as simple as making the language of the content entertaining, and making the presentation attractive and fun.

Update Content

We regularly build CMS systems into our solutions to allow clients to manage the content of their app themselves.  Regularly updating content within the app is a great way to keep users engaged.  Live feeds from social networks are an easy way to bring up to date information into the app.  Push notifications can be used to alert a user when new content has been added – this feature should be used sparingly though, annoy your users and they will simply disable it or remove the app!

Give Incentives

We‘ve found that competitions and exclusive content are a great way to reward users and keep them interested.  You can also reward your users for using the app frequently or for posting messages about the app on their social networks, increasing their engagement and spreading the word!

Measure Engagement

Simple download statistics do little to tell you how your app is being used and how often.  Building measurement tools into the app can give you useful information; such as how long gaps are between usages of the app and how users respond to push notifications.  Getting a detailed picture of how your users are using the app is essential if you are to respond to user habits and tailor updates to your user base.

We love to chat about new and exciting ways to make apps that stand the test of time, come visit us to find out more, or let us know your thoughts.

PayPal yesterday unveiled a new peer-to-peer payment functionality that allows Android users to pay each other by tapping two near field communication (NFC)-enabled devices together.

Users of the PayPal app on Android and iPhone have had the possibility of transferring money through bump technology for a little while now but this shows how PayPal is gearing up for NFC as part of its larger push on mobile payments

According to the PayPal video (view here) the process for initiating and confirming payments using the NFC feature is just two taps per user, rather than the multi-stepped process required in the bump-powered version.

Currently this is only possible on Android’s only NFC enabled phone the Samsung Nexus S, so doesn’t quite have the reach of the bump technology yet but does show a promising direction for PayPal and its move into NFC.

The really interesting stuff from PayPal is apparently set to launch in 6 months when they make a move in to merchant and retail payments.  It will be interesting to see how they compete against Google’s wallet initiative.  PayPal needs to figure out how to tap that market for offline purchases, which is much bigger than than pure online transactions where it’s excelled.

Either way it’s pretty cool to see another attempt at NFC and a little glimpse of how we will be making payments and transferring money in the not to distant future.