Quick write up from this morning’s Ovi Developer Event run by Nokia at the Century Club in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue.

Roughly 100 odd people showed up with standing room only, so it demonstrated that the London mobile crowd is clearly interested to hear Nokia’s story. I suspect the promotion across Mobile Monday London helped as I spotted a few familiar faces in the crowd. Attendees over indexed on business types, as a voluntary show of hands revealed only about 25% of the crowd were coders.

There was a degree of confusion about the purpose of the event, with messages mixed between a developer event and a launch event for the upcoming N8 handset, so may be that helps explain the relativity low developer turn out for a “developer” event.

The was an air of expectation, mixed with some healthy cynicism, as evidenced on the event Twitter stream #ovidevsldn.

Mark Loughran, Nokia UK MD opened up proceedings and highlighted a couple of recent Ovi success stories. He also mentioned that Ovi was running its first UK TV campaign in August – more on that in a second.

Janaina Pilomia from Forum Nokia then ran through the changes on Forum Nokia. The main message was one of simplification. Forum Nokia has been re-designed to focus around three core elements: Design, Develop, and Distribute.

Design focuses on research, conceptual design, prototyping, access to UX evaluation experts, design and optimization.

The clear message around Develop was that the previous Nokia offering was too complex. IT has now been consolidated down to three core areas web apps, java apps, and QT native apps (pronounced as Cutee)

There are also three target device grouping: Phones (S40), smart phones (Symbian), and Computers (Maemo / MeeGo)

It was noted that QT (based on C++ ) already has a 100,000 strong developer community on desktop apps and  Skype was given as an example of a QT desktop app. (figure edited after comment from Hamish Wille)

Windows, Mac or Linux SDK’s available, with one click installs – tools, build, debug, and testing on host PC’s. Developer no longer need device specific SDK’s, and Janaina also referenced a live handset testing environment that sounded like Device Anywhere, but was not confirmed.

Amongst the new api’s are ones for sensors, location, and messaging. Nokia pushed the “write in once” native development framework then compile for Meego, Symbian etc

QT comes preinstalled on Symbian ^3 onwards, with install on demand for earlier devices – the smart installer is available now from Forum Nokia.

QT Quick is a user interface creation kit, with visual tools for UI creation based on QML language (extension to JavaScript)

The QT web runtime – runs on top of QT and QT webkit, and is a W3C standards bases web runtime (HTML 5, CSS 3) and open source.

Moving on to Distribute, individuals can now publish to Ovi store  (as opposed to registered companies), with Nokia “taking the risk” as the publisher. There is a public beta of Nokia signing Symbian apps for free.  “That’s how much we care”. Note the offer only applies if publishing in the Ovi store, not for independent distribution.

Keith Varty from UK Services and Marketing came next to preview the Ovi TV ad due to break on the 9^th August. He described the work that Nokia are doing to directly influence big brands, quoting over 50 branded apps were now available in Ovi, like MTV, Tesco, and the Daily Mirror.

He said a reminder to the brands that Nokia own 37% of the UK Smartphone market and deliver 1.7 million app downloads a day surprises the brands, who I suspect suffer from iPhone blindness. The TV ad features Spotify, You Tube and Sky on the end frame.

Keith also discussed the summer Ovi press campaign, run in The Metro and The Sun over the last 8 – 10 weeks featuring topical themes like festivals / weddings / holidays highlighting apps in the Ovi catalogue.  They have also used their creative agency, Marvlous, to create a series of “rapid apps” to leverage PR opportunities – fun / different, e.g. world class excuses for missing work to watch the world cup.

We got some additional statistics; the average user downloads 8 content items (no time period quoted), Q2 2010 saw a 100% increase in downloads vs Q1 2010, 11 million people have  downloaded Nokia’s free sat nav app, the most popular download devices are 5800, X6, N97 mini, and tellingly everyday 1.2 billion people use a Nokia phone.

We then were treated to a demo of the N8 in action, and it is an impressive piece of kit. A home screen demo showed the customizable UI, the user can add modules like iGoogle. Ovi has direct home screen access, and live content can be displayed from your email inbox, Facebook, etc.

Some time was spent showing off the phones video capabilities. The N8 can output at 720p resolution, has HDMI out and can play HD video at 25 fps. It also has Dolby 5.1, and can play BBC iPlayer content at 30 fps making the N8 a great entertainment choice. The video chip can motor at 60 fps for menus and cover flow art work in the music application.

A new feature “USB on the go” was demoed. Via an adapter in the box, a standard USB stick can be plugged into the N8, opening a window on the phone UI, offering full drag and drop and playback functionality.

The N8 comes with 16Gb memory onboard, expandable by 32Gb via SD. The battery can handle 7 hours HD video playback or 50 hours music play back. There is an FM transmitter onboard, and a 12mp camera, with mechanical shutter & wide angle lense.

The hardware demo impressed the crowd (see twitter stream for more commentary) it really is packing a hell of a lot in. Nokia has tried this approach in past and I hope that the “swiss army” knife approach doesn’t mean Nokia struggle to effectively position the device. Sony Ericsson successfully segmented their phones: Walkman (great music) and Cybershot (great camera). Time will tell if Nokia successfully convey the right message for the N8 when it packs so much in.

There were some rumblings of disappointment that an event labeled “developer” lacked any detailed technical information, it also felt like a missed opportunity to reach out to the independent developer crowd. Rather than working with indie developers, Nokia had worked exclusively with their agency to create widgets to support their ad campaign, and the theme of the marketing message was Nokia’s focus on working with tier one brands, seemingly at the expense of the indie’s. I understand the reasons for Nokia doing this from the consumer perspective, as the end punter wants to see brands they know and trust, but none the less, a more polished story around how Nokia can support indie developers from a marketing perspective would have been welcomed.

The partner story was also missing. I’m not sure if that is because there is no partner story, or if there wasn’t time to cover it, but there was a sense that it was a Nokia closed ecosystem – it would be nice to understand how a developer working with Nokia can open up other opportunities and it would make sense for Nokia to leverage its powerful relationships throughout the Mobile ecosystem to the benefit of developers.

Overall the event, and N8, seemed to be well received with some positive sentiment on Twitter. I guess the key challenge for establishing the N8 in the UK will be that its primary target audience will already be locked into long term iPhone contracts. To grow its 37% UK Smartphone market share, Nokia will need to tackle this issue head on by either aggressive targeting of iPhone users, or by attempting to sell into the UK market currently not carrying Smartphones, or both. However, today left me with the strong feeling that Nokia are not out of this game.

Follow the Twitter back channel here: #ovidevsldn

I’ll also be trying to get some hard copies to hand out at upcoming Telefonica developer events.

[In the final part of our series on our latest research - Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond - Telefonica's James Parton discusses the challenges facing mobile network operators in their quest to stay relevant to mobile application developers. Full research report available for free download or see part 1, part 2 and part 3 of the blog series on mobile developer economics]

You can read it here.

Opening up was Mike Kirkup, Head of Developer Relations at RIM, who were sponsoring the evening. Mike touched on the theme of “super apps” and promoted the current Blackberry Super App contest with $1.5 million in prize money available, plus take to market support for the winners. Check the contest out here.

Next up was the panel segment to provide advice and insights into the topic for the evening

The panel was chaired by Ben Scott Robinson, creative director at We Love Mobile and included:

(Updated: thanks to Adam Cohen Rose for complete panel details, check out his write up here)

The first question posed was “why apps when mobile web is pretty much ubiquitous?”

Chris was first to respond. He argued that his agency was using mobile apps to compensate for a lack of speed on mobile connections to deliver a better customer experience. He also made the point that an app gave them a much greater ability to customise the UI and better represent his client’s brands than a mobile browser.

Alyssa was first to reference the “A word”, saying Apple had set the gold standard in music (7 Digital are a music company). She said 7 Digital preferred the browser route for their music store as it was ubiquitous.

Mike tabled that actually much of this current trend towards apps was driven by customer expectation rather than smart technology choices. He cited brands simply publishing shortcuts in Blackberry World seeing uplifts in traffic of 30 – 50% simply because it delivered an app like experience. i.e. it gets your brand (app icon) on the top deck of the handset for instance access. (a shortcut is an icon, which when clicked simply opens the mobile browser and takes you to a mobile website)

Eli highlighted that it is unlikely your entire potential audience is going to be on one or two platforms so choosing apps over web is going to limit your commercial potential, so you have to balance customer experience with business objectives.

This brought the second question around the use of customer demographics. Eli made the telling point that actually there is no evidence that developers are doing anything with demographics or other marketing techniques. The recently published Vision Mobile report Developer Economics 2010, available for free here, thanks to Telefonica’s sponsorship, plug plug!, highlighted that the vast majority of developers still limit their “market research” to testing their app out with friends and colleagues. This is not a long term strategy for success.

Tony highlighted that historically the mobile operator was the shop keeper that kept control of how many apps were offered to its customers. With the rise of the apps stores this limitation has gone, but ironically now the noise issue is becoming a major problem for developers with limited marketing budgets / skills.

Dave made the point that in B2B app distribution, often the users (the employees) are not the purchasers.

Chris highlighted the time sensitivity around demographic data, citing an anecdotal example of seeing more and more kids carrying iPhones, which demographic data does not show. He also cited the case of shared device usage in the home (e.g. siblings both using an iPhone for gaming) These examples present an opportunity for real time network enablers that can tell you what devices are being used, and by who, at that precise point in time.

Mike described the recent success of Blackberry penetrating into the youth market. I think he was over modest to say this was not planned. Blackberry exec’s I know where talking about the need to diversify into consumer 2 – 3 years ago. He put the success down to a simple, well executed proposition: Communication. Blackberry’s initial success was opening better communications for CEO’s. Now Blackberry is enabling better consumer communication via Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry Messenger, signalling a shift from SMS as the primary youth communication method.

Chris then tackled apps as a marketing tool. It was clear there are many brands asking for apps without understanding anything about the mobile space, e.g. the limited reach of an iPhone only play. Chris put this down to:

1)      Wanting association (no matter how tenuous) with a cool brand e.g. Apple

2)      Seeking a PR opportunity

Tony used Facebook to highlight the discoverability issues. Facebook has 35,000 games and 250,000 apps yet nobody can name more than a dozen. Only the brands and publishers that have the marketing muscle are driving visibility. Tony’s new company Teepee Games aims to address this by aggregating recommended games for consumers.

Eli made the point that none of these issues are new, and are no different to the challenges facing FMCG brands fighting over shelf space in a supermarket like Tesco. The Developer Economics 2010 report highlighted developers were willing to pay for premium store placement, a practice well established in traditional bricks and mortar retailing. Eli also raised a good point that paying for placement may only get you so far. There is still the consumer confidence & trust issue of unknown brands.

Alyssa highlighted that open partnerships was a key element of the marketing mix. 7 Digital has driven downloads by integrating with other partners like Last FM and Shazam. Building relationships with other companies and network operators can help overcome the visibility issues.

Building on Eli’s point Mike stated these issues were not new, but just new people experiencing them for the first time.

Dave made the point that the most valuable real estate was the handset itself, and good old fashioned networking with the mobile operators pays off. Preload is vital (see Shazam as a case in point)

Chris talked about the overall package of actions like PR. Their approach is to create talkability to push the app into the Top 25 of the app store, then let organic downloads drive growth. There is a second hit of PR to promote the app once it drops out of the Top 25.

Eli highlighted an example of good integrated communications where the Royal Society of Arts have their iPhone app pushed by the girl selling tickets at the entrance desk, contrasting that to Selfridges who make no in store reference to their app at all.

Mike commented that RIM have been surprised by the rapid growth of Blackberry Messenger (BBM), with some customers going into retail stores asking for BBM without knowing it comes on a Blackberry device.

When asked about “free” as a marketing tactic Eli commented that makes sense if the app is an extension of your core business e.g. Nike +, but not if your business is the app itself. The point was made that it is very difficult to convert free customers to pay, and freemuim models need to have clear value in the up sell to drive conversion.

Tony made an interesting point contrasting the mindset of Nokia users with iPhone users. Nokia users don’t baulk at paying £5 for a mobile game, where as iPhone users recoil at the thought of a 59p app. Is this an example of a mobile native mindset vs. a web native mindset?

Automated App porting tools came up, and Chris said in his experience they were good for heavy lifting and doing volume, but to ensure his clients brands were correctly represented they always do bespoke work saying the porting solutions always breakdown at the edges. Despite having an employee of Grapple ask a challenging question from the audience only seconds before, they suddenly became invisible when offered the chance to respond to the criticism which led to a beautiful awkward silence that Ricky Gervais would have been proud of.

IMO the best piece of insight from the night came from Chris when asked how developers on a shoe string budget could drive visibility. “Cause trouble” was the answer. He cited You Tube’s early rise to prominence by liberally infringing copyright which didn’t seem to deter Google from buying them. Do something sexy or do something that will get you noticed.

For me the evening highlighted a tech fuelled market approaching commercial maturity. There is no escaping the basic fact that if you are operating in a competitive environment, trying to make yourself heard to your target audience, there has to be a conscious decision to invest in marketing. You simply can’t ignore that fact or attempt to blame the app store owners for somehow letting you down otherwise you will fail.

I keep getting a sense that some developers are still seeking a magic / free solution to their marketing issues. This marketing investment doesn’t need to be scarily expensive, and can be totally outsourced if necessary. Still, it was encouraging to see the debate starting to move away from a purely technology feature led conversation, to at least considering the need to do more than the “throw it against a wall and see if it sticks” approach so commonly seen.  Despite “marketing” being an almost taboo word in some developer circles, maybe tonight signalled the beginning of something new…

You can follow the Twitter stream from the event here.

It’s set for 18:00 on the 3rd August 2010 at the Embankment Hotel.

The Eventbrite page to sign up can be found here: http://twtvite.com/bedforduktweetup

I look forward to meeting you there!

Many writers have described, far more eloquently than I ever could, the social and business impacts of Twitter & social media, so let me state up front that this is purely a personal reflection of my experience of Twitter. I don’t put myself out there as some social media guru. I don’t have that many followers, and I was relatively late to the party.

However, one of the key stimuli for this piece has been the increasing number of “real life” meetings and interactions with people that begin “Ah, I follow you on Twitter”, so whilst I do have a relatively small following, it would seem to be fairly well targeted and relevant to my work.

The fact I’m doing this at all highlights for me how remarkable and unique Twitter has become for me. No other online service (or offline for that matter) has ever motivated me to reflect or assess my experience of using it and I’ve been “into” computing since 1982, online since 1994, and running my own website since 1996 so plenty of other things have had the opportunity to grab me!

Over the past couple of years I have been lucky enough to occupy a fairly high profile role in a large company. My original decision to sign up for Twitter was business led, as I was keen to adopt new communication channels to begin building relationships with potential members for a new service I was planning called O2 Litmus.

It was very clear from day 1 that Twitter was somewhat unique.

Firstly I was determined that I would blend both my work and personal worlds. This is challenging to pull off, and I have to say I have failed miserably to achieve this on Facebook, but that’s a story for another time. Despite the commonly held view from Twitter non believers of “just that how important can 140 character text updates be?” the authenticity, especially if you are directly or indirectly representing a large company is vital. For me the worst possible outcome would be people suspecting my use of Twitter was just a marketing tactic, or worse still a PR company posting on my behalf.

Secondly, I took time to think through “why would people want to follow me?” If all I did was use my account as another channel to announce work related activity it would quickly get dull, and from the marketing mix perspective just duplicate existing channels like our blog and forums.

In my marketing role I spend a lot of my time reading industry related analysis and news, so I decided to effectively “open source” my desk research. As any marketer will know it’s a significant personal investment to keep on top of your sector, especially one as fast moving as mobile and digital. Therefore I thought why not help people by flagging the stuff I found interesting – this could actually add some real value back to people who took the time to follow me. Little did I know at the time what I was taking on, but the point I’m making was there was a conscious thought process about a) why would people follow me and b) how can I differentiate myself and what I put out.

In the two years since joining Twitter I have tweeted 3,659 times, averaging exactly 5 posts a day. What I think is intriguing is unlike many services my usage is actually increasing – I’m getting more addicted. There is not the familiar novelty period then gradual decline.

Researching this post has left me frustrated – there is a real lack of tools that allow you to run analytics on your tweet history. I wanted to share data points like the time it took me to reach my first 1,000 tweets vs. my last 1,000 tweets, intuitively I think creating the last 1,000 has been significantly quicker. What has been my peak day, week or month over the past two years, and what could I attribute those peaks back to, which posts have been most re-tweeted?

The best I could find was a combination of Tweetscan,Tweetsheet, and Twistory but none of these gave me the historical data analytics I wanted at my finger tips – that would seem a prime monetisation opportunity for Twitter, especially with more and more brands now adopting Twitter as a key element of their marketing mix. If anyone can point me to a tool I’m missing, I’d love to hear from you.

So what have been the “highlights” from the 3,659 posts and two years?

Well I’ll admit I’ve shown a complete lack of dedication by not going back through all those messages one by one, although I now suspect I couldn’t even if I wanted to. That should be a key consideration for marketers: backup as you go for easy archive access and analysis. Anyway, four stick in my mind:

Twitchhiker

An amazing thing happened 6 months into my use of Twitter proving to me what a powerful business tool Twitter can be. Paul Smith was undertaking a crazy personal challenge for charity, and through Twitter word of mouth I found myself with a great sponsorship opportunity and a chance to support Paul’s remarkable efforts. You can read how the relationship came about in Paul’s own words here, and read a description of the Twitchhiker project here.

Turning customers into fans

I wish I could find the original tweet and link out to it, but I can’t. However, the interaction is fairly easy to replay and has happened more than once. A clearly frustrated and angry O2 customer was failing to resolve a problem he was having (I can’t actually remember the detail now, but that doesn’t detract from the point). In desperation he had obviously done a random search of Twitter and found my details and sent me a plea for help. By promptly responding and taking ownership of the problem I like to think I went some small way to turning around his perception of the company that I work for and turned him into a fan. Brands will quickly have to figure out how to measure the value of these kinds of interactions, which will be vital when justifying digital investments.

Bedford Tweet Up

No technology or service I’ve ever used seems to have the level of humanity that I’ve experienced with Twitter. People seem to go out of their way to help one another. Even buildings are getting into the act! Big Ben tells me the time and even Heathrow Airport welcomes me and tries to make my “experience” more pleasurable.

The most trivial of tweet was triggered when I stole the mayoral status for my local train station from a fellow tweeter. Within 17 minutes Eric had suggested setting up a local Tweetup, and my immediate reaction was, “yeah, totally!” no hesitation at all. We are currently planning something for early August and who knows what new networking and relationships that will bring. My question is what makes this kind of behaviour unique to Twitter? Chat boards, forums, and Instant Messaging have been around for years, but no one would have dreamt to suggest these kind of impromptu meets up’s – that would feel like front page of the Daily Mail material…I’ll leave the answer to the “digital” psychologists.

O2 Litmus is bigger than Christmas

Finally for a bit of fun, you can’t buy a headline like that. The use of hashtags are vital for tracking conversation and creating community around your activities. When we soft launched O2 Litmus in December 2008 our hashtag trended higher than Christmas, leading us to our cheeky boast. We won’t mention that the West Coast of the US was asleep at the time, that’s just detail

So my takeouts from the past two years, for what they are worth:

1. Carefully consider the work / personal balance of your Twitter account
2. If you want to build a following, plan out why people should follow you – have a purpose
3. Ensure your Twitter Bio is fine tuned with key words describing you or your business. You only have 140 characters to get it right.
4. Take offline backups of your Twitter activity for analytical and good practice purposes. You never know when you may need to look up a statement or commitment you or one of your employees has made
5. Be prepared for your life to move to being always on and real time. Responsiveness is now measured in minutes, not days or hours. I’m now effectively permanently at work. If you think Blackberry blurred the line, it doesn’t compare. Be ready and embrace it. I can’t go back.
6. Ensure you and your people recognise they are representing your company at all times, even if tweeting from personal accounts. The web doesn’t respect boundaries – don’t write dumb stuff, and don’t tweet drunk!
7. Kind of obvious, but no spamming. Don’t pump out unsolicited crap to your followers
8. Be wary of 3^rd party plug in’s. Loads of services now make it easy to connect into your twitter stream, Foursquare being a popular example. Make sure you don’t water down the quality of your output. Only 2.4% of my tweets have been generated by Foursquare, yet I’ve had more than one follower contact me to say they will stop following me if I don’t control frequency of updates.
9. Be yourself – add personality
10. Use and promote hastags to create community around your brand or specific activity
11. Integrate Twitter into your events as a live back channel
12. Magical stuff “just happens” as your network widens. Unexpected opportunities present themselves from the most innocuous exchanges.

On a spooky weird closing note, I kid you not that I woke up at 3:00am this morning with the idea for this post swirling in my head, but that not the strange bit…

After tossing and turning for an hour I decided to stop fighting it and get up and start writing before I lost my inspiration. When I started researching the data points of the post I made a rather freaky discovery; It was exactly two years to the day that I joined Twitter!

I was so taken aback I took a screen shot of my desktop with my Twitter join date and current date on my desktop. Sure I could have doctored the date on my PC for artistic effect, but believe me I don’t have the time or the inclination

Go figure that out!

You can read more here

Or visit the survey directly here

The project was really challenging to pull together with our friends at Vision Mobile, so we hope you agree with our view that this is a ground breaking piece of developer research that plugs a real gap in the market.

Let us know what you think. If you want to discuss on Twitter or help us promote the report (pretty please!) then use hash tag #devecon

Enjoy!

Today is one of those days where lots of hard work finally pays off, allowing you to step back and be proud of something. I have been dropping subtle hints at various speaking opps over the past few months that some significant changes are coming to Telefonica developer activity; well today I’m pleased to share one of those milestones.

We have launched a new blog, replacing the four existing regional blogs we had covering the UK, Spain, Mexico and Argentina. Not only does this mean we dramatically simplify things, but it means that we finally have a technical platform to create something that actually does the job we need it to do!

You may recall we brought Debi Jones into the Telefonica team a while back, and it’s great that all the hard work that Debi has been putting in behind the scenes since joining the family is now public. Debi is also building out an awesome team of contributors so I really hope the blog becomes a valuable industry resource for all working in the mobile & web development field.

I’ve penned a brief summary of the year to date on the new blog, so you can read more there. Check it out, sign up as a member and start making some noise!

The aim of this new MIG is fairly straight forward; to provide a platform for people involved in marketing technology to share best practice, learn and network.

Andy has kindly asked me to support him in the creation and management of the MIG. To aid logistics, reduce the travel burden for participants, and to allow people to build local networks we have decided to split the MIG into North and South chapters. Andy will lead the Northern chapter, and I will lead the Southern chapter.

My initial idea for the inaugural Southern event is a relaxed informal gathering in London featuring a couple of guest speakers to share real life experiences and insights. No powerpoint – just interesting conversation and great networking.

Of course like any good marketer, I want to ensure the format works for the intended audience, so nothing is precious or set in stone. Please let me know what you want from the MIG. It goes without saying that any offers of help will be gratefully received! Be that sponsors, venues, speakers, etc.

In terms of timings, the plan looks like this. Andy and I will finalise our initial thoughts by early July, with the aim of running the first events in October.

So if you are a marketing practitioner in the technology field or just have a personal interest in marketing tech, then you are more than welcome to join us. To receive official CIM recognition, the MIG needs to attract at least 50 registered CIM members, so please help us to spread the word. However please note you do not have to be a CIM member to come along.

You can start to engage and make suggestions by joining our Technology MIG Linked In Group.

I look forward to meeting you soon!