As I wrote on my previous post, this is my fourth year judging the Mobile Premier Awards, so I thought I’d give you some tips about how to put your company in danger of winning something. If you know someone who is presenting, you might like to point them over here as a kind of check list before the day.
I make no apologies that some of these are a little bit obvious because at least 50% of the finalists throw away their chances of winning by failing to observe at least one of these rules.
1. Sorry to be a little harsh and language-ist here, but the presentations are in English. If English is not your mother tongue, or if you aren’t very good at it, you’re going to be at a disadvantage. Every year, there’s more than one company who finishes their 3 minutes and no one has a clue about what they do. Naturally, this means that they don’t have a chance at winning awards or attracting any attention from the bloggers and journalists who attend.
So, the first rule is: Choose someone to present who can speak the best English. If you are the CEO and can’t speak English well and the most junior person in the company happens to be fluent, put your pride aside and get the Junior to do it. It’s much better that everyone understand the presentation than recognises you as the big cheese – there’ll be plenty of time for that later.
I feel a little bad about writing this part, especially as my language ability is so rubbish. But it really is important.
2. Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse
This again sounds obvious. But loads of companies run out of time and quite obviously have missed out some of what they really wanted to say. 3 minutes is not the standard length of your company presentation. You will need to adapt and it won’t work on the fly.
Did I say that it’s important to rehearse, especially the timing? This includes rehearsing in front of colleagues and getting honest feedback. Then try and giving it to people without expert knowledge and get them to explain back to you what you do.
3. Stand out. You’ll need to give this a lot of thought, before you start rehearsing. But you’ll be competing with the best startups in the world and from a judging point of view, it can be a little overwhelming. If you’re on towards the end, you have to really make sure you’re memorable.
One of the best examples from last year was Unkasoft. After a general introduction to the product (you can skip the first 1 min 40 secs if you’re in a real hurry), the speaker suddenly bought the product to life by acting out the special features and which included a quite spectacular…..well take a look.
Difficult to forget, right? All the judges need to do was to use a shorthand “ah, he was guy with the great presentation” and he’s memorable.
4. Humour helps, if you can pull it off. But it’s not a fundamental requirement and culturally, it doesn’t always work.
The above are hard and fast rules – ignore them at your peril. But what follows are my opinions, based on the 100 or so pitches I’ve seen over the years at the MPAs and other events.
5. The best presentations start with a clear statement of what problem the company is solving, followed by an explanation of what the company does. If you can tell this as a human sized personal story, this might work even better. Babajob last year did this really well, when the presenter told the story of two nannies (with photos of them) in India. Although similar in age, qualifications and experience, one earned $20 a month and one earned $120. You can read more here if you like, but the point is that by telling a story about a couple of individuals, it made the presentation memorable and understandable.
6. Don’t focus on the tech. This might sound odd in an environment dedicated to technology, but the story you’re trying to communicate is what it does and how it makes the world a better place, not how it works and a full list of all the features you’ve worked so hard to code. If you’re thinking of including a complicated diagram of how the tech is architected, you’re probably on the wrong track.
7. I find images help to reinforce messages, especially in a multi-cultural audience. Equally, slides with too much text detract from your story. There’s loads of comparisons of Steve Jobs Vs Bill Gates style of presenting around, but one of my favourites is over at Presentation Zen. Clearly, poor use of PowerPoint hasn’t exactly held Bill back, but for lesser mortals like us, the Jobs Method is going to be more effective most of the time.
Finally, please remember, a great idea poorly presented won’t stand a chance. A good idea well presented might very well win something.
If you’d like to add your ideas to these, please feel free. If you are entering the MPA’s – Good Luck!
It’s one of my favourite events of the year and it’ll be the fourth year I’ve been on the jury – I’ve been involved since the beginning – and it gets better and bigger every year. If you’re in Barcelona for MWC, you really should make a point of going. And if you’re not in Barcelona, are you sure you’re reading the right blog?
This year, I’m very pleased to have been asked to give a keynote, along with Accel’s Rich Wong (who also sits on the AdMob Board). I’m going to try and distill some of my experiences (good and bad) in mobile startups into a 10 minute talk. Quite a challenge.
The MPA’s themselves feature the best start ups (early and emerging stage) chosen by local Mobile Monday chapters throughout the world. Then, the best 20 are selected to present for 3 minutes at the Awards themselves. If you’re one of the lucky few, I’ll put a few tips on a subsequent post, which I recommend you read. From an attendee point of view, you get an afternoon seeing some of the best startups in the world, but it’s also intimate enough to meet everyone in both the breaks and also if you attend the dinner afterwards. You can see the kind of variety the Awards attract from my write-up last year.
One of the great thing about the Awards is that there are three ways to win! You can win a Jury award, where a bunch of “experts” (that’s where I come in) cast their vote. But the audience gets to vote too, as well as Mobile Monday chapters.
I hope you can come and if you do, please try and make a point of coming and saying hello. I tend to be quite busy at these things, but feel free to come and join the conversation.
There are a bunch of sectors going through huge disruptions at the moment, whether it’s newspapers, telephony (via VoIP), books, TV, music, film, mobile handsets and if those rumours are right, the PC might be coming in for a fair bit of disruption tomorrow too. But one sector that is changing and doesn’t get a lot of focus is the slow shift to Direct Democracy over the Representative Democracies that dominates much of “the West’s” (forgive the slightly archaic term) politics.
Representative Democracies work by voters electing someone to supposedly represent their interests in the legislature. The elected official applies their own and probably more often, their political parties’ judgment on how to vote. And the only thing the electorate can do if they don’t like the way their representative votes is to kick them out when it comes to re-election.
But with today’s technology, we don’t have to put up with this any more. It’s possible to direct an elected official on how to vote on a daily or weekly basis. The role of the politician would change to one of explaining in simple terms what the more complicated issues of the day were and the citizens would make their opinion clear. Any politician standing in any election today could already pledge to vote how they were instructed – or at least take it into account, which would be a great and brave first step.
Technology is already changing politics. Examples range from the huge grassroots fund raising initiative we saw in the US last year, to national elections conducted online (in Estonia in 2005 and 2007) to iPhone Apps (thanks, Lisa) that allow you see who your MP is and educate the user. And 226 Parliamentary candidates in the UK are using Twitter to communicate with the electorate. What’s the betting most are using to to broadcast, rather than as a feedback loop though?
The problem with Direct Democracy is that the people who could make it happen, the MPs and political parties have the most to lose from this disruption. The role of the MP would suddenly be stripped of most decision making – actually, would we need these intermediaries at all any more? The parties would also face great change. Sure, they could compose a manifesto, but each piece of legislation would only be implemented at the behest of the people. Gone would be the days when a party could do pretty much what they wanted, with a suitable majority.
The unknown factor, of course, would be how this would influence the policy of a country generally. Would we fight quite so many wars, for example, where the people whose children would die would be in change of the decision? Would counties like the UK re-introduce capital punishment , as surveys seem to suggest? Would the man on the street want a control on immigration, in an anonymous voting structure?
I think we’ll have to keep guessing on these other and other issues, at least for the time being. But I am convinced that Direct Democracy will happen. The question is, when?
We’ll all too aware that record companies have been blaming their industry woes on people who download music without paying for it. They’re also very fond of making the flawed assumption that every track downloaded for free would have been paid for if the free option didn’t exist – despite no evidence to support the argument and that it’s not logical anyway if you ponder it for more than a nano-second or two.
There were two pieces of news this week that demonstrated the other side of this coin, namely that people who download free stuff also spend money on music and that it’s possible to make money out of free anyway.
Exhibit 1 is provided by the music industry themselves in the form of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) and report they published online. As Torrent Freak points out
Compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…
* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
* 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
* 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.
* 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.
The implication of this for me, is to confirm empirically what I’ve observed anecdotally, that file sharing is very often used to preview music, the best of which they go on to purchase. Obviously, there are many citizens who don’t conform to that model, but I wonder how much music they’d actually buy if they couldn’t get it free anyway?
Meanwhile, Moco News reports that Tapulous’s Tap Tap Revenge enjoyed 2.5 downloads of their App in the first two months, but that 1 million were pirate downloads. However, Tapulous knows who these users are and treats them slightly differently to ordinary customers by showing them more ads. This results in many converting to their best customers for virtual goods they sell in the game and for paid music downloads.
So there you have. File sharers pay for music. And you can make money from people who start off by thinking they won’t pay you. Who would have thought it?
Head on over to this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists 207 at Volker on Mobile.
If you’re not from around these parts, the Carnival features the very best writing about mobile from the previous week at a different blogger’s website. It’s a great resource for finding out what’s on in mobile – all in one central place.
If you’re a blogger yourself, you should think about contributing, or hosting a Carnival – it does wonders for your traffic and page rank.
Carlo wrote last week about Mobile Trends 2020, a project curated by our pal Rudy De Waele. Rudy has updated the slide show with contributions from me, as well as other people who failed to get their act together for the original deadline – or perhaps they decided that they would like to be part of such an event when they saw it in all its glory.
Go and take a look here for inspiration, provocation and a general sense of wonder at where we’re going with mobile on Spaceship Earth. It’s probably worth a few revisits as there’s a lot to take in on just one.
Hardly a day goes by right now without some new announcement by some new startup or established player announcing that they’re launching an Augmented Reality platform that allows you to leave digital messages to others. Sometimes these are private messages to a specified group and sometimes they’re public, with everyone being able to access them, providing that they’re using that particular proprietary platform.
My concern (as you’ll see from those posts) is how this information is curated that is being eagerly posted all over the place as I write this today. My original thinking would be to have an organisation in place like Wikipedia, who would be able to police it for accuracy – whether deliberate or intentional. If you think about it, the potential for abuse is huge – just imagine a restaurateur making up their own reviews. And potentially, it’s infinitely more complex than Wikipedia as it needs a central repository for the information, which is then edited for accuracy and authenticity, ideally by someone with local knowledge too, before being allowed to be replicated locally.
Augmented Reality has many exciting potential uses, but the annotations are only going to work if the information is credible and the user can rely on it. Otherwise, a few dodgy meals on the basis of forged reviews, or some misinformation about the historicity of the building or district will undermine the user’s trust. And once that’s gone, it won’t return.
This type of messaging is sometimes called Digital or Virtual Graffiti and this highlights another of my concerns about this type of user generated content. Is Augmented Reality going to be so cluttered, ugly and intrusive that people eventually abandon using it altogether?
Of course, this content doesn’t have to be user generated. It could be centrally controlled and generated with partners by the company developing the AR. But then, that has real scale issues if the ambition is to populate a country, let alone the Globe.
Please don’t understand me – I’m a huge fan of the concept of AR and you have to only read my 5 year old posts to appreciate that. But I’m raising some very valid issues for the nascent industry that need to be thought about seriously once we stop getting hyped by the hype.
The best way that the AR industry can start tackling these issues is form some kind of Association or Committee to agree some standards and best practices. It won’t be easy – these things never are, especially when you’re writing the rule book as you go. But it does need to be done if the AR industry is to thrive for its users and equally importantly be self-regulating.
10 years ago I attended the very first meeting of what became the Mobile Marketing Association in the UK (and perhaps the first such meeting in the world). Then the mobile marketing industry was at about the same stage at AR, maybe even lower profile in many ways. It was the right time to start thinking about the “boring but important” issues then, just as it’s the right time to be thinking along those likes for the AR industry today. Because if these things aren’t thought through, the sector will never take off.
Like many of us, this Christmas I received a Kindle in my stocking. I had really wanted one for ages, but it was only recently that they were kindly made available to us 94% of the global population who don’t live in the US. Go figure.
I really love my Kindle. I especially love the ability to hear about a book and be reading it within minutes. I am a voracious reader and it’s just wonderful.
But, it does illustrate very well the difference between “search” and “discovery”. If you know what book you want, it’s easy to find it on your Kindle (or PC). But if you just want to do the equivalent of wandering into a bookshop one wintery Sunday afternoon and browsing randomly through the bookshelves, digital still can’t match the analogue experience. Sure, we have Recommendation engines and such like, but they are still pretty basic and seem to be lagging behind most other technologies. I won’t go into an exhaustive list here, but I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve found a favourite author’s new book by visiting a bookstore or reading a review in analogue media. And yet, I’ve already told Amazon that I love that author, so why haven’t they told me about the new book?
At the same time, some research yesterday highlighted the ongoing trend of people using their mobiles in retail stores to check product reviews (52%) and more worryingly, if you are a retailer, to cross quote pricing – 36% at the moment. Note that this was a survey of Smartphone users, so as more and more of us use these powerful devices, this is going to be an increasingly noticeable trend.
If you are a retailer, you will already be losing market share to the digital world – look what’s happened to the analogue music store in both the US and UK (and I think that this would have happened without “piracy”). But this ability to cross-check pricing, which empowers the consumer to decide if they want to delay gratification for a better price, or if they’re prepared to pay a premium price to have it now, is going to accelerate the trend.
At the moment, online stores like Amazon benefit from a low cost distribution model, with no retail stores. However, there is an argument that we’ll increasingly hear that online retailers are actually parasitically benefiting from their physical competitors by inadvertently being free showrooms for Amazon et al, where consumers go to discover and browse, only to actually buy online or over-the-air.
In the short term, I don’t doubt that we’ll see all kinds of shenanigans associated with industries experiencing great change. Sooner or later a book store or other retailer will ban people using their mobiles in-store and much good it’ll do them as it isn’t trying to solve the problem, but treat a symptom. We saw a lot of this kind of behaviour from record companies in the last decade or so.
Longer term, I believe that online retailers will have to grab the bull by the horns and recognise that they need to help physical stores stay in business. This isn’t a philanthropic motivation at all. If physical stores disappear, there”s a very real danger that the market as a whole will shrink, certainly for a product such as books. If we can’t find something we really want to read, we’ll find another way to occupy our time. And discovery remains an important stimulus of sales.
So, do you think we’ll see Amazon bookstores on our High Streets and in our shopping malls? I do. I also think we’ll see some intriguing affiliate programmes aimed at supporting and making money for the independent book store in the not so distant future.
In some ways, it’ll be the giant bookstore chains that will no longer be able to compete and we may see a renaissance of local bookstores which, on balance, would probably be a good thing.
The book industry is changing increasingly in a fast and furious way and the players in the market need to change accordingly. And we know what the alternative to change is, don’t we?
I’m just getting my agenda sorted out for the year and the first event I’m doing is M-Football next week in London, which looks like a great kick off (sorry!) for the World Cup year and one which will be hugely important for mobile too.
If you’d like a whopping 40% off and a day at the Emirates Stadium, mixing with a great line up of speakers and attendees, use the booking code “mobh4pp3″.
If you’re going, please come and say Hi. Meeting MobHappy readers is something I love and if there’s anything you’d like to share here, feel free to talk to me about it.
I just put up a couple of posts that you might find worth a read.
At Media Week, I wrote about the amazing success of Pizza Hut’s relatively new iPhone App, that has already generated over $1 million in pizza sales. mCommerce has been a long time coming, but it’s arriving at last.
Other subjects that caught my eye recently were Revolution’s coverage of a new AdMob campaign for STA Travel. What’s interesting is that it’s click-to-call, which has been slow to take off in mobile and which ought to be a no-brainer. Anyone have any thoughts as to why it’s not used more often?
Finally, I also like the new Guinness ad, though it reminded me a lot of one of the scenes from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, when they’re creating Earth. The Guinness ad can be seen here and like most ads from the makers of the Black Stuff, it’s very classy indeed.
