MobilEco Summit

I attended/spoke at this series of round tables put on by Plugged In Ventures. Speakers from Google, MSFT, the WSJ, Time, and Hot Potato were there too. Following are some of my recollections of interesting observations:

Mobile adoption by brands is being slowed by lack of access to reliable data which is compounded by the difficulty of combining with legacy CRM systems into a holistic data store.

Mobile ad spending is still in the 'experimental' bucket for major brands. Initial euphoria over landing a major brand should be tempered by the fact that today, thousands of mobile vendors are now vying for less than 5% of the budget.

Mobile, is the 'connective tissue'. For advertisers, the promise of combining buys across multi-mediums is alluring (e.g. per Time, Inc, 2/3 of their sales invoices involve cross platform buys:

*in store promotions
*TV
*radio
*magazine
*applications
*messaging

Google says that 1 in 5 searches from computers are location related; 1 in 3 on mobile devices.

The tablet is a wild card, participants were split as to whether behavior is more like a phone or a computer. The WSJ says that its tablet subscriber behavior is most similar to physical reading, than the phone.

For corporations building a mobile application is a fraction of the cost commitment to maintaining, tracking and updating the ecosystem associated with it.

With the recent debate over whether the web is dead (supplanted by the resurrection of applications) many comments were made about the role of applications. As expected, with nearly 300,000 applications in Apple's application store, distribution/discovery were cited as real issues. This discussion brought me back 10 years to early internet and debates on how will people find your site....probably the same solutions.