Eating Our Own Mobile Dog Food

Back in February, I wrote about my plans to attend Social Media Week New York and about Mobile Perspectives' role in building Social Media Week's mobile website. 

Social Media Week itself is a worldwide event exploring the social, cultural and economic impact of social media. Their mission is to help people and organizations connect through collaboration, learning and the sharing of ideas and information.

During February's Social Media Week, more than 1000 events were held in 12 host cities on 5 continents. September's event takes place in 14 cities, including here in Chicago from September 24-28.

I'm glad I went to SMW NY - the events I attended were well organized with great content and compelling speakers and panelists.  It was also a great opportunity to use the SMW Mobile Website and SMW Mobile Apps as any other attendee would. As a visitor to New York - I was especially grateful for the maps within the event descriptions to help get me from venue to venue.

It was also a great opportunity to see what we could do better - from navigating the event schedule, to accessing more local content, to providing a better integrated experience for attendees using both the SMW mobile website and the SMW mobile apps.

Ahead of the September event, we've worked closely with CrowdCentric (SMW's global coordinator), XOMO Digital (the SMW Mobile Application developers), Techliminal (responsible for the core SMW web and registration platforms), New Media Innovation (our technology platform partner) and with other SMW partners to improve the on-the-go attendee experience.  You can read more about our efforts in Social Media Week's recent blog post "Enhancing The SMW Mobile Experience".

Mobile Perspectives will also be hosting a panel discussion on "Social Media & Mobile: Is Your Social Media Strategy Mobile-Ready" during Social Media Week Chicago on September 27th.

Make sure you visit http://www.socialmediaweek.org to see if Social Media Week is coming to your city. For those of you in Chicago, check out the schedule here - events are filling up fast!

I hope to see you there!

Comments below, email me at todd@mobile-perspectives.com, follow me (@toddshingler) on Twitter or reach out via our website.

Unlimited Wireless Data Plans Heading for Extinction

The explosive growth of mobile data consumption driven by smartphone and tablet adoption and the roll-out of faster wireless data networks is speeding the move towards usage-based mobile data plans.
 

Mobile consumers are increasingly downloading books, streaming movies, watching videos, and listening to cloud-based music services such as Spotify and Pandora.  Growing use of internet voice services like Skype and Google Voice and text messaging alternatives such as iPhone messenger and now Facebook messenger consume mobile data AND directly eat into wireless operator voice and text messaging revenues.

Consider some of these Mobile Statistics:

• 600M YouTube video views each day from mobile devices
• 2.6B mobile applications were downloaded in March 2012
• 8.5% of all internet traffic is now from mobile devices
• 15% of all ‘search’ traffic is from mobile devices
• 70% of Pandora’s listening hours are from mobile devices
• 54% of Facebook’s 901M users access Facebook from their mobile device each month

Clearly, wireless operators don’t want to simply provide the bandwidth for everyone else to profit from and they are looking for ways to capitalize – particularly as traditional voice revenues continue to drop and even as their own cost to transmit data (on a per GB basis) continues to decline. The first step, already playing out, is the move away from unlimited data plans.

Verizon and Comcast End Unlimited and Capped Data Plans

Yesterday, a Verizon executive made a statement that mobile customers that currently have unlimited data plans would have to move to a tiered usage-based data plan if they wanted to upgrade to a 4G LTE device.  Verizon, like AT&T before it, no longer offers unlimited data plans to new subscribers and has no doubt been thinking about the best time to cease unlimited data plans for existing customers as well.

Not surprisingly, Verizon received a backlash of negativity from customers and as of this morning seemed to be backing off the statement – instead indicating that they are reviewing pricing plans and will announce them well in advance of implementing them.

Coincidentally, Comcast announced yesterday that they were ending their ‘hard cap’ of 250GB for home internet subscribers and were now running trials where customers were given a nominally higher data allowance (300GB) with $10 overage fees for each additional 50GB of data consumed.

Both moves are further evidence that unlimited data plans will inevitably be replaced by usage-based data plans.

Beyond Unlimited and Usage-based Data Plans

From a wireless operator perspective, much of the rest of the world has already adopted usage-based data plans, so Verizon’s intentions aren’t without precedent. That said, the simple “data usage” model is likely to evolve to better reflect how mobile consumers are using their mobile devices. 

These “consumer pays” models are also likely to be supplemented with more creative – and lucrative - “shared cost” and “sponsored cost” models allowing wireless operators to charge content providers for using their networks or for prioritizing their data traffic.

A few directions wireless operators could explore:

• Capped 'best-effort' plans - which would allow basic email, internet, downloads without a guarantee on bandwidth quality and speed and with max monthly data limits. Streaming video usage would be 'best-effort' and in certain instances blocked if there was network congestion.
• "Premium" plans that would have faster speeds and better quality video by prioritizing data consumption by these users above the basic 'best-effort' plans. e.g. my streaming video always works but yours may be blocked when there is network congestion. As Comcast is doing on the wireline side, these plans would likely have upper thresholds on monthly usage with overage charges.
• “a la carte” fees where users could be asked to pay extra fee for specific services, e.g. for streaming video - either unlimited video for a premium fee or a certain amount of streaming video for a lower price. This might even by charged per GB if you aren't on the 'unlimited' video plan.
• Ditto for over-the-air “app store” downloads and cloud-based storage services like iCloud
• Given mobile social media consumption, I could see operators offering plans similar to unlimited text plans.  $5/month for unlimited access to Facebook, Google+, etc.

Wireless operators may also look to get data usage subsidized by the companies generating the most data traffic by:

• Striking deals with Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube etc. to subsidize users wanting to download or stream content (apps, music, video) over the operator network. This could range from simple licensing fees, to variable fees based on usage to getting a piece of each individual item 'purchased' - e.g. they get $.05 of each $.99 song or app downloaded over their network to asking for a piece of advertising revenue these companies are collecting over the operator network.
• Seeking the right to inject or overlay their own ads into the content so they can generate their own additional advertising revenue.
• Striking similar licensing deals directly with Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. to 'prioritize' or 'subsidize' use of these networks over the operator network.  Why wouldn't wireless operators ask the social networks for a piece of ad revenues generated on their networks?
• Seeking profit-share relationships with Retailers. Amazon handled more than $2B in mobile transactions in 2011, eBay more than $4B. Why not ask for 1% of m-commerce revenues that their networks facilitate? In exchange, wireless operators could prioritize bandwidth for access to a retailer’s website and/or related video content.

The move away from unlimited data plans has been coming for a while, but you can be sure that once they are gone, wireless operators will do whatever they can to capitalize on their role as a critical gateway to the internet for mobile consumers.

Comments below, email me at todd@mobile-perspectives.com, follow me ( @toddshingler ) on Twitter or reach out via our website.

Social Media Week Goes Mobile!

I'm excited to be headed to Social Media Week in New York next week for a number of reasons.

For one, I'll be attending as many of the events as possible - though with more than 250 events spread throughout the city I'll clearly be missing some of them. Fortunately, I'll be able to follow along through various Twitter hashtags and also catch many of the events streaming live (including to mobile phones) thanks to Livestream.

It'll be interesting to hear how often the intersection of Social Media and mobile phones is addressed given the explosive growth of Social Media engagement via mobile phones:

• Facebook acknowledged in their recent IPO filing that 425M of their 845M users access Facebook from their mobile phones
• Twitter says more than half of their active users use Twitter on their mobiles, generating 40% of all tweets sent
• YouTube sees more than 400M mobile video plays each day

Brands and businesses need to quickly figure out how they can best leverage the union of mobile & social or they'll be left behind by those that do.  Many of those who have already figured it out will be speaking at SMW in New York or at events in another SMW host city.

I'm also looking forward to SMW NY as it will be a great opportunity to get feedback from other attendees on Mobile Perspectives' latest project - developing the mobile website for the Social Media Week. Working with SMW creators CrowdCentric, Techliminal in San Francisco, Nokia in Finland and our technology partner New Media Innovation out of Australia, we created a mobile website that seamlessly extends Social Media Week to mobile users.

Mobile visitors to SMW can login and see details and access maps for events they've registered for, register for additional events throughout the week, engage SMW globally and locally on various social media platforms, and more.

As a bi-annual global event, Social Media Week is also in Miami, San Francisco, Washington DC, Toronto, São Paulo, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, London, and Hamburg next week. In September, Social Media Week will be in another 12-13 cities including here in Chicago where Mobile Perspectives is based.

Since going live 3 weeks ago, the mobile SMW website has been visited from more than 100 countries and is now seeing many thousands of visitors each day!

Social Media Week recently published an article (SMW In Your Hands - Our New Mobile Site) about the project, including a Q&A with myself and Rob Leishman from New Media Innovation.



Any other mobile & social aficionados out there headed to SMW NY? I'd love to meet up.

Comments below, email me at todd@mobile-perspectives.com, follow me (@toddshingler) on Twitter or reach out via our website.