Google Think:Mobile Sydney Wrap-Up

“It’s not too late to be early” – Nick Leeder, Managing Director of Google.

It is predicted that half of the Australian population will use Mobile Smartphones by the end of 2011 – right now 37% of Australians own a smartphone making us a world leader in Mobile Smartphone Adoption. The message of “get in early” was repeated to us throughout the day at Google’s Think:Mobile 2011 event highlighting the enormous opportunities in making your online presence compatible with mobile devices – now!

On Thursday 8 Sept, myself and several others from Outrider’s SEM and SEO team made the trip down to the Sydney City Recital Hall to hear a gathering of senior marketing executives, industry visionaries, and agency leaders discuss all things mobile. The agenda included: William Easton and Nick Leeder Director of Mobile and Managing Director at Google, Foad Fadaghi Research Director from Telsyte, Hugo Barra Product Director at Android-Google, David Thodey CEO of Telstra, Jason Pellegrino Head of Mobile Ads Google, Don Meji CEO of Dominos Pizza, Andrew Murrell GM Marketing at Commonwealth Bank, and Lucie Austin Regional Marketing Director Coca-Cola.

At the end of the event, we left inspired to start designing our mobile strategies and with plenty of ideas on how to do this. The following is a summary of the key learnings from the day.

Welcome

“Welcome to Think:Tech 2011. It wouldn’t be a mobile conference if we didn’t ask you to switch your phones ON”

– William Easton, Director of Mobile at Google.

William Easton was MC and did a great job of leading the event. Interestingly, he asked everyone to switch on their mobile phones during the event as we would be doing real-time interactive polls and Twitter feed questions via Mobile. The first poll is shown in the picture below.

Nick Leeder was up next and set the mood for the day. Leeder showed his enthusiasm toward the Mobile movement -

“Some ideas move mountains and create rivers of gold. Google thinks Mobile is a mountain mover and will not only create rivers of gold but also dry them up”.

Google’s Managing Director was very enthusiastic about Mobile Smartphone adoption and it was obvious that Mobile was not to be overlooked.

Mobile trends in the Australian market

Foad Fadaghi is the Director of Research at Telsyte and presented some eye-opening statistics on Mobile adoption and other usage stats.

• Australia is at the forefront of Mobile Smartphone adoption with 37% penetration. Singapore is the only country with higher adoption.
• Australian Smartphones sales are growing at a rapid rate. Mobile market penetration is currently at 75% and is expected to be at 96% by 2014.

• iOS is still the leader at 42% of the market followed by Android at 29%. Android is growing at a high rate.
• Tablets reported 241% growth in 2010 to 2011. Predicted to grow more rapidly as Content & Apps mature.
• Tablets are predicted to cannibalise eBooks, netbooks and laptops.
• Tablet penetration is predicted to soar to 24% of Australian population by 2014. Currently at 8%.

The Mobile User of Tomorrow

Hugo Barra is the Product Management Director at Android-Google and demonstrated several intriguing live Android demos. He also introduced the theory “Mobile First”, which was coined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Mobile First is the new rule that all Google products will be designed for the Mobile medium first, as he sees this is where future users will be spending most of their time and provisioning most services. More info on Mobile First.

The Android Operating System is gaining momentum with 550,000 activations per day and was the center of Hugo’s first demo of the day using his Samsung Galaxy tablet device. We got a sneak preview of Android’s next operating system 4.0 deliciously named “Ice Cream Sandwich”. Cool features included: new layouts that sped up the way tasks are performed, graphics that push the limits of the GPU and an exciting new feature – facial recognition! This was the coolest feature of Android 4.0, utilizing the front-facing camera to track the user’s facial gestures. Imagine being able to go back in a web browser by frowning or being able to open an application by smiling. Google is truly innovating how people will be able to use tablet devices.

Hugo’s next demo involved the use of the Samsung Galaxy Smartphone. Chrome-to-phone is a new extension that allows anything in a web browser to be sent to an Android mobile. Hugo was able to highlight a phone number from Google maps and send it straight to the phone’s dialer with a single click, removing the manual legwork.  NFC (near field communication) is a feature that is built into all the latest Android phones that allows wireless communication between the Smartphone and any device with an NFC chip. Hugo demonstrated several uses for this technology including swiping your phone to a tag in a retail shop for deals/price/info and tapping your phone to another phone to share data.

Google Goggles on the Smartphone was another cool demo. Hugo was able to take a photo of Sudoku Puzzle in a magazine, and using cloud computing, upload it to the Goggles App which solved the puzzle for him.

The obvious takeaway of this segment was that Google is changing the way people interact with mobile devices and increasing the efficiency of how mobiles are used.

The Future of Mobile in Australia

It’s safe to say that David Thodey CEO of Telstra is in a good position to provide insights on where mobile usage is headed in the future. David is seeing mobile usage on the Telstra network double every month, consistent with Telsyte’s research. He went on to describe the types of speeds that the mobile network is heading in and predicts 1GBps connections in the near future. This will only encourage more mobile usage and mobile accessible multi-media content as the connections mature. David predicts that in the future we will be seeing more and more everyday devices connected to the internet, painting a picture of futuristic internet enabled vehicles and appliances, the new breed of smart mobile devices.

It’s not too late to be early

Jason Pelligrino Industry Leader of Mobile Ads at Google emphasized the rapid expansion of mobile adoption – “The pace of change is phenomenal”. In 2010 there were 500 million enabled phones, this has expanded to 1 Billion in 2011. He predicts at this pace, the number of smart phones will exceed the number of PC’s by Q4 2012. His analysis shows that we are still only at the beginning of the Market Cycle and explains that those businesses that get in early will reap the benefits of being market leaders. He also provided some interesting stats:

• 48% of Smartphone users go to bed with their phone within mobile reach (Poorani from our office is part of this audience, she watches YouTube in bed)
• 60% use Smartphones on their commute to work
• 75% use their smartphones in off-time at work (off-time being any time they aren’t in front of the desktop)
• 4 million Australians use mobile internet banking
• 72% use their mobile for comparison shopping. 1 in every 5 of these users have changed their mind in a retail store as a result of this mobile comparison shopping.
• 25% of Smartphone users have bought using their mobile phone
• 66% of local searches are from a mobile device – half of these searches result in an action

To emphasise the prematurity of the Mobile lifecycle, Jason shared with us that globally only 1 in every 5 companies have mobile optimized websites. The difference that an 18kb mobile site compared to a 400kb full site on a GPRS connection can be a make or break difference for online leads and transactions. Jason believes that every business should be making their entry into the mobile market by using the following easy steps:

1. Develop & integrate your mobile strategy
2. Build your mobile destination (try Google Mobile Site Builder)
3. Connect with your users – let them know you’re mobile enabled and they will come
4. Mobilise your business with data (use analytics to build your mobile strategy)

Mobile Pioneers

This segment of the event provided the audience with case studies of market leaders in the Mobile internet market.

Don Meji CEO of Dominos Pizza was first up. Dominos was the first in their market to develop a mobile App. This App allows Smartphone users to easily place their orders online and also track the progression of their order, which previously was invisible. To date, it’s one of the most successful iPhone apps accounting for 40% of total digital sales and generates $1 million in revenue each week. Don says that it “empowers the customer with the invisible aspect of pizza”. The Android app which was only recently released had 200,000 orders on its first day of being live. “By being first, you get the market. Your customers are there waiting”. Don provides two basic rules for Mobile App development:

1. Build Apps that people will use more than once – people delete apps and novelty wears off.
2. Don’t build Apps just for the sake of building an app

The next case study was provided by Andrew Murell GM of Channel Marketing at Commonwealth Bank. Andrew also emphasised the increasing adoption of mobile, predicting that “in 2 years, mobile banking will overtake online banking. It will be easier to make transactions on your mobile than on a desktop”. Commonwealth has been working on furthering Mobile Smartphone integration to the business by providing a holistic approach integrating social media to their mobile apps. Andrew predicts Commonwealth contactless bank payments via Mobile phones will be available by December 2011.

Lucie Austin, Regional Marketing Director from Coca-Cola was an unlikely candidate to speak at a Mobile event, as in her own words, “fast moving consumer goods feels far away from Mobile”. However, Coca-Cola have great success with promotions via the Mobile channel. “Mobile is in line with our story-telling… it allows for ‘Right Here & Right now’, Rather than ‘Right place at the right time’”. Coca-Cola understands the importance of the mobile channel and heavily uses SMS to promote their fast moving goods. So far, their SMS campaigns have received over 4 trillion SMS messages world-wide for a variety of their promotions.  As well as this, Lucie demonstrated an impressive Coca-Cola iPhone App that utilised iPhone’s accelerometer and sound recognition capability to allow for game-play interaction with a Coca-Cola TVC.

To finish up the day, Nick Leeder spoke again leaving us with the message

“Get in [to Mobile] now. We’re only at the tip of the iceberg.”

Tags: android, Google, Mobile, smartphone