Mobile Fix: Does size matter with tablets?
Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, on the new mobile niche between smartphones and tablets…
A week after launch, Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet is getting a lot of love and there seems to be a view that this form factor has a lot of appeal.
As well as the success of the Kindle Fire, the popularity of the Samsung Note (with the new version rumoured to be launching at the same time as the iPhone 5) suggests many people are looking for something in-between the smartphone and the iPad.
New York-based venture capitalist Fred Wilson has been playing with the Nexus 7 for a few days and is a big fan, making the point that he uses it for calls too.
We know quite a few people who have preordered theirs. In the UK, PC World are taking orders and quoting a delivery date of 19 July.
Of course Apple isn’t going to let a new category emerge without taking part, so there are lots of rumours that the company will announce a seven-inch tablet at the same price point – a mini iPad.
We have been saying for ages that Apple will enter this category, but we’re convinced that it won’t be part of the iPad family.
The one area of the Apple product range that needs an update is the iPod, and we think that Apple would be smart to bring in a new iPod that competes with the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire.
As well as revitalising the whole iPod range, it would be great marketing to effectively reposition the Google and Amazon products away from the iPad.
Retail
One of our 20% projects is looking at how mobile could help revitalise the high street through a loyalty scheme that small stores could join. So we keep looking at the retail space and where the innovation is.
One huge area is where people go to stores to pick up items bought online. As much as we love Amazon, the delivery model is creaking with huge queues of people collecting Amazon parcels at the Post Office every time we go (one of the most interesting rumours we heard this year is that Amazon could bid for Royal Mail).
In the US, more than half of the items bought on Walmart’s website are collected in store.
In this country, House of Fraser have had some success with their online stores in Liverpool and Glasgow, where you can try any product before ordering it on a screen and collecting it the next day.
One of the benefits for the store is that people often buy something else when they come in to collect. Building on this, we understand that some high street retailers are considering accepting e-commerce returns for other stores, in order to get the store traffic.
A new study from Deloitte suggests that mobile already influences about 5% of all US retail purchases, and this is forecast to grow to between 17% and 21%.
That sounds rather significant, right? If you look at it in actual sales, this suggests that mobile will influence $159 billion in sales this year and around $700 billion by 2016. As Forbes said, Amazon Price Check may be evil, but it’s the future.
Of course, retailers recognise the need to innovate: an interesting study from Motorola says that 74% of retailers recognise that developing a more engaging in-store customer experience is going to be crucial.
Another new entrant into the space is IBM, who have launched an app focused on grocery sales – using augmented reality.
Another interesting thing we noticed was this – in the new Google Maps service for Android you can search inside a number of buildings, including Selfridges, Harrods, John Lewis, Debenhams and House of Fraser.
The potential data from that is really interesting, a little like the Tesco experimentation with using Wi-Fi to track customers in store.
Mobile money
Running alongside the disruption in retail is the innovation around money. Barclays are testing a service where all their business customers will be offered the ability to take card payments; so Square and/or iZetter are going to be here, at scale, very soon.
Telefonica are busy agreeing partnerships with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and RIM to enable customers to pay for digital goods and services on their phone bill, while T-Mobile are partnering with Mastercard to push near field communication (NFC) payments across Europe.
HTML5 and SEO
In a week when Amazon has launched a HTML5 version of its Kindle app to avoid paying the “Apple tax”, we are seeing moves from Google to help people developing mobile optimised sites with clear guidance on what they see as best practice. The benefit of following this advice is advantage in the nascent world of mobile SEO.
We are convinced that at some point Google will have to tweak their algorithm so sites that are mobile optimised perform better in organic search on mobile than those that are not.
This will cause a major upset, but it is inevitable: Google is designed to give me the best results for my search and right now, on mobile, it doesn’t.
Measuring marketing
With news from GroupM that digital ad spend in the UK is set to grow by 14% this year (to around £5.3 billion, largely at the expense of traditional media), it is vital that brands have a full view of how various tactics work.
The big lie around media measurement is that digital is somehow less well-measured than traditional. However, the plumbing around mobile and social is still developing and so are the best techniques for measuring success.
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