Mobile

“Never try, never fail, those are the words I live by”, or so says Drew Carey’s character Crank in the animated kids film ‘Robots’. I heard these words coming from the back of the car a few days ago as I headed off on holiday with the family for a week in North Devon. You could run a business by that motto but I’m not sure it would last long or be an exciting place to work.

On the contrary,  it is the belief of both my team and I that we must try, that sees Foviance opening for business in China this quarter, with a new office in Shanghai. Read more…

I’m delighted to be able to share a recent conversation I had with Frank Ma, a close associate in China for the last two years now, and the man who will be responsible for ensuring the success of Foviance’s exciting new venture in Shanghai – Foviance Asia.

Frank, can you tell me a bit about your background and what attracted you to research?

I started out in research over 13 years ago right out of university. Like many fresh graduates I had little clue of what I wanted to do except that I wanted to get exposure to a number of different industries. This is what the research offers – a chance to work with a broad range of companies and learn how they do things. Read more…

This is the first Foviance newsletter of 2010; a year we believe will be remembered for the true emergence of the mobile internet as a mature, ubiquitous, mainstream technology.

I offer my reasons for this optimism with a round up of the key factors which will be driving mobile internet adoption and development in the year ahead. Paul suggests that the signs all around us indicate that mobile customer engagement is already gathering impressive momentum. Xavier looks at the shape the evolving mobile internet will take and offers some insight into for businesses planning their own strategy in the light of instantly popular app technology. And finally Clare looks at the impact all this will have for more traditional content publishers and how they are evolving to embrace rapid mobile innovation and adoption.

You might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog page.

I’d also be very happy to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Marty

In this issue:

• 2010: The year of mobile
• The ‘Determined Creep’ of mobile customer engagement
• Mobile websites versus mobile applications
• An all-consuming interest in mobile content

Well, is this finally it? Is 2010 really the year of mobile? Each year since 2001 has been heralded as the year when the mobile internet would become a pervasive reality. After so many false dawns is there more reason to be optimistic this year?At Foviance we think there is. We’re pretty excited about it and here’s why: Read more…

Blink and you might miss it – The Tipping Point for mobile customer engagement might be upon us quicker than we thought.If, like me you are reading Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant new book ‘What the Dog Saw’ you will have come across the term ‘creeping determinism’, a concept attributed to psychologist Baruch Fischhoff who first came up with it thirty five years ago. The principle states that as time goes by we start to convince ourselves that what has now happened was in fact always going to happen. Furthermore, through this process of enlightened hindsight, we convince ourselves so entirely, that any doubt we may have had upfront diminishes and is lost from our memory. Read more…

Everyone has their childhood fears of which some stay with you in adulthood, mine’s that of earthquakes, so much so that since a young age I’ve feared visiting San Francisco. Haiti on the other hand has always been on my ‘radar’ as a place where slavery is rife, as if that’s not bad enough; Haiti is then hit with a devastating earthquake. The horrific effect of the Haiti earthquake however has woken the world up to the plight of the poorest country in the western hemisphere and the humanitarian efforts to bring this devastated country back from the brink have been in effect worldwide. One of the fastest ways donations have been received towards the relief efforts, has been through mobile phones – simply by sending a text from our mobiles to a specific number. Read more…

It’s coming up to 9 months since I got an eReader and in that time barely a month has gone by without a new development in either the eBook or eReader space. I have been watching these developments with interest – recent events to note are the UK Kindle release and the growing dominance of applications (apps) to both sell and display eBooks. Read more…

Several years ago, I was involved in an international project that focussed on security when using mobile devices and how trust could be enabled in users. At that time, very few users were accessing the mobile internet on a regular basis and consequently, it was very difficult for them to envisage the dangers posed by hackers, malware and unauthorised access to both personal and business data stored on their mobile device.Things have changed since then in terms of mobile internet usage as a boom seems imminent, fuelled by the rise of 3G, smartphones and affordable data package tariffs. Indeed, all around us smartphones are becoming ubiquitous with a spike in smartphone adoption predicted as users come out of contracts and seek a better deal for their money. Read more…