Reflections on EDM08

On Monday 9th June I attended the EDM08 conference. It was a fairly small affair with perhaps 100 delegates, but they had travelled far and wide to be there and on my table were people from the US, Nordic region and mainland Europe.

EDM stands for European Directories Marketplace and the event is run by Whitaker Associates. I had little idea about how the connection with directories worked before attending, but soon discovered that it was all to do with the delivery of information services, leading to this year’s theme: mobile.

The keynote was delivered by Dr Mike Short, director of R&D at O2 and a man with impressive credentials in the mobile arena. Chair of the mobile data association (MDA) among other things, Dr Short has spent 20 years in the mobile and wider telecoms industries. He shared plenty of industry stats and previews of O2 research to be published in July, both of which I can summarise here for you in a few bullet points.

General statistics:

• There were 2.95 billion mobile subscribers globally by June 2007.
• The forecast for the end of 2008 is 3.3 billion (source: The Mobile World).
• There is 115 percent mobile penetration in the UK, equating to 69 million handsets.
• There were 57 billion SMS and 449m picture messages sent in the UK in 2007.
• The mobile internet was accessed by 17 million UK individuals in 2007.

From O2’s research:

• Most people would rather leave home without their wallet than their mobile.
• Trials which combined mobile SIMs with Oyster and Credit cards (separately and together) using near field communication technology (NFC) resulted in a greater degree of success with Oyster cards than credit cards. It will be interesting to see what conclusions O2 draws from this, as it seems to me that it is a moot point because ultimately they will all surely be combined anyway.
• Mobile development began at phase one with voice and text. Present
  day is phase six which is the ‘content’ phase. He believes that the next stage, phase 7, is the ‘application’ phase.

Following the keynote there was a range of presentations, discussions and some really interesting debates and opinions that I would like to record.

There was plenty of debate around the importance of mobile compared to PC. James Levey of Amdocs suggested that click-through rates online were currently at about two percent on average but predicted mobile would achieve four percent click-through rates in the near future. Mobile search currently represents two to four percent of desktop search globally, with the exception of China where mobile search accounts for 25 percent. Google predicts that the crossover point, where mobile search overtakes desktop, will come within four years, then rapidly grow to double the desktop search share.

To provide a little more context to this, it is worth mentioning stats presented by Russell Buckley of Admob, the world’s largest mobile ad marketplace. Russell currently estimates that Admob sees three billion page views per month on its network, on which they serve ads today. The largest contributors to that number, notably all in the English language, are:

• US = 50 percent
• India and UK = 10 percent each
• South Africa = 5 percent
• Indonesia = 5 percent

Other presentations gave me some interesting nuggets worth noting, such as: “In ten years you will be able to access the knowledge of humankind from a mobile.” Or: “The fastest growing age of penetration of mobile phones in the UK is seven to eight year olds. All exciting stuff, but I was most impressed by Simon Grice of www.ideas.org. He managed to rattle off more concepts and ideas in ten minutes than I have in a decade. The few I managed to grab were:

• Information is the new pollution. In a conference focusing on information services and directories Grice argued that in the future this will be too much and humans won’t be able to deal with the flow of info.
• Search will become useless because the range of results will be too difficult to filter. Grice suggested that when people get bogged down with information they ask people they know for advice and in this way sites like Twitter and Facebook become the information services networks of the future.
• Discovery as opposed to search. Search is fine if you know what you are looking for but what if you don’t? For example your local pub is holding an Italian night. If you don’t search for that you may not find out so you need to be told or have a way to discover it that is not necessarily advertising. Location based services have a role to play but it is not clear what role at this stage.

All of the great new ideas discussed at EDM08 are definitely worth exploring further, which is exactly what I intend to do now.