Agile Development - A Product Owner's Story

The number of mobile apps being downloaded is soaring. The Apple iPhone store is expanding at a rapid pace and Mobango, which focuses on social mobile apps, says its store has seen a 500% increase in app downloads over the last 12 months - 23 million downloads in total. The lower cost of mobile data services (many are now flat rate, albeit on a nigh impossible to implement fair use policy) and the more user friendly GUIs of the Apps Stores has made downloading mobile apps the latest craze. For me, the biggest potential stumbling block could be over saturation of app stores, with mobile users bemused by the myriad of different apps available to download. It's becoming increasingly difficult to search for an app that might be useful amongst the array of dross that's available. On the Apple Store, Tom Tom still lead the way with the biggest value of downloads for their iPhone version of their navigator app. They found the way to make money from mobile apps, but charging £56 w...

I'm pleased to say that I've been asked to present at the upcoming Informa Conference on Mobile Financial Services to be held at the Copthorne Tara Hotel in London on March 9th. My presentation will focus on the market opportunity for Mobile Payments identifying why some countries offer better opportunities than others and what the major geographic trends are. For registration details, please see and I hope to see you there for a chat over coffee. I plan to first of all identify the different opportunities for different mobile payment propositions. For example, the market value of a particular region or country varies greatly depending on whether you're thinking of launching micro-payment solutions versus mobile remittances. The mobile phone is pretty much ubiquitous everywhere, including the developing world (where the number of phones outstrips even the number of televisions), but its only in the West and tiger economies where you're going to see any great number o...

Any company selling goods and services to consumers or other businesses should become savvy in the practice of Mobile Marketing. It’s one of many marketing channels that have been around for sometime, but until now it’s been in the shadows of the mainstream mass media channels such as TV, Direct Marketing and, more recently, Online Marketing. However, according to Gartner, the number of people using the Mobile Web to find content on the Internet will, in 2010, surpasses those using a web browser on a PC. There are already over 3 billion mobile phone users in the world and in increasingly more countries, penetration exceeds 100% (as some have more than one phone). The fact is, thanks to advancing technology and ever reducing mobile data network prices, the mobile as a channel has matured and any brand ignoring the marketing value of this channel will start to fall behind its more adventurous competitors. What is Mobile Marketing all about? One thing is certain, Mobile Market...

In the midst of a recession when most companies are slashing investment in new technologies , they continued to fund projects to develop mobile solutions. Forrester have just published a report that suggests that in this volatile global economic environment, firms are still excited about exploiting the mobile channel. Tom Peters advocates the need to innovate one's way out of a recession, and it looks like the innovation of choice is Mobile. Enterprises are looking to mobile solutions as a way of cutting costs, improving productivity, enhancing business efficiencies and, most importantly, delivery real value that will attract new customers from competitors who fail to deliver what consumers are demanding. A quote from the report highlights Forrester's rosy outlook - "We predict a more stable economic environment in 2010 and expect... ...programmes to drive [mobile] application development for 4 th generation devices and long-term evolution networks". The report als...

I came across this free, downloadable report that looks at the myths surrounding the iPhone and considers whether it is valid to call it the most revolutionary phone on the market. The 100 page report is available here from the Strand website (you just need to provide a few details but there's a privacy opt out option to avoid spam): http://www.strandreports.com/sw3926.asp Personally, who cares if its not actually the most technological advanced bit of mobile equipment on the market. For me it's all about the "I want one" factor of the brand that has kick started a Smartphone market that had seriously faltered with poor efforts from the major phone manufacturers who were simply trying to mimic a PC but with a smaller screen and less processing power. At least Apple had the strength of brand to experiment with new approaches to user interaction and application downloading, even if allot of what they actually introduced wasn't original. We have allot to thank Ap...

First of all, welcome back and I hope you had a great Christmas and that the New Year will bring all you wish for. In my first blog of 2010 I decided to focus on the market opportunity in the Mobile Payments space. One of my predictions for 2010 is that this area will grow and start to attract more than just the early adopters. Making payments on mobile devices will become a natural occurrence over the next 18 months, whether it's explicit or built into applications hosted on the device. According to a paper written by Cap Gemini, there were only 30 million using their mobile devices to make payments at the end beginning of 2008. That represented about 1% of the mobile market, so only one in a hundred used their phones for making payments of any kind. During 2009 the mobile payments market has changed significantly with the emergence of significant usage in mainly the developing world. Safaricom and Vodafone made the most impact, from a headline perspective, with the succe...