Blunden’s crucible

I attended EDM08 on Monday which was coincidentally the 8th year the conference had run. It is a fairly small affair with perhaps 100 people (max) but they travelled far and wide to be there and on my table were people from the US, Nordic area and mainland Europe.

EDM stands for European Directories Marketplace and the event is run by Whitaker Associates. It is fair to say I had no idea about how the connection with directories worked before attending but it is of course to do with the delivery of information services and hence this years theme: mobile.

The keynote was delivered by Dr Mike Short Director of R&D at O2 and a man’s whose credentials in mobile are extensive. He is Chairman of the mobile data association (the mda) amongst other things but has spent 20 years in the mobile/telecoms industry. He shared plenty of stats and insight to research that O2 will publish in July both of which I have summarised here in a few bullet points:

• there were 2.95bn mobile subscribers at June07
• 3.3bn are forecast by end 2008 (source: The mobile world)
• There is 115% mobile penetration in the UK which equates to 69 million handsets
• There were 57 billion sms sent in the UK in 2007
• 449m picture messages were sent in the UK in 2007
• 17m accessed the mobile internet in 2007

From O2’s research:

• Most people would rather leave home without their wallet than their mobile
• Research that trialled combining mobile with Oyster and Credit card (separately and together) using near field communication technology (NFC) resulted in a greater degree of success when sim and oyster were combined than sim and credit card. It will be interesting to see what conclusions O2 draws from this as it seems to me that it is a moot point. Ultimately won’t they all be combined anyway?

Finally Mike described the phases of mobile, starting at phase one with voice and text, up to present day phase six which is the ‘Content’ phase. Mike believes that phase 7 is the ‘application’ phase.

Following the keynote there were a range of presentations and discussions and I am not going to blog them all. There were some really interesting debates and opinions that I would like to record.

There was some debate around the importance of mobile compared to pc and James Levey of Amdocs suggested that click through rates online were currently at about 2% on average but that he predicts mobile will achieve 4% click through rates in the near future. In terms of search, mobile search currently represents 2-4% of desktop search globally, where China is an exception with mobile search representing 25%. Google predict that the cross over point where mobile search overtakes desktop will be within 4 years and that not long after mobile search will double desktop search.

To put some more context on this it is worth mentioning stats presented by Russell Buckley of Admob. Admob started business in 2006 and are already the worlds largest mobile ad marketplace. Russell talked briefly about global page views on mobile and which countries had the largest global share. Currently he estimates that there are 3bn page views per month on mobile [correction: which Admob see on their network and on which they serve ads on today]. The largest contributors to that number are:

• US = 50%
• India and UK = 10% each (total 20%)
• South Africa = 5%
• Indonesia = 5%

Interestingly all the above are in English language!

Other presentations delivered nuggets such as ‘in 10 years you will be able to access the knowledge of humankind from a mobile’ and the fastest growing age of penetration of mobile phones in the UK is 7 to 8 year old’s. All exciting stuff. But then I was blown away by Simon Grice of www.Ideas.org.

Simon rattled off more concepts and ideas in 10 minutes than I have in a decade. The few I caught hold of were “Information is the new pollution”. IN a conference focussing on information services and directories he 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. Simon suggests 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.

Simon also talked about 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.

These ideas are worth exploring further, which is what I intend to do.