This Tuesday in DCU, we had our second conference. Like the « get social » conference, it has taken place at the Helix in DCU. The theme which was this time « Get Mobile » has turned around the different way to use technology in our favor to promote a product. We had the chance to have this time again a lot of speakers (six in total), who showed us an incredible amount of ideas, ads and astonishing ways to gain the costumer’s attention.
I will let you discover this conference as if you have been there for real !
Our first speaker was Dr Theo Lynn, who directly started with some statistics: « 96% of Irish have a smartphone, 60% have an iphone 36% a phone working with android and 3% have a blackberry.
Through his speech i twas clearly possible to understand how much smartphones are based on communication by sharing contents. As an example he explained us that nowadays 77% of online mobile researches are done at home or at work, wich means that this is serious researches because not only made during a journey to spend time. Due to that it is easy to understand that firms have to reconsider the way they apprehend the market and the way they sell their product. This leads to a main point enunciated by the speaker, which is that « we have 2 times mor chance to find out what we are looking for thanks to a mobile app or a mobile website version than before ».
We are used to all this technology, so we can be indifferent to it (and me first). But when
this doctor told us that we are now able to tell our phone to remind us to buy flowers, and this when we are in a perimeter of 50m from a flower shop, it just made me react and realize that technology is still going ahead !
And it continued because he had taken with him a Google glass prototype ! With this kind of glasses you can have access to information at any time anywhere, record, take pictures, geolocate, and much more !
Yet we have to do not forget that in spite of this attractive aspect we don’t know yet all the negative effects it can be for our brain. And we already guess which kind of privacy issues it is unluckly going to leads to.
In the same kind of spirit, Theo Lynn talked about the smartwatches which are wearable
datas as well. And even if the datas are not always wearable they follow us everywhere, like in some cars nowadays. As an exemple Mercedes Benz E-Class Saloon and Estate are conected to internet permanently.
A point that the speaker didnt highlight was that all this technologies could have inconvenients and negative affect as distraction while driving or privacy.
Anyway we had a great speech and i think it have made react most of the audience !
Let me introduce our second speaker, Dr Mark Hughes, working for the DigifEye company. His speech was about how to take advantage of visuals contents which are everywhere. DigifEye analyzes the images online, helps reorganize to draw attention to a particular point on them if necessary. They program computers to be able to recognize faces but also famous personalities like Barack Obama or Johnny Halliday. Their computers are also able to classify images based on tags and captions on the pictures.
It can seems easy to do all of that, so let me remind you why it is so hard to recognize a
face or to classify pictures. First of all let’s take the average size of a picture: 1280 x 960.
This size coresponds to a million pixel to analyse ! And because each pixel is a
combination of numbers (not even only binary number, composed only of 1 and 0) that
make up the whole color, this is just a mammoth task to analyse and deal with all this pieces of information (source: 01net.com).
They are also able to follow the movements of a car on a video to « photoshop » it while moving.
With this type of system they can (as an example with Google glass) recognize a situation and link it to a brand / festival / any event. This works particularly well with static objects. Like what Ikea did for its last catalog in France (2014’s catalog).
In this way DigifEye is currently developing a mobile app which help recognising clothes on someone else, to find it on the web and buy it. Indeed the costumer just has to take a picture in the street or in a magazine to find it and buy it. This is possible thanks to all the links between the app and all the brands and magazines (more than 3200 brands and 900 retailers).
The goal is to make the computer work like if it had to recognise a face, but instead it had to recognise and focus on clothes. Then the computer must be able to differentiate the different types of clothing (dress, jeans, hat …) and once it found in which category is the clothing, i must link it to the right product thanks to it connections to the brands products.
You can find it already amazing, but let me finish with the fact that the computers of DigifEye are also able to suggest articles associated with the one just purchased, regarding to fashion !
So this speaker showed us how much computers are « intelligents » nowadays, and that we must take advantage of it especially in business.
The third speaker was Dr Cathal Gurrin has been talking about pervasive mobile computing, with the same kind of speech as Dr Mark Hughes but focusing with another point of view. First focused on how technologies have grown up suddenly, he made a transition to the wearable datas as Google glasses. This new kind of technology must be location aware and activity aware as well, for finally knowing us better than ourselves !
We have this possibility to record everything we see or hear, this technology can also be used be used to improve health, productivity in a firm, security etc.
In summary devices are becoming context aware persuasives, and must be used in business.
We can notice that this is the second speaker who conclude on this point, that’s why i am not going to dwell on it !
Let me now introduce the following speaker, Eoin Cruise, working for the Nokia company. He explained us how Nokia did to make a come back on the market by the way of an
acquiring by Microsoft and the Windows Phone OS. However the Nokia brand is not that famous in smartphone’s market, that’s why Mircosoft is trying to light up its strategy to the costumers. The goal is
to make the Nokia Lumia an afordable smartphone and in addition at the forefront of technology. By this way Microsoft wants to remove the « afordable Nokia » from its scale (the scale is composed by three steps, starting from the top: « Lumia », then « afordables » and finally « first prices » which have less options and can support less apps).
Through this speech I think that we can light up an idea, which is for me the main one: the market and the demand are fluctuants, and it is always possible to turncoat. It is a matter
of brand image and how to impress by showing that the brand is still in the race AND
EVEN MORE because the brand is climbing towards the top ! A brand can make a come 
back with only a little boost and an idea. For this special case with Nokia, I think that if they use their ex-notoriety with the Nokia 3310 which is still really popular (especially on internet because there is the myth saying that this is THE unbreakable phone), they will be able to highlight their strengths thanks to Microsoft.
I don’t want to be pompous but someone seems to love my point of view (don’t judge him please).
Our fifth speaker was Paul davey, working for IBM. First of all let me remind you what IBM do: this enterprise contrary to what people are used to think, is not only specialized in
computing, it does also network services, it make powerful computers for companies (and
not for lambda customer anymore) like to maintain Google’s servers, it make software for a lot of machines as ATMs, they are present in aeronautical software (This list is obviously not exhaustive !).
During his speech Paul Davey talked about software, with a brand new intelligent software named Watson. Watson is made by IBM, it is able to analyze huge datas to correlate them and make statistics, as an example it is used to know which treatment need to be applied to which pathology.
You can find here the link for the Watson website and the Facebook page if you want to follow it or just learn more about it !
Watson playing Jeopardy with two humans
IBM is particularly focused on the management, implementation and data platforms, security, and analytics. IBM make analyzes aimed to help societies in their marketing program. The analyzes allow them to understand as an example where and why people go on certain web pages without beeing interressed by it.
Apple and IBM are working together a lot (for ios), and as well with Twitter in recent weeks.
If you want you can contact or just follow Paul davey on Twitter: @pauldaveyIBM !
The speaker who finished and closed this Get Mobile conference was Alex Meisl, working for Wiforia. His speech has turned around preconceived ideas as « mobile texts are dead », explaining why it is wrong and how to use it for marketing in a new way; but also around what he considers as the right marketing policy.
His first examples were to say that sms is not dead, mobile advertising isn’t trivial, that apps are not the future, and retailers are screwed. Four preconceived ideas which he has broken with relevents statistics !
Here are some:
-145bn SMS sent in UK in 2013. Which represents 6.5 per head per day
– Mobile advertising will overtake Newspaper, advertising in the UK in 2014 $3.53 bn (15.1%) vs $3.23bn (13.8%)
– 80% of branded applications get less than 1,000 downloads « When brands get it right, the returns can be huge. The problem appears to be that most are getting it wrong.” Howard Davies, Media Partner
-Retailers spend has increased 600% in 5 years. A well executed omni-channel strategy delivers 3x the sales per customer compared to a single channel. Sales have doubled in 10 years to $16bn.
In the second part of his speech he had a long explaination about how to « fish » the costumers. He compared all the costumers to fishes, and gave us a free fish lesson that i am going summarize for you.
He considered that to fish.. catch the costumer we have to respect and follow the four next steps:
– Awareness (Advertising + Direct Response + Search)
–Engagement (Messaging + Mobile website + Apps + In-store engagement)
–Purchase (Sampling + Coupons + mPayments)
–Loyalty (Recognition + Engagement + Repeat)
Here is a short video to show you what kind of product Alex Meisl was talking about in his Awarness part. This is the kind of product which use technologies (here smartphone’s bluetooth) to improve the marketing impact on costumers.
He left us with his 6 key take-aways:
- Don’t forget standard business principles
- mCommerce is more important than mShopping
- Get all customers to self-identify
- Mobile makes anything a digital gateway
- Context, especially location, is the key driver
- Don’t forget “old tech” – SMS etc.
This is the end of my abstract on this second conference here at DCU. It was again extremely rewarding, and made us think in a new way for sure. I personnaly had to reconsider what i was thinking about « old technologies » like sms or bluetooth; they are not dead and you can still use it in an efficient way if you are smart enough ! I also realized how big was the mobile’s market and how many opportunities it can give us, for marketing but also for science (Watson, DigifEye).
Thanks to DCU university which welcomed and organised this event, and of course thanks to all the speakers !
DICE conferences 
