I’ll be representing my client, Telesocial, at Mobile World Congress this year. Telesocial brings mobile voice to the social web.  If you’d like to learn more about Telesocial, the only free API for making mobile calls AND safely enabling mobile to mobile voice calls via social apps and the web, and please contact me.

If this is your first time attending Mobile World Congress, I’d encourage you to check out this post from Helen Keegan, who has great advice for first timers and suggestions on where to score free tickets.  You may also want to check out the Mobile Fringe Festival, the first fringe festival to be held the same week as Mobile World Congress.

Sunday, 26 February, 2012:

Mobile Sunday 2012

• About: “The seventh annual Mobile Sunday – the now classic meet-up of mobile influencers, developers, investors and entrepreneurs will be taking place in Barcelona on the eve of this year’s Mobile World Congress.  Mobile Sunday is also a unique chance for you to meet AppCircus organizers and winners and to meet the MobileMonday global chapter founders in one spot during the conference.”
• Time: 26 February, 2012: 7pm CET
  
• Location: City Hall, Rambla de Catalunya 2-4, 08002 Barcelona (right next to the Plaça Catalunya)
• RSVP: Required. Please register here.
  
• Cost: Attending Mobile Sunday is free. Registration required.

GoMo News Lounge Sponsored By Lumata

• About: “GoMo  News will be hosting a lounge with the fabulous mobile advertising company Lumataon February 26th from 8pm at Mobile World Congress.  This is an invitation only event and is only for mobile marketers or highly connected gurus. It is going to be relaxed and chilled an ideal opportunity to do network ahead of the show with “same page” individuals.  If you would like an invite – please email bena at: benagomo<at>gmail<dot>com”
• Time: 8:00-11:00pm
  
• Location: Provided with invitation.
  
• RSVP: This is an invitation only event and is only for mobile marketers or highly connected gurus. It is going to be relaxed and chilled an ideal opportunity to do network ahead of the show with “same page” individuals.  If you would like an invite – please email bena at: benagomo<at>gmail<dot>com
  
• Cost: Free

Monday, 27 February, 2012:

Mobile Premier Awards 2012

• About: “Don’t miss your chance to witness the best of the best from the AppCircus 2011 World Tour –  46 winners from 30 countries will take part at this year’s Mobile Premier Awards on February 27th.  You will have a rare chance to meet developers from all over the world competing for the best app of the year. The competition is the largest open and global cross-platform app competition in the mobile industry, it provides the point of reference for the startup and developer community during Mobile World Congress. Why attend?
  • Discover up and coming apps from all over the world
  • Learn how the app business ticks by watching our international jury of experts analyzing the apps live on stage
  • Profit from great networking opportunities  with an audience made up of developers, industry experts, investors”
• Time: 4:00-8:00pm
  
• Location: SALA APOLO, C/ Nou de la Rambla 113, 08004 Barcelona (a jewel of the classic dance hall design!)
• RSVP: Sign up here.
  
• Cost: Free! Registration required.

Mobile Marketing Mixer // During Mobile World Congress

• About: “Join us for the Mobile Marketing Mixer powered by Smaato and sponsored by Adfonic, Celtra, Mobile Marketing Magazine and Poynt.  Come out and start Mobile World Congress with the first night out in a proper way!  Join us at the lovely and legendary Incognito Bar in Barcelona – we will have great drinks, open bar and the most important thing – fun people like you the whole night long!”
• Time: 6:30-11:00pm
  
• Location: Incognito Bar, Calle Fusina 6, 08003 Barcelona, Spain
• RSVP: Required here.
  
• Cost: Free
  

Networking By Moonlight

• About: “New this year! Join the GSMA for casual “Networking by Moonlight” events at the Magic Fountain.  Included in all passes at no additional cost, these events provide attendees the opportunity to network and enjoy drinks & light bites before their evening plans. In addition to the spectacular fountain display, entertainments will include music and a stunning aerial dance performance taking place right over the audience.  Whether you stop by for a few moments before leaving the venue or stay until your dinner plans begin, don’t miss this fun opportunity to network with fellow attendees! More details coming soon.”
• Time: TBA
  
• Location: TBA
  
• RSVP: TBA
  
• Cost: Free for MWC pass holders.

Tuesday, 28 February, 2012:

GoMo News Blender

• About: “Velti is the headline sponsor of The GoMo News Blender February 28th 2012 at Mobile World Congress.  Diffusion PR will sponsor the cocktails and the event will be a full on get down and excited about mobile marketing event.  If you are in mobile, keep your tie on; get your business cards out and make sure you do some great business!  We look forward to welcoming you to our open bar!  We start at 6pm local time!”
• Time:  6:00-11:00pm
  
• Location: Marmalade Bar Barcelona, Riera Alta 4-6, 08001 Barcelona Barcelona, Spain
• RSVP: Register here.
  
• Cost: Free
  

Wednesday, 29 February, 2012:

WipJam Party

• About: “We’re holding another one of our famous parties in a great new venue on the Wednesday night of MWC. Be sure to register now to get on the list — you won’t want to miss out on the great crowd and networking, free food and drinks, and of course, JAMEOKE. And this year the WIP party meets the Android Barcelona User Group!  One more year Mobile World Congress is coming and Android Barcelona User Group is ready for the Android party. This year inside the WIP party, join the Android corner to meet  all the major players of the Android ecosystem as well local developers.”
• Time: 7:00-10:00pm
  
• Location: Museu del Rock, 4th floor, Arenas de Barcelona (the big round building across the Plaza from MWC), Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 373-385, local PC2 CP08015 Barcelona
• RSVP: Register here.
  
• Cost: Free. Registration required.
  

Swedish Beers Party

• About: “Like our previous events, this is a relaxed evening, no formalities, no presentations, no business cards thrust in your face as soon as you arrive. Just come with an open mind, be prepared to see friends old and new, talk nonsense, enjoy a drink or five and have yourself a good time. Oh, and leave the ties, the corporate personas and the sales spiel at the door please. The Swedish Beers crew will be on hand – Helen, Jenny, Gabriel, Shafiq, Cat, Sarah, Russell – and the friendliest bar staff in town are all waiting to welcome you.It is likely to get a bit busy at times. But don’t worry, people will be coming in and out all evening. That’s kind of the point as we know there’s always a lot going on and you might want to check out more than one party. If it’s very busy, there’s no need to queue to get in. Just check out one of the other bars nearby and come back a little later when it’s a bit less frantic.”
  
• Time: 7:00pm-2:00am
  
• Location: Dos Trece, 40 Carrer Carme, Barcelona, Spain
• RSVP: No need to RSVP unless you want to. There’s no guest list, no tickets and there’s no guaranteed entry. Just come and go as you please.
  
• Cost: Free
  

Thursday 1 March, 2012:

MLove Mobile World Congress 2012

• About: “You are invited to the second MLOVE @ MWC the final after work party!  So let’s paint the town RED and maybe even dance the night away, please check-in to reserve your space in the cool Incognito club in the hip El Born neighborhood.  SURPRISE:  We are preparing a launch of a new service together with TREND ONE that night – please stay tuned.  SPONSORED by Mobile Marketing Magazine & TrendOne.  To become a sponsor for this exclusive party event, feel free to contact: sponsor@mlove.com.”
• Time: 6:30pm – 2:00am
  
• Location: Incognito Cocktail Bar, Calle Fusina 6, 08003 Barcelona, Spain
• RSVP: On Facebook.
  
• Cost: Free
  

• A typical US mobile device contains 18 apps?
• 10% of adult cell phone users have downloaded an app within thepast week, 20% of those under age 30?
• 8 in 10 Americans own two or more mobile devices?
• Mobile advertising will cross the $1B mark in 2011 on its way to $2.5B in 2014s?

With staggering stats like that, it should come as no surprise that the App Economy is changing the world. Come to APPNATION III November 30-December 1, 2011 at the San Francisco Design Center in San Francisco and find out what’s next and how you can profit from this burgeoning marketplace.  Socialize Mobilize is a media sponsor of APPNATION again this year, and you’ll save 30% off registration when you use the code “SOCIALIZEMOBILIZE”

This year’s speakers include:

• Anna Bagger, GM Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, IAB
• Cathy Edwards, Co-Founder and CTO, Chomp
• Kara Nortman, GM, UrbanSpoon

The agenda is full of good sessions including:

• How Do We Grow the App Economy? What’s Working and What’s Next?
• App Marketing Do’s and Dont’s
• The Rising Influence of Search in App Discoverability
• Platform WarsCross-App / In-App Advertising Best Practices
• Free, Freemium or Paid? How Do You Value Your App And (What) Should You
• Charge For It?
• Tablet-based Advertising: Real-world Case Studies And Emerging Best Practices
• And  more…

At APPNATION III you can also attend:

• Boot Camp: A kick-butt workshop series for Facebook, Verizon, and Android developers
• AppCircus Hackathon: Where developers pitch on stage in front of an international jury, formed by industry experts, and an opportunity to be nominated for the Mobile Premiere Awards 2012
• Isobar Create 32 NFC Hackathon: Build Something Epic. Watch (or take part) as developers develop, simulate and test apps for the NFC chip.

APPNATION is the first conference to focus 100% on the business of apps and their transformative impact on consumers and enterprise technology, devices, commerce, media and social interaction. Register here.

First up… Mark Zuckerberg.

• 350,000,000 people monthly are touching Facebook’s mobile apps. Facebook is pushing on mobile and thinks it’s going to be a big opportunity for developers.
• On mobile apps, social infrastructure has been missing. The app store model is a good way to get distribution, but developing your apps so that they’re fundamentally social will also give you better distribution through the social graph.
• The vision for Facebook’s mobile apps. Facebook thinks that all apps will eventually become social. Mark says he wants Facebook to be on every phone and as deeply integrated into many devices as possible.
• Apps need to be able to work everywhere. Facebook is investing in web technologies in HTML5 and Javascript so that your apps can work many places.
• It’s not just about a web platform that works across devices, in any of the places where Facebook can link to native apps – iphone, ipad, android apps, they support native development as well.  Facebook is investing in both web and native.
• Facebook is sending millions of clicks to developers that are working with them on v1 and v2 of these mobile releases.

Luke Shepard, Mobile Platform Engineer, is going to give a technical talk next…

• Mobile users are twice as engaged on Facebook as other users.
• We have a large desktop ecosystem launched 4.5 years ago. We have many multimillion dollar companies built on that from scratch.
• These companies built themselves on the social graph, and this is great, but until now, mobile companies haven’t been able to do this.
• Social apps need to be cross platform, and users need to be able to communicate with friends – regardless of what platform they’re on – iphone, android, etc.
• Luke is going over the three ways you can improve viral growth in mobile development:
•  “Requests” dialog, which has been launched on mobile. It works in any native apps as well as mobile web apps…. This is the social loop. You send a request, a user requests it and ends up in your app.
• They also introduced a “News Feed” dialog. This allows users to add comments, and personal insight into your app: Posting, view on wall, view on newsfeed….Facebook filters this so that this only works if you’ve configured your app to work on mobile.
• “Open Graph” stories from the web will turn up on mobile and mobile will turn up on web. They’ll turn up wherever your app is configured to work.
• Developer’s apps are now integrated into the Facebook experience in the form of “Bookmarks”.  Your apps are now integrated into the experience.
• “Payments” is another pain point for developers. Mobile web payments can happen via Visa and Paypal.
• Facebook is encouraging developers to “build Social from the ground up” Users now authenticate with Facebook before they use your app, so that there’s no install process, no bouncing back and forth to Facebook.
• Social apps should work everywhere…  Today, it’s expensive to make tons of different apps on different platforms. Facebook believes that you can have a unified code base by putting everything on the web – Javascript, CSS, HTML5… Facebook believes that in the future, the biggest businesses will be build on this seamless web technology.

Matt Kelly and Ragu (sp) are going through a code walkthrough. They’re going to build a social app from scratch in 10 minutes…

• Go to developers.facebook.com/apps… Now there’s additional checkbox so that you can add your web apps
• There’s a thing called authenticated referrals that allows the user to be immediately authenticated when they hit your app.
• They’re starting by building a simple HTML5 page… I’ll spare you the details… They’re opening the simulator, and building away…
• And, they built an app that allows you to find people with similar Facebook Likes. Fun app and very easy to build.

After lunch now…

The Senior Partner Manager for Wooga is now up.

• Founded in 2009.
• They’ve got 6 games out there.
• He’s talking about the time line of their launch for their game Magic Land: May 11- October 11, which uses HTML5
• For the first release they use “News Feed” and “Requests” from Facebook inside their app
•  To set up this game, they used Amazon Web Servies and Scalarium. Their back-end stack is HAProxy, nodeJS, and riak
• Performance:
• Canvas: Their bet on the future
• Benchmark for your game’s specific needs – don’t rely on others’ benchmarks
• Buffer, don’t update: optimize drawing operations (dirty rectangles)
• Enforce native scale.
• Loading and Caching
• Save game state in local storage, synce with server for persistent game
• Throttle client-server requests to reduce network and server load
• Combine images into sprites
• Combine and minimize style sheets and scripts
• Use HTTP caching aggressively, but rename files when the content changes, so caching doesn’t get in the way.
• Prioritize list of files inside the Cache Manifest
• No dynamic pages – all files are delivered from the CDN
• Three sets of assets for different resolutions
• Summary of his thoughts:
• HTML5 on mobile is still young and documentation is sparse
• He thinks iOS WebKit is better than Android WebKit in features, tooling and performance
• Interaction design for touch devices is a challenge
• He gives us a glimpse into what’s coming in the future:
• Gameplay connections between Flash and HTML version
• Native Wrapper: getting onto the App Store
• More social features
• Pirates!

A couple of other developers came up to share technical best practice…

Dave Johonson from PhoneGap is now up. They were just acquired by Adobe.  Visit: http://github.com/callback/

• Here’s how PhoneGap works:

• Embed a chromeless browser in a native app
• create a “bridge” between the browser and the antive code
• write a web app
• package the web app with the native code and deploy

• They support iOS, Android, BlackBerry, webOS, Symbian, Windows Phone, and Samsung Bada
• MIT/BSD/APACHE: Originally it was under MIT/BSD license… Now they’re moving to APACHE 2.0 license
• They have a large community – “better than a technicolor wolf with Eagle’s wings” (he’s showing a great graphic here)
• PhoneGap is doing very well with mindshare – largely because of the open sourced nature of the project
• Thousands of apps have been build with PhoneGap… 15-20,000 apps in the Apple App store made with PhoneGap
• Contributors to PhoneGap include: Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, RIM, HP/Palm
• Users of PhoneGap include: Alcatel-Lucent, Zynga, Microsoft, Travelocity, Vodafone, Wikipedia and others
• When you’re designing your app, think about mobile first… Look at use cases for mobile and don’t just tack on a mobile strategy at the end of your web strategy
• HTML(5) can be wrapped in PhoneGap to yield native apps
• He’s going over a lot of technical demos..
• @davejohnson @phonegap

And, we’re back from the break… If you’re interested in the hack day, you can join this group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/249308791784214/

Now up… Jonathan Matus, Manager Mobile Platform Product Marketing  and Christine Abernathy, Partner Engineer to talk about the Mobile Open Graph…

• Jonathan is talking about Nike Plus… He tried running once, and he is recalling how several years ago, he hit the 100 mile marker using Nike Plus, and he wanted to share this achievement through Facebook. At the time, he had to cut and paste an icon from Nike’s website, save it and then upload it to Facebook. These days, if Nike were to enable Open Graph, he could have just added the picture automagically to Facebook.
• Jonathan is also describing how music is shared… It’s not seamless. The Open Graph can help with this.
• There’s a focus on actions and objects in Open Graph… Developers should think through which objects users need on the go.
• He’s going through some examples of different apps that are using the Open Graph…
• There’s a book recommending app… Kobo (iOS). You can list your favorite books, and highlight your favorite quotes from a book and share those with your friends using Open Graph
• Another example app is Color – the way that they’re sharing pictures and videos  leverages Open Graph.

• When you use color, you log in with Facebook, so all of your Facebook pictures are shown to you in a compelling way
• You can take a picture, and because it’s connected to Open Graph, your pictures show in your Facebook Ticker.
• Open Graph also allows you to share common experiences more easily
• You can also Host… The Facebook Ticker will show your friends where you are, and allow you to broadcast live video streams of events to your friends.

• How should you use Open Graph?
• Christine is demoing a gifting app…

We’re moving towards the very technical part of the agenda, so I’m jumping out…

Telesocial’s new platform enables developers to add mobile voice calls, messages, and conferencing features into applications enables users can communicate with each other over mobile voice networks, without exchanging phone numbers:

“Telesocial’s API, combined with an inter-operator cloud directory, allows web users to click-to-call directly to a mobile phone from within a social game or app, without having to know the receivers’ phone number.  Telesocial’s API is transforming the social web into an integrated directory and perhaps the ultimate phone book.”

Imagine playing social games online and interacting with your in-game friends voice to voice, without the pressure of sharing your mobile phone number… Imagine screening potential dates on a dating site voice to voice without giving up your phone number… Imagine being able to initiate a mobile to mobile group phone call with  all of your Fantasy Football friends during the game, by just clicking a web link in your SMS or email…  Imagine seamless mobile-to-mobile calling between Facebook Friends and Fans and Twitter Followers, all without exchanging numbers…  All this and more can be made possible through Telesocial’s platform.

Telesocial makes it possible to initiate mobile-to-mobile calls inside of an app, without sharing your phone number, so you can communicate safely and securely.  Developers have the option to notify users of a phone conversation by ringing their mobile, sending them a link via sms or email, or by providing an in-app notification.  Additionally, Telesocial provides data on the API usage, giving developers the ability to directly measure the impact, click by click.

“The Telesocial API allows developers to add innovative voice functionalities to their games and applications,” says Eric Stone, CTO and co-founder of Telesocial. “Our API translates user IDs into phone numbers, creating a phone-numberless voice service that connects people anytime, anywhere on their favorite device, the mobile phone.”

Unlike existing VoIP solutions, with Telesocial, users don’t need to download a separate voice client to participate in a call or be logged into a particular social platform, game or app to receive a call or voice message.  Telesocial’s service is enabled by strategic relationships with telecoms providers.  Telesocial calls leverage the existing mobile-phone infrastructure, without exposing users’ phone numbers or compromising voice quality as VoIP often does.  Plus, it’s much easier to keep track of mobile voice minutes used with Telesocial than it is to keep track of how many megabites are consumed in a mobile VoIP conversation.

One of the coolest features of Telesocial’s platform is the ability to set-up Talkspaces™, which are always-on mobile to mobile conference lines centered around a specific topic or clique.  With Telesocial’s new Click-Me-In functionality, users can click a link to be connected to a mobile Talkspace™ anytime, anywhere–without knowing other participants’ mobile telephone numbers – as long as they’re connected via a supported social network. When a new Talkspace is created, participants are invited to join via a web link that can be embedded in email or SMS.  When you create a Talkspace™ you’ll be alerted as soon as somebody joins that space, making it easy to join a group phone conversation.  You could, for example, set up a Talkspace that allows anyone in your family to initiate a group call instantly, no phone numbers required – perfect for making big announcements, sending birthday best wishes, or talking during a family emergency… You could also set-up a Team Talkspace for your closest colleagues, or use a Talkspace to initiate a focus group for a subset of your customers.

“President Obama has hosted several town hall meetings on various social networks,” says Bill Waytena, CEO and co-founder of Telesocial. “While his town hall meetings have reached tens of thousands of people via micro-blogging and fan page posts, we are confident that voice remains the most expressive and compelling way to connect with others.  Imagine at the next online town hall meeting the President gets on the phone …what would you ask him then?”

I am currently at GDC Online in Austin, Texas talking with games developers about how they can benefit from Telesocial’s new API.  Recalling my recent post on the Gamification of apps, one of the more interesting things I’ve realized about Telesocial is how easily the API can be used to drive gaming mechanics inside apps… Take, for example, the “Appointment” dynamic…. Developers can use Telesocial’s API to send voice mail messages with special instructions or secret missions to users, incenting/reminding users to come back into a game at a particular time. Games developers can offer benefits to active users to pull inactive players back into games.  Likewise, communal discovery and shared experiences can be made more intimate through the use of voice to voice communication in game as well as asynchronously.  Additionally, voice to voice interaction can be used to re-enforce social status in apps by giving users special status/benefits for making calls.

If you’d like to use the free Telesocial API, check it out here: http://dev.telesocial.com.  For more information on Telesocial, visit: http://www.telesocial.com.
I’d love to know what you think about Telesocial’s platform, and/or if you use it to make cool apps.  Ping me if you’d like to learn more or if you would like to meet the Telesocial team.

For starters, it it ingests your communication logs, address book, emails, etc. and builds a screen of tiles featuring the top 30 people that you contact most, a feature they call your “pop faves”.  To create your pop faves, Poptuit leaves your data on the phone but it uses an algorithm to look at recency, frequency of conversations. This algorithm also processes the duration of your call, conversational reciprocity, and more.  You can re-order the tiles as you see fit.  The app also lets you know which of your friends are also on Poptuit (green star = on Poptuit and available to talk, red star= on Poptuit but not free to talk).

It does a similar thing with the merchants you contact most. Apptera has a background in mobile yellow pages, so they’re able to seamlessly match the phone numbers you call with the merchant information in their database to assemble a list of the top 30 merchants you contact most.  They have partnerships with AT&T Interactive, CityGrid, Yelp to pull in information about companies: pictures, store hours, etc.  Today, phone calls and emails connect you to companies through Poptuit. Vogel tells me in the future, they’ll likely help you connect to Merchants through “Likes” and check-ins on social networks as well.

Another cool Poptuit feature is location sharing.  Much like Glympse and the new “Family and Friends” app Apple announced today for the iPhone, with Poptuit, you can share your location with friends/family for a specific period of time.  If your friend is not on Poptuit, (s)he’ll get a text message that you’re trying to share your location. These features are all opt in, and you can control how long you want to share your location for with a particular contact.

As you can see below, Poptuit also threads conversations, which makes it easier to track your conversations with friends, regardless of whether on phone, email, or text.

It does a similar thing with your favorite merchants:

I asked Vogel about how Poptuit plans to make money with this app.  He comes from an advertising background and feels that personal/ smarter yellow pages will be valuable real estate. Though Poptuit doesn’t want to be a conventional deals app. It aims to be a personal network app connecting users’s favorite people and places. Their plan is to allow merchants to target users. They want to catch people at the golden moment when they’re interested in getting something.  As opposed to spamming people with irrelevant coupons (what man doesn’t love getting all of those Brazilian waxing coupons from Groupon?!), Poptuit wants to connect users with merchants in a more meaningful, helpful, non spammy way.  Ultimately, Vogel says they’ll monetize in several ways:

• A featured merchant slot (though they don’t just yet).
• Ingesting 3^rd party ads from companies like Groupon, Living Social, Att Interactive, Citysearch, Valpack, etc. and targeting those ads towards a user’s favorite places
• Enabeling merchants to use Poptuit as a platform – i.e. CRM in a box.

The only way Poptuit will be able to make this business model work is by attracting a ton of users, and ensuring that ads and targeting enhance, rather than detract from the user experience. Vogel is aware of this, and he’s confident that Poptuit will do just that.  Poptuit is currently in private beta with several hundred users, and Vogel says that beta customers are using it to replace sevearal other apps, on average using it 10 times a day. They hope to be out of beta and launch live to the public in Q4.  In the meantime, if you’d like to try it, you can sign up for a free beta account using the word “pop” here.

Here’s how Amazon’s Kindle Fire stacks up to its competitors from a hardware perspective:

Amazon already sells tons of digital books, movies, music, and more, and since the Kindle Fire is so cheap, there’s only a few plausible reasons why someone wouldn’t want to buy one:

• For users that own an existing Kindle, the Kindle Fire screen may not appeal. The screen looks good, but it’ll be harder to read in bright sunlight than the existing black and white Kindle.
• Battery life With the old Kindle, a single charge lasts up to two months with wireless off.  In contrast, the Amazon Kindle Fire only gets up to 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, with wireless off.
• Power tablet users including existing iPad and Galaxy Tab 10.1 users probably won’t be tempted to buy a Kindle Fire.  Either they’ve spent a ton of money on a high end piece of hardware that does similar things and lasts a bit longer than the Kindle Fire, or they may be turned off by the modified version of Android offered on the Kindle Fire.

Overall, the Amazon Kindle Fire looks like a great piece of hardware, and the Amazon Appstore is a great place to get digital content…. So, at $199, it’ll be hard for many tech-savvy consumers to resist.

In 2009 I wrote an article on how virality is broken in mobile and what to do to fix it.  A lot has changed since then including that creating virality in mobile is getting easier. As more people adopt iOS, Android, and HTML5, fragmentation appears to be less of a problem (although it still is one).  It’s getting easier to find ways to create virality in apps, and developers are getting more and more creative in the ways that they engage users – particularly through the introduction of gaming mechanics.

There are many dynamics that drive game play, but these four appear to me to be the most effective in non-gaming settings, like mobile:

1. Appointment: This is enticing someone to be at a specific place at a specific time.  All of the “ville” games by Zynga do this… Farmville, Cityville, etc.  They require users to complete a certain task at a specific time or risk losing something (i.e. water your plants now, or they’ll wilt).  Groupon Now is also a good example of this… Users must act quickly, or they’ll lose out on an opportunity. Scarcity is a great motivator. This works not only with games and offers, but also with things like medical apps. I’ve heard of several apps that are either out there or coming soon that remind users to take their medicine on time, or test their blood sugar on time (for diabetics), using this mechanic.

2. Influence and status: As much I wish we weren’t, people are inherently status driven. This gaming mechanic works by giving users some level of status to aspire to. FourSquare’s badging concept is a good example of this dynamic… If you visit a specific venue more than anyone else, you become “The Mayor,” which encourages repeat check-ins, and users are encouraged to participate in quests that can earn them other status badges.  Retailers do this too… Sephora, for example, offers VIB (Very Important Beauty Insider) status to shoppers that spend more than $350 in a calendar year, which entitles those users to perks like product discounts, early access to new products, invitations to exclusive shopping events, and more.  Users should be able to earn status by buying it, or investing enough time in a game that they earn it (while the developer earns user loyalty and revenue from advertising).

3. Progression: People are motivated by the desire to move ahead. This gaming mechanic seeks to motivate to get through a certain number of steps.  Companies like LinkedIn use this mechanic to encourage people to complete their online profile by showing an incomplete status bar.  The concept of “leveling up” in a game is standard practice… From the early days of Super Mario Brothers to the more modern MMPOGs like World of Warcraft, giving people the feeling that they’ve progressed/ achieved something gives them a reason to come back. These “epic” or “achievement” moments encourage users to keep coming back

4. Communal discovery/ shared experience: Most people are generally motivated by shared social experiences. Giving people a common goal and asking them to work together to achieve it often brings that group closer together.  Similarly when users see their friends doing something that looks like fun, they want to try it.  #4 can be used really effectively with #2 (Influence and Status) to drive users in social groups towards a desired action like regular visits, buying virtual goods, etc.

Seth Priebatsch did a great presentation touching on all of these mechanics at TED last year, but there are a ton of others out there that can successfully be incorporated into mobile.  Companies like OpenFeint (Gree), Beintoo, Kiip, and others are trying to drive these and other gaming mechanics into mobile experiences. So, while “gaming mechanics” and “gamification” have become THE buzzword bingo words of 2011, in talking to many of the mobile app developers i know, it appears to be for good reason. These techniques are working to successfully drive repeat and increased usage of mobile apps for many developers.

Karen Webster, CEO of Market Platform Dynamics is the moderator. Panelists are:

• Brad Greene – Senior Business Leader, Visa
• Chris Hylen – VP and GM, Payment Solutions Division, Intuit
• Dave Talich – VP, Global Product Management, Verifone
• Laura Chambers – Senior Director of PayPal Mobile, Paypal

Brad Green from Visa thinks that 2012 will be a “transitional year for mobile payments where we move from pilots and trials to real, full blown deployments, but we still think it’s going to take several years before we see critical mass adoption.” The key to getting mass adoption is going to be getting retailers on board. For merchants who upgrade their infrastructure to enable mobile payments, Visa is going to waive the PCI compliance audit for retailers. This is an expensive and time consuming process, so this will be a great incentive for merchants to upgrade. In 2015, for merchants who don’t upgrade to mobile payments, they’re going to do a liability shift, where merchants will hold the liability from the bank to the merchant… Another “strong incentive” to get merchants to upgrade…The crowd laughs.

Chris Hylen from Intuit feels “Incredibly good in its ability to lead in payments.”

Laura Chambers from Paypal says that Paypal started re-investing in mobile about 5 years ago.  Paypal says that offline merchants have approached them to help them get into mobile payments.

Dave Talach from VeriFone says that the lack of expectation at the brick and mortar stores for mobile vouchers has fueled the lack of consumer and retailer adoption. Verifone has historically provided many point of sale devices, but it’s a “green field” for mobile payments. The company that builds relationships with retailers is going to succeed. Where you’ve come from isn’t exactly where you’re going. Talach believes that with NFC – A certain amount of experimentation is useful. “Success lies with simplicity…I personally believe in NFC because I believe that it’s the ultimate personal technology.”

Chambers Paypal will do $3B in payments this year, and not a penny of it will be NFC. “I would agree NFC is a great techology… I think it’s going to take a while…. We’re talking about a 3-5 year window.”  There’s a lot that needs to get sorted out around who is owed what when NFC is used, and it’s a lot to work out. “Merchants won’t invest until they see it going to happen.” “At paypal, we’re not going to wait 3-5 years,” which is why Paypal announced some other mobile payments

Greene says Visa is going to be supporting Google Wallet and ISIS.

When asked about what they think of Google Wallet… There was no consensus… Hylen thinks that it’s Google’s “Plan B” to Google Checkout. Talach thinks Google Wallet is going to be a catalyst. Chambers feels that it is “narrow.”

Hylen says that Intuit is placing a series of bets, of which NFC is one. They’re focused on embracing the current enviroment and “being on the forefront of change.”

Greene from Visa says they’re focusing on “Trust, reliability, ubiquity, and merchant acceptance” while layering on new features/value adds, and he’s confident consumers will adopt it. Visa’s existing business mitigates this. If things move quickly, great. If not, they’re still operating a thriving business.

VeriFone is implementing NFC and Google Wallet initiatives. NFC is nice because it leverages proven security standards that the big card processors have used in the past. Most if VeriFone’s IP is in security systems. They ship 3.5 million devices a year, and their goal is to make sure fraud is limited.They want mobile interaction to blossom.

Chambers views the biggest challenge in mobile payments is “the hammer syndrome…When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Paypal is trying to build a system that is broad but flexible. Pushing something new onto merchants won’t work, so Paypal is trying to introduce changes that appeal to merchant’s existing behavior, while bringing value to merchants and consumers.

There’s a question from the audience… “How do you view peer to peer payments?”  Chambers says that Paypal is finding that people are using peer to peer transactions as a way to substitute cash. It’s a big market. Mobile is a great use case for peer to peer. Hylen agrees with Chambers. Peer to peer is important. “To ignore it would be a big mistake… And, it’s growing.”

Second question from the audience… “How are you going to transition the consumer. It’s got to be about adoption from the consumers, not pushing it.” Chambers says it’s “not about just payments.” Paypal is thinking more about the end-to-end solution. Paypal finds that for consumers the digitalization of coupons is important, but people will need a reason to change their behavior.  Talach believes that paper receipts and coupons is a problem. He wants to see consistency to the consumer. One company may be a single tap, one double… Confusion is a bad thing.” Green says “In this country, payments work pretty darn well.” To get into a new value proposition, you need to add value. That’s why Visa is also looking at emerging countries to add value to unbanked consumers to “provide for the first time basic financial services to people have been previously restricted to cash.”

Another question from the audience…In other countries, mobile payments have taken off, but we don’t seem to be pushing consumers like they are in Asia. Chambers says that Asia, Australia, and Europe are growing strong, but there are also a lot of people doing mobile shopping in America. “I wouldn’t underestimate the appetite of Americans to do mobile shopping.”  Innovative merchants know that people are price comparing and buying on mobile in bricks and mortar stores. Talach says that US is under pressure to go beyond payments – to add value. The international community enables mobile payments, but the pressure is on for US entrepreneurs to

Final question from Webster…Is 2012 going to be THE year of mobile payments?

Chambers says no. 2012 is going to be an important year in the growth curve of mobile payments. We’ll see experimentation, pilots, etc. In 2013 and 2014, we’ll see mainstream adoption.

Green believes its more true than false, but we’ll still be a few years off from ubiquity.

Hylen says it’s false. The 2010s are the years of mobile payments. “We’re not quite there yet. It’s all about innovation, but it’s going to happen over many years.”

Talach says, “Success lays in years of hard work, not in a year of magical work.”

Today Movile, the leading mobile services company, announces Zeewe 2.0 (go.zeewe.com), the new version of the pioneering HTML5 app store and directory for smartphones and tablets. Zeewe has more than 1.5 million users worldwide, and these users typically use at least 5 web apps that they discover on Zeewe.  Movile also announces the launch of several exciting new features for Zeewe including off-line mode which enables users to use the Zeewe store and select apps without an internet connection on iOS devices. Beside this, Zeewe also now offers developers a payment API that enables them to charge for Apps and transact in-app purchases.

In the ten months since Zeewe launched, a robust community of users and developers has embraced it as the best place to discover, share and recommend cross-platform, HTML5-based mobile apps including games, music and videos, books, entertainment, business and more.

Eduardo Lins Henrique, Head of Innovations at Movile and Zeewe Product Lead describes Zeewe’s viral growth:
Since Zeewe’s launch last December, many well-respected companies have developed cross-platform HTML5 web apps including: The Financial Times (ft.com), Google (plus.google.com and Chrome Store), Pandora (Pandora.com), and others. Many more companies, including Facebook, are rumored to be next. Movile is accelerating its leadership position in Smartphone, Tablet and converged web applications by investing in Zeewe and other products that leverage HTML5.

Zeewe 2.0 uses HTML5 offline resources based on cache features to enable a seamless offline HTML5 app browsing experience, initially for iOS Safari users with support for Android users coming soon. Zeewe also now supports HTML5 apps designed to work offline like Block Dream, Blast Effect, Checklist, Card Flip. Movile expects this enhancement will significantly improve the Zeewe experience. Henrique continues:

Zeewe users will interact more with our application because the time to load each page in the system is 10 times faster than before. In user tests, this dramatically improved the Zeewe navigation experience and click through rates.

Dario Sciacca, DS Effect´s CEO says,

This announcement is very important for the HTML5 market. We tried Zeewe 2.0 and we agreed that the user experience is much better than the first iteration. About billing, all developers are interested in monetizing their business. At DS Effect, this is not different and we will certainly use Zeewe payments APIs soon.

Zeewe 2.0’s new billing APIs, which launched today using Movile´s own connections and Zong, a PayPal service and a leading provider of payments through mobile carrier billing. It is initially available in the United States of America and Brazil and will roll out to additional countries including the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, India, and Mexico in the coming months.

According to PayPal’s Senior Director of Mobile Stephane Kasriel, “It´s fantastic to have an App Store based on HTML5 technology in Zong´s portfolio. HTML5 web apps are a growing trend amongst mobile developers and they are being widely adopted in the market. We’re excited to to be Zeewe’s exclusive in-app payments solution.”

Movile believes that the future of mobile apps is based on the open web standards of HTML5 and driving cross-platform mobile experiences that leverage the social graph. Zeewe is boosting the discovery and usage of HTML5 apps and enabling mobile users to share and pay for experiences seamlessly across OSes.

Zeewe by Movile is a cross-platform mobile app store based on the open web standards of HTML5. Zeewe is the best place to discover and share cross-platform mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. Any mobile user with an HTML5-enabled browser can visit: http://zeewe.com and start using free apps in seconds, without registration or credit cards.
Zeewe’s “FriendZee” feature provides push notifications and social discovery through Facebook and Twitter, so users can easily see which apps their friends are using and try them out.
Zeewe launched in late December, 2010 and just achieved 1.5 million users worldwide, with most users in the US, UK, Mexico, China, and Brazil. Zeewe was developed by Movile, the leading mobile services company based in Latin America.
Zeewe is simple to use:

• Visit Zeewe.com from an iOS or Android device, and discover tons of free apps.
• Click on an app that sounds interesting and see ratings and comments from other users.
• Download apps in seconds.
• Share apps with friends, and invite them to play games with you.