I’ll be moderating two panels on Monday, February 15, 2009 in the “Mobile Applications – Innovation Vs Fragmentation” stream.  A few of the details are still being confirmed, but here’s what’s been announced so far…

The first panel is from 11:00 AM to 11:45 AM in Hall 5 and is “Attracting investment to the apps market – Identifying the key success factors” The panelists will include:

• Rich Wong, Partner, Accel Partners
• Bob Borchers, Partner, Opus Capital
• David Weiden, Partner, Khosla Ventures

The second panel is from 11.45 – 12.30 in Hall 5 and is on “Unlocking application revenue – billing and payments”.  The panelists will include:

• Yves Tyrode, Executive Vice President, Technocentre, Orange
• Marco Argenti, Vice President, Media & Games, Nokia
• Eric Duprat, General Manager, Mobile, PayPal
• Tyler Lessard, Vice President of Global Alliances & Developer Relations, RIM

I’ll update this post as/when new details are announced.

I’m also looking forward to attending the WIPJAM at Mobile World Congress on Thursday, February 18th, where I’ll be participating in the “Features and Enhancements for Addictive Applications” deep dive discussion.  Unfortunately, the JAM filled up very quickly – in great part because the 200 lucky attendees will receive a free pass to Mobile World Congress thanks to Caroline Lewko’s good planning.  If you’re not registered but eager to get in, cozy up to @wipjam on Twitter and request a slot on the wait list.

You can learn about the Official Mobile World Congress events by visiting the official agenda.  To learn about some of the official and un-official networking events and Parties at Mobile World Congress this year, check out my list.

If there are questions you’d like to hear me to ask any of the panelists, please post your suggestions in the form of a comment below, or ping me (@lisawhelan) on twitter.

It was the 25^th and final DEMO conference produced by Chris Shipley, but it was the first of many to come for co-producer Matt Marshall, editor and CEO of VentureBeat. The change in leadership brought with it format changes – including the addition of 90-second “AlphaPitches” by early-stage start-ups, which complimented the longer, 6-minute pitches from more mature start-ups.

Over the past 13 years, many technology start-ups have debuted products at DEMO including Palm, Inc., VMware, WebEx, iRobot, Salesforce.com, Danger Research, Adobe Systems, SixApart, and others. DEMO alumni from 15 such companies were honored at DEMOfall 09 with “Lifetime Achievement Awards,” and the conference was buzzing until the end with guest appearances.

Expectations for new products at DEMOfall 09 were high, and the event didn’t disappoint. Of the nearly sixty companies that debuted new products, seven received “DEMO God” awards. Five were traditional start-ups, and two were “AlphaPitch,” early stage start-ups:

• Emo Labs: Edge Motion speaker technology with ‘zero-footprint’.
• Intelius’ DateCheck: iPhone app that lets you screen your date – do a criminal check and more – just with a phone number.
• Zorap: Live video chat with drag and drop sharing of photos, music, etc.
• Hevva’s Local Dirt: a buyers and sellers marketplace that allows you to find local food vendors
• Twirl TV: A Hulu-esque competitor. See what TV your friends have watched and get recommendations on what to watch next online!
• Pinyadda (AlphaPitch): “personalized and social content aggregation”
• ShareGrove (AlphaPitch): Real-time real conversations with your real friends over the web. Enjoy seamless inline sharing of personal and media content.

Two companies also received “People’s Choice” awards, including up to $500,000 in free advertising from IDG:

• Liaise, Inc. which “automates the capture and management of tasks, issues, dates and priorities buried inside emails” was voted “Best Business Product”
• Emo Labs (mentioned above).

Surprisingly, only one of the winners of any of the formal awards was a mobile app. – DateCheck From Intelius.  Though a handful of interesting mobile start-ups pitched including:

• waze, crowd-sourced maps and traffic navigation
• OrganIP from Digitrad Communications, which includes a mobile address book application that can initiate a VOIP call online with your ‘friends’ on social networks – even when you don’t have their mobile number.
• CallSpark!, which is focused on improving your mobile dialling experience. CallSpark! vastly improves your address book, so, if you don’t have a number for someone listed in your phone book, CallSpark! searches across the Internet to find matches for your address book search from the Internet (Whitepages, Gmail, Salesforce.com, Facebook, twitter, and more).
• rseven, which keeps a time line of your mobile activity.

If you’re a start-up thinking of launching your product at a future DEMO, there’s a lot you can learn from this year’s presenters.  As I watched dozens of companies pitch – some expertly and others somewhat naively – the most effective presentations – the ones with impact – shared the following common characteristics:

• A confident, articulate, and well-practiced presenter.
  • There were a few presenters that ran into technical glitches on stage… I recommend testing everything multiple times before your preso and using your own computer on stage to avoid the risk of encountering changed display settings from previous presenters.
  • If you’re not a native English speaker, don’t be discouraged! Just make sure to practice your pitch repeatedly with a native speaker who can offer feedback and help on your cadence and pronunciation to ensure the crowd will understand you and how great your product is.
• A compelling value proposition that solves a real problem and an end-to-end solution that makes life easier for the user.
• A catchy tagline / “30-second elevator pitch” that articulates product value quickly and effectively and makes people feel like your product is solving a real problem.
  • You should have heard the crowd erupt in laughter and applause when Intelius talked about DateCheck’s “sleaze detector.”)

• Lars Albright, Senior VP of Business Development at Quattro Wireless
• Patrick Mork, VP of Marketing at GetJar
• David Katz, VP of Product at Yahoo! Mobile
• Ali Diab, VP of Product at AdMob
• Andrew Lacy, CEO of Tapulous

I had hoped to live tweet the event, but as is often the case when you get enough mobile geeks in a room, network connectivity wasn’t on my side.   I also discovered that Gravity, while ordinarily a fantastic app, didn’t handle the network connectivity issues well (i.e. it only queued 1 tweet at a time, and not for longer than a minute and a half… Sigh). So, I took notes the good old fashioned way – with a pen and paper – tweeting when technology permitted. Here are the most interesting tidbits from my notes*:

• Andrew Lacy from Tapulous anticipates the in-app advertising opportunity to double and that virtual goods will prove itself soon.
• When asked what platform he’d recommend developers create for, David Katz from Yahoo! Mobile said that Yahoo! tries to remain platform agnostic and that they’re trying not to make big bets on a specific platform. For developers today, Katz sees the biggest opportunity for iPhone and RIM… If developers have easy to create apps, it’s easier to spread themselves across multiple platforms.  However, given development costs, the richer the application, the more necessary it is for developers to place a bet.
• Ali Diab from AdMob encouraged developers to think of mobile phones less as phones and more as computers when they develop.
• Andrew Lacy said that when Tapulous was started, they decided that they wouldn’t build white-label apps for others, despite getting a lot of offers for development work from movie studios.  At the time, he saw movie studios excited to launch their own apps, but he thinks that’s changed a bit.  He’s seeing more movie studios and brands in general that want to integrate promotions for their film or product with existing applications that are successful like Tap Tap Revenge, rather than creating their own apps.
• The panelists were asked how they decide to charge for apps and how they price their apps.
  • Andrew Lacy from Tapulous suggested developers consider the process they used, which is:
    • Launch the app at a specific price point (or free) and see how it performs and go from there
    • Run surveys to see what you can charge for
    • In the future, Tapulous is looking into bringing chargable digital content into their apps.
  • David Katz said that because Yahoo! is a web publisher as well as a mobile publisher, they look at mobile as a way to create loyal users, without looking at how much money mobile is generating.  They don’t charge for their apps right now because they look at mobile more as a way to create engagement with their users and to be on one more platform. If you’re not Yahoo! Mobile, it’s tough to decide if/what to charge and how to make money.  Katz talked about advertising and said, developers that are going to advertise need to decide:
    • What to advertise.
    • How to advertise – i.e. determine how rich the advertising experience will be and what form it will take. (Banner advertising is more valuable on mobile than web).
    • Can the app generate enough traffic to generate meaningful revenue?
• An audience member asked what other forms of monetization developers should consider besides Ads and App store…
  • Andrew Lacy  from Tapulous said that he sees many iPhone apps in the ecosystem suffer 40% churn monthly, so it’s difficult for developers to calculate average cost of a user.  Developer should give users a reason to come back to their apps.  Developers should think of their mobile apps like they’d think of a website and keep up the content… Tapulous aims to “delight people on a daily basis and keep them coming back.”  In terms of alternate revenue sources, Lacy would look at:
    • Subscription content
    • Up-sell opportunities in-app
  • David Katz said he thinks that eventually developers that want to see ongoing success will need to pay an ad network to promote them/their app.
• Patrick Mork from GetJar talked about how the world needs better search, indexing, etc. for mobile apps. The life cycle of apps is shortening.  GetJar is apparently seeing an average lifespan for an app of 3-4 weeks.
• When discussing how app developers can become popular and keep up their growth momentum…
  • Lars Albright from Quattro believes developers already have the ability to use Ad networks to effectively grow their business.
  • Ali Diab said that Apps that are highly ranked stay highly ranked for a long time… He equated it as being a bit like Newton’s First Law: “An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion”
• An audience member asked the panel why SMS, which is one of the most common ways to drive big revenue these days, hadn’t been mentioned.  Ali Diab said, “SMS is like the fax machine. It’ll be gone in 5 years.” At which point, the audience erupted in ‘booos’ of disapproval.  (On a personal note: I see Ali’s point, but I also agree with the audience… Just because SMS isn’t sexy and is old fashioned doesn’t meant that it won’t continue to generate revenue – especially in less sophisticated markets like the third world – and for that matter the US where some of the location based APIs Verizon mentioned at their developer conference last week would operate via SMS.)
• An audience member asked how much of a mobile ad spend developers need to make to see results.
  • Ali Diab started off by joking that by investing ’six figures’ developers would see an uplift.  When the audience gasped, he mentioned that $4-5,000 should generate a ’serious uplift’ over a week or a few days.
  • Lars Albright agreed with Ali Diab, recommending that developers do an ad burst but make sure to reserve enough money to keep up the ads over a sustained period of time.
• Someone in the audience asked if the panel thought that age segmentation would continue across handsets – i.e. iPhone users are younger than RIM who are younger than Nokia.
  • David Katz said he suspects this will change over time and that demographics will equalize across handsets as wider adoption of mobile technologies continue
• Another audience member asked whether the panel thought developers should create native apps or web apps like Palm-Pre.  At that point, someone on the panel joked, “The what?” And, the whole audience erupted in laughter…
  • Patrick Mork says that they’re seeing both types of apps on GetJar.  He said developers will need to make the choice that’s right for them based on their product and service and what the customer expects.

At the end of the session, there were general announcements:

• Dealmaker Media announced a call for mobile start-ups for the Under the Radar conference.
• Someone from a company called ‘Mobicoupons’ is looking to hire Ruby on Rails developers, UI designers, and others.

*I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible in my notes.  If you’re one of the panelists and feel I’ve misrepresented what you said in any way, please accept my apologies and email me so that I can edit this post accordingly.

You can try it for free and get 25 free mintutes of top-up time by filling out a quick survey within the app on Facebook about which Embee features you’d find most appealing.  Inside the Embee Mobile Minute Wallet Facebook app, you can:

• Buy minutes using: Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, “Spare Change” or “Pay by Mobile”
• Earn free minutes by taking quizzes, filling out surveys, etc. (sounds very similar to Peanut Labs‘ approach)

Embee is based in San Francisco, California.  The Embee Mobile Minute Wallet is available for a wide number of pre-paid mobile users, and is apparently coming to more soon.

While I believe that the remainder of 2007 and early 2008 will bring more social networking IPOs than we’ve seen so far (not many), I don’t
believe that Classmates.com will be an accurate indicator of the success of future social networking IPOs.   Even if Classmates.com’s IPO bombs, Facebook, LinkedIn IPO, and Bebo IPO have a strong liklihood of being successful IPOs.  To have a solid IPO, a social networking company will have to do more than just link people socially.  It will need to be a platform for relevancy, discovery, sharing, and search.

When Google IPOed, it was successful, not just because it enabled search, but it provided a platform that wove together search, information, email, and
more with relevant and targeted advertising.  Facebook will succeed with an IPO not because it is a social networking site but because it is a social networking platform that allows 3rd party developers to plug-in and users to benefit.  In other words, it is, in effect, a social media operating system.  LinkedIn and Bebo will have successful IPOs if they continue to grow their user base, expand their platform capabilities, and quickly develop a useful API for 3rd party developers.  However, to be clear, it will take a lot of effort, great skills, good timing, (and, perhaps, a miracle) for either Bebo or LinkedIn to have a more successful IPO than Facebook.

By engaging 3rd party developers so early, Facebook gained a clear lead over the competition, which will be hard for competitors to surpass.  By creating a social networking operating system, which allows entreprenurial developers to plug in, contribute to, and profit from a wider economy, Facebook has peaked the interests of investors – not only as a company in which to invest but as an economy in which to invest.  As I mentioned in my last post,
VCs are expressing a strong interest in the players within the facebook 3rd party developer economy, and is easy to see why.  Facebook is creating a social media operating system that has the potential to revolutionize the web by changing the way people find and interact with content and applications.

Yesterday, Robert Scoble posted an interesting video trilogy on his blog in which he predicts that if they work together, Facebook,  Mahalo, and Techmeme will trounce Google in 4 years by providing superior SEO-free, reduced-noise, social search that does more than Google.  While I’d be seriously surprised if Google didn’t have something up its sleeve to compete with the vision Scoble outlines and I don’t think we’ll see the end of SEO, I do think Scoble makes some good points in his vlogs.  His musings on the topic of social networking, social media, and search highlight a growing interest in social networking as a space and its potential to change the way we surf the net.

There is nothing more attractive to investors than strong possibilities and good ideas, and it’s clear in the quickly growing and evolving space of
social networking, there is a high concentration of both.  Which social networking companies will choose to ride the wave with an IPO remains to be seen, but I’m betting with Reuters in thinking the numbers will increase very soon.

Note: I’m not an investment advisor, and my blog posts do not constitute financial advice.