An Overview To South Asia Mobile Conference 2012

South Asia mobile conference was an indeed success. And it was a great opportunity to gather knowledge for all mobile application developers, Telecommunication partners and also marketing people, business people, venture capitalists to make their future decisions. At the conference there was lot of discussions on mobile technologies using   many different perspectives and many sub topics.  Modern world now focus on Mobile than any other technology in recent past. What would be the reason for this? Well, the opening key note speaker of the conference Mr.Tomi Ahonen (Author, Consultant and Motivational speaker, Hong Kong) answered this question very well.  As he explained the fact “Why Mobile takes this much attention these days?”  He introduces Mobile as an enormous filed of information under some facts, those include that it is the 7th Mass media of marketing, which defeats TV, Radio, Press, Cinema and most surprisingly ‘The Internet’. 

 •1st mass media Print 1500: Buy-to-Own, Advertising, Subscr.

–books, pamphlets, newspapers, music scores, magazines

•2nd mass media Recordings 1900: Sound
–vinyl, tape, CD, DVD: music, software, videogames, movies
•3rd mass media Cinema 1910: Multimedia, Pay per View
–silent, b/w sound, color, cinemascope: newsreels, movies
•4th mass media Radio 1920: Streaming, License
–AM, FM, stereo, digital: news, music, sports, drama
•5th mass media TV 1950: (no innovation!)
–b/w, color, cable/satellite, digital: news, drama, soaps, reality
•6th mass media Internet 1995: interactive & search
–narrowband, broadband: email, search, browsing, downloading
•7th mass media Mobile 2000: pers./always-on/carried/payment
2G SMS, WAP, 2.5G, 3G: messaging, browsing

( reference : Mobile as the 7th Mass Media Channel by Tomi Ahonen)

And also it is always connected through the sim card. And It has a built in payment mechanism.  Apart from this it gives a Digital interface to the user.  All these facts were focusing on whole mobile phone industry. Means all feature phones, smart phones other phones. He points out a very interesting fact here. That is marketing people should be aware of ‘i-syndrome’ (or we can use the word Android-syndrome if we prefer), which is having the attitude, only smart phone application are included in Mobile marketing. Or we might say ‘building a smart phone application to each and every product is mobile marketing’ in simple words.  And he says ‘NO’ to this attitude. According to him SMS, MMS, technologies are not dead yet. We could still use these to   distribute, market, even to buy a product. This became highly doubtable fact throughout the day after that. As Mr.Harsha Purasinghe mentioned Samsung has defeated and taken away the authority of the mobile industry that NOKIA had over a decade, which implies Feature phones and other phones are dying, (with Nokia?).  So what are feature phones, what are limitations we have in feature phones and what are smart phones what would be the Pros and Cons of a smart phone? Which is the biggest market? SMS, MMS based applications or Smart phone applications? Find out answers to these questions in our next Post.

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