Smart Phones. Smart Meetings.
After a long and winding road in the development of our SWIFT Mobile platform, we finally settled on our mantra: “Smart phones. Smart Meetings.” Guy Kawasaki defines a mantra as “three or four words that explain why your product, service, or company should exist.” Mantras need to be meaningful and memorable. In this post, I hope to explain why I think our mantra of Smart Phones/Smart Meetings is a good one.
Smart Phones
In a recent column in the All Things D blog, Walter Mossberg writes:
The handheld computer is the new PC–the most exciting, promising new platform for running software and connecting to cloud-based services.
He then goes on to assess the strengths and weakness of the dominant players:
- Apple’s iPhone has an installed base of 30 million devices (17 million phones and 15 million iPod touches). The app store has over 30,000 applications which have been downloaded over 1 billion times. Despite this commanding lead, the iPhone is only available on AT&T, is expensive, and has an electronic keyboard.
- RIM’s Blackberry has an installed base of 50 million users. But the Blackberry app platform only works on models introduced after 2006. Mossberg claims that the UI is pretty bad for anything other than email.
- Microsoft’s Window’s Mobile has a large installed base and plans for an app service. But Window’s Mobile is old and has a poor UI and no dedicated phone.
- Google’s Android has an app store and a UI that is on part with the iPhone. Android is open source so it can run on multiple phones across multiple carriers. But the first phone, T-Mobile’s G1, was not popular. The Android app store has only a few apps to date.
- The Palm Pre has just launched to impressive reviews. But the Palm brand is yesterday’s news and the Pre runs on the Sprint network.
- Nokia has the largest installed base of cell phones worldwide (and about 40% of the browser traffic on its Symbian browser) and is working on an app store. Symbian has only 3 percent of the browser share in the US.
The iPhone leads both in the US and worldwide in smart phone traffic, but Symbian still has the lead in terms of worldwide shore of the mobile browser market:
Smart meetings
We decided to focus on the meeting market because using a smart phone at a meeting solves large problems for meeting organizers and their customers, and because the “intelligence” in a smart phone can be used to create an entirely new interface to a meeting and value derived from it.
Solve Problems
Smart phones solve the basic problem of putting a full operating system in the hands of users freeing them from the need for a lap top. At our beta test at SES, I decided to leave my lap top in my hotel room and only bring my iPhone. I am pleased to report that I could do anything I needed to at the meeting with SWIFT Mobile:
- Manage my schedule. I had access to the conference schedule and my personalized schedule.
- Take notes. I could take private notes on the session pages within SWIFT Mobile.
- Tweet. I could Tweet directly from SWIFT Mobile.
- Rate and comment. I could rate sessions and sponsors on a five star rating system. I could also write public comments about things at the conference.
- Find people. I could search a directory of attendees. In the next version of SWIFT Mobile, I will be able to send an email to someone. (Private email addresses are never exposed on the platform.) These features give me better networking and a great likelihood of finding the right people at the conference.
- Track activity feeds. SWIFT uses Twitter hashtags to aggregate information being published on Twitter and publish this information on the appropriate SWIFT pages.
Create Value
Smart phones also have ways of creating new kinds of value and ROI for people at meetings.
- Analytics. Mobile analytics can capture detailed information about your users — the basic things that can be gotten through Google Analytics like demographics, session length, frequency of use, and user retention — as well as detailed analysis of features within the SWIFT Mobile application — note taking, twitter, directory access, and so on. These analytics provide an important new way to understand what people are doing at your meeting and what they find to be meaningful and valuable.
- Mobile sponsorships. Smart phones offer new means of branding, information gathering, and lead generation for sponsors and exhibitors at conferences. Sponsorship offerings will include: sponsorships on smart phone navigation bars and mobile web pages; featured pages on mobile site; featured messaging; and contents and polling.
- Location Messaging. Location messaging uses the GPS of the smart phone to match users against their needs and interests. For example, if I include a need for graphic designers who understand analytics in my profile, SWIFT Mobile can notify me when a person who matches these criteria is nearby.
- Collective Intelligence. Because people are more likely to use their smart phones than their lap tops in a variety of settings at a meeting, SWIFT Mobile can really start to capture the collective intelligence of the community. This collective intelligence is made up of aggregation and analysis of the actions taken by users on their smart phone, along with trends and rankings captured. SWIFT Mobile captures influence rankings of speakers, users, and sponsors/exhibitors. Any attribute can be analyzed and ranked.
Are there other ways to use smart phone to make smart meetings? If so, please let us know.
