SBC News Oisin Lunny: My Kingdom for a Smartphone!

Oisin Lunny: My Kingdom for a Smartphone!

lunnyOisin Lunny SBC’s Mobile Gaming Columnist and Senior Market Development Manager for mobile enterprise development firm OpenMarket, discusses how the ubiquitous smartphone is taking over the world.

“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” In one famous Shakespearean scenario a horse was considered to be worth an entire kingdom, being the only thing that stood between King Richard III and certain death. Today’s Shakespearean protagonist could well find himself beseeching the heavens for a smartphone, particularly if he was a betting man.

Smartphones are quickly but surely replacing a dazzling array of technology for many people: cameras, radios, CD collections, portable TVs, print news, stopwatches, flashlights, alarm clocks, day planners, wrist watches, calculators, Dictaphones, maps, and even the mighty rolodex. Even console games are due to be outnumbered by mobile games, according to Newzoo, who predict a $25bn market in 2015.

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Photo credit: David Brandon Geeting (http://davidbrandongeeting.com)

 

Humans are addicted to smartphones. As far back in time as 2011, already two thirds of us were going to sleep beside our smartphones, and checking them first thing every morning. In a study by Telenav, 63% of people would forgo the luxury of chocolate and 21% would go without shoes, rather than go a week without their smartphones.

Companies that successfully tap into our mobile addiction are reaping rewards that would make a King blush. Mobile gambling is expected to grow at double-digit rates, reaching over 40% of the total online gambling market by 2018, and will account for 44% of total interactive gambling gross win according to H2 Gambling Capital. The global mobile gambling market is forecast to generate an eye watering €19bn in 2018.

As reported last week in SBC, GTECH OnPremise mobile is a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) technology innovation that recognizes the central role of mobile in our modern customer experience. The new GTech technology will enable MGM’s sports betting products to offer live in-play betting and sports betting wagers via mobile, anytime and anywhere in the state of Nevada. New real-money, on-premise mobile casino and slot games will also be playable anywhere within an MGM property through customer’s own smartphones or tablets.

In an interview with La Fleur’s Magazine, GTECH’s Renato Ascol and Jaymin Patel, agreed, ‘the future belongs to mobile solutions’ with Patel stating: “Mobile technologies are going to drive tremendous change.” GTECH is already putting its considerable resources behind this insight, building the worlds largest gaming company with mobile at the heart of their strategy. For example GTECH is already working on iBeacon for proximity marketing at lottery retailers, blurring the lines between interactive wagering and retail wagering in a way that will offer a targeted and personalised user experience, all on consumers own mobile devices.

According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, everyone on the planet will be online within five years, largely via always-connected mobile devices. Customers are on their mobile devices almost every waking minute, and are approaching zero tolerance for a bad customer experience. According to Harris Interactive, 86% of customers will stop doing business with a company because of a bad experience; this is up from 59% only four years ago. Quality is King.

A comprehensive mobile engagement strategy is as vital to global gaming and gambling brands as the aforementioned horse to the aforementioned King. At OpenMarket we recognize the vital importance of effective enterprise mobile engagement. We are seeing more and more companies using mobile to help them interact better with their customers and employees, and improve their business operations.

To that end, we have made available a new report from Forrester Research titled ‘Create Mobile Moments with Messaging’. In this report, Julie Ask and colleagues lay out the opportunities to use mobile messaging across the entire enterprise customer lifecycle. The white paper also outlines how to use the IDEA cycle to identify the most important mobile moments, and shares tactics on how to use messaging to its full potential.

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Mobile messaging has proven its effectiveness and ubiquity, so the white paper shares key data on how to design effective messages, how to engineer your business to support messaging, how to use mobile analytics, and how to leverage evolving messaging best practices. The report examines how the power of messaging is rooted in its immediacy, rather than personalisation, and shows how mobile messaging moments extend throughout the entire customer journey. It also asks why enterprises are still challenged to engage consumers beyond marketing, and identifies which pain points can be alleviated with mobile messaging.

So can we imagine the Shakespearean King reincarnated as a modern day businessman, offering his kingdom for a Forrester white paper? Well that’s probably stretching the analogy, but I think you’ll find this research useful. You can download our King-sized white paper from this link: http://www2.openmarket.com/forrester-creating-mobile-moments-white-paper

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