Mobile World Congress 2015 and the contextual revolution

Title image source: GSMA

This week I attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. As it was in previous years, this has been the most illuminating show I may attend this year. Packed with plenty of very good discussions with technology and functional enablers in Mobile it was a great opportunity to gain a thorough overview of recent developments in the leading companies in Mobile.

The congress was a great opportunity to analyse the newest inventions in the Mobile evolution of our digital world. Samsung’s next iteration on their flagship smartphones in the Galaxy series. Sony announced their virtual-reality helmet. Huawei and LG to top up with their newest iteration on an outstandingly good-looking take on smart gear.

Source: GSMA

For deeper integrations however, I understood that we entered a time of weakening disruptive innovation. Although smart watches, TV and auto integrating far out, their true value is by far not in reach. In this matter I am still missing the real innovation in making those gadgets and our silent surroundings clearly smarter. I once more found to what critical extent our industries are driven by the quantitative approaches of the corporate players in the field, releasing batches of smart gadgets and the Internet of Things hardware one after another. However, the quality of that remains very low in my opinion, as the actual advantages of Mobile have not been picked up. From improved push notifications for smart watches, to app indexing for search integration or another mobile ad platform, I found the majority of functional enablers in the fields of Discovery, Marketing or Intelligence stepping on their business-centered taste, often by no means disruptive to the innovation of the digital lifestyle.

The essential point we have to understand is, that we’re missing the key advantage of those Mobile integrations: the adaptation of content and services to our situative and general context. In many situations I find myself immensely stressed from all those mobile notifications, buzzing on my smartphones, smart watch and glass, voice-typing emails with mistyping from background noise, CRM pushes incoming every morning at the same tick and video ads asking me out when urgently checking flight information at poorest connectivity in a cab to the airport. If you will, with each further gadget I feel I am more exposed to another port to the ignorance implemented in the products that were actually supposed to make my life more enjoyable. Certainly it is not taken into account when and where I want to interact according to my temporary needs and expectations. Thinking of my smartphones, I am literally taking them everywhere I go. The interaction flows by no means adapt to the circumstances I am temporarily in. When meeting at a noisy booth at the conference, the devices do not understand that I am not able to consume a podcast or voice mail. In the same way it’s not the right time to suggest me reading a news article when I am standing in a rainy taxi queue in front of a venue or going for a sunbath in a park close by. Music or a podcast would actually be perfect in that scenario.

Source: hotelactual.com

Apart of a few R&D approaches to making the Mobile appliance reason about our situative and general contexts, that are able to actually interact with our attention accordingly, most of my apps are run by conversion-optimised softwares focussed on counting sessions with their bothering offerings throughout day and night. What this leads to as a result is a Mobile World Congress that exchanges in large discussions on a cross-functional data privacy, essentially looking backwards instead of taking bigger steps into true opportunities.

It is the duality of the personalisation of content and services and the actual context of a user. Both of those worlds are integrated such as Yin and Yang. While targeting people can be accomplished by the segmentation of users based on data of their behavioural events, in many cases we cannot infer on their intentions to that behaviour, as we are missing their context of action. So far, we are at the edge of solving personalisation in Mobile across all functions, however too often concluding on intentions from the behavioural data we analyse asynchronously. Sometimes we even believe that extending data collection on user behaviour towards gaining more and more information about the person and its actions across platforms would be sufficient to implement contextual reasoning. Basically it is exactly that misleading idea of contextual personalisation that makes us believe we’d have an urgent need for infinite data collection in the way we try to infer on the users’ intentions. In a qualitative approach however, recording user data in an asynchronous way is essentially not enough. We must proactively analyse the user context and interact accordingly to the user expectations in a synchronous format. All those theoretical figures we play around in the personalisation will not work out to their full power as long as we are missing to achieve the right balance to our products being truly meaningful right at the moment of interaction. So going further the road of personalisation is too static to accomplish that mission. Research clearly shows there is a lot more to be done to make products actually contextual. Actually this is not only about the context in the very short durations of sessions in Mobile, that we interact with the user’s attention and influence upon. In a world of the Internet of Things it is the cross-platform sensing of user context, that requires us to bring together each perspective to the user context. With such a full fledged understanding we are able to make up individual flows for interaction, that will then lead to more enjoyable lives.

Ford's MoDe e-bike, Source: BBC

Greatly, there have been a few signals turning on proper sensing of the situative environments of their users on the Mobile World Congress. At a starting point this seems to happen in the corporate companies, as they tend to focus on the future funds instead of the short trades. Ford’s protective enhancements in their MoDe electric show, that was shown at the conference, shows a great take on an integrative solution of managing our situative expectations of protection in the dangerous municipal environment of rushing metal. Google’s Now service on the Android system uses full cloud capabilities to bring in situational suggestions on travel options to commute more efficiently or explore close-by restaurants. Viacom’s latest announcement to move into the development of second-screen offerings shows of a future of smarter situational media interaction.

For me the biggest innovation at this year’s MWC is a very energy-efficient take on the location-based discovery of social and services provided by Qualcomm’s proximity platform LTE Direct. This system-level integration into existing LTE standards allows a context-driven digital format of yellow pages down to the actually reachable individuals. Based on that technology a bunch of sneaky geeks from Austin (TX) founded a startup called M87 to give a try on an as disruptive integration of working out a much faster approach to classic carrier networks by building an ad-hoc peer-to-peer mobile network based on the discovery solutions by LTE Direct.

These signals give us a sneak peek on the next and ultimate phase that will make the Mobile evolution a digital revolution. Actually the first steps into an extensive context-sensing world of Mobile are being made right at this time in scientific research, such as in the field of the development of a framework to adaptive mobile applications in E-Learning at the chair of Complex Multimedia Application Systems at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

Source: GSMA

On the other side the industry leverages user data in the personalisation of content and audience-targeted or re-engagement advertising already, focussing on higher conversions due to adapted placement strategies to the individual. The technologies developed for the personalisation are capable of being further developed to reason about user context, as they already consolidate user data into a similarly actionable, however very asynchronous, way. In the long-term it will be those solutions that lead to a successful integration of those contextual adaptations. Specifically it is going to be the real-time marketing, CRM and A/B testing platforms that are laying out the technical layers for that today. Those platforms implement the cutting edge algorithmic approaches to data-driven reasoning for behavioural targeting, that can be leveraged in the adaptation of product offerings for the user context. For those it will be the easiest to integrate with the latest server- and client-side implementations soon being found.

Departing from that great conference with a large stack of business cards of very influencing believers into Mobile, I conclude it is our homework now to kick off the contextual revolution into a smarter future.