What Raven Zachary’s Thinking About
Stamats is proud to present Raven Zachary as a keynote speaker for our upcoming Stamats Integrated Marketing: Technology Conference (SIM Tech) next week in Boston. Raven developed the iPhone app for the Obama campaign. He started his first Internet company back in late 1993. He is a former industry analyst, now mobile entrepreneur. We thought we’d ask him a few questions as a warm up to SIM Tech.
Understanding that the Obama ’08 application was a brand awareness and recruitment tool… What can institutions learn from this success and incorporate into their mobile marketing endeavors?
The industry has been talking about how mobility will impact marketing on a large scale for decades. We’ve seen some limited success with early Smartphone platforms in the United States, but more so overseas in Europe and Asia. With the arrival of iPhone and the rollout of high-speed mobile networks, we’re seeing tremendous new activity taking place in the United States and abroad. With Obama ’08 for iPhone, we focused on two primary areas for the Obama Campaign – information and activism. We provided a set of information – issues, videos, photos, and a news reader, information that was readily available and published by the campaign using Internet services such as YouTube, Flickr, and from their own campaign website over RSS.
But where I believe we fundamentally changed the relationship here between the citizen and the campaign through mobile technology was relating to activism (I would normally call this person a user, but it seems an odd choice in this context). Through the use of location based services (GPS), we were able to inform the citizen where the closest campaign office was and provide a listing of campaign events sorted by proximity. If the citizen traveled from Oregon to Iowa, we’d update the information specifically for the current location. The feature that received the most media attention was Call Your Friends. We sorted the citizen’s existing iPhone contact list by key battleground states, and provided a calling tool for the citizen to make campaign calls to people already in their social network. Mobile technology allowed us to shift campaign calls from time spent at a volunteer center on a phone bank in a block of time you did not know to calling people you already knew on your own schedule, in much smaller blocks of time – sometimes a single call, perhaps while waiting in line somewhere. There is still an important place for phone banks, we just made this concept accessible to a set of citizens who would never volunteer in that capacity.
This is just one example of how mobile technology can fundamentally change the relationship that organizations have with their members or brands have with consumers. We’re going to see new innovation on mobile technology over the next few years that rivals the innovation we saw in the early days of the web 15 years ago. Collectively, we have laid the groundwork for this innovation – we have a mobile data infrastructure and an Internet services infrastructure, both which reduce barriers to entry for people wanting to provide mobile products & services. This is truly an exciting time.
As the mobile device transcends its phone capabilities and moves into more of a tool of omni-communication and pocket computing where do you see its place in the grand scheme of things 5 years from now?
Anytime I am asked about where things are headed into the future in a specific number of years, it’s best to look back an equal number of years at where we’ve come since then. In 2004, we had a pretty weak Smartphone market in the United States with limited data speeds. Mobile costs were higher for the consumer, and we were coming out of a down economy. If you were lucky, you had corporate email on your mobile device, perhaps a BlackBerry or a Windows Mobile device or a Palm Treo. You or your employer paid more for data services, web browsing on the go was severely limited (and certainly not the full experience), and it was fairly difficult to load mobile applications onto your device. Most people thought of mobile phones as just that – phones. And, mobile carriers (e.g. Verizon) set all of the rules for consumers, rules that were in the best interest of these mobile carriers, not consumers. Innovation was moving slowly and within bounds.
In 2007, Apple fundamentally changed the relationship between the mobile carrier and the consumer by making the primary relationship exist between the consumer and the mobile device manufacturer. No longer were we buying an AT&T phone, we were buying an iPhone that happened to run on the AT&T network. The network was secondary to the device. This is the way it should be. I have a Mac at home on a Clear WiMax Internet connection. Clear is easily replaceable. My Mac, much less so. This shift has since had ripple effects, all of which are
positive for consumers.
Looking to 2014, we will have three to four market-leading Smartphone operating systems (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, for sure, a fourth is debatable) providing easy access to mobile applications, Internet content that looks and acts like identically to your desktop experience, increased data speeds at lower costs, more and more websites optimized for mobile use across multiple Smartphone operating systems, greater consumer protections on network portability and access, and mobile carriers will be transformed into ‘dumb pipes’ – what they’ve been dreading. It happened in the wired telecommunications industry, and it’s happening now in the wireless telecommunications industry. I don’t see carrier “lock-in” going way anytime soon though as consumer prefer to upgrade to new devices for less than $200. Without carrier subsidies on new devices locked into a multi-year, we’d shift towards $600 upgrades and that’s simply prohibitive to the majority of consumers. I am an iPhone user, I pay AT&T every month, but my loyalty is to the iPhone. I have my device of choice, and I will change carriers in the future, if it serves my own best interests. This is the way that people will generally perceive the mobile market by 2014.
In terms of big-picture futurism by 2014, I think we are going to see less distinction between computers and mobile devices. Likely, this means docking a mobile device to a home or office computer and having that mobile environment coexist on-screen – the ability to access information on both devices simultaneously through a shared screen, keyboard, and mouse. I don’t think that by 2014 we’re going to have projectors and virtual laser keyboards built into phones on a large scale, perhaps a novelty device here and there. Our work and home environments aren’t setup to accommodate projectors and laser generated keyboards have no tactile response. Wearable phones (especially on the head) aren’t going to be very popular for a number of reasons – including the need to access a screen, the size, social stigma, and fear of mobile device radiation impacting the brain. 2020 is a different story. I think everyone will be wearing glasses then. These glasses will overlay information on your viewing area. Your surroundings will become the display. By 2040, we’ll have contact lenses that do the same. By 2080, we’ll have new eyeballs. By 2200, we’ll all be suspended in containers of spice gas folding space with no interest in mobile devices anymore.
Recognizing that the mobile landscape is still the ‘wild wild west’ (i.e. multiple providers, platforms, devices) how would you suggest an institution focus its mobile initiatives given all the possible variables?
Let me answer this question in two ways – how brands provide mobile applications and how enterprises dictate mobile policy.
When my firm Small Society works with large brands, what we are seeing at this point is the iPhone platform being the testbed for mobile applications. Most brands are happy just having an iPhone app right now, but over time, brands are going to need to provide support for multiple platforms. This puts iPhone into an envious position right row as being the first mobile platform to support. iPhone first, universal mobile web second, and perhaps Android or BlackBerry third. Where I see deviation from this is where brands have close relationships with folks like Microsoft, RIM, or Nokia, so the prioritization is perhaps different.
We’re rapidly shifting away from the enterprise dictating mobile policy. People understand that when you start a new job, you are given a computer. People generally don’t bring a personal computer to a new job. Mobile devices are more personal. People want to use their own device of choice. I see some people now carrying around a work and a personal mobile device and I find this to be pretty crazy. Why go through this pain?! You go through this pain because you have no choice – your IT folks won’t let you officially connect your own smartphone to the corporate email and VPN system. The people I see carrying around one device now in strict enterprise environments are the people who figure out on their own how to connect the device. As more and more Smartphone platforms start natively supporting Microsoft Exchange and industry-standard VPN protocols, people will just make it work on their own as ‘rogue activity’. Something will change on a large scale and the enterprise will not be able to stop the demand by its employees to make enterprise services work across multiple Smartphone platforms.
We’ve read that all kids have iPhones. How did they learn how to use it and is it an integral part of their everyday lives as it is with adults? How do you see their school work tying into mobile devices as they become more widely adopted, now and in the future?
All kids do not have iPhones, although a co-worker recently took a trip to New York City and told me that everyone there has an iPhone. My two older sons have iPhones and everyone wants to play games on them at recess. Of course, we don’t let our sons do that. There are some kids in that school with an iPod touch, which runs the same operating system as an iPhone, but without the mobile network access, camera, etc. Smartphone adoption is being led by adults with disposable income. Kids are going to be inheriting older devices from their parents for awhile still, at least until we start seeing more smartphones in the $99 or less price range, and that almost always comes with a contract lock-in. Primary and secondary schools are so far behind in the use of technology that I doubt we will see much there in the next five years. For higher education? Absolutely.
Register today, limited seats available! Also, check us out online at www.stamats.com/simtech for more speaker information and conference schedule highlights.
