With the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony taking place in London in less than four weeks’ time, on 28 November, we continue our daily preview with a look at the finalists in the Most Effective Mobile Application – b2c category.

AccuWeather for Android 

This great-looking app has to date seen more than 20m downloads. It features push notifications for severe weather in the United States, while for locations outside the US, the app offers in-app, severe weather notices. Other features include My AccuWeather customizable lifestyle forecasts for specific health concerns and outdoor activities, such as asthma, dog walking, and golf. The app also offers homescreen widgets, radar for N. America and Europe, worldwide satellite overlaying interactive Google Maps, news and weather videos, and the current temperature in the notification bar. To cap an impressive package, it offers forecasts for nearly 3m locations around the world in 27 languages. Forecasts update every 15 minutes, including the hourly forecast for the next 24 hours and the 15-day extended forecast. 

The Asda App

Asda’s approach to developing it’s grocery shopping app for iOS and Android was not to cram in as many tech innovations as possible, but rather to offer useful, convenient features in response to customer feedback, in order to make shopping quicker and more convenient for its customers.

These include a live petrol price checker, product bar code scanner and a ‘Did you forget?’ feature, reminding shoppers about items they regularly buy. As a result, the app has been downloaded more than 2m times to date, and Asda has added some of the app’s features to its mobile site for customers not using iOS or Android handsets. Mobile now accounts for 25 per cent of all Asda’s grocery home shopping sales, with 90 per cent of these coming from the app 

British Gas App 

Over the last 12 months, British Gas has worked hard to ensure that its customers can manage their British Gas account at any time, wherever they are, using the company’s iOS and Android app. 

Over the past 12 months, the app’s visual identity has been redesigned. Customers can also register their British Gas account through the app, rather than going through the main website authentications process. They can also securely pay their bill through the app, and download a PDF copy of their latest paper bill. And in what British Gas believes is an industry first, customers can request a real-time bill, immediately after providing British Gas with a meter reading. The customer is then prompted to either make a payment or modify their Direct Debit plan. So the bill they receive in the post or via email is a £0 balance confirming how much they have used and paid. The app has so far achieved close to 1m downloads, and now represents British Gas’s second largest customer channel, handling more customer interactions than its network of customer service agents.  

Durex – The Durexperiment App

The Durexperiment app stemmed from research that identified that, while 83 per cent of people worldwide believe that a good and fuilfilling sex life is a vital part of life, 54 per cent of people world-wide are not fully satisfied with their sex lives. The app unlocks a series of experiments running over four weeks. After each experiment, couples can measure their arousal and rate their pleasure levels to see how close they are to the Durex Sweet Spot. The experiments are designed to help lovers to discover more about each other, and bring them together. All the experiments were endorsed by a “leading” psychologist and sexologist. At the time of entry, the app had achieved 160,000 downloads. 

Hotels.com

The Hotels.com app aims to ensure sure that Hotels.com customers can easily take their booking with them, switching from desktop to mobile devices just by signing into their account. The app also simplifies the booking process by storing payment card details so that users will never have to enter them twice if logged in.

The app is updates each quarter for each platform. Product development includes R&D, user testing, debugging, soft launch and release to make sure Hotels.com stays on top of new technology trends and delivers a product that is easy to use and effective. The app has achieved an impressive (though confidential) number of downloads since launch. 

The Mothercare App

The Mothercare iPhone app is designed as a smart companion for busy mums and mums-and-dads-to-be, designed to help them through one of the most important times of their life. In the app, users can shop the full mothercare.com range, view product videos, access their mothercare.com account, and create wishlists, checklists and To Do lists. The app also features a store finder, barcode scanner, advice-led videos from Mothercare TV, and a week-by-week pregnancy guide. The app has already picked up a number of retail and parenting industry awards. 

MX Data – Tube Map

The Tube Map app was first launched in 200, and has undergone many iterations and improvements since. The app is free to download, earning revenues from in-app advertising. It provides a detailed map, station information, live departure boards, line status updates, and intelligent route planning. The app has over 300,000 daily active users, and has been downloaded more than 10m times. 

Sync Interactive – Pregnancy by Bounty

This app from parenting club, Bounty, is designed to help mums-to-be through their pregnancy. It include a due date calculator; daily articles outlining what is happening with the mum-to-be’s body, her baby and what she should be aware of on a week-by-week basis; a journal to keep track of personal developments; a gallery to share photos; and advice-led videos. There’s also a guide for dads. At the time of entry, the app had garnered over 100,000 downloads. 

TUI Travel/AKQA/Aditi Technologies/Creator – My Thomson App

This good-looking app is designed to help TUO customers manage their holiday before they start their trip, and enriches their experience while they’re away. The app offers a countdown of days to go until the holiday, together with information, including weather information, on the destination hotel and resort. Users can also call up a summary of the holiday details, and use the app to create and manage a holiday checklist, including things that need doing and things that need packing. 

The app clocked up 15,000 organic downloads in the first month with no media spend, rising to 120,000 downloads in the first three months. It was also the No.1 free app in the Apple App Store for three weeks. 

Turkiye Is Bankasi – IsCep

The ??Cep app is aimed at both retail and corporate banking users, and enables them to  perform more than 100 secure financial transactions, including money transfers, credit card transactions, investment transactions, stock trading, foreign currency trading, bill payments, loan applications,  and more. The app also enables cash withdrawals via QR codes in around 10 seconds at compatible ATMs. Between November 2012 and July 2013, approximately 10.000 cash withdrawals were conducted this way.  And in the 12 months to June 2013, the number of ??Cep unique logins reached 410,000 

Westfield/nFluence – My Westfield Personalised App

This app is designed to personalise the retail experience for shoppers at the Westfield shopping centres in order to drive footfall and sales for the centres’ retailers. The app harnesses nFluence’s autograph technology, allowing users to have fun simply by “Swoting” brands (swiping and voting in one action). Users simply select ‘up’ for like and ‘down’ for dislike, then within 30 seconds the new Westfield app is able to generate a customer profile called an autograph which, based upon their choices contains over 600 interests, 2,000 brand affinities, and 84 demographics.

In order to achieve a precise understanding of the consumer’s preferences, with every brand or content piece ‘swoted’ up or down, 2,700 variables will change accordingly. The customer profile contains no personal information, just brand affinities, interests and preferences, and remains completely transparent and under the control of the shopper at all times.  

Content such as fashion events, cinema listings, offers, new product lines and new Westfield store openings are collated according to the user’s customer profile and served to their own personalised wall. Customers can also express their like or dislike on any piece of content served, thereby allowing them to continually refine their customer profile. Retailers upload their content to the app via a self-service portal in which they are able to set interest tags to calculate relevancy, and contextual parameters for when the content is available such as time and location. Shoppers are rewarded with relevant content and offers in the app; retailers are able to deliver these offers to those shoppers that have expressed an interest in them. The app has been warmly received by retailers and shoppers alike. 

Wimbledon, The All England Lawn Tennis Club – Wimbledon 2013 Official App

This app enabled tennis fans to follow the action from the 2013 Wimbledon tennis tournament live from wherever they were. Along with the tournament’s tablet app and mobile sites, its role is to allow fans to rapidly engage with the content they want in a quick and effective manner throughout the day, in particular when travelling to and from work. Fans were also able to receive customised alerts for their favourite players.

The apps contains Wimbledon news; live scores and statistics; results; order of play; draws; photos; live video and radio; live audio commentary from Centre and No.1 Courts; on-demand video; player profiles; a live blog; customised player alerts; and an on-site ‘Find it’  function. The app was branded by IBM, providing a showcase of IBM’s work, as Official Supplier of IT to the tournament. 

The iPhone and Android versions of the app were each downloaded more than 800,000 times during the course of the two-week event. 

The Awards Ceremony takes place at the London Film Museum on the evening of 28 November. There are just four tables still remaining. A table of 10 costs £2,250. Individual seats cost £250. You can book your seat at the awards here. Or call Lisa Slavin on +44 (0) 207 183 5285 or email [email protected]