Sitting in the audience at Google’s Think Mobile event earlier this week, it was evident just how much clout the company has. There were a few agencies in the room, but by and large, it was full to bursting with brands, all there to hear what Google, and a host of other companies, are doing in mobile. And with around 400 people in the room, that’s a lot of brands.
I’m not sure if there were any network operators in the room, but if there were, they must have been glad to see the back of Carphone Warehouse co-founder Charles Dunstone after he had delivered his keynote.
He used it to remind delegates how text messaging, and the revenues it has generated for operators over the years, was a “100 per cent total accident”, included in the GSM standard in order to enable operators’ engineers to send each other messages. Nokia, Dunstone revealed, only included it in their handsets early on because they were not sure if they were allowed to leave it out.
As for the networks, Dunstone said that for such a light service, in terms of its bandwidth requirements, the networks had “managed to charge an enormous premium for it”. Warming to his theme, with a passing reference to the relative lack of uptake of MMS, he continued: “Everything the mobile industry has invented thinking customers might like it has been a failure…The business model has succeeded in spite of the incompetence of the people within it.” Ouch.
This wasn’t just a random rant though. The point he got to was that the incumbent operators had, in his words “squandered the opportunity” and now a whole new bunch of companies, the operating system suppliers like Google and Apple, had come in. “They are the ones driving it forward, and it’s a sad reflection on the state of the industry,” he continued. At which point, whoever it was at Google who booked him must have been dreaming of that new job in California.
From the Google camp, mobile advertising sales director Ian Carrington took to the stage to evangelise mobile, as he does very well, armed with a laptop full of stats that told delegates why they should be doing something sooner rather than later. He also used very cool alternative to PowerPoint that I predict every agency in the room will be using within a few months. 
Later on, five brands – Unilever, Waitrose, Audi, ebookers and Paddy Power – took to the stage for rapid-fire presentations explaining what they were doing on mobile and what benefit they were seeing from it. Each of these were armed with their own stats that showed that the effort had been worth it.
All of this was punctuated by Google mobile business development manager, Amanda Rosenberg, giving live demos of various Google services and trickery, including Hyperlocal, YouTube Remote, and Chrome2Phone, which transfers web pages from a Chrome browser on a PC to an Android phone in an instant, as if by magic.
If Rosenberg ever tires of Google, she should go for a job on Blue Peter. I’ve rarely seen anyone present live demos with such laid-back flair, and when it goes wrong, as live demos often do, she’s unflappable. Which applies also to Google UK & Ireland MD Matt Brittin, whose lighting fast summary of the day’s events bordered on a stand-up routine.
Given the variety of content presented throughout the day, different people will have got different things from it. But if the purpose of the event was to inspire those people in the room who have not yet formulated a mobile strategy to go forth and do so, you’d have to say it looked like an unqualified success.
David Murphy
Editor
