2. DAY4
1
“THE OTHERS”
Farmers in third world countries see success over crops via mobile weather
updates! Disease is halted due to SMS texting awareness in developing market!
Oh these people, if only they know what the internet could do for them!
These are the types of headlines that saturate the media in which we form our
opinions about developing markets and mobile penetration. Well, it’s wrong.
What people don’t know is that when developing countries around the world see
growth in internet and mobile usage, these users are immediately going straight
to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and their local news sources. They
are joining the global conversation immediately (faster than your gramps).
We need to stop thinking of these global citizens as “the others”. Because that 26
year old programmer in Kenya is going to be the one driving innovation in her country
faster than the 26 year old programmer in Palo Alto making privileged assumptions.
2015 MOBILE WORLD CONGRES RECAP
3. DAY4
2
ENABLING FINANCIAL
INCLUSION
Cash is not the friend of the excluded. If you receive cash for an hourly-
waged job and you can’t pay a bill online, or send money home to mom,
or perhaps your benefits are stolen on your commute home, how are
you supposed to keep this physical money digitally secure?
Mobile banking helps solve this issue of cash-turned-digital transactions, but
only if all the mobile banking silos around the world drop their act and... wait
for it...become ubiquitous (the most overused word in 2015 so far, sorry!). A
majority of speakers at MWC have placed a call to arms for the larger financial
institutions of the world to embrace mobile banking systems so that a global
money transfer hub can exist, one which allows for all types of financial
transactions to take place regardless of phone, carrier, or financial provider.
2015 MOBILE WORLD CONGRES RECAP
4. DAY4
3
HOW ARE YOU PAYING?
According to PayPal, these are the four dominant mobile payment types:
REMOTE MOBILE PAYMENT: consumer is shopping
in a native application or shopping digitally
MOBILE IN-STORE PAYMENTS: payment occurs in a physical store
where the mobile device is used by a consumer to make a payment
MOBILE POINT OF SALE: geared towards smalls businesses who never accepted credit
cards but are trying to find new ways to accept more payment forms (think Square)
HYBRID: consumer makes purchase on a mobile website for an item,
but chooses to pick it up in a physical store versus shipping
2015 MOBILE WORLD CONGRES RECAP
5. DAY4
4
THE TRUST
REVOLUTION
CEO of AVG Gary Kovacs believes that trust is the new currency. He also
believes that it’s an inalienable human right in the mobile industry that’s
under a tremendous threat. The industry needs to fundamentally change
how it accesses and uses data. It can start by doing these three things:
1. The code to products we deliver must be simpler. We operate our
lives across a series of operating systems and multiple platforms.
It’s currently a mess to navigate and different rules apply.
2. The one page user-agreement challenge. Kovacs had his team look at all the privacy
policies attached to his digital life. If he wanted to read them all, it would take nearly
76 days to get through all the fine print. What do all these companies possibly need?!
Lets push for an industry standard of one-page user agreements with a size 12 font.
3. Expectations of user behavior. Kovacs and partners are pushing for #SMARTUSER
education. If you don’t do it in real life, why do it online? The idea is if we make
trust smart and simple, educating users how to behave will be just as easy.
2015 MOBILE WORLD CONGRES RECAP
6. DAY4
5
WRONG PLACE AT
THE WRONG TIME
When you start to look back over time, there are a ton of ideas that failed in the digital
and mobile space. Could it have been just an issue of wrong place, wrong time? A
decade ago, was the mobile technology just not good enough for rating your college
colleagues Hot Or Not to explode as a money generator? Because online dating
app Tinder has the same foundation as Hot or Not (swipe right for hot, swipe left for
not), it just exploded because of location services and social network growth.
So creatives, entrepreneurs, big idea thinkers, and marketers too, it might be worth
taking a trip back down memory lane and determining what ideas failed miserably due
to wrong timing that could thrive based on the progression of our mobile technologies.
2015 MOBILE WORLD CONGRES RECAP