Locatrix Team Offsite Event
May 8th, 2009 by admin
Gavin's feet
The Locatrix team held an “offsite” event this week at the Toowong Bowls Club. Our Barefoot Bowls afternoon was enjoyed by all – thanks to Sherwin for the photographs, and to Gavin for logistics (and cooking!). Here’s a few photographs.
Watching his ball go into the gutter probably.
Saqib discovered a talent in lawn bowling.
Gavin on the barbie.. how Aussie is that!
Great BBQ by Gavin!
Gavin doing a dance for us. We are not amused.
It’s time to (re)engage your subscribers
May 7th, 2009 by Mark WhiteA couple of months ago we were meeting with a product manager for a European mobile operator, who confessed he had a big problem with mobile social networking. His manager had done a “link deal” with one of the big social networks – you can probably guess which one – and with much fanfare, a new link and logo appeared on that operator’s mobile home page.
At first glance, this initiative had a tremendously successful outcome for the MNO. Their mobile Internet usage saw double-digit percentage growth overnight. And kept growing.
A week later, the operator announced increased usage caps for all of its data plans. No great problem here, as subscribers rapidly became new mobile social networking enthusiasts, often in their thousands each day. But certainly less revenue per MB.
In fact everyone was terribly pleased until later in the month they discovered that while overall mobile data was substantially up, their on-portal traffic had actually decreased, by more than 30 percent. And adding to that dilemma, ARPU decreased for nearly every VAS product they offered to their subscribers.
So while the social networking traffic was increasing, the mobile operator had become a dumb pipe – and found themselves dramatically exposed to churn in a competitive market. Because “m-site” social networking on network A is an identical experience on network B. And C. Or even D. Popular social networking sites are attracting millions of unique visitors to their mobile portals every month, and while mobile data usage rises, the ARPU curve – from data usage alone – is trending ever downwards. What should be an opportunity for mobile operators can very quickly become a massive problem.
To help mobile product and VAS managers meet this challenge, we devised the Locatrix (Re)Engage Workshops. Our thesis is this: mobile operators don’t need to “introduce” social networking services – their subscribers are already there. Instead, they need to formulate and execute strategies which provide a re-engagement path, via and through existing social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and Friendster.
Delivered in either half-day and full-day seminar formats, our (Re)Engage Workshops help mobile product managers and network executives better understand the demographic mix of social networking users, and teaches them how to create a subscriber engagement strategy by working within the social networking paradigm. Creating, for example, a framework for injecting your mobile brand and VAS solutions into social networking portals, and helping your customers promote their favorite services to their friends. And while we of course present engagement examples based on Locatrix solutions and services, there is no ongoing commercial obligation from the (Re)Engage workshop – just an opportunity to learn and refresh your strategies for leveraging mobile social networking within your subscriber base. And (Re)Engaging with your customers!
There’s more information about the Locatrix (Re)Engage Workshops on our website, but for a limited time we are offering a free half-day (Re)Engage Workshop to qualifying operators who are readers of this newsletter: simply mention “Position Update” when you contact us, or use this special e-mail link.
Behind The Scenes: Salamander
April 23rd, 2009 by Sam CollinsMost developers writing web applications for mobile devices decide to:
- Develop for the most common devices.
- Develop so that it looks “kinda ok” on most devices.
- Use hacks to get it to work on a couple of other devices.
- Somehow use the WURFL database.
Several of our solutions revolve around displaying maps. We want the maps to fit to the width of each device. We also like to know what an acceptable base font size is. We want to know as much as we can about every device, so that our solutions work perfectly regardless of device. We run Salamander behind every major (and minor!) solution we develop here at Locatrix Communications to solve this.
Salamander lets developers write layout code for all devices at once. By allowing any service to get any attributes about any device. Mobile applications no longer have to look “kinda ok” on some devices. Applications become tailored to each device. For example:
- Display size
- Supported WAP version
- Supported Java version
- Official support by an MNO
- Default font size.
The web-based front end of Salamander also allows us to instantly change and/or rollback changes on any device-specific attributes across all our solutions. Additionally, it automagically pulls community updates from the WURFL database.
To call Salamander, we simply create a new Salamander object and then query the attributes we need.
if (!isset($_SESSION['device'])
{
require_once('/include/Salamander.class.php');
$salamander = new Salamander("http://salamander.me");
$_SESSION['device'] = $salamander->getSalamanderDevice($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]);
}
The Salamander class handles all the communications with the Salamander server. It returns an array of various required attributes for applications to query.
We then query attributes such as:
- $_SESSION['device']['baseFontSize']
- $_SESSION['device']['imageType']
- $_SESSION['device']['imageWidth']
- $_SESSION['device']['imageHeight']
- $_SESSION['device']['is3G']
From there we resize images, set font sizes, enable/disable bandwidth intensive features, etc.
Want to try out Salamander with your applications? Want to send feedback? Send me an email!