Over The Air 2011: Stolen and lost phones - can mobile phone applications help with the problem?

Detective Sergeant Andy Williams

• National Mobile Crime Unit – based in Notting Hill
• Criminals stealing to order
• Cops are not the most technologically advanced people – when Andy wants something done, he asks his children…
• in 2001, 45% street crime linked to mobiles
  
  • this was from the British Crime Survey – not reported crime, but surveyed
• current stats:
  
  • 9.7% of all UK crime accounted for by theft of a handset
  • 60% of mobile phones stolen in personal robberies are iPhones or BlackBerrys
    
    • not just the phone is high value, but the data on the phones
  • avg 8,000 phones stolen every month in london

what happens to stolen phones?

• used until blocked (by IMEI)
  
  • IMEI blocking works across UK, 60% of Europe, plus North & South America coming in soon
  • but main export markets are North Africa (mainly Algeria) & Romania
• some handsets are vulnerable to having their IMEI changed (so can be unblocked)
• phones used for parts (broken screens, etc)
• phones used for non-phone functions – mp3 player, etc
• blocking:
  
  • operator will block SIM
  • will also request IMEI to be blocked
• individual can install a theft tracking app, but police would need a signed warrant
  
  • police can’t monitor 8,000 phones a month
• IMEIs are personal data in Germany
• phones offered on eBay, shown as blocked or no signal

immobilise – national property register

http://immobilise.com

• if device is registered with immobilise, police don’t need to go through RIPA
• can put anything with a serial number on there
• can check on people’s phones when stop people on the street
• private company set up and operated in conjunction with the police

formation of NMPCU

• initially front line - reducing robbery
• expanded to all acquisitive crime
• working at all levels of crime - local through to organised
• now an offence to offer to reprogram a phone (change the IMEI)

Police Central eCrime Unit

• trying to combat cyber-criminals
• looking at denial of service attacks, etc
• front line police notoriously poor at dealing with cyber crime
• but no law enforcement agency that specialises in all areas of cyber crime
• most expertise is in the forensic area
• judicial system is not set up to deal with cyber crime
• judicial boundaries don’t help – if online connections are not in UK…
• recently starting up new kind of officer: Covert Internet Investigator
• not very many across the country

Case study: organised criminals targeting music events

• following same bands the whole time
  
  • bands with mosh pits…
• Download 2010: 3 people found with 140 phones buried under their tent

Security & new mobile tech

• Man City gave 20 season ticket holders their tickets on their phone
• if someone steals your phone, they have access to your wallet, your ticket, your flat…
• NFC requirements requested by police:
  
  • PIN required for all payments – not gonna happen!
    
    • at the moment, 5 payments of £10 until a PIN required
  • capture IMEI during transactions
    
    • possible but not gonna happen
  • compulsory registration with financial institution
    
    • may happen

key areas

• registration at point of sale
• carphone warehouse register 25,000 phones a day at Xmas
• only 4 in 10 PIN lock their phone
  
  • significant barrier
• locating devices post theft
  
  • works ok, but not great – won’t work if someone goes into a block of flats
• identification of a SIM change post theft

checkMEND

http://www.recipero.com/checkmend

• can find out if an IMEI is stolen
• some operators run this service for free
• but otherwise may cost £1 a shot

MomoLondon: 200,000 apps - where's mine?

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200,000 Apps — Where’s mine?

A busy Mobile Monday tonight — perhaps sparked by the twin pull of the “marketing” and “apps” tags in the event description!

It was a good panel with a fair spread of perspective: Eli from Vision Mobile provided a lot of useful information, based on research with mobile developers as to what works and what doesn’t; Dave Burrows talked about the traditional BlackBerry corporate apps; and Alyssa Tisne understood how to get people to buy things amongst 10 million different audio tracks.

There was a good mix of people afterwards as well — not just the usual suspects, but some design and marketing students on a 3 month course at Birkbeck and a load of BlackBerry developers too.

Anyway, on to my notes, typed at speed as usual. If you’d like to add anything or correct something I thought you said, please add a comment or contact me on twitter at adamcohenrose.

Keynote — Mike Kirkup, Director, Developer Relations, BlackBerry

• BB introducing lots of ways to pay
• enabling in-app payments
• running a Super-App Developer Challenge at the moment (ends Sept 6th)
  • focussed on “super-apps”: tightly integrated, efficient apps
  • apps need to be in Developer World to be entered

Panel

• Chair: Ben Scott-Robinson - Creative Director, We Love Mobile
• Chris Bourke - MD, Mobext
• Dave Burrows - Director of R&D Interchange Group
• Alyssa Tisne - VP Strategic Partnerships, 7Digital
• Tony Pearce - CEO and co-founder, TeePee Games
• Eli Camilleri - Asssociate, Vision Mobie
• Mike Kirkup - BlackBerry

Why apps rather than mobile internet?

• CB: speed. Apps compensate for the lack of speed across mobile internet
  • speed will gradually improve over years
  • but apps provide clean, sophisticated, richer user experience
  • but can have local storage & javascript in browser apps…
• AT: Apple has set gold standard for music apps
  • 7digital’s iPhone presence is web-only as can’t compete with Apple
  • however, can integrate with last.fm and built-in player on BB
• MK: BB6 web platform has been optimised to ensure that it gives a great experience
  • 30-50% increase in traffic just by having an app icon (on home screen and app store), even if the app just launches the browser
• EC: user experience is much better, but ubiquity is much harder
  • if you want to target a market rather than a technology then you have to strike a balance

Demographics & handsets: which demographics on which handsets?

• EC: most people are not looking at demographics…
  • when asked devs where they were getting market information, they said mates, colleagues… not really the people actually using the app!
  • survey sponsored by Telefonica — they have more experience understanding the demographics
• TP: hardest thing for any publisher is to get their app discovered
  • need to peel back the profile of the user
  • find out what they actually like
• DB: we do a lot of B2B work — boss buys app and imposes on staff
  • don’t have a high curve of under 25s
  • instead have a large number of users all the way to 60+
  • most people want to do one thing on the device and that one thing well
  • amongst first feedback: “yes, but can we take the phone away please” !?!?
• CB: mobile is moving too fast. although they’re tracking analytics, the market changes continually
  • seeing 13 year olds with iPhones purchased by their parents
  • they’re probably hand-me-downs as the parent gets the next version…
  • have run campaigns which were more successful with younger brother or sister of target audience — other family members were grabbing phone

BB has become a youth device — was this deliberate?

• MK: partially driven by people transitioning from SMS, but also by other capabilities
  • not a concerted strategy, unfortunately :-)
  • were surprised at take up of BlackBerry Messager (BBM)
  • people walk into shops and say “I want BBM”, “Oh, that’s for BlackBerry”, “so that’s what I want”

Apps as marketing tools & marketing for apps

• CB: iPhone apps may be a case of the CEO’s wife…
  • but also association with a cool company may rub off
  • launched a campaign for EBLEX: responsible for promoting beef & lamb in UK
  • made an app to help you BBQ better (iBBQ)
• TP: no-one knows the apps on facebook
  • top few games are there because the publishers have the money to keep investing in advertising
  • http://teepeegames.com is a discovery site for mobile & social media apps
• EC: market towards niches
  • these are services — can learn from old industries how to get to individuals who need them
  • even games are entertainment services
  • seeing links between old platforms (e.g. magazine) & new (digital) ones
  • can do guerilla marketing
  • need to take responsibility for own marketing
  • get association with a brand that’s trusted & known
• AT: 7digital want to integrate with other music apps
  • esp. streaming apps — “now buy the music you’ve just heard”
• MK: seems like a new problem but it’s a new set of people encountering the problem
  • if you convince crackberry.com blog to feature your app then downloads go through the roof… (email: kevin@crackberry.com)
• DB: the real estate is on the device
  • when first buy a PC, first thing I do is remove the ISP adverts
  • there will be a time that this will happen on mobile

Apps are pushed through other media. How?

• CB: need to have significant budget and use it wisely
  • for BBQ app, targeted mobile ad networks & aggregators
  • initially ran an explosive campaign to push app into top 25
  • then get organic usage and get talked about
  • when start to fall out of top 25, need to give app another push — a bit more budget
  • BBQ app relied exclusively on mobile media
• CE: Royal Academy of Arts app — all users had downloaded it when they visited the museum
  • front desk had told them about it
  • still don’t know why they’re not promoting retail apps in retail stores (e.g. Selfridges app)

Is it worth plugging a free app?

• EC: yes, if it’s extending services for a segment they want to own
  • again, BBQ example fits well
  • but not if it’s your core product
  • freemium works if the extra functionality is worth something and has clear value
  • bad free apps create noise — destroy space and time for apps that people will really value
• TP: Nokia users are used to paying £5 for an app, whereas iPhone users are shocked at 59p
  • unless you have a freemium model and can get existing users to give you money
• EC: ad-funded apps were not making money they expected
  • ones that were working were
  • maybe because of numbers
• TP: content is key
• DB: have to monetise somewhere?
  • sometimes get the money paid as development
  • marketing done by somewhere else
  • ad-funded market is in its infancy
  • have to have consolidated advertising mechanisms to provide content
• AT: can send push message to get people to interact with app
  • get free releases and browse associated paid ones
  • since 7digital is a store, the app is always free

Is sponsorship a realistic model for launching an app?

• CB: absolutely (see above)
  • actively looking for sponsorship opportunities
  • white labelling apps (esp. games)
• BSR: lots of useful case studies
  • e.g. VW approached a specific game, stripped it down just to show VW car and released it for free
• CB: Brand Butler idea
  • releasing services and games to consumers is a great way to get brand awareness & engagement

Andrew Scott (Rummble): discoverability should be about word of mouth but some operators still have a rate sheet for their promoted places

• BSR: in theory app stores provide word of mouth
• MK: BB twitter app has a load of feedback comments which are attempted first tweets… (is that a problem with the BB store?)
• TP: teepeegames.com will have a combination of user recommendation & editorial control
  • putting a social network behind each product
• AT: with 10 million audio tracks available, discoverability is about genre, really good meta-data (which is not always available from the item itself), friends recommendations, …

Fragmentation: has anyone used an app-porting mechanism, and how did it work?

• CB: they tend to break down at the edges
  • a bit like decorating your house — it’s only beautiful at the end when the details have been completed
  • app-porting tech tend to deal with heavy lifting well, but don’t deal with the polish
• Charles McCloud from metaflow: have sent roughly 50 million SKUs to market
  • there are a few porting technologies out there
  • it’s tough, complicated & costly
  • it comes down to what user experience you want to deliver
• BSR: if you want to deal with extra percentages covering the market, it gets more and more expensive
  • fragmentation is getting worse from an agency perspective
• when porting, you want to take advantage of the new platform — not just port the app
  • e.g. to port an iPhone app to iPad — a day or so
  • but to take advantage of the iPad and make a good iPad app — a couple of months

How can apps modify people’s behaviour? e.g. foursquare

• DB: “mission critical” apps need to modify behaviour or won’t get ROI
  • BBM is changing his behaviour
  • carriers want stickiness

How do small new companies get market knowledge?

• EC: talk to the people who you think are your real customers
  • mobile metrics are mostly irrelevant — they come from technology point of view
  • even talking to 30 people who you believe you want to use your service
  • also want to test apps with people who will actually use it
• CB: can also do croudsource-based testing (e.g. mob4hire)
  • can target individual segments or geographic regions
• BSR: avoid listening to the press!

Helen Keegan: where does a small development house start with marketing, PR, branding?

• MK: have a very popular “Marketing for Developers” session at BlackBerry World — can send slides
  • simple things: start a blog
  • respond to complaints — the faster the better
  • BB recommend mob4hire
  • get ideas from professionals giving a quote
• CB: only way to get noticed is to cause trouble!
  • have something in your app that people will talk about
  • do something that will upset somebody
  • or start saving and then come to us :-)
• BSR: don’t target a big audience — target a niche
  • communicate to people in context
  • if you’re in a niche, you probably know the people already

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Notices

• Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition launching this week
• nothing in August
• Over The Air 10/11th September
  • need volunteers to help
  • and sponsorship money
• Demo night on Monday following
• October — Design for Accessibility
• October — DCKTN/UKTI competition for dev places to Mobile World Congress

Mobile Device Stats

I've been looking at various mobile statistics recently and thought I'd put up a quick post on my findings so far.

I started with some work at Kizoom, analysing the traffic we see on our UK Transport services. This then led to my session at BarCampLondon7, in which I presented the session counts for mobile browsers from a sample month (September) in 2007, 2008 and 2009. I've published these results in a DabbleDB database at http://mobilesessions.dabbledb.com/ for your slicing and dicing enjoyment.

I was inspired by Bryan Rieger's article on mobiforge, where he tells developers to "Expect and manage diversity" and links to some great graphs from the deviceatlas data explorer showing how screen sizes differ across device release dates. However, fantastic though deviceatlas is, it doesn't capture the actual usage of the devices on mobile sites -- it just counts one for each device, no matter whether it's a popular Nokia or an almost unused Sagem.

I've tried to rectify this lack of popularity data by publishing the Kizoom sample data. It's not perfect and each year isn't quite the same sample (we've released and withdrawn various services across the time range), but it's a start. I've even tried putting the same data into IBM's manyeyes to get some alternate visualisations.

Some of the trends that I've been seeing coming out of this data are not surprising: the iPhone punches way above its weight in terms of mobile traffic, and screen sizes are getting bigger as the years go on. One trend that is slightly unexpected is the growing popularity of BlackBerry devices over the last few years -- at least it's surprising to me quite how popular they've become (showing third in the brand popularity for 2009 behind Nokia and SonyEricsson, and ahead of Samsung and Apple).

There's been some other data published recently that seems to support the same trends. The September AdMob metrics have recently been released and this month they're highlighting the change in devices from 2007 to 2009 (a popular theme!). Their stats show that the iPhone and iPod Touch are number one and two in the UK -- probably due to in-app ads supplementing the web usage, especially when considering that the HTC Android phones (not nearly as popular a phone as the Nokia N95) also manage slots in the top 10.

Ian Homer of Bemoko pointed out the StatCounter Global Stats site, which has some very nice stats and pretty graphs to go with them. This site provides sliceable worldwide stats from 3 million websites (240 million hits in UK). Since the sites may not be mobile specific, I would expect mobile devices used to browse "the full web" would take precedence over smaller, more phone-focussed devices.

Here's an example: Top 9 Mobile Browsers in Europe 2008/09

As expected, the iPhone and iPod Touch (or "iTouch") gets the majority of the traffic, with Nokia coming a strong second. NetFront is the browser used by SonyEricsson smartphones (and others) so comes fairly high in the rankings (it seems that StatCounter may have changed how they categorise SonyEricsson browsers in August 2009, as NetFront swaps with SonyEricsson -- this is even more apparent in their Mobile OS stats for the same region).

Once more, BlackBerry devices are making a strong showing in recent months, a gain which shows even stronger when the stats are shown just for the UK.