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Emerging mobile technologies and on-device portals
Today, November 19, 2009, 6 hours ago | Cian
At the Mobile Marketing Forum in Los Angeles this week, we took a break from pure advertising during the day to talk about new technologies and how they are moving forward in mobile. Bob Bilbruck, MD of B2Group, spoke about some of the exciting applications of QR Codes, LBS advertising and On-Device Portals.

Before his talk, Bob showed us a great presentation detailing some of the rocketing numbers in communications and particularly mobile:


Emerging mobile technologies and on-device portals from Cian Gomo on Vimeo.

He went on to mostly about convergence - particularly from On-Device Portals as they lead to better services in LBS and QR Codes.

What is an On-Device Portal (ODP)?

An ODP is like the middle ground between operator portals and applications. Like any operator portal you might access, an ODP is basically a route you can use to quickly access services and information you want. By integrating location and barcodes, an ODP should allow a user in a foreign city to use the portal search function to find a nearby restaurant, get directions and advertising, and download a mobile coupon. However, unlike an operator portal, an ODP is not hosted off-line and accessed through a web connection. Instead it is downloaded to your device (hence “on-device”) like an application, and you access on-line information through the portal.

An ODP should provide four basic functions: browsing, purchasing, using and viewing. A fifth function that is rapidly growing in the ODP space is location-based advertising. As different channels for mobile advertising, commerce and location advance and gain stability, these can be used to make ODPs a much more attractive option.

Like the MMA for advertising, there is a body that wants to promote standards in On-Device Portals. The On Device Portal Consortium comprises 300 companies in the ODP space. The Consortium was originally created to let companies in the space share information with each other. Now it attemps to gather information, and push guidelines, standard and practices.

Why should a company develop and ODP?

“I’m going to directly paraphrase Bob on this one: “It’s faster to develop, test and launch new devices on an ODP. The same applies for new applications and new network services. Search and advertisers are evolving into a marketplace mode, and this is best delivered over an ODP. Most ODPs target a wide variety of mobile operating systems, so they can be served to a wider audience - and it’s easier to monetise services when they’re being served to a large audience over an ODP.”

And finally we were served a quick run-down on Apps vs. ODPs:

Applications are still mostly OS centric
ODP in the future will not be OS centric
An ODP can host other programs (including apps), and it can be customised by the user.

What we think?

Ok, so technically this speech was just a big pitch for on-developer portals. But I hadn’t had too much exposure to them before, and it was nice to see a new model proposed that stepped outside of the “application or mobile web?” axis. Also, claiming that ODPs have an advantage over apps because they will be OS agnostic in the future isn’t a great claim - after all apps are moving towards being OS agnostic as well.
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