Warren Cammack

This event is held on the first Monday of every month and aims to bring together people who are based in Sydney and interesting in mobile technology. The events are sponsored by Blackberry however the speakers and content is typically of interest to those who work on any mobile platform.

The first speaker was Scott OBrien ·Marketing Director at Explore Engage. Explore engage have produced some great augmented reality (AR) applications in the last 12 months – primarily for the purpose of brand advertising. You may have seen the KIA campaign during the Australian Open whereby viewers could hold their phone up to the screen when a KIA logo was shown (or against any image of the KIA logo in magazines etc). The application then showed an interactive AR model of the new KIA  Optima car.

Scott presented an overview of the consumer’s appetite for all things AR and it was particularly amusing to see French Hip Hop artist ‘The Toxic Avenger’ with the music video “N’IMPORTE COMMENT“. Of particular interest was the “AR” way of “adding friends” or “poking” others. The video itself is obviously not using any of the real AR technology but it’s an interesting vision of what the future may look like.

Viewdle was also cited as something that would likely be a game changer in terms of how people may use AR for something other than a gimmick – the website for this looks amazing however it’s still in beta and a week after signing up I’ve still not received my login so can’t comment on how it works.

The key question of whether the use of AR results in any tangible benefits for the client of a campaign was asked however the answer to this focussed on the brand benefits. As with a lot of marketing it’s difficult to put a price on what the cool factor might do for a brand.

Scott left the audience with a teaser that Explore Engage are launching a new product next month and that this would blow away anything that we’d seen to date – hyperbole or not, we’ll have to wait and see.

The second presenter was Laura Chambers Senior Director of Mobile at Paypal who whilst pushing the benefits of Paypal over other payment methods like NFC and credit cards had some great points to consider. The main message was that consumers are really looking for the end to end experience of buying something and don’t really care about the payment method they use. An example of making a payment and the receipt automatically being stored as part of the transaction so that if/when the customer needed to return the item they could simply lookup the payment and show the merchant their receipt. Whilst this sounds like something that will be offered as part of MAMBO I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something that Paypal will be spruiking in the coming months.

Laura also gave some examples of how you could use Paypal mobile to make purchases in Palo Alto including carrots at a farmers market. Given the tech friendly nature of the area it wasn’t surprising that this would be the case but it makes you think how long it will be before we see this spread down to the “backward” parts of the world like Sydney and London!

The stats that were quoted about the exponential growth of payments via mobile were amazing, likewise were the insights into how consumer habits are chasing so that the busiest time for purchasing from ebay is now a Sunday. Mobile commerce is about to become huge and it’s coming to an armchair, park bench, office, train near you.

Laura also confirmed that Paypal are partnering with a Malaysian Telco to drive payment services in that country – she didn’t provide detail on the model but it will be interesting to see how this looks and whether it will be a template for the rest of the world.

[One final overheard comment was that Westpac’s affiliation with Paypal has led to WBC cancelling any mobile payments development and that they will be utilising a white labelled version of the Paypal platform. We shall see….]