PechaKucha App Edition Alumni Quipper Secure Funding From Atomico

We've been hearing great things around participants ever since the inaugural PechKucha App Edition MaintainPR put on back in May of last year.

Quipper, a technology venture specialising in e-learning mobile apps secured a $500,000 round from Niklas Zennström's Atomico in November! Talk about a happy new year!

We also think it's high time we caught up with Kliqed and The Situationist as well, since so much can happen in a short time!

Stay tuned for more updates!

The Unstoppable Mobile Web and Internet of Things Pt. 2

In part 1 of this post, we outlined some amazing statistics and hopefully got your attention tuned to mobile for 2011 and beyond. For part 2, we'll outline a broader trend that ties together smarter handsets with a new connected way of living.

Articles on the "Internet of Things," or "Web of Things" continue to hit mainstream news sources. The concept is simple enough -- as connected sensors become cheaper to fabricate, the everyday things in our lives (like the bridge you drive across to get to work, as well as your HDTV) will become easier to run/repair/operate thanks to an ever aware computer network making sense of the data.

In The Economist's Nov 2010 Special Report on Smart Systems, one of the best articles we found on the subject, the smartphone is touted as one of the more important "nodes" in a global network of sensors that will relay information from our daily lives back to the omnipresent number crunchers making sense of our physical world.

Whether you realize it or not, if you're a smartphone user, you aren't just talking to friends and family and using your favorite apps...your phone is talking to the web. Whether it's new search capability through Google's mobile application -- which factors in GPS when returning search results -- or more open collaborative applications like WikiCity, which was used to map the city of Rome in real-time from opt-in users, the future will be mapped and course corrected via mobile.

From a health perspective, the computing power and cultural importance of your cell phone -- something most people are hardly ever without -- is a match made in heaven. Now through Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and other mobile health sensors, we will begin to see wearable and more non-invasive ways to analyze vital implants such as pace makers, blood glucose and more.

From a broader consumer perspective, the mobile will begin to "sense" more about your day -- through your routine of sitting, walking etc...as well as how to react in a given mode. For example, a handset that allows you to answer an incoming call with a motion gesture even if you are in the middle of a run, rather than fiddle with buttons, is a safer handset!

From the mobile apps onward, the transformation of living alongside our data streams will be swift and dramatic. From our local devices, data can be accessed anywhere and streamed thanks to cloud computing. The apps that prove to be the most important in our lives and daily routines will not just be confined to the phone...they will appear in multiple iterations across different operating systems and user interfaces.

So the next time you take out your smartphone for a Google search or to play a quick game on the subway...think of the future, and be ready to share your data!

Event Summary: Oxford Business & Reuters Institute Symposium on Paying for Content

MaintainPR was lucky enough to snag an invite from new media wunderkid Joe Brilliant (@joebrilliant) to attend this sold out discussion on the future of content monetization.

Held at Oxford's only modern looking building, the Said Business School, and curated by Said Business, The Oxford Business Network (OBN), and  The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), the evening was divided into short presentations from experts in news, media and technology, and then a Q&A session for attendees to address the panel.

Speakers included:

Dr. David Levy, RISJ Director (Moderating)
Mark Oliver, Chief Executive, Oliver and Ohlbaum Consulting
Professor Robert G. Picard, RISJ Director of Research
Erin Ericson, Content Manager, Developer Marketing at Vodafone
Christophe Cauvy, Digital Director, EMEA, McCann WorldGroup

We were impressed by all the data and points made, and in particular, with Robert Picard's exploration into the issue of payment systems as a hindrance to cooperation and innovation in the online media sector.

While e-money has come a long way since the introduction of PayPal over a decade ago, Picard argued that an e-commerce system without added transaction costs from banks or credit card companies will be necessary in bringing costs for online news content into the realm of realistic consumer comfort.

Mark Oliver's recent consumer polls through his consultancy served as visual reminders that data supports promiscuous consumption on the Internet. In short -- while we as consumers of news have allegiances to particular papers and columnists in the physical world of print journalism, the same is not true for overarching consumer behavior of news digestion online.

Erin Ericson's mobile app expertise, and surveys of the evenings attendees on smartphone usage highlighted the ongoing trend of content creators turning to applications and specifically the mobile and tablet OS for means to an affluent audience. But the issues of marketplace fragmentation (read: multiple app stores) and noise (50% of iOS developers have less than 1K downloads, and there are over 400K iPhone apps) will continue to be barriers for the consumer.

We are looking forward to more insightful discussions from the Oxford Business Network. Thanks again Joe!

The Unstoppable Mobile Web and Internet of Things Pt. 1

The title of this post -- which sounds like some sort of mashup between a Philip K. Dick and Roald Dahl short -- is instead the future. Don't stare directly at the future! You just did it again! Look away...

Jokes aside, the explosive growth of mobile broadband and personal smartphone/tablet devices is truly something to behold. In a recent LA Times piece, David Sarno cites the Global Mobile Traffic Forecast from Cisco, to estimate that 6.3 exabytes (or "the equivalent of every man, women and child on earth sending 1,000 text messages every second") will be sent each month globally by 2015.

These are staggering figures, but easy to accept when one considers that in many areas of the world, mobile is the only web, since fixed Internet was never a part of the infrastructure.

Mary Meeker, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, calls this "the fifth most major technology cycle of the past half century."

MaintainPR calls it the unstoppable mobile web, and it excites and concerns us on a daily...hell...hourly (if you look at the speed which mobile-related technology news is flying out at) basis.

Take today as an exampled. During the time I have taken to write this post, we have had first impressions of the app-dominating iPhone 4 running for the first time on a new major U.S. network, the launch event and anouncement for Google's tablet-scaled OS, continuing commentary on the web-based version of the Android App Marketplace (which was announced yesterday)...oh, and how about some investing advice from Forbes around Nokia, one of the silent, but still dominant mobile web players.

Head spinning yet? What if I told you that the Wall Street Journal is reporting world-wide revenue from mobile apps to triple this year to $15 billion?

Whether you love them or hate them, smartphones and mobile apps are about to dramatically alter the way we live. In part 2 of this post, we'll take a look at some of where MaintainPR believes all this is going. Thanks for reading!

What is Social CRM?

The term Social CRM has recently escalated in B2B and B2C business press, after analysts at Gartner released a Magic Quadrant report, outlining their definitions and players in the field. It's important to public relations and social media marketing professionals to follow, because many of the most important voices with something to add about a client's product or service may not be on public social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

Gartner's definition of Social CRM is "a business strategy that mutually benefits cloud-based communities and the business by fostering engagement while generating opportunities for sales, marketing and customer service."

Cloud-based, as in most cases, unless referring to a Super Mario level, means that the information that is shared and saved within each community is managed by shared servers and software.

So who is getting all up in these clouds? Glad you ask!

Some of the companies most relevant for technologies with data capabilities that will interest your homely PR guy are: KickApps, Pluck, and LiveWorld

The reason being that these companies make services which are easily configurable between open and closed networks (Facebook, Twitter, and an internal company wiki or network for instance) and offer the advantage of containing all the insights in a branded environment the deploying company can own.

Pluck, is part of the micro-publishing beomouth "Demand Media," which was recently called out in a New Yorker profile on a related subject matter as a "content farm, which dispense altogether with professional storytelling, in favor of search-engine-optimized information packaging." OUCH!!!

The future of storytelling and journalism aside...I prefer to back and get excited about KickApps anyway, since they were a client during my tenure at Horn Group public relations.

KickApps, which recently added full CMS (content management) to it's social media platform, lets companies get info in the most important Social CRM areas: Direct Feedback (polls, ratings, reviews, recommendations, Q&A) ,Open Conversations (forums, groups) and Stimulated Responses (blogs, comments, photo galleries submissions) and also plugs directly into Facebook via an app taking advantage of the Facebook API.

For examples of some of the usage and campaigns this has enabled, take a look at this blog post from their site.

This is just one company example from a variety of management consoles to enable content collection, observation, control and analysis for marketers in the social web, and with consumers more and more likely to engage with a brand through a familiar network like Facebook, you can see why the space is about to take off.

What are your thoughts on Social CRM, and did I miss anyone important? Let me know here or on Twitter: rorohello

Ryan