Mob4Hire WOWs at MWC Barcelona 2010

We had a great time last week at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona! I documented the industry perspective in my blog posts for www.techvibes.com; which you can read here. Thanks to Rob Lewis for posting ...

Summary from MWC 2010:

It’s all about the apps.

I don’t want to re-iterate what I said in those posts ‘cause you can read them yourselves, but I wanted to augment that story with our personal success. Starting on Day 1 when we joined Motodev at their Developer Conference, it was a week of unprecedented attention.

I was happy to sit on the "Maximize your Android Market Opportunity" panel ... fun stuff. Ultimately, any business needs to make money, and mobile developers are well known for their current starving artist period (i.e. lots are not making money!). Using some stats I gathered from places like Androlib.com, a developer can start piecing together a real business strategy vs. making the 9,000th iteration of Tetris.

Throughout the week, it's clear that our message of “Don’t Crash. Don’t Suck. Get Sticky.” is becoming the mantra for an industry that suffers from worsening handset, O/S and operator fragmentation. The citizens of the Mob4Hire community share the same belief: having real people involved in the development of mobile software is vital to having a great user experience when the app, mobile website or mobile ad campaign is released.

You can’t make great software without users.

And, if you don't have great software, you will not get good user ratings on an app store. Our current research shows that 83% of mobile users won't download software without seeing 4 or 5 star user ratings in app store reviews. We call it "The Curse of the One Star"

Marek Pawlowski from the London based MEX forum (global leaders in user experience) joined us in the booth for awhile; he blogged about the "growing interest in remote mobile user experience testing" on the MEX site. As Marek states:

With so many variations of handset and networks, it is impossible to predict where the chain of user experience will break down in a controlled environment - the Mob4Hire approach gets you direct to the street-level conditions which will make or break the UX of your application.

We also got a great mention from Russell Buckley at Mobhappy.com.

But how do you know if users will rank your App high or low? That’s where Mob4Hire come in – by pre-testing your App before it’s launched. Not only will you learn what your ranking will probably be with that version, but you’ll find out why. This allows you to improve and tweak your App, re-test and launch when you’re confident that you’ve cracked it.

It was also heartening to have some great meetings with many partners, carriers and handset manufacturers who are looking at crowdsourcing as the answer to not only create great user experiences, but also to give scale to testing and market research processes. Not to mention, helping to guarantee that apps, websites and ad campaigns will resonate with users “Ummm ... do you know why users will love that app? Because users helped create it.”

Specifically, our “Mob4Hire as a Platform” architecture is drawing great attention since our specially designed API’s give them a great head start in the adoption of crowdsourced solutions. By leaving the hard part of crowd management and cloud infrastructure to us, enterprises such as carriers, operating systems and handset manufacturers can quickly introduce the power of crowd sourcing to their app stores, developer networks. Click here to make an appointment to talk to us at CTIA Vegas next month!

Last but not least, thanks to Heli and Laura and everyone at the Canadian Pavilion for the great opportunity and for working so hard to make it come together. We’re excited to be included in very impressive group of world class and leading edge companies.

We’ve got some big announcements coming up in the next few months. Stay tuned!

Thanks to everyone that's helped out along the way ... as always: Trust in the Mob!

Stephen King, CEO

Mob4Hire at Mobile World Congress Barcelona

The last few weeks before THE major worldwide wireless trade show are always crazy. First, there's making sure every ounce of our time is well spent meeting with our friends, customers, partners and media. It's a good chance to get out from behind Skype and have quality face to face time.

Second, after coming off a great autumn season, we got deep down into product development over the last few months and, in addition to several great announcements to make, we'll be showing off the first looks at our new Version 3 Mob4Hire platform!

We are proud to be in the Canadian Pavilion this year ... thanks to all the great people at the Federal and Provincial (Alberta) governments for putting this together! Specifically, we are in the Canadian Pavilion in booth area 2A105 in Hall 2 near the exit to Hall 1. See map to the right.

Come by and see us! If you'd like to pre-arrange a meeting, please contact Allen Poutanen, VP Business Development: allen@mob4hire.com.

See you in Catalonia!