I was lucky enough to attend ENIAC Ventures’ mobile M1 Summit last week, which featured many great speakers. Over the course of the event I wrote a few notes on general themes that emerged throughout the various panels. These themes ranged from mobile’s effect on the supply side of the on-demand economy, to smart watch trends, to corporate innovation. I elaborate more below:

Mobile Is The Cure For The Supply Side Of The On-Demand Economy

The reason companies like Uber are so successful is because they were able to create a marketplace for drivers which couldn’t exist prior to mobile. As Howard Morgan from First Round Capital said during his fireside chat, “People could always go to their computer and order something when they needed it, that part of on-demand could work. But the people that were needed to do those actions weren’t always sitting by their computers. Now with mobile, they are.” VCs on panels seemed bullish about companies that were able to use mobile as a means to connect a previously disaggregated marketplace, and the economics behind the supply side would be a big determinant of the company’s success. Sure, a lot of people would want “on-demand” anything in their lives that needs effort, but are there people on the other side willing to do that, and how much do they charge?

The Watch Is Going To Introduce New Types Of Interactions

The  (apple/smart) watch was brought up several times, but most people haven’t quite formed an opinion about the gadget (in fact, not many people were even wearing one). An interesting point made was how the watch was going to bring a new focus onto visual components and voice as opposed to the text interfaces we’re normally used to. When display real estate is that small, you can’t afford to be using letters. Another take was that the watch was going to make one-bit information processing more mainstream. As Benedict Evans said, “Anytime the process of taking your phone out is longer than the phone action itself, the watch will replace that”.

Data Is Being Created But Not Utilized Well

Mobile becoming mainstream gave entirely new sets of data about individuals, including their locations, preferences, social interactions, etc. The introduction of wearables is going to create even more. However, data is still incredibly disparate among these devices, and companies are slowly arriving to make sense of this data trove. Cross-platform data sets are still a huge opportunity, especially as IoT picks up and sensors/smart devices can provide additional insight. The emergence of all this data around individuals also leads to the next theme of…

The Emergence Of Identity 1.0 (Or Maybe Not Quite)

Data is slowly coming together to paint a cohesive picture and create better “identities” for us. This directly relates the most to marketing, so companies can better use our identities to target ads and products that we actually want and need (so I don’t have to keep getting that Spotify ad about improving the home I don’t own). Polly Lieberman of Drawbridge commented that we aren’t even in Identity 1.0, since we’re still not doing a great job of targeting ads to the right customers but with (phrase this differently) data sets this will get better. In fact, McDonald’s Head of Digital Business Development made a great point that McDonald’s knows it serves 70 million customers a day, but doesn’t know how many times that specific customer has gone to McDonald’s in the last week. While this data is incredibly valuable, as identities are created, privacy becomes a bigger issue.

Corporations Are Slow To Mobile, But Making Moves

Adopting mobile technology has not been mainstream for most enterprises/corporations. A large reason for that, as Howard Morgan mentioned, is that moving entire systems onto cloud based technology is a hard process for companies that have large intricate architectures in place. On top of that, security is still a huge issue for mobile and is just another reason executives can say no to implementation.

That being said, their heads are not buried in the sand. McDonald’s is keeping an eye on self-driving cars, since impulse drive-thru buyers are a big portion of their customers. Procter & Gamble has been partnering with analytics companies to understand who their customers are, and Walmart has been trying to understand what apps their customers are using inside the store.

A final interesting point that was made explained how successful enterprise technology usually bleeds over from the consumer side (dropbox and slack were examples). Back in the day, clunky software was something companies demanded employees use, but now consumer employees are demanding sleek software themselves and bringing it into the workplace.

Mobile UI/UX Is The Most Important Thing For Apps, Especially Commerce

When it comes to mobile, design should be a high priority. Leaders in the industry all mentioned how wrapping websites into a mobile version would soon not cut it, and apps have to be optimized for phone use (simple actions, more visual based). For commerce companies this is especially true when visual “real estate” becomes a limiting factor as apps tread the line of showing too many or too few items.

Notifications for users also came up several times, with apps having to tread the line between annoying users and keeping them engaged. Ajay Kapoor of P&G got a lot of head nodding when he said “Currently, mobile is great at reminding people of something, but not so great at persuading them to buy it.”

US and Non-US Are Two Different Playing Fields

Benedict Evans had a good portion of his presentation dedicated to the fact that most of the new smartphone users are outside the US, and Android actually has more users than iPhones worldwide (despite iPhones monetizing better, probably due to customer base). When talking to international startups, it was clear that they were cognizant of their global users, and catered their companies to these geographic contexts. One example was Rovio creating culturally sensitive games for other countries, or Flipkart going mobile-only since that was what their target demographic was using (a strategy that was agreed, could not work in the US).

An interesting point I noted was how different telecom company operations were between the US and developing countries. In the US these companies are highly regulated, but in other countries these are consolidated superpowers, who sometimes use their power for good (setting up M-Pesa in Kenya) or not-so-good (allowing FB to bypass net neutrality rules in India).

Everyone Is Bullish On Connected Devices

Not much to say here, this was brought up in almost every panel as the future of mobile. The question becomes “how will these networks stay secure?” and “who will have access to this data?”.

Hope these notes were helpful, and feel free to ask me anything on twitter @nikillinit.