On the 11th of November all the students doing the DICE module in DCU landed back into The Helix once again for the second this semester. This time however we were having our get mobile conference. I wondered how it would differ from our last conference, get social. Although I found the last conference interesting I preferred the get mobile conference. The reason for this I suppose was because I had more of an interest in the topic at hand.
Theo Lynn
Once again Dr. Theo Lynn opened our conference. If you didn’t know from my last post, he is a Business Innovation Platform Director at DCU. He shared some facts with us like how 96% of Irish 18-35 year olds own a smart phone and also how 90% of people access Facebook from their smart phone! The statistic that shocked me the most was how 57% of people use their phone while on the toilet, maybe not the most appealing fact but it was surprising.
Dr. Mark Hughes
Next up was Dr. Mark Hughes. He is the Chief Technical Officer at Digifeye. They are a discovery and sales platform company who help all sorts of companies to turn their digital imagery into shoppable content. He told us how a staggering 250 million images are uploaded online each day! They analysis visual content so you can for example, buy what you can see in images
such as pictures of celebs wearing clothes you would like which is done by computer vision. He explained how this is a lot more accurate than flicker searches as those searches are only based on the tags of the image rather than the image itself. This was all very new and fascinating to me as I had no idea that pictures could be searched in different ways and how some are clearly a lot more accurate than others.
Dr. Cathal Gurinn
Our third speaker at our get social conference was Dr. Cathal Gurrin. He is a lecturer at the school of computing at DCU. He is also a funded Investigator in the INSIGHT Centre for Data Analytics which funds 200 researchers and 50 academics. He does a lot of lifelogging and had one of the largest lifelog archives worldwide. Lifelogging focuses on mobile as a sensor and he believes that that wearable will go mainstream in 2015. He explained to use of devices such as google glass are:
- Location aware
- Activity aware
- Environmentally aware
- Socially aware
These personal lifelogs record everything and create a complete and accurate picture of an individual which gives a visual memory of a person’s life. Before this conference I had never heard of lifelogging so it was all very new and exciting to me when he explained it. I can’t however imagine myself wearing google glasses by next year if I’m honest!
Eoin Cruise
Next up was Eoin Cruise. He is the market lead at Microsoft. He previously worked for Nokia but now in 2015 all the Nokia devices will be re-branded to Microsoft. They decided to do this as Nokia reputation for the latest phone devices had fallen dramatically in recent years. However as Eoin mentioned, in 2013 Nokias smartphone volume share was 11.6% which was due to the launch of the Nokia Lumia. The aim of Nokia and Microsoft integrating together in relation to phones are to:
- Ensure the success of Lumia smartphones
- Continue to drive volume with Nokia First phones
- Increase usage of Microsoft experience and services
As I listened to Eoin talking about the Lumia I realised that this affordable smartphone had a lot to offer. I questioned my IPhone more and more. Maybe this Lumia would be the better option for me, especially since my track record with phone hasn’t been great with the getting lost or broken more times than I care to admit!
Paul Davey
The next speaker was Paul Davey, a mobile leader at IBM. What I didn’t realise before Pauls presentation was that IBM were the inventors of the first smartphone, it was really surprising to me. He told us how ‘creating a truly engaging mobile experience involves far more than building great mobile apps’. He told us about the IBM MobileFirst offering portfolio which included:
- Application and Data platform
- Management
- Security
- Analytic
What I found to be the most interesting part of his presentation was IBMs Watson service. 350 text books can be analysed in 17 seconds by Watson which I found astounding. They are testing it for research on medical illnesses and if it makes it to the publically available for medical diagnoses, it would be a huge advance in technology and with treating illnesses.
Alex Meisl
The final speaker was Alex Meisl who is the Chair of Wiforia. He opened with 4 misapprehensions:
- SMS is dead- actually 145 billion SMS were sent in the UK in 2013
- Mobile advertising is trivial- In fact it will overtake newspaper advertising in the UK in 2014
- Apps are the future- It turns out 80% of branded apps get less than 1000 downloads
- Retailers are screwed- Sales have doubled in 10 years to $16 billion
He shared some interesting facts with us like how one third of UK people would rather give up sex than their smartphone and how more 5 year olds know how to a smartphone than tie their laces, I would have never guessed that. Now 17% of 
CMO’s have fully integrated mobile and they are adopting a mobile-first mindset and listening to their customers. He told us how companies should ‘fish where the fish are’ and the 4 points of this are:
- Awareness
- Engagement
- Purchase
- Loyalty
Although Alex shared some facts and information that I found very interesting, he spoke for over an hour and I felt like it was hard to keep fully engaged with what he was saying, even though it was more likely very intriguing. I think that if he had spoken for a shorter length of time I would have found it more enjoyable.
In conclusion I really enjoyed this conference. I felt i learned a lot about the the new and upcoming advances in relation to mobile and other technologies. Don’t forget to read my next blog post which will be in February for the Get Started conference.
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