Tag Archives: website production

Points to consider when designing your next mobile app

Percentage of people who have disagreements with their partner due to their mobile phone usage, by age from Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2016 report
Percentage of people who have disagreements with their partner due to their mobile phone usage, by age

According to Deloitte’s Mobile Consumer Survey 2016 report, mobile hasn’t just reached saturating point (over 80% of the UK now owns a smartphone – and still annually growing at 7%), it’s become embedded in our day to day (and night to night) lives. We don’t just own a smartphone, we let it take over our lives – foregoing sleep or partner and friends asking us to put the thing away.

Here are the highlights and takeaways (all are UK statistics, from 3,251 respondents) from the Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2016 report:

  • 10% of smartphone owners check their device immediately on waking up, with over two thirds of us checking our phone within 30 minutes of rising.
  • 43% of us check our phones within 30 minutes of going to bed.
Suggestion: next time you want to spend time with your family or friends, forget your phone from Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2016 report
Suggestion: next time you want to spend time with your family or friends, forget your phone
  • Half of smartphone owners aged 18-24 check their phone in the middle of the night (most of whom check the time, instant messages, social media notifications or email). If you’re not in that age bracket, it’s still 48% for 25-34 year olds, 37% of 35-44 year olds and 27% aged 45-54.
  • Next time you’re out with friends in a restaurant checking your email, or supposed to be out with the family, or just crossing the road, remember the two graphs above.

Continue reading Points to consider when designing your next mobile app

Friends Reunited: 5 reasons why it went so wrong

Friends Reunited - 5 things that went wrong
Friends Reunited – 5 things that went wrong. One of which was this poor design

Friends Reunited, one of the UK’s Internet stars, announced yesterday that it will be closing in a month’s time.

In the UK, Friends Reunited was the Internet version of Woolworths – it’s a site which we all had some affinity to, but didn’t use, and are sad to see depart. How could this household name fail to succeed?

There are five reasons why the site couldn’t compete with later social networks. Continue reading Friends Reunited: 5 reasons why it went so wrong

Agile London at Thomas Cook

Agile London - worth attending if you work in software development
Agile London – worth attending if you work in software development

This evening I went to the latest Agile London event, hosted at Thomas Cook, at a supremely convenient location about quarter of a mile away from the Endava office.

Our host for the evening was Jesus Fernandez, the Development Manager at Thomas Cook. In a concise introduction he described how Thomas Cook has been consolidation pretty much everything – from its management team to the brands it was selling, to its technology platforms.

Thomas Cook is an £8bn ($13bn) public company which has recently gone through a Digital Transformation programme. Continue reading Agile London at Thomas Cook

Trends snapshot: Blockchain, self-service and digital platforms

Blockchain, self-service and single digital platforms are the key trends we are seeing across industry verticals (media, financial services and insurance) at the moment.

Blockchain

Get your Blockchain T-shirt here while it's still cool
Get your Blockchain T-shirt from Zazzle to show the World you know what it is

Blockchain is a centralised, distributed ledger. Its most famous use is Bitcoin to track all the individual ‘bits’ of Bitcoin.

In Insurance it might be a list of all insurable assets. In media the chain can store media assets. In Financial Services it can store equities. Continue reading Trends snapshot: Blockchain, self-service and digital platforms

11 lessons about innovation from the New York Times

The BBC Newsroom. Currently peaceful. And sometimes less peaceful.

Whilst doing some research at work on innovation within the Publishing industry, a colleague of mine found a leaked report from the New York Times from March this year (the full article is at the end of this page).

At 94 pages, it’s a must-read for anyone within Publishing. I took 11 key points from the document:

  1. (page 16) Hallmarks of disruptors… number 4: “Initially inferior to existing products.” This is so true. Almost every time we work on a new innovative project, there will always be someone criticising that product A does things better, or product B is more comprehensive. The answer is twofold – firstly, you can have something more superior, but it will take a lot longer and cost a lost more money; and secondly, it’s part and parcel of developing something new. Remember Twitter’s outages? Remember how basic Facebook looked?
  2. Only a third of NYT readers visit the homepage. Just think of the effort in designing the homepage! Google is great at providing users links directly into articles, and users share articles not homepages. This is the proof. Continue reading 11 lessons about innovation from the New York Times

Monetising customer data

This is the last post in the monetisation series. We’ve explored ten ways to monetise large digital audiences, from simple advertising to selling products. This post discusses ways of making money from data.

Data monetisation is one of the newest of all the models we’ve discussed in the series. And it’s probably the most misunderstood. When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, it proved how valuable user data has become.

But customer data isn’t that new. The market for sales-leads data has been around for ages. The difference now is how that data is collected and ‘mined’. Data used to be scraped from public sources such as Companies House and Yellow Pages. Now companies are setup with the sole purpose of collecting information from users.

Continue reading Monetising customer data

Using premium rate mobile services to monetise a site

This is the penultimate post in the monetisation series. We’ll be discussing how to use premium mobile services to monetise digital properties.

‘Traditional’ premium rate services

There has been some negative publicity about premium messaging in the UK, mainly surrounding television programmes. One key issue is the “bill-shock”, of when a customer’s mobile phone bill arrives a few weeks later, and the customer is surprised at the number of premium messages they’ve sent during the month. Mobile operators have walked a tightrope by offering some payment opportunities on their customers’ handsets, without turning phones into complete wallets (yet).

Continue reading Using premium rate mobile services to monetise a site

The cross selling and upselling business model

This is the ninth part of the series on how companies can make money from high traffic websites. In this post we’ll discuss cross-selling and upselling. As we’ll demonstrate, cross selling doesn’t need high traffic to sell more products.

At Endava we work with companies who are capturing data about their visitors and attempting to personalise the experience, usually with a goal of providing superior service, or selling more goods.

It’s all about the customer (and CRM is key)

At the heart of this solution is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. CRM has become synonymous with large, expensive and difficult IT programmes.

Continue reading The cross selling and upselling business model

The Sponsorship business model

LA Lakers digital sponsorship in action: The Hublot watch in the top right is a sponsor, Verizon is a banner ad
LA Lakers digital sponsorship in action: The Hublot watch in the top right is a sponsor and Verizon is a banner ad

This post is the third of a multi-part article on methods to monetise large digital audiences. The sponsorship model can be used for any size audience, and varying levels of content quality – it all depends on the organisations the website is attracting as sponsors.

Sponsorship is essentially a fixed promotion. Whether it’s putting a logo on a section of a website or a Formula 1 mirror, it’s a longer term arrangement than an advert.

Continue reading The Sponsorship business model