I am just returning now from a week in Stockholm, after attending MobileMonday's Global Founders Meeting (GFM) and Mobile Summit Sweden. I can't write much about GFM (top secret...), I can only say it has been a great experience, and was very nice to get together with Mobile Monday foundersry from all over the world.As for Mobile Summit Sweden, The conference was organized by Ken Imamura, founder of MoMo Sweden, and a lot of the speakers were also MoMo founders since they stayed after GFM. There was also good content in the usual fields such as panels from VCs and incubators in the mobile field, sessions about mobile marketing, advertising, gaming and so on. It is nice to get to know the activities of Nordic companies in the mobile field - and some really have their game on.
But for me the MobileMonday stuff was the most interesting... for example, we heard about the story of MobileMonday from Peter Westerbacka, one of the founders of MoMo, always important to know our history...
The last part of the summit called Global Outlook was especially interesting - we got to heard about emerging markets from MoMo founders in the regions of South East Asia (Andy Zain, MoMo Jakarta), Latin America (Nidal Barake, MoMo Caracas) and India (S R Raja, MoMo Bangalore) - a real eye opener. In the same way we heard from Lars Cosh-Ishi, founder of MoMo Tokyo about the Japanese mobile market, which is the exact opposite: perhaps the most developed mobile market in the world.
All agreed that when dealing with an emerging market, one must recognize it and not just "copy & paste" the penetration strategies we use in developed market. The needs can sometimes be very basic (i.e. not 3D mobile games, but rather simple SMS-based solutions). Also business models needs to be rethought - for example, in south east Asia renting a game for one week (with DRM lock) can actually fit the model in which people are used to consume, and will definitely fit their pocket as well.
I'll spend now a week or two back in Israel before my next event, so a lot of work for me... See you at the next post!
