Montreal Tech Watch

150 people attended Mobile Monday Montreal (MoMoMo) on April 14. A friendly and welcoming ambiance prevailed throughout the 3-hour event which paved the way for lots of networking opportunities for the attendees.There were four speakers and each one had to address one topic.

• How can Traditional media like radio create value with SMS ?

• Sylvain Langlois from Astral Media talked about the excitement the radio broadcaster feels when he sees the scrolling SMS messages on the screen.At the same time, it saves him/her time answering the phone and chatting with the listeners. He also talked about the obvious value for publicity people.In addition, he mentioned the Boutique Mobile where listeners can purchase content. 

Here, I would like to open parentheses to talk about a similar business model in Europe: O3 is the largest radio station in Austria. They have implemented a mobile service solution called Radio Hitservice. The solution is comprised of several steps: 1)customers would send an SMS (price 0.30 EURO) in order to receive information about the artist and song title currently playing.2) After receiving this info, customers could easily access any associated product like ringtones, wallpapers, CDs…3) Based on the information gathered a customer profile is built in the CRM database. 4) Customers can then take advantage of this profile and use more services like the hit reminder – it allows listeners to sign up (via WAP,web or SMS) to receive an alert when a song is played next.This solution has become very popular :1) 150,000 customers + 250,000 requests/month. 2) 80,000 mobile club members- in the CRM database. Consequently, the number of listeners grew and advertising revenues increased.       

• How can Radio Canada position itself within the mobile community with its demographic?
• Stephane Bousquet of Radio-Canada mentioned that the listeners are still mostly interested in getting the news data. He added that there could be better alternative to SMS, like MMS and the mobile portal.In addition, they plan to target the enterprise users like the Blackberries and the other smartphones like the iphone.     
• Why did RDS acquire the mobile rights to publish video clips of the Canadian Hockey Club ?

• Robert Turcotte of RDS remarked that the users still do not know how to access all their handsets features. He added that there is some work to be done from the vendors side in order to raise the awareness of the subscribers to their hansets features. He also said that the audience for the last Hockey match reached a peak of 1.2 million.

• How can advertising agencies demonstrate to clients the importance of mobile media?

• Luc Cornier of Cossette Communications said that they have created focus groups of heavy mobile users so that they could understand the mobile ecosystem and be able to identify the rising opportunities.In addition, he said that evangelists should be chosen from within this industry in order to guide the users.

I want to note that the questions of the audience revealed frustrations when it came to the high costs that the mobile end users incur.

Finally, I sensed lots of positive energy and enthusiasm within the crowd in this first Mobile Monday Montreal that will eventually be held on a monthly basis.With this bonding of energies it seems that lots of major hurdles can be overcome in order to make Montreal a shining example in the mobile industry .