At the end of September Diffusion Mobile hosted its first ever Mobile Knowledge Seminar, chaired by The Daily Telegraph’s technology editor Claudine Beaumont and with panellists from the GSMA, IAB and Juniper Research, discussing future opportunities for mobile media in a post-App Store world. With attendees from across the mobile industry, the event tackled opportunities and challenges for companies in a number of areas of mobile, including operators, advertisers, content developers and media owners.

One of the main points raised from those taking part was that without proper mobile internet strategies in place, businesses will lose out regardless of the attention they pay to apps and app stores. Future adoption of feature rich and value added services will centre on mobile users’ internet experiences, not just applications. In many cases, apps are already an easy one click portal to a mobile internet service, and indicative of the way access to and experience of such services are likely to go.

Alongside the seminar Diffusion Mobile has launched a whitepaper studying future opportunities for mobile media, conducted by Juniper Research. In the whitepaper, it is suggested that revenues for application downloads are expected to reach $11.3bn by 2014, represented by a total of almost 20 billion downloads per year. Most interestingly, the study indicates that mobile games will no longer be the dominant driver of app downloads. Gaming’s share of app downloads is expected to fall from current levels of 86 per cent to 50 per cent within five years, as apps geared for general entertainment, multimedia, education and social networking steadily gain market share.

If you would like to receive a complimentary copy of the whitepaper, please visit our whitepapers page and click the link to submit your details. One of the Diffusion Mobile team will then drop you a complimentary copy over. Essential reading for anyone covering the apps and mobile internet spaces!

It’s been a day of milestones at Diffusion, we’ve moved into new offices (excuse the unpacked boxes if you’re visiting this week!) but even more significantly, we have also launched Diffusion Mobile.

Diffusion Mobile will specialise in helping clients in the rapidly growing consumer orientated segments of mobile telecoms including; content and applications, mobile advertising and consumer hardware. Competition and innovation in the mobile sector is becoming increasingly intense, and creative PR is essential to secure the mindshare of consumers, mobile industry partners and the investor community.

The team will bring Diffusion’s next generation approach to this vibrant sector, with integrated communication campaigns built around media relations, social media and search marketing. Reflecting Diffusion’s focus on accountability and measurement, Diffusion Mobile will also operate on a payment by results basis, with clear deliverables for all campaigns and clients only paying for results actually achieved.

We are also excited to welcome Juniper Research, the leading telecoms analyst house specialising in the mobile and wireless sector, as Diffusion Mobile’s first client.   We will be running an integrated digital campaign to raise awareness of the firm and its market reports, positioning its analysts as industry thought leaders.   The campaign will be implemented by mobile industry specialist David Ross-Tomlin, whose PR campaign experience includes some of the biggest names in the mobile industry including BlackBerry, Ericsson and HTC.

If you’re a company in the mobile space we’d love to talk to you about how our fresh approach can help you to meet your communication and business objectives.  Please give us a call on 0207 025 1500 or drop us a line at david@diffusion-mobile.com.

I’ve already predicted that all things video will be big this year, so very interesting to see a new application called Zannel which is billing itself as the first ‘Instant Media Messaging’ service. The programme allows you to send photos and videos taken with your mobile via sms to appear on your Facebook page as near real-time updates on what you’re up to. There are companies offering elements of this already and a number of start-ups trying to create a platform agnostic Video Twitter. All Facebook has some more detail and highlights the applications ease of use, always the holy grail with any mobile software. Definitely one to watch…

2007 has been an amazing year personally. Leaving the warm bosom of agency life was a difficult decision but I’ve since been lucky enough to work with some amazing clients, agencies and practitioners on some really ground breaking digital PR campaigns. It’s been a journey into the future of PR and the future looks very bright indeed. So what do I think 2008 will bring?

1. The Year of the Widget
I have been spending a lot of time over the past couple of months working with some great developers on the design of widgets. I’m not talking about Zombies here, but creative, engaging, viral and above all value-added applications which support wider PR campaigns. The integration of widgets into the armoury of digital PR tactics will really take off in 2008 as developments like OpenSocial improve the economics and allow single applications to access larger audiences across multiple social networking sites. Beyond their role in PR, the widget will continue to change the shape of online advertising, as they move onto the desktop and mobiles – this recent article in Adweek is well worth a read to get up to speed.

2. Do you Vlog?
Video blogging will be one of the biggest tech trends of 2008. This will be driven by high profile bloggers such as Iain Dale experimenting with the medium as well as new platforms like Seesmic and Magnify. Another driver will be next generation mobile handsets with better quality in-built video cameras combined with falling data costs enabling vlogging on the move. It could even capture the media zeitgeist from Facebook, speaking of which…

3. Facebook media backlash
A bit like Jade Goody, having devoted acres of coverage building it up, 2008 will see the media try to bring Facebook down. The Beacon disaster has seen the US press sharpening its knives and the shift in sentiment will no doubt cross the Atlantic. Despite the less favourable coverage, Facebook will continue to grow and members will spend more and more time on the site. Reports of Facebook’s imminent demise by a few over excited commentators are I feel greatly exaggerated. The positives that make the site so great still far out weigh the disadvantages. The Beacon saga has shown Mark Zuckerberg that he stops listening to users concerns at his peril – I don’t think he will be stupid enough to make the same mistakes twice. Removing the negatives in terms of poor data protection and privacy, overly intrusive commercialisation and the small but growing volume of application related spam will need to be his top priorities for 2008.

4. Jumping on the social media bandwagon
Johnny come lately PR agencies will continue to jump on the social media bandwagon. Expect PR Week to be full of more stories of traditional PR agencies appointing heads of social media and creating specialist divisions.

5. A high-profile PR account shifts to a digital agency
The fundamental shifts in the PR industry will come into sharp focus when a high-profile client shifts its PR account to a Spannerworks-esque agency with digital and search at its core. There will be much debate and navel gazing. A few weeks later agencies respond by – yes you’ve guessed it – doing more of number 4.