Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 5)

Christopher Dean: We think that users today demand and in the future will demand even more a set of user journeys that are much more personal and conversational. No more do you have the broadcast-the-same-message-to-everyone system or a traditional marketing funnel where people start at the beginning and fall out at the bottom. It has to be delivered when we’re having the conversation.

A lot of my competitors can’t update their segments of users for a few hours or overnight. If you can’t do it in real time, then you can’t deliver a personalized interactive conversation. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: However, you gave examples of gaming and retail. Are those industries also applying these methodologies and principles aggressively?

Christopher Dean: It’s interesting. One of the powerful reasons that Swrve is so successful is that we started in the mobile gaming space. The mobile game companies and the publishers, which are actually part of larger entertainment companies, were the first businesses in the entire industry to crack the code regarding how you interact with users on mobile and deliver delightful experiences. They were the first to understand managing first-time user experience, delivering delightful game experience so that the user keeps returning again and again and keeps spending money on virtual goods. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 3)

Christopher Dean: People are consuming content in smaller amounts. They want action taken when they walk into Macy’s with an app open. A very interesting new development is being able to track a user, see what they’re doing in the app and understanding where they are from a location perspective, then updating a segment of a user, and triggering an action, which is delivering some content, all in real time. That’s one thing that has really evolved and emerged.

The second thing is about not just tracking clicks and time in the app but about conversion events. What every real publisher cares about is their conversion events. What do they ultimately want people to be doing? You have to have a system that tracks all the way through what the conversion event is. Because we sell to a bunch of different verticals, when we walk into a media company, they really want to track whether you watched Jimmy Fallon last night. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom (Part 2)

Rob Chamberlin: Everybody wants to consume content via mobile devices now and not on a PC or when they’re stationary. That trend is driving what we’re doing. We started the company saying, “Voice and SMS are just going to be apps with mobile users. The value that both consumers and businesses gain from mobility and from wireless networks is data.”

If you think about it, that’s the only thing that consumers are paying for today. Everything else, you assume it to be free. It’s all about how many gigabytes I get per month. Those are the trends that are really driving what we’re doing and certainly our suspicions upon launching the company have been confirmed with what’s happened in the marketplace over the last several years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 2)

Christopher Dean: That gets to the next level of the platform, which is really all about automation and integration. How do we automate some of these experiences when you have millions and millions of users using your application? You need to treat them in segments. You can treat them on an individual basis but we believe that it’s better to actually treat them from a segment perspective and then take action in an automated way.

What we’re seeing is that many marketers and people who are running apps are very much in an overwhelmed mode today around data. There’s so much data coming at them. We help them simplify that. We have a predictive marketing suite and we have machine learning capabilities built into our platform to help find the signal from the noise, and to take actions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom (Part 1)

This conversation highlights how businesses overlay mobile virtual networks on top of wireless carrier networks for specific use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction to yourself as well as DataXoom and introduce our audience to the context of this call.

Rob Chamberlin: I’m the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom. We’re a multi-carrier, data-centric MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). We have wholesale partnerships with three of the largest four US wireless carriers. We target and work wth business customers only, and connect those customers to the mobile Internet. At a high level, our value proposition is a single platform from which to manage your wireless users across carriers with one bill to control all of that in terms that are quite business friendly.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s understand this in a bit more detail. You said you are catering to business customers who are creating these Mobile Virtual Networks. What are the use cases? Why are they doing that? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 1)

This discussion delves into the depths of what can be tracked and what is being tracked in maximising the impact of mobile apps in industries like travel and hospitality, retail, gaming, etc. It’s a very good view into predictive and analytics-based targeting, real-time actions based on specific business goals, and the related domain. Very interesting conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Swrve.

Christopher Dean: I’m the CEO of Swrve. Swrve is a mobile engagement platform based in San Francisco with offices around the world. We deliver everything that a brand needs to be successful on a mobile app. As the world is transforming and moving to more and more mobile experiences, brands need to >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as the main driver of that consumer-driven purchase cycle? Is it more the community and the people in their network who influence the purchase decision or is it that self-serving content that people read about? Whether it’s on the site of the retailer or other sites, there’s also a lot of content that people are self-serving right now. Between the two, which one is impacting purchase decisions more these days?

Jason Wallis: Both of them impact purchase decisions whether it’s deliberate or not. Sometimes, it depends on the item. If it’s to showcase a luxury item, they may actually directly engage with their social network to get lot more opinions and feedback. If it’s a more casual purchase item, that might not be a strong sentiment. Content is involved in all of those decisions.

What we’ve seen is there’s certainly value served by retailers which is technical in nature, but final decisions are usually driven by community-provided or user-generated content. Content is pretty pervasive throughout the whole purchase cycle. People trust their networks and their friends—birds of a feather flock together. Those are two pretty strong forces that really help shape how people buy, when they buy and what they buy. >>>