When Hospitality and Retail professionals from around the world want to learn more about mobile marketing they come to The Mobile Host Show in Las Vegas. The Mobile Host Show is currently scheduled for May 23rd and promises to deliver talks on mobile strategies for couponing, loyalty programs, CRM software and in-car apps. This year it’s being held at the Mirage Hotel & Casino and the speaker list looks terrific!

In addition to David Jones of Shazam and David Offierski of Konrad Group, mobileStorm’s very own Darren Withers (Head of Marketing and Casino Client Services) will be onsite discussing successful strategies with SMS and Email Marketing. We caught up with Darren to ask him about his presentation. In his session, he plans to cover solid email and SMS strategies that he’s successfully executed for retail and hospitality clients like Zappos in Las Vegas, Caesars Golf, Landrys, Tao Group and Cannery Casinos. He’ll then discuss how to apply those marketing tactics to similar businesses of all sizes.

With all the exciting changes happening in mobile it’s sure to be an event Hospitality and Retail Professionals (especially those already in the Las Vegas Area) won’t want to miss!

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I were invited to attend the Hakkasan Restaurant & Nightclub’s grand opening in Las Vegas. Angel Management Group (who manages Hakkasan) is a client of ours, and to this day I have never received an invitation to a nightclub even remotely close to the sophistication of Hakkasan’s grand opening invitation. I mean, I have received some pretty neat wedding party invitations where it must have been a $500 per head, but those invitations did not come with a wireless bluetooth speaker.

I read reports that it cost $200,000,000 to completely open up the club (from construction to DJ contracts). At least $1,000,000 was spent on these invitations. I am very grateful to have a client like AMG and cannot thank them enough for putting us up at the MGM Grand, getting us a table and some bottles. Here is to AMG! You are doing it right guys.

Most Amazing Invitation In the World from mobileStorm on Vimeo.

Recently I took my almost five year old daughter to a father/daughter dance. One of the fun activities was a whole table full of glasses, hats, jewelry, and a whole bunch of other funny props you could wear. You then lined up, and a photographer took your picture. KK and I had the best time posing for the camera while dressing up in all of these funny outfits.

One of the pictures of myself I thought came out pretty funny. I had slipped on this really odd hat and tilted it backwards, put on some Porsche Carrera sun glasses and of course looking as gangster as possible, threw up “westside!”.

I thought I looked pretty hip hop (but minus the street cred), so I knew with that combination I had a pretty good Facebook profile picture. After posting it I had the usual amount of comments and smart alec remarks one would get from friends and family, after posting a ridiculous picture of themselves.

Last week mobileStorm had an announcement of a new, really important feature, on our “mobileStorm for Healthcare” platform. I had completely forgot that your profile picture on Facebook is not private and can be accessed thru an API. Well that is exactly what happened. Apparently a friend of mine wanting to keep update-to-date on some of the things that were happening with me at mobileStorm, and was using an RSS alert news reader (like Google alerts) to do just that. This RSS technology grabs the person’s profile picture and then slaps it on the news feed with whatever news is being scanned for the keyword he was trying to keep track of, in this case “Jared Reitzin”. He forwarded me the email to congratulate me on the announcement, and I immediately realized I was a part of my own Onion story.

(Original photo taken at Father Daughter Dance Jan 2013)

Healthcare is a pretty conservative industry so I really hope our clients or potential clients will get a kick out of this as opposed to worrying about whether or not they should do business with mobileStorm and it’s “wanna be gangster” CEO. I cannot say there is a silver lining to all of this because it just happened, but who knows; maybe it gives mobileStorm some  ”wall-street” cred?  I definitely feel that when you want your data on Facebook to be private, everything should be private. Who knows what other bits of information they are willing to offer up publicly, or what policies they will change without telling anyone as they have done in the past?

Nice lesson learned on this one.

Cheers,

Jared ReitzinHip Hop CEO

mobileStorm fans, partners (we call our clients partners because we really do view them as such) and friends we have great news to announce this morning.  mobileStorm for Healthcare just got a major upgrade.  We’re talking Hyper-drive here.  Up till now, our partners enjoyed the ease of messaging to both email and sms lists in the same campaign through our innovative and efficient drag and drop interface.  They could also use our robust Audience and Communication APIs to trigger email and sms campaigns out of their own system while also maintaining a real-time sync of their database with ours.

Today the platform just got amped up in a big way.  Partners can now message cross channel in campaigns that contain unlimited numbers of email and sms messages in them all triggered off of time, date, behavior, engagement and profile data.  Imagine the most creative message flows and you can build it.  It’ll only get better when we extend Push Notifications and AppMail™ channels into our SaaS platform this year.

Oh yeah, almost forgot that our legendary customer support will be with you every step of the way to assist you should you need advice.  I’m looking forward to seeing many of our partners in person as we showcase this capability and demonstrate how this will revolutionize the way you communicate with your members.

Here are just a few use cases our clients will be clamoring to implement.

1.  Smoking cessation

2. Weight loss programs

3.  Recurring birthday, anniversary and holiday campaigns.

4.  Bill payment and escalation

5.  Daily, Weekly, Monthly Tips.

6.  Appointment Reminders and Reschedule

etc. etc. etc.

Let me know what you think!

The other day, a colleague and I were defending our thoughts on the most influential and disruptive technologies of the last 20 years.  The usual suspects came and went very quickly and with little debate.  TIVO … duh.  Touch screens … well it was actually invented in 1965 but it really became a staple of consumer devices in this century so maybe.  IPhone… well revolutionary yes, however, it was derivative of many personal data assistants that came before it.  It laid the foundation for the next generation of telephony and basically killed the non-Smartphone market.  Ask Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia, if they think it was disruptive.

If the Smartphone killed the mobile phone, then what will kill the Smartphone?  What is the next round of disruption to this industry?  Why exactly is the Smartphone dead?

To develop disruption, the first step is to identify the pain points within the existing process.  For telephony it’s actually pretty easy.

1. Smartphones need to have big screen sizes.  Practically, there is only so far a screen can grow and still be portable.  Current phone sizes can range up past 5 inches; however, no one thinks a 7 inch screen is practical for daily communication purposes.  However, increasingly the gap between tablet, Smartphone and computer is shrinking.  We must find a way to execute more with less space or fundamentally change the equation.
2. Touch screens aren’t that practical.  Finger prints drive us all crazy.  Screen protectors are just painful and steal the vibrancy away from today’s high res screens.  Cursor positioning on a Smartphone is a labor in futility and don’t get me started on why iOS won’t add the cursor arrows to their keyboards.  Touch screens also require you to be looking down or at them to engage.  How many times have you almost walked into a pole, while texting or surfing on your phone?
3. Does anyone like earpieces?  Both Bluetooth and wired have fundamental issues and limitations.  Tangled cords, poor sound transmission, poor amplification, noise cancellation that baffles both the user and party on the other line.  Do you walk around all day with an ear piece on or put it in your pocket until needed.  You need to charge it with a separate charger than your phone (generally) and how often does either your phone or earpiece run out of power when you need it most?  The underlying problem is that flat, rectangular phones are a flawed shape for telephony.  Great for data, poor for conducting a conversation.
4. Where do you put your phone when you aren’t using it?  Nomophobia is the fear of losing your phone.  We can all agree that it is a well founded fear and most of us have misplaced, lost or dropped a phone.  With phone prices rising, it’s easy to understand how this has become a condition.  The bigger phones get, coupled with the more power needed to support the larger and higher resolution screens, the harder it is to comfortably walk around with a phone in your pocket.  Form and function are again at odds.

So what does my crystal ball say as to the future evolution of personal computing, communication and telephony.  It actually takes a page directly out of Apple’s own playbook.  Identify a form factor that can be stylish, trendsetting and leverages existing capabilities in a way that provides a differential experience.  Take technologies that are already there and combine them in a way that hasn’t been thought of yet.

Welcome to, iGlasses 2018.  Not the currently interpreted view of what Google’s Project Glass and Apple’s existing iGlasses initiative represent but the real world and disruptive application of that vision.  Imagine a set of eye glasses, with thousands of frame choices for you to make, that integrates hard-wired earbuds (think of a better version of what Oakley makes) and battery and charging systems to make them a completely integrated system.  Utilize induction to charge and slim connectors, Bluetooth or wireless to upload and download data.

These transparent, head mounted, displays would permit the wearer to view and interact with content through a much, much larger perspective.  Imagine how you would interact with a 50 inch screen in front of you?  Don’t worry about walking into a pole because you can see right through the data and you have your head up all the time.

Now how would you interact with the data?  On a Smartphone you touch, tap and drag.  Using iGlasses, you could use four different data input methods.

1. Voice.  Clearly Siri and voice technology is only improving.  It won’t be long for you to be able to guide your experience through voice alone.  Siri, pull up today’s calendar.  Siri, call my brother.  That works already, however it would become cumbersome on its own for repetitive navigation commands.
2. Eye tracking.  The frames of the glasses could have sensors that track the movements of your eye to reference where on the virtual screen you are looking at.  Currently, there are dozens of practical applications using eye tracking as a computer interface.  It simply needs to be miniaturized to fit this application.
3. Hand/finger tracking.  Kinect and other gesture control technologies are exploding right now.  Unlike eye tracking, imagine the sensor is on the other side of the rim tracking your hand/finger movements to position the cursor on the virtual screen.  Look anywhere and virtually type in the air to compose your next email.
4. Lastly, and certainly not as far off as you think is mind control.  No really!  Check out this TED video to see how a small number of strategically positioned electrodes can enable anyone to move cursors and 3D renderings with their mind.  Imagine that the rim, temple and earpiece have sensors that detect your unique brainwave pattern.  Instead of reading how to click and swipe in the instruction manual, it’ll teach you how to calibrate the sensors to read your thoughts.

So you may ask… How would you ever fit all the components required by a phone into a slim pair of iGlasses frames?  Great question.  That could be accomplished in at least two ways.

1. Miniaturization.  If Moore’s Law holds then it won’t take more than 5 or 6 years for the circuitry in a standard Smartphone to fit within a modestly sized frame.  Batteries are also shrinking and smaller circuits require less power to execute the same functions.
2. Key fob.  Imagine that instead of having the phone within the glasses, the actual telephony hardware, computer and main battery are shrunk into a key fob that pares with the iGlasses to do the heavy processing.  The key fob would still be very small but can be shaped in a form that allows for the components to fit better together.  Now you have another reason to fear losing your keys!

Am I serious?  Absolutely!  Is it a disruptive idea?  You tell me.  While you think about, it, I’m placing my advanced order.

A new study was just published recently out of the University of Kansas School of Medicine that looked at physician’s preferred method for “brief communication” while on the job.  The results prove that text messaging is increasingly becoming the favored choice.

The University polled 106 physicians and found that 27 percent named texting their preferred method, compared to 23 percent that favored hospital-issued pagers, and 21 percent that said face-to-face conversation was preferred.  Among the survey pool, 57 percent reported sending or receiving work-related text messages, though it’s important to note that a majority of those polled were younger physicians — with 62 percent only having practiced medicine for 10 years or less.

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It’s no secret that digital marketers must take into account mobile usage these days when preparing and sending email marketing campaigns, but you may be surprised by just how quickly usage is being skewed towards the mobile channel.

Thanks to the folks over at emailmonday.com, it was revealed that mobile email will account for 10-35% of total email opens by 2013, depending on your target audience, product, and email type.  In addition, it was revealed that more than one-half (56%) of US consumers who have made at least one purchase using their smartphone have done so in response to a marketing message delivered via mobile email.

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Join us tomorrow, April 17th at 9am PDT for our latest webinar on the topic of casino marketing using email and SMS.

Our Director of Casino Client Services, Darren Withers, will discuss how to use an email and SMS digital marketing strategy to not only keep new players and guests coming through the door, but also retain active Players Club and Hotel databases through engagement to maintain loyalty to your property.

You’ll learn the ins and outs of using email and SMS marketing separately, as well as how to boost performance and ROI by integrating the two channels for maximum exposure and effectiveness.  Following the presentation, we’ll also be holding a Q&A session to answer any casino marketing -related questions.  We hope to see you there!

Register here to reserve your spot.