Should mobile developers look East for ARPU inspiration?

It’s a couple of years now since I got the chance to write for a well-known international newspaper on how the ever-changing telecoms market was going to throw up a new batch of opportunities for developers who were keen to make sure they were working at the most commercially profitable end of the spectrum.

The situation it seems, these days, is all about ARPU (average revenue per unit) and therefore making the most money out of every single mobile ‘transaction’ so-to-speak.

The piece I wrote at the time was for the newspaper’s Asia section in connection with a big conference called Communicasia – there’s another one this year in Singapore during June. What’s important about the Asian connection is that, broadly speaking, the more developed markets of this region (Japan, Singapore, the happy part of Korea etc.) have often been seen as a good gauge as to the future form of our own European mobile usage and behaviour.

Location-based services have for some time now been regarded as a safe bet on the ARPU hedge-fund scale. But your average developer newsfeed seems to have rapidly gotten over the excitement factor around suggesting that GPS map-driven services to tell us where the nearest toilet, pizza, coffee-bar is are the answer.

Actually, I’m 40-years old and can usually (although not always I have to admit) find my own way to the toilet.

So with an eye on the East, I wondered whether the mobile marketing machines out there are calling for a new approach to ‘device’ development in 2009.

A company I’ve not heard of before, but who seem to offer reasonable enough advice for mobile developers is Novarra. For those who do design ‘made-for-mobile’ web sites, Novarra recommends using standard naming conventions as outlined in the ‘W3C Mobile Web Initiative’ to ensure the best possible user experience across all handsets.

Great – if you’re working at the handset level then that’s cool. What about the network? Well, outfits such as Soonr are trying to drive cloud-based mobile services, but are we ready for this and should this be captivating the attention of mobile developers trying to identify the highest possible ARPU opportunities?

Another company (I told you this stuff was flying around like wildfire this week) called Xtract pumped out a five-point recession action plan for the mobile market. Oh that’s just PR isn’t it? Well yes it is – but is there anything of substance in it?

The aforementioned vendor reaffirmed the slightly obvious by saying this week that while mobile operators are perhaps not the worst hit businesses by the recession, subscribers may put off a phone upgrade and perhaps will be less likely to try out new services, reducing their call and texting volumes to save cash. Yikes – ARPU coming under fire then right? What should we do about it?

According to Xtract, 3D profiling techniques to analyse subscribers' demographic and behavioural data, as well as their social networking trends, could be some of the key areas to concentrate on and – logically one assumes – develop for.

Looking for viral marketing opportunities (alright this is obvious stuff, but just look at Twitter in the last six months) and new untapped revenue streams through analytical subscriber profiling is argued to be a sensible route too – even if it does sound like an invasion of privacy when phrased like that.

But don’t trust me, I topped up my pay-as-you-go Palm Treo with 50 quid in 2006 and haven’t been back to the Orange shop since.

(Clue for this technique: people usually call me – and I’m usually out of the country, so I don’t get the call. Email loves me and I love it.)

So should mobile developers (and operators for that matter) look East for ARPU inspiration this year? Will the mobile usage patterns of wacky Japanese school kids and nerds tell us which video/location-based/space-invaders-style applications will best drive ARPU in our home market in the months ahead? Well maybe I guess. You could always go to Singapore in June and try and find out. I think the market and those who operate within it will settle at its own recession-level watershed naturally to be honest. It’s fun to try and look ahead though.