‘Teenage Heroes’ Panel Interview [Re-posted]

Posted by Ben Smith on 15th December 2009

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After the excellent ‘Teenage Heroes’ Panel at the Heroes of the Mobile Screen conference on 7th December, Vikki caught up with 4 of the panel - Nick, Rachel, Shivz and Rebecca - to recap the discussion and find out a little more.

- Apologies to payByMobile for the error in the first version of this post.

The panel made particular mention of pitches from:

Flook - An iPhone and web application: …a brand new way to discover and share the world around you. Flook’s innovative UI lets you simply swipe through a stream of nearby flook cards. Cards have a full-screen photo and some text and they’re also geo-located - placed at a specific location for you to find when you’re nearby. Over time, flook learns which cards people like most, and then shows them to you first. It’s a bit like StumbleUpon for the world around you.

payByMobile - An SMS-based mobile payment system: paybymobile is a wallet for online shopping - top-up and text to pay. Instead of inputting card payment details or PayPal passwords, the user texts a payment code to pay for their shopping. Purchases are charged to a mobile wallet and not the mobile phone bill. Funds can be loaded onto the user’s wallet in-store at your local shop, at an ATM or via online banking, and most other places where mobile top-up is sold as paybymobile is the new operator option on the top-up menu. It works on every mobile phone, both contract and pre-pay, and is free to the end-user.

Psonar - A music backup, streaming, discovery and purchase service available on the web and mobile devices: Psonar makes it easy to put your entire music collection in the Cloud and manage it as you want. The service finds and uploads the music and playlists from your PC or MP3 player to the cloud-based service and then makes that music available from anywhere.

Animentals by Fluid Pixel Studios - An online and mobile game for Nokia phones: “Help the hapless Dr. Foof rehabilitate his collection of crazed pets. The first Animental in the collection is Furball who is both whacky and uncontrollable and requires constant care. Keep him happy for a week to prove to Dr. Foof that Furball has recovered but watch what Furball is up to, he’s full of mischief and has a different entertaining reaction to everything you do.”

The panel also saw LiveTalkback a ‘live’ polling application for iPhone and Nokia handsets.

We were hugely surprised not just by the panel’s reactions, but also their mobile habits and reactions to some of the products being pitched. Stuart Dredge produced a very detailed record of events for Mobile Entertainment.

What do you think? Was the panel representative? Who did well?

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For more information on the panel and the Digital Youth Project from project creator Julia Shalet who’s provided more coverage and background on the panel on her blog. Julia filled us in on how she has pioneer this approach after the event:

“My objectives are always to provide both entertaining and insightful sessions for businesses / industries alongside engaging and relevant learning experiences for young people.”

“The Teen Panel is a great way to get some quick insights that need further follow up. It is just a toe-dip. I also run innovation workshops with young people that work really well to get a deeper dive and have also run sessions around proposition development that include young people desiging a social media marketing plan for a business targetting the youth.”

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Thanks to Richard Hyndman for use of his photograph from the session.

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  • For those of us who have absolutely no clue what BlackBerry Messenger is, think you can snag a teenager off the street, have him/her give a demo, and explain why they like it so much?
  • I've never used it personally, but it's just basic IM but using the BB PIN. I'll ping some of them an email to find out why they prefer it to MSN or similar...
  • liamlowe
    Viikki, Paymo (Boku) are a well funded VC operation out of San Fran, but were not at #hotms but none the less will probably enjoy your para of exposure here.
    Ben, a touch of realism required to your wrapping up. 6 teenage dragons and 2 didn't shop/buy online, and of the four who did, three liked www.paybymobile.net and it goes without saying that we will be ecstatic if we secure three quarters of UK teenager online shoppers as (occasional) paybymobile users.
    Panel was great, but feedback, like all feedback as to go through filter to reach the key action points. Some of the recent blog commentary is missing that filter. Let's not have the teenagers running the asylum...
  • Liam,

    Many, many apologies - that was my error based on poor notes and a late night editing schedule. I've removed the video and post, will correct and re-post.

    For clarity: all of the discussion was on paybymobile.net the reference to the other firm was only introduced by me in the edit... I'm off to sit on the blogger's naughty step.

    Ben
  • OK... now I've finished making myself look foolish by posting videos with errors in them... :-)

    re: the summary. I agree about the filtering... and that's why I thought the initial - slightly less than enthusiastic - comment about 'why change?' was telling. Will sceptical consumers get past that initial inertia? I'm sure you've tested this, so interested to hear how those concerns played out.

    Also, was this audience your target market? Personally, I was a bit confused about the example you cited... Which teenager would have £200 in a wallet in advance of a laptop purchase, and if they moved it there specifically for the transaction what the benefit over the established payment mechanisms were?
  • Rog
    Whilst we wait, here is an (iPhone) capture of the flook pitch to the mobile heroes. Disclaimer - it's me pitching.
    http://flookblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/we-co...
  • Thanks for your patience - the video's fixed and up now.
  • Gabriel Brown
    Nice video. Good interviews. Articulate interviewees. Surprised about the appeal of Blackberry... but then teenagers are often aspirational in the sense of wanting stuff from an older age group.

    Wihtout reading too much into one interview, parental income (or at least willingness to pay for their kids' phones) would appear to be the most important factor as to whether a teenager gets a Blackberry Bold on contract or a basic phone with a £5 T-Mobile pre-pay voucher. This probably determines the iPhone or Blackberry decision more than the features of the respective devices.
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