If you want to stay relevant, you need to become more like a Bay Area start-up, not less.

In his Disruptions column for the The New York Times, Nick Bilton criticized Silicon Valley start-ups for creating tech products that lack mass market appeal.

In essence, he argued that the high concentration of engineers in the Valley has resulted in an “echo chamber” of ideas geared toward solving “mundane problems” that don’t exist for the rest of world. Bilton called out a couple of companies as examples, including BlackJet, an “affordable private jet” provider.

His main gripe seems to be that the services offered by these start-ups aren’t scalable or sustainable business models.

While it’s hard to argue that private planes will ever be a viable form of transportation for anyone but the wealthy, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this echo chamber of ideas is a bad thing either—especially for industries that exist outside the San Francisco Bay Area start-up scene.

In my Kontagent Konnect 2013 keynote, I examined the future of technology as it relates to business and consumers. And one thing is certain: mobile and data will be what drives the customer experience. For everything from banks and retailers to travel companies and even the health care industry, mobile will become essential to doing business.

So what does all of this have to do with this so-called “echo chamber”?

It’s simple. Any company that hopes to thrive in the future will need to create customer experiences that take full advantage of everything mobile platforms have to offer. And nowhere is technology pushed to the limits further and more broadly than in Silicon Valley. Though companies here may sometimes create niche products, this echo chamber is what causes them constantly innovate and test new ideas and technology—especially with data.

In short, if a company wants to stay relevant, its needs to become more like Bay Area start-ups, not less.

The Mobile Opportunity
There’s incredible opportunity in mobile. While this isn’t revolutionary news, have you really dissected why the opportunity here is so great?

But before we get to why, let’s take a moment to quantify the potential in this space. Today, mobile apps are a $25 billion industry, slated to grow more every year. According to Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends report, the number of mobile subscribers has grown to over 1.5 billion worldwide from 1.1 billion last year. Mobile devices are already starting to outpace laptop purchases and tablets have recently overtaken desktops in sales.

Sales of Tablets and other mobile devices have begun to surpass desktop and laptops.

Given all this intel, it’s no surprise that companies everywhere already see the writing on the wall. It’s why over 60 percent of businesses are increasing their mobile budgets.

But while it’s good that companies are taking mobile seriously, the problem is that at least 75 percent of these companies don’t actually have a proper plan in place. In essence, they’re spending blindly to creating a bunch of mobile ventures that may or may not resonate with customers.

You don’t need me to tell you why this is bad. But what is worth mentioning is the true effect mobile can have on your business. And that’s its ability to disrupt the market.

It’s basic business. Typically, when a company is first to market with a solution that fills a need, that company has a strong chance of becoming the market leader. This is true for both new industries and established ones.

Take Uber for example. We all know the success story here. A little car service start-up becomes a consumer darling, its growth spikes and now it’s spreading like wildfire both in the States and aboard. But what some may not appreciate is the true ingenuity behind what this company accomplished.

Uber utilized mobile and data to disrupt the private transportation industry.

Prior to Uber, the transportation industry was largely stagnant in terms of innovation. In order to get a taxi or private shuttle, you were generally stuck either trying to flag one down on the street or calling in a request. Both methods were burdensome because they took a long time and weren’t very reliable. I can’t count the number of times I called a taxi service just to have it never show up–not to mention the fact that you also needed know where you are before you call in (which let’s face it, how often do you know where you are when you call a taxi?).

By utilizing your smartphone’s GPS tracker and always-on data connection, Uber was able to craft an app that, in a few taps, lets you call a car to pick you up, track its ETA and notify you when it arrives–all without severely interrupting your night out. For the taxi driver, an Uber-enabled smartphone and backend service has fully replaced and massively improved the ineffective legacy dispatch systems and have been existence forever.

That’s the power mobile and data have to disrupt a market place. In just a few years, Uber was able to go from a start-up to a corporation that has the former titans of the transportation industry on the run. And the way they did it was by creating a deep, personalized mobile experience. So how can you do the same?

Creating the Perfect Customer Experience
Think about your best interactions as a customer. What made those experiences so great? Was it the consistency? The way the business knew what you needed without asking? The fact that they made you feel appreciated? Or a combination of all the above?

Chances are it’s probably the last one. And it’s also probably safe to assume that the customer interaction you had in mind wasn’t regarding an online purchase order you completed on your laptop, but rather it was with an actual person.

It might sound a little outlandish, but as evidenced by Uber and companies like it, this is what mobile is capable of doing—create customer experiences that are as good as interacting with a real person. Unlike any other digital touch-point in history, mobile devices can deliver a customer experience that’s omnipresent, relevant and intimate—the three elements of an ideal customer experience.

And the reason it’s able to do this is because of customer data.

The Role of Data in Disrupting the Market
Your mobile device is essentially an extremely sophisticated sensor that’s constantly collecting data about your every preference.

Moreover, unlike with a desktop, because your mobile device is always with you, you are more willing to not only included personal details about your life in it, such as your contact list and daily calendar, but also more willing to share that information with mobile companies you trust in exchange for using the services they provide.

And this is what makes mobile such a powerful platform. Because companies are able to tap into this level of data, they’ll be able to learn what their customers truly want. You won’t need focus groups or research reports to craft your next product release or upgrade, because with all the data you’re collecting, you’ll be able to create exactly what your customers desire. And even more important is that you’ll be able to find out whether you actually delivered what they wanted by testing hypotheses.

But make no mistake, the process isn’t simple. After all, separating and extracting actionable information from your metrics requires data science expertise. The customer data sets in the age of mobile are bigger than anything companies have dealt with in the past.

Using data science to to build deep, engaging and personalized mobile customer experiences require more than just being able to collect data.

For example, we had one customer sending us 150 billion data points a month after their app spiked in popularity. To put that in perspective, just a few years ago the most data that the largest analytics company would collect is about 1 trillion data points per month across their entire customer base. That means for just that one customer mentioned earlier, they were producing 15 percent of the total data that used to be collected in a month, everyday.

The bottom line is that if you want to disrupt your market and become (or stay) its leader, crafting a mobile customer experience that’s omnipresent, relevant and intimate is key. Data is vital to doing it, but having a platform built to capture and visualize all your customer metrics is just one part of the formula. The sheer complexity and volume of data today means that having a data scientist on hand to make sense of it all is essential, along with having your entire organization committed to using data to guide every decision.

That’s what Silicon Valley companies do best: they understand the important role that both mobile and data will play in the future of business. If you want your company to become the next Uber, you need to do the same.

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About the author: Jeff Tseng is Kontagent’s CEO and co-founder where he is responsible for driving and shaping Kontagent’s future growth and dominance in the mobile customer intelligence industry. An adept programmer and data modeler, Jeff built the first iteration of Kontagent’s proprietary data analytics engine. He has bachelor and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was also a Ph.D. candidate in the same discipline. You can reach him at @jefftee.

During the interview, Peter asked me to describe the differences between creating app mechanics for social apps versus that of mobile apps. This is a question we answer every day at Kontagent and we know now what smart app developers and marketers need to do to create amazing experiences. Specifically, we recommend that:

• Design for short session engagement on phones: People often engage “on the go.” This is very different than the world of social apps as Web users frequently sat for long sessions.

• Differentiate by device: Tablet apps and mobile apps often exhibit vastly different user behavior. Design for the device and leverage bigger screens, longer engagement windows, and higher likelihood to purchase on tablets. Social apps on the web only had one platform to worry about.

• Precisely measure user acquisition channels: Unlike apps on Facebook where there was one dominant user acquisition channel (Facebook Ads), mobile advertising is extremely fragmented and there are enormous differences in the quality of users across channels.

• Analytics are more important than ever: Iteration time is much slower on mobile due to App Store approval processes and the very nature of binary client side app distribution. Be prepared to measure results, carefully plan and analyze experiments, and use data intelligently to make the best decisions and get the most out of less frequent, larger app updates.

• Leverage social channels: Check out the Top Grossing apps today and you’ll find nearly all of them build around social features. Unlike social apps on the Web, leveraging just one social channel is not enough on mobile. Facebook, Twitter, Game Center, and now Google Plus are all important in the Web. Measure the performance of social channels to test and optimize sharing features and campaigns.

• Don’t forget to test: You only get one big launch on mobile–make the most of it. There is limited “shelf space” in the form of a featured position in app stores, and discovery is a major problem for the ecosystem today. Make sure you experiment in small test markets well before your big launch in major markets, and that you are using data to help test what is and isn’t working in your app and iterate before you go big.

• When monetizing your mobile app, remember that the same online lessons apply BUT:

  • Optimize game mechanics and balance engagement while encouraging your users to make in-app purchases;

  • Track revenue channels to understand the best price points for your user cohorts;

  • Individually track each and every revenue channel, from in-app purchases to ad yields, for-sale mix and conversion funnels–to understand the best price points;

Today launching a mobile app feels a little more like launching a boxed software product in the days of yore. And while, many lessons apply as you cross over from the world of social app development to the mobile app business, you’ll have to overcome new challenges. The most successful mobile app companies in the world realize this and have deployed new practices, and make the most of this explosive marketplace.

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About the author: Josh Williams is president and chief science officer at Kontagent, where he oversees strategic revenue projects, data science and R&D. A serial entrepreneur, Josh has led two successful start-ups to large exits (one in big data, one in gaming). Josh is an investor and loves collaborating with other entrepreneurs.

You all already know that mobile is poised to become the dominant digital platform. For consumers the world over, it’s the first place they go to for information, commerce, entertainment and more. That much isn’t a mystery. The big question is what do mobile businesses need to do to create apps that resonate with customers?

It’s a tough question for sure, but answering it is key to dominating the $25 billion app market. Kontagent President and Chief Science Officer Josh Williams recently gave his insights into how companies can do it.

Speaking on a panel at Inside Social Apps 2013, Josh offered tips on how to use data science to optimize ROI and design stickier apps that drive mobile customer lifetime value. He also shared his thoughts on the next big thing in apps.

Check out the video for highlights from his session.

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About the author: Edward Tan is a content marketing writer for Kontagent. In addition to covering the company’s never-ending stream of innovations, he also writes about the latest tech industry trends and news. As a former journalist, Edward has years of reporting experience under his belt and (for some reason) also possesses a law degree. His passion for technology and all things geek run deep. He still has his original Apple II–and it still works! You can reach him at @drdonutcat.

I must say, going to the conference, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Having worked for so long with so many early adopting companies (ooVoo, JackThreads, eHarmony, EA, Halfbrick Studios) in traditionally more early adopting industries (gaming, mobile commerce), I didn’t have high expectations about the content or the networking. My assumption was that banks are slow to adopt new technologies, and so mobile would be no more than a bell and a whistle.

I was wrong.

There’s some really cool mobile tech being developed in the financial services space. There were robots who could remotely sign legal documents; mobile bank tellers and customer service agents ready to talk to you on your iPad; a variety of mobile wallets with new innovations like friend-to-friend payments; and lots of banks who are working hard to learn, understand and deploy innovative new mobile solutions to create better customer experiences and find new ways to deflect costs from more expensive channels. I was sincerely impressed by some of the efforts by USAA, Wells Fargo, Ally Bank and others to integrate these exciting new features, and their commitment to making mobile their primary channel.

However…

The conference felt a bit like a car show. What I mean by that is it was full of shiny objects–cool technology that, while pretty darn interesting, had little practicality. And though it was innovative, it also had no proof points. Cool technology for the sake of cool technology make conferences more exciting, but with so many competing innovations, how is a business supposed to figure out which one to actually deploy?

Data was completely missing from the conversation, and I found that a bit scary.

How is a bank–whose business is being cannibalized by mobile already and presents huge risks if they don’t get it right–supposed to determine which new feature will generate the greatest return? There’s just not that much room for error… Unless of course they are keenly attuned to their mobile customer behavior, and understand how mobile customer intelligence can help them alleviate risks and create smarter opportunities.

Indeed, at the show, it was apparent there are five primary pain points that banks have when it comes to understanding their mobile customers. Here at Kontagent, we address these pain points with our mobile customer intelligence solution, which is a combination of mobile analytics and data science consultation.

Here are five pain points, and our unique approach to solving each one, head on:

Pain Point #1: How do I know if mobile is worth the investment, relative to other channels?

The kSuite Multiscreen dashboard lets you see how customers move across your banking products.

The Kontagent kSuite Multiscreen executive dashboard is our answer to this common pain point. Banks are scrambling for data and insights into how their customers interact with their product on their desktop versus their mobile app. Which channel has the most efficient customer acquisition? Where is retention and loyalty the highest? Which has the best revenue potential? Without this insight, it’s relatively impossible to run a smart (mobile) business.

Pain Point #2: What’s the lifetime value of my mobile customers?

Kontagent’s Revenue Analysis makes analyzing LTV simple.

I heard this question a lot at the conference. And I’ve heard it on many other occasions. When you dig a little deeper into what banks are asking, it becomes clear that it can’t simply be answered with a single number. Our recently-released Revenue Analysis feature helps banks and other types of businesses to evaluate and trace the lifetime value (LTV) of their customers, and run analysis on how different groups or cohorts compare to one another. In this way, banks can make smarter marketing decisions, deliver relevant content based on LTV and overall run a much more efficient business.

Pain Point #3: How can I be sure I’m creating a positive mobile customer experience, and not risking my brand?

A deep custom event framework system is vital to understanding customer interactions in your app.

The biggest risk to banks at this point, by far, is the potential for creating a negative customer experience. Too many financial institutions are either trying to cram their websites into their mobile app or leveraging cookie-cutter mobile app platforms that deliver no differentiating value. Even worse, many banks’ mobile apps are unstable and crash.

To address this major pain point, Kontagent’s custom event hierarchy and custom event timeline helps banks monitor customer behavior from the moment their app is downloaded and throughout the customer’s entire lifetime of interaction with their brand.

Something technically wrong, and hanging up your app? You’ll see it before it becomes a problem. Customers not making it past the third session? Identify what and where the blockers to progression are, and fix it before it gets too expensive. The custom event framework is flexible and powerful, and it’s the heart and soul of our mobile customer intelligence solution.

Pain Point #4: How do I target the right customers at the right time, with the right offers?

Although banks need to work on their customer experience and generally de-risk their app, they are also concerned about how to target cross-sell and upsell offers to their customers in the mobile channel.

For years at Capital One, I worked with teams on these types of strategies, and we leveraged every piece of real estate in existence (from statement ads to envelope stuffers, banner ads, emails and text messages). Now, the game has changed with mobile apps, and banks are once again in the dark about how to access, evaluate and act on customer behavioral data to run profitable marketing campaigns.

kSuite DataMine’s allows members from every department run queries quickly and easily.

Our kSuite DataMine™ solution is a phenomenal tool to help marketers conduct analysis and identify opportunities in their customer base. Run queries to identify the top 1 percent of customers (by any attribute); the “inactives” (those who haven’t logged into the app in X amount of time); those with the highest propensity to buy a product; or any other targeting criteria you can come up with. It’s quick, easy, powerful and flexible, and it gives marketers the power to run direct response campaigns that used to take 10 times as long to execute.

Pain Point #5: How do I see a single view of my customers, across screens and channels?

Kontagent data scientists experts in translating metrics into strategies.

This is the big money pain point for banks, and just about every cross-channel business we talk to. Everyone wants supreme knowledge of their customers, wherever they are, whenever they want. Multiscreen. Cross-channel. Omnichannel. Learn more at kontagent.com/banking.

Our approach to this vexing problem is twofold:

1. Let’s focus on mobile first, and gradually layer in your other digital channels, and then your offline/branch channel. Solving the Omnichannel problem isn’t an easy one and it will take time. In the meantime, your mobile channel is an enormous risk to your business if not done right. It’s also a massive opportunity lost that you will not get back. Let’s build the customer analytics infrastructure to track customer lifetime behavior and value, using mobile as the “stake in the ground”, and then use that model to figure out the bigger picture.
2. We’ll put our data science expertise to work for you. Kontagent is where math and engineering meet. We’ve got a powerful SaaS offering, collecting over 1 trillion user actions each year. But, we’ve also got an incredibly talented and brilliant group of data scientists who are both working on R&D (models for predictive analytics, amongst other projects), as well as consulting with clients on custom solutions to solve big problems, like, “How do I see a single view of my customers, across screens and across channels?” If you’re vexed by a data puzzle in your mobile or multiscreen business, we welcome the challenge.

I am encouraged by how the banking and financial services sector is experimenting and investing in new mobile technologies and platforms. As a consumer, it’s exciting to me that I can now deposit a check without visiting the ATM, pay a friend through friend-to-friend payments and use my phone as a credit card at various retailers.

But, as an analytically-driven business person, I am fearful that this same industry is in for a difficult wake-up call if they don’t start to adopt more agile development and marketing methods that their counterparts in other, more early-adopting industries are using. Mobile will be big money for banks who do it right. For everyone else, keep those bowls of candy full in your branches… You’re going to need it.

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About the author: Dan Kimball is Kontagent’s CMO and resident storyteller. His drive to make sense of complex concepts and solutions comes from his unique background in philosophy, quantitative research and brand marketing. You can contact Dan at: @dmkimball05.

These days, we’re all crazy busy. And we all spend more than enough time on tasks that we know to be time drains, wishing for smarter and faster.

Kontagent has set out to simplify, improve and empower your workflow. With the upgraded kSuite DataMine, we answered the call from our customers, many of whom asked for added functionalities. So, we’re really excited to roll out improvements and know they will make making sense of your data even more pain-free.

“We’ve been able to dramatically cut down the time it takes to make data-driven decisions on our app development cycles,” said Linda Lee, Head of Data and Monetization, PLAYSTUDIOS.

“With kSuite DataMine, many team members across our organization—from marketing to product—are able to analyze their data and shift gears quickly to meet their specific KPIs. In the past, they’ve had to rely on analysts to run their queries and this often slowed things down. We’re now able to save hours daily, and can instead use that time to focus on our strategic business goals and objectives.”

NEW FOR kSUITE DATAMINE

Scheduling. Save time by writing queries once and scheduling them to run at regular intervals, and receive an email notification at your preferred frequency when results are ready.

Run a daily report on key KPIs across all applications for an executive report, or create a weekly report on top ten spenders for marketing and customer service.

Sharing. Standardize reporting and ensure consistency across applications by sharing queries with users, and receive email notifications when someone shares a new query.

Write a query once and then share it with other teams, who can then run the queries without having to know how to write Hive QL.

New UI. Easily manage an unlimited number of queries with an updated UI, including better tabbing and more logical processes for saving and grouping queries.

Label and group 50 to 100 different queries, save time with better organization and means of discovery. Find out the status of queries using indicator icons for active queries, when they fail/succeed, when they are shared and when they are scheduled.

Reference queries. Skip manually writing Hive QL code and get any level of reporting that isn’t currently available in the dashboard with pre-written reference queries, designed around specific business needs.

Quickly edit a few lines of Hive QL to view the performance of your apps across multiple platforms.

With the new kSuite DataMine, you have the most flexible and complete analytics tool available, to help you build engaging applications. And our team of expert data scientists is at your side, so you get the best platform and service, for less cost than building business intelligence capabilities in-house.

Maximize customer lifetime value and success in your domain. We help you find data insights that traditional Web and mobile analytics can’t. For more information about Kontagent’s kSuite mobile intelligence platform is available at: kontagent.com/products

For current kSuite DataMine customers, the upgrade is now available at no additional charge. Contact your Kontagent customer success manager for details. Happy mining!

 
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About the author: Catherine Mylinh is a member of Kontagent’s storytelling team, where she is head of PR, brand and content marketing. She is also the editor-in-chief of kScope. In her former life, Catherine was a news anchor for CBS and NBC. She credits her journalism and computer science roots—she was once a programmer!—for her love of learning and writing about all things high tech. You can contact Catherine at @cat_mylinh.

For all the hype around “big data”—or tech that crunches through massive amounts of emails, tweets, video and other files to find useful information—some startups aren’t yet making tons of noise.

That’s probably not going to be the case for much longer.

Startups that got funding a couple of years ago are starting to get some serious momentum. Others are still in stealth mode, busily putting the finishing touches on potentially game changing tech.

Read the full story here.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced this week that the gaming company is cutting nearly one-fifth of its workforce as financial struggles continue. (Courtesy: Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced this week that the gaming company is laying off 18 percent of its workforce. Pincus says the move, which includes cutting 520 positions and closing LA and NYC offices, allows Zynga to reshift its focus to mobile platforms where its players are spending more time.

The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform… Mobile and touch screens are revolutionizing gaming. Our opportunity is to make mobile gaming truly social by offering people new, fun ways to meet, play and connect.

We think it’s a good move for Zynga. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you know mobile is growing like wildfire, becoming the backbone by which people consume content.

“Mobile apps are today where social apps were in the maturity phase five years ago,” said Josh Williams, Kontagent’s president and chief science officer. “The moves that Mark and his team made, while painful, are necessary if they are to have a chance at building a dominant mobile app company akin to what they did with Facebook.”  

Yet, 75 percent of business leaders admit to not having a well-defined mobile strategy for 2013. Most of them still consider this new channel as an add-on, retrofitting their Web strategies to fit mobile. That’s really troubling because, as Zynga has shown us, it doesn’t work that way.

Our team of engineers and data scientists work with hundreds of developers who are also faced with the challenge of transitioning from the social Web to mobile. We’ve found that it’s really a different ball game. We know that:

1. What worked for the Web doesn’t work for mobile.
   You can’t just neatly export your social Web app mechanics to mobile and expect to succeed. What a customer wants to experience on a desktop is very different from what she wants on a mobile device. Responsive design isn’t enough. You’ll have to design the content to the context of the platform.
2. With native mobile apps, the KPIs are different.
   It’s not just about page views. App developers are masters at seeing how the new KPIs tie together: session lengths; 1-, 3-, 7-day retention; average revenue per user, etc. Many of them are using a solution that has been modeled with these metrics in mind.
3. Feature releases and A/B testing are a lot more complicated.
   On social, you can push out new features and updates in real time. Then, you can track how your customers are reacting to these changes, segment and iterate immediately. On mobile, the stakes are higher and so are the development nuances. For example, you have to submit changes to the App Store, which could take weeks, and negatively impact engagement rates if your customers aren’t feeling your last changes.
4. Mobile is app development on steroids.
   We know from our internal research that things move much faster on mobile than they do on social. For example, early user testing on social lasts weeks, even months. Early user testing on mobile can last as little as a few days. Then, there are different stages of the mobile lifecycle you need to understand, as well as when/how to shift to the next stage. Many developers have told us creating apps for mobile is like working in a pressure cooker.
5. The early indicators for success aren’t the same.
   Kontagent’s data science team has been studying thousands of social and mobile apps to gain insight into industry benchmarks. One question we tried to answer is, ‘What are the early indicators that an app will be successful?’ Surprisingly, the initial signals that a social app will be a big hit can be misleading when applied to mobile. In other words, we’ve seen that mobile apps that show early signs of success—at least when compared to their social-app counterparts—failed in the long-term. (We wonder if perhaps Zynga was led astray by basing the forecast of its mobile games on its social benchmarks.)

Read this executive brief to learn what mobile-first companies are doing to succeed in mobile.

“Mobile is a different beast than the social gaming app space that Zynga helped create,” Williams continued. “You have less time to iterate with mobile apps. Mobile is its own space, with its own rules about what works and what doesn’t. It takes strategic focus to create great mobile experiences and this is something that the Zynga team will have to do well—and quickly—if they want to survive.”

Anyway, we’re really excited to share our findings with you in the coming weeks; we hope it will shed some light on why some apps fail while others are wildly successful. Our data science team of super-smart quants is determining how to better predict customer lifetime value (LTV) in mobile.

We’re using this research to model our analytics solution, baking it into the product so it’s easier for you to get those early signals and shift focus as necessary—faster.

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About the author: Catherine Mylinh is a member of Kontagent’s storytelling team, where she is head of PR, brand and content marketing. She is also the editor-in-chief of kScope. In her former life, Catherine was a news anchor for CBS and NBC. She credits her journalism and computer science roots—she was once a programmer!—for her love of learning and writing about all things high tech. You can contact Catherine at @cat_mylinh.

Check out how we help other customers get the most ROI from their mobile channels.

Welcome back from Memorial Day weekend! In case you missed it, last week we hosted our second annual Kontagent Konnect 2013.

Hundreds of mobile leaders joined us in San Francisco for two days of discussions on the future of mobile, and share lessons they’ve learned from using data and mobile analytics to create lasting customer experiences on this new platform.

Be sure to sign up for our Kontagent Konnect 2013 executive brief. We’ll go much more in depth on all the sessions; it’s slated to go out next week. For now, here are highlights from KK2013. We hope you’ll be able to apply what you learned to your own business immediately.

Click to view KK2013 photos.

We brought together mobile industry leaders and innovators at Kontagent Konnect to discuss the current opportunities and challenges mobile has created, as well as where they think we’ll be in the next 12-18 months.

On Day 1, Kontagent product managers and data scientists held user sessions and panels on using Kontagent kSuite to improve your mobile strategies.

Most people don’t know what they’re doing

We switched gears on Day 2, moving from product-centric sessions to thought leadership. Econsultancy’s VP of Research Stefan Tornquist kicked off the day with key findings from the 2013 Mobile Sophistication and Strategy Study, and other industry stats:

• By May 2013, more people will be using smartphones and tablets than desktops and laptops.

• Half of teen smartphone owners use the smartphone as their primary point of Internet access.

• 130% adjustment!! PayPal adjusted its 2012 mobile payments estimate from $3 billion to $8 billion.

• “In 2009, mobile commerce barely existed. Today, mobile touches nearly 1 in 3 purchases on eBay.” -Steve Yankovich, VP of Innovation and New Ventures, eBay.

• Only 25% of businesses report having a “well-defined” mobile strategy, yet most expect to spend more in mobile in 2013.

The bottom line: Many businesses are rushing into mobile, Stefan said. As a result, they’re building mobile plans without the right key performance indicators (KPIs) in place. “Mobile-first” companies can take advantage of their competitors’ haste by using data to optimize their mobile strategies and break ahead. Here’s the full presentation:

Data is a “messy reality”

Khan Academy Lead Developer Ben Kamens says “data is more messy reality than epic results.”

Khan Academy Lead Developer Ben Kamens also took the stage. Ben spoke about the “messy reality” of analytics–how it can oftentimes lead you astray–and why you more than just hard data to derive real insights. “Hire smart people to help you science that data,” he said. It’s what we here at Kontagent believe, too.

Here’s an example: Khan Academy tested what it calls the Struggling Model–a piece of code or algorithm that answers the question, ‘When is a student struggling?’ At what point does its software say, “This person is struggling. What can we do to adjust this behavior? Let’s alert a teacher. Let’s do something about it.” Scroll to the 8-minute mark of Ben’s video to see how Khan Academy performed cohort analysis, A/B testing and enlisted the help of teachers to solve this problem.

Where are you in the mobile lifecycle?

Techcrunch’s Anthony Ha moderates a panel with executives from mobile-first companies HotelTonight, Uber and MessageMe on how they use data to optimize user experiences.

Kontagent CEO and co-founder Jeff Tseng spoke about how mobile is driving the “perfect customer experience”–which is “omnipresent, relevant and intimate.” (We’ll dedicate an entire blog post to that in the near future. Stay tuned!)

Other executives from HotelTonight, Uber, MessageMe, Zions Bank, Big Fish Games and General Motors discussed the very different ways they’ve taken the mobile disruption and turned it into business opportunities.

Most of them agree that mobile businesses grow through a typical lifecycle: early testing, growth, maturity and sunset. Depending on the stage of your business, the KPIs will be different.

“Understanding these phases is crucial to creating a successful app,” said Martin Colaco, Director of Data Science, Kontagent. “Both successful and failed apps follow certain data trends and tracking your app’s progress along these benchmarks will let you know whether your app may be a hit or a failure.”

Perhaps MessageMe’s Arjun Sethi said it best:

When a customer gives you their time, that investment is valuable. Don’t waste it with a bad product. We’re not mobile-first; we’re product-first. Mobile just happens to be the platform we’re building on right now.

It goes back to what Ben (and Kontagent) believe: Top developers know that to create the best products and most meaningful customer experiences, it takes a combination of human intuition and hard data. After all, mobile is only monetizing 25% of what the Web does. There is still a lot of room for growth, and Kontagent can help.

And finally…

Thank you to everyone for coming out and making this year’s conference a huge success. We also want to thank our customers, who’ve contributed to Kontagent’s amazing growth in the past year! 

Don’t forget to sign up to receive the Kontagent Konnect executive brief when it drops next week. And, be on the lookout for details on Kontagent Konnect 2014. We look forward to seeing you next year!

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About the author: Catherine Mylinh is a member of Kontagent’s storytelling team, where she is head of PR, brand and content marketing. She is also the editor-in-chief of kScope. In her former life, Catherine was a news anchor for CBS and NBC. She credits her journalism and computer science roots—she was once a programmer!—for her love of learning and writing about all things high tech. You can contact Catherine at @cat_mylinh.

David Gutierrez will be a speaker at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Register now–space is limited.

There’s a lot of talk about the need for companies to be more data-driven in their decision making process. It’s a mantra that’s often repeated throughout the mobile industry. But what does being “data-driven” actually mean?

Most of you already know the basic concept of data-driven decision making. In essence, it entails tracking and analyzing your data in order to guide your business decisions. While this is an accurate description, it doesn’t tell you much about what data can really do for your business. Incorporating data-driven decision making throughout your organization can raise your revenue, customer loyalty and any other business goal dramatically, especially for those of you in the mobile space.

You don’t have to look very far to find examples of data-driven decision making success stories. Caesars Entertainment, GEICO and the Oakland Athletics are just a few examples of organizations that have used data-driven decision making to change the course of their businesses for the better. So what did they do exactly and how can you replicate their success?

A lesson in data-driven decision making

When a company utilizes data-driven decision making to identify and address internal and external opportunities, they’re able to gain a competitive advantage and disrupt their market at the same time. This, in turn, causes other companies in the space to change how they operate in order to keep up with the new market leader.

For example, take casino giant Caesars and its customer loyalty program.

A big problem in the casino industry is customer loyalty. When players are winning, keeping them around isn’t too hard. But when they’re not, that’s when a player is more likely to stop gambling and leave the casino unhappy. Their dissatisfaction, in turn, translates into less return visits and (if they do come back) reduced betting. Therefore, in order to keep players loyal, casinos need to make sure their customers leave happy.

Of course, the catch is that in order for casinos to make money, players to need to lose their bets.

Caesars’ CEO used data to revolutionize customer loyalty in the casino industry.

When Gary Loveman, a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, became CEO of Caesars (Harrah’s at the time), he sought to find a way to make it so that even players who lost money at his casinos still left happy. And to do it, he turned to data.

Loveman hired a group a data experts to analyze the casino’s gambling metrics. And the result was the creation of company’s customer loyalty program.

Now, while loyalty programs have been used by casinos for years to keep players engaged, Loveman used data to take the concept to a new level.

Players enrolled in the program were given special ID cards that would allow the casino to track a player’s gambling wins and losses. Using this data, Loveman was able to discover each player’s “breaking point,” which is the amount of money a player is willing to lose before they stop gambling. Loveman learned that players who reached their breaking point were more likely to leave his casinos with a bad impression and spend less in the future.

So to correct this, whenever a player is close to their breaking point, an alert goes out to a casino employee who then reaches out to the player and gives them free gifts or cash. By injecting data science into the company’s loyalty program, Loveman discovered a way to specifically identify at-risk players and turn them into happy ones before they left the casino. And while these rewards wouldn’t always keep players gambling, it did make them more loyal to his brand and therefore more likely to return in the future. Loveman’s use of data for his loyalty program set a new standard that changed how other casinos would structure their own programs.

The Oakland A’s and GEICO disrupt their markets

Billy Beane utilized metrics to transform the Oakland A’s into a MLB contender.

The power of data to disrupt markets isn’t just limited to the casino industry either. Data science was also used by Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane to transform the organization’s failing baseball team into a playoff contender, as portrayed in the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball.

By utilizing statistician Paul DePodesta and sabermetrics, Beane was able to identify and recruit statistically high-performing players who, under traditional baseball scouting methodology, wouldn’t be considered valuable Major League Baseball material. Beane used data to build his high-performing team  and did so with less money than other organizations. His data-driven strategy ultimately changed how other MLB general managers approached scouting and team building.

The Gecko became ad icon for GEICO because of data.

GEICO was also able to raise its auto insurance market share dramatically using data following the introduction of its advertising mascot, the Gecko.

According to GEICO Chief Marketing Officer Ted Ward, the Gecko was originally “hatched” using no traditional market research and wasn’t intended to be a long-term campaign. But the company’s data experts were able to attribute their bumps in business to the new mascot and from there they were able to continually refine the Gecko into an ad icon.

The takeaway here is that when an organization becomes data-driven, they disrupt the market. And those who do so first hold the greatest advantage because every company afterward will be playing catch up. So what can you do to become more data-driven?

How to integrate data into every decision

Becoming a data-driven organization starts with taking a more holistic approach to how you use your data. Having an analytics platform alone isn’t enough. Like Caesars, the Oakland A’s and GEICO have shown, disrupting your market requires more than being able to track your metrics. This is especially true in the highly fragmented and competitive mobile industry.

What these companies possessed that their competitors lacked was the right people, process and data platform in place to identify the problems and opportunities in their industry. This in turn allowed these businesses to fully utilize their data to surge ahead of their rivals.

Read this executive brief to learn what mobile-first companies are doing to succeed in mobile.

Here are three ways you can change your organization to do the same:

1. Get the right people: Have data-oriented skill sets companywide

Successful data-driven organizations have hired or trained their teams to have the right skillset.  Many of the key teams in these organizations have a data scientist as an integral part of each decision-making team.  For example, in larger successful gaming companies, each individual game team has a data scientist working with the lead product manager.

However, across the broader mobile industry, there are a lot of mobile businesses today that don’t have data scientists on staff at all. Furthermore, those that do, often make the mistake of cordoning them off into their own department and including them only in certain projects or only to create performance reports. This is an incredible misstep because doing so limits their ability to offer data-driven insights into broader company initiatives.

Caesars, GEICO and the Oakland A’s all had data experts involved in their key decisions. By including a data scientist in every vital department within your company, you can ensure that you’ll always have a perspective backed by data to guide your projects. And if you don’t have the resources to hire a team of data scientists, mobile customer intelligence companies like ours can help you.

2. Implement a data-driven process: Structure your company around data

Success in mobile requires a total buy-in around data analysis at all levels of your company. This means not just hiring data experts, but also getting everyone in your business to value and understand what the data can tell you. that is, to think like a data scientist.  This will ensure that the decisions taken will have the desired impact.

An argument frequently used against a data-driven approach is that it kills creativity and intuition.  These attributes are incredibly valuable and I’m not suggesting by any means to replace them altogether. A good balance between the two is to use data to validate what your creativity and intuition suggest, either by using the current data available or by creating an experiment in which you try out your change in a small group and see if the data validates what you’re trying to achieve.

Another key aspect is to track data to evaluate the performance of your teams and company overall.  All of this in turn will let you increase the success rate of any internal or external business initiative, regardless of your industry.

3. Get the best-in-breed software: Utilize an intuitive data intelligence platform

Ensuring that everyone in your organization has easy access to data is vital to fostering a work environment that runs on information. An intuitive and deep data analytics platform will allow your stakeholders to become more data savvy by removing the barriers to your company’s metrics. While there are a lot of analytics platforms on the market today, make sure the one you pick lets you easily manipulate and create visualizations out of your data.

But remember, your purpose is to disrupt your market and gain an advantage over your competition. While implementing one of these strategies is a step in the right direction, in order to become the next Caesars, GEICO or Oakland A’s you need to be able to act on all three. And in the ever-changing mobile space, brands that disrupt their market will usually become its leader. So make sure you have a mobile customer intelligence solution in place that can help you do it.

Want to learn more about how to use data-driven decisions to disrupt the mobile? Join David Gutierrez, along with leading data scientists and mobile innovators at Kontagent Konnect 2013 in San Francisco on May 20-21. Space is limited. Register now!

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About the author: David Gutierrez, Ph.D., is a data scientist and customer success manager at Kontagent. David’s passion lies in understanding the interplay between data, customer behavior and online casino gambling in order to create actionable business strategies for his clients. Contact him at david.gutierrez@kontagent.com or follow him at @degm00.