Mark McGuinness has more than 22 years’ experience in digital marketing director roles with both private and publicly listed iGaming operators. He is a co-founder of http://www.esportsbet.com a resource for gamers and sports bettors who wish to start betting on eSports.
Stand-first
Web 2.0 is dead long live the new king! 2016 is being heralded as the new era in digital and mobile commerce due to the enormous growth and usage of conversational interfaces that can hear you, understand, and respond to your every need. Combine this with that rise and rise of messaging apps such as WeChat, Telegram, Viber and WhatsApp; these new super social conversational platforms the next opportunity for Eastern European operators and affiliates.
Amazon Echo calling earth
No not the Hollywood movie of the same name, we are of course referring to that digital behemoth and chameleon, Amazon and their much-hyped Amazon Echo product. If you haven’t yet heard about this product, do please do take note as Amazon is investing millions of dollars in developing an ecosystem for the Echo product. Why you may ask? Well Amazon Echo is a wireless speaker and voice command device; that springs to life with the voice prompt ‘Alexa’ which is capable of many services. It’s sort of a modern day version of the Genie and the Lamp and your wish is my command master. The Alexa activated services range from voice interaction; music playback making to-do lists; setting alarms; streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real-time information. It can do all the mundane ‘daily stuff’ allowing us mere mortals to get on with living our lives.
Similar to the Genie and Lamp analogy, you can have a ‘conversation’ with Alexa, thanks to the advances in speech recognition technology, of which Alexa can also start to learn how each of us talks, different dialects, idioms and all. Conversational interfaces are pervading every facet of our lives. Our smartphones and cars now support the likes of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, of which you can ‘talk’ too Siri or Google’s Cortana for travel directions, reply to a text message and so on.
These conversational interfaces shall continue to become part of the digital fabric or our lives. Why, well simply we have too much information at our finger types and too many apps to navigate. We need a filter or equivalent of a digital Personal Assistant which in effect the conversational interface provides that layer or barrier. This single point of contact conversational interface will and shall effectively help control our working and social lives.
The explosive growth of messaging apps
So we’ve talked about conversational interfaces. Let’s also take a look at messaging apps, which in effect are another short form of conversational message exchanges of tasks and information between individuals or groups.
Let’s look at the messaging platform numbers. China’s Tencent’s WeChat a mobile messaging app first released in 2011 has a reported 697 million monthly users. Furthermore, 40 percent of WeChat users are aged between 25 and 34 years of age a very desirable customer segment with money to spend.
If we look at WhatsApp, they had 1 billion active users in February of this year up 700 million on the previous according to research firm Statista. Other messaging platforms such as Telegram started by Pavel Durov, who was also the founder of VK.com one of Russia’s largest social networks has according to their official blog, 100 million monthly active users and 350,000 new users joining every day is stellar growth.
Messaging Platforms and conversational interfaces are the future of digital communications and services. Facebook is another tech behemoth investing heavily in the space with the launch of their Messenger platform. David Marcus, VP of Messaging Products for Facebook was quoted as saying, “Every month, over 900 million people around the world communicate with friends, families and over 50 million businesses on Messenger. It’s the second most popular app on iOS, and was the fastest growing app in the US in 2015.
I fully ascribe to these trends and comments. Why, well if you consider the growth in conversational commerce, digital assistants or chatbots that use highly structured messaging to funnel the conversation to a desirable outcome, whether for business or person-to-person use. It is so straightforward and intuitive and therefore can be regarded as a killer application. Then why would you go to a traditional website and fret over the User interface and UX experience with your ever-growing in-house design team, developers, and data scientists in order to sell your business services?
Furthermore if you wrap or layer on top of these platforms, intelligent services such as digital assistants, chatbots, the argument becomes even more compelling. This is a key trend, that won’t go away, the era of conversational user interfaces, personal assistants, AI and chatbots where users request data and converse in the natural language form that sit on top of the messaging platforms infrastructure have arrived and won’t regress.
Many pundits have rightly dubbed 2016 as the era of conversational commerce. Therein lies the opportunity for Eastern European gaming operators and affiliates to consider how they build products that fit into these fast growing platforms, whether that is a conversational and messaging application to seek the best odds, bonuses’ to placing the bets or just a companion app. The technology is there, it just requires some imagination and those that do, shall ultimately dominate that service space for the next 10 years.
