I found this interesting interview of Nick Desai from the mobile marketing company Juice Wireless (link below). This is a company to keep an eye on. Earlier I mentioned Juice Wireless and their JuiceCaster mobile media service.
In the interview, by Mobile Marketing Magazine, Nick makes a few comments that clearly shows that he gets the integration between Web and mobile.
Here’s one example he used:
Take Epicurious. It’s an online database of 18,000 recipes. So you find
the recipe that appeals to you, and then what would usually happen is
that you hit the ‘Print’ button, the recipe goes to your printer, and
when you’re in the grocery store two days later trying to get the
ingredients you need to make the meal, they are still sitting at home
on your printer. So we have created a mobile application called Epi To
Go which sends the recipe to your phone and creates a mobile web page
with the ingredients for all the recipes you have marked.*
And then he says later on:
It all comes back to the increasing reliance of people in the US on the
Internet to get through day-to-day life. This is what gives us the
opportunity to create these applications that integrate with the
Internet. [emphasis mine] The user interface on the phone is limited. People will always want a small, lightweight phone, so you will never
have a great keypad and screen. Those limitations will not go away, so
you have to look at how you combat them, and the way you do it is by
creating intelligent applications that seamlessly integrate with the
Net experience. You won’t search an 18,000-recipe database on your
phone. Where the phone comes into play is for the retrieval of the
data, and that’s what it is all about.
And then brings up another example of Web-mobile integration:
The pizza-ordering application is a similar idea. We are talking to one
of the four major pizza chains right now. No one will go through 14
toppings, large or extra large and all that on the phone, but if you
can enter your address and your typical order on your computer and then
1-click order from your phone on the way home, that’s great.
Link: Mobile Marketing Magazine: View from the States.
*I can see this Epi To Go doing some other cool stuff, like advertising the recipes at the store to make the reverse mobile to PC direction. Hmm.
UPDATE 30jul07: This post is 18 months old. Unfortunately, the only comments have been mostly negative ones of Nick Desai. This past month has been very busy with the bulk of the negative comments coming in. Something’s up, and I realized that I didn’t want to be a part of it. Since this last wave started, I’ve been wanting to close the comments, because I really don’t want this site to be a Nick-bashing site.
There will always be positive and negative comments on folks and I’ve seen all sorts of folks in this industry. But, I’m closing comments and asking folks to go elsewhere to continue this conversation around Nick Desai (which was not the original point of this article).
