• Ei kai kukaan mobiilia käytä muuhun kuin soittoihin ja tekstareihin kun on vaikea niprättävä, pieni ruutu ja hidas käyttää… Me keskitytään meidän digistrategiaan eli webbisivuihin ja sosiaaliseen mediaan.
• Mobiili on mielenkiintoinen alue mutta tää on niin sekavaa kun on mobiilisivustot ja nää iPhone-sovellukset.. Sitä paitsi mikä se juttu on mikä siellä mobiilissa pitäisi olla eli kuka sen osaisi sanoa..?
• Ei hitsi, tää mobiili onkin cool juttu. Kyllä meidänkin pitää saada oma sovellus iPhoneen ja iPadiin!
• Miten tää on näin kallista kun webbisivujahan saa jo tonnillakin… Ai kato, noita mobiilisivustojahan saa aika halvalla ja nehän toimii kivasti kaikissa mobiililaitteissa eli varmaan parasta ostaa sellainen.
• Mikä tää sovelluskauppa oikein on? Mutta ei kai kukaan viitsi mitää sovelluksia asentaa, eikös se on jotain nörttien touhua.. En mä oo ainakaan koskaan viitsinyt mitään sieltä Ovi-kaupasta ostaa..
• Ai mutta katos meidän IT-osasto jossain päin organisaatiota on lähtenytkin jo tekemään iPhone-sovellusta eli tääkinhän on jo hanskassa..
• Jipii, nyt meillä on iPhone-sovellus mutta aika vähän vielä näköjään noita todellisia käyttäjiä ja sai vain palautteessa kaksi tähteä käyttäjiltä.. Mobiilisivustotkin sai kivasti lehdissä huomiota kun on tälleen ihan mobiilisti alettu palvella. Vähänhän ne on hankalammat ja tylsemmät käyttää kuin noi coolit iPhone-sovellukset ja aika harva varmaan käyttää niitä kovin usein mutta voidaan ainakin sanoa palvelemamme niillä kaikkia tasapuolisesti..
• Tavallaan tää meidän iPhone-sovellus oli ihan mielenkiintoinen kokeilu mutta nyt tarttis sit kattoa miten palvellaan hyvin myös muitakin kuin iPhonen käyttäjiä.. Eikös ne Android-puhelimetkin oo aika suosittuja. Niin ja niitä nokioiden käyttäjiäkin taitaa Suomessa olla vielä aika paljon.. Ai joutuuko näihin kaikkiin tekemään jonkun eri ponnistuksen..?
• Pitäisiköhän näitä ostaa jostakin talon ulkopuolelta kun on vähän tällainen erityisjuttu eli pitäisiköhän näitä sit ostaa IT-taloilta vai mainostoimistoilta… Vai pitäisiköhän tehdä itse eli eihän tuo koodaaminen niin vaikea juttu ole ja kyllähän me itse tunnetaan asiakkaamme parhaiten..
• Noita iPhone-koodareitahan ja erilaisia mobiilikehittäjiähän eli sekä isoja IT-taloja että pieniä nyrkkipajoja on tarjolla joka nurkasta eli pitäisköhän kilpailuttaa vaan nää niin saataisiin tää tosi halvalla..
• Mut hei, meidän mainostoimistohan tarjoaa nykyisin mobiiliratkaisujakin eli me voidaan ostaa tää samoilta kavereilta kun meidän webbisivutkin joka tuntuukin turvalliselta ratkaisulta. Vähän se tuntuu tulevan kalliiksi mutta toisaalta ehkä tää touhu vaan on tällaista ja kyllä ne kaverit ainakin vakuuttivat ymmärtävänsä mobiilipuolen tosi hyvin..
• No nyt me on (heti 6-12 kk:n ponnistelujen jälkeen) saatu ihan ok sovellukset iPhoneen, Androidiin ja Windows Phoneen ja selvittiin selvästi alle 100 000€:lla eli tehtiin varmaan fiksusti. Ainoa ongelma on, että kaikki muutokset pitää nyt tehdä kolmeen eri alustaan ja mukana kolme eri yritystä eli mainostoimisto ja iOS/Android-kehittäjä ja Windows Phone-kehittäjä eli hiukkasen on kallista ja vähän mutkikastakin..
• Täähän oli vasta alkua eli noita sovelluksiahan pitäisi tehdä useampaan eri tarpeeseen mutta sittenhän se maksaa taas vähintään useita kymmeniä tuhansia..
• Mitenköhän me saataisiin tää pelittämään niin, ettei tarttisi tehdä kokonaan erillistä ponnistusta webbiin, mobiiliin, tabletteihin ja vielä ehkä perinteisiinkin kanaviin?
• Mut hei, toi HTML5:hän kuulemma ratkaisee melkein kaiken eli eihän meidän tarvii kuin kytkeä webbisivuihin HTML5 päälle niin ne toimii älypuhelimissakin eikä tarvii mitään erillistä ponnistusta mobiiliin, vai eiks se meekään niin..?

Tämäntyyppisiin pohteisiin me olemme Kii Oy:ssä törmänneet viimeisen parin vuoden aikan käymissämme asiakaskeskusteluissa tämän markkinan taistellessa vasta synnytystuskissa. Paljon kysymyksiä kieltämättä herää helposti.

Mobiili on markkinoinnissa ja asiakaspalvelussa suurien mahdollisuuksien alue mutta samalla vaikea tontti ja siinä tehdään helposti paljon tyhmiä ratkaisuja, jotka ovat parhaimmillaankin yleensä johtavat vain keskinkertaiseen lopputulokseen kalliilla budjetilla tai pahimmillaan johtava katastrofaaliseen huonoon lopputulokseen tai erittäin kallisiin ja tarpeettomiin ylläpitokuluihin. Lisäksi niin sanottuja asiantuntijoita ponnahtelee eri paikoista kohta samaa tahtia kuin viimeisen parin vuoden aikana sosiaalisen median  guruja.

Kii Oy on:

- edelläkävijä asiakaspalvelun, markkinoinnin ja median ratkaisuissa kosketusnäyttöisistä älypuhelimista ja tableteista

- kehittänyt osaamista ja ratkaisuja jo vuodesta 2009 kun muut eivät edes vielä tulleet ajatelleeksi näitä asioita

- kehittänyt uniikin osaamisen keskeisistä asioista tällä alueella keskustelemalla hyvin monien erilaisten toimijoiden kanssa, seuraamalla aktiivisesti markkinan kehittymisestä Suomessa ja ulkomailla sekä kehittämällä ratkaisumalleja, joiden avulla toteuttaa laadukkaita ratkaisuja oikeisiin tarpeisiin kustannustehokkaasti

- kokonaisratkaisutoimittaja asiakaspalvelun, markkinoinnin ja median tarpeisiin kosketusnäyttöisissä älypuhelimissa ja tableteissa

- keskittynyt erityisesti ratkaisuihin, jotka näyttävät ja tuntuvat hyviltä ja joissa on hyödynnetty yksilöllisyyttä ja yhteisöllisyyttä

- uniikilla tavalla kilpailukyinen erityisesti kun halutaan fiksuja ja käytettäviä mobiilipalveluita sekä ratkaisut kaikkiin älypuhelinalustoihin

- keskittynyt hyödyntämään sekä mobiilisivustojen että sovellusten parhaita puolia

- luonut ratkaisumallit, joilla mahdollistetaan käyttöönotto sekä puhelimen selaimesta että sovelluskaupoista

- tarvittaessa vain riippumaton konsultti, jonka avulla kartatte pahimmat karikot ja jatkatte toimintaanne olemassaolevien yhteistyökumppanienne kanssa

- keskittynyt tuottamaan asiakkailleen liiketoimintahyötyä

Tulemme mielelläni keskustelemaan miten te voisitte parhaiten palvella asiakkaitanne näistä maagisista henkilökohtaisista laitteista, jotka kulkevat aina mukana.

Hyvää Uutta Vuotta!

Timo / Kii

Digital = Mobile

In this video there is a peak of the cross-platform application solution Kii can offer to iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone 7. This is targeted for retail and services industries that want to serve their customers directly to their smartphones.

Texts are here in Finnish but this should give you an idea, i.e. this works around product and shops catalogues allowing browsing and search of the products as well as viewing the product images and product details. It also includes shopping list/favourite functionality, finding similar products, sharing to social media and shops on the map. We can also provide more advanced functionality based on your request.

If you are interested in providing something like this kind of service for your products, services and/or shops, ask for a quotation from here.

After a long long silence this blog is back. During the past year Kii has been focusing on execution of its strategy. We have put our money where our mouth has been and continues to be, i.e. in smartphone applications as a great way to provide customer service and as an engaging new media and marketing channel.

Also, we are coming out of the closet, i.e. our first public event (beyond a lot of customer discussion) is tomorrow on Wed 28^th in Helsinki Wanha Satama in the Markkinointiviestinnän Viikko (“the week of marketing communications”). We will have a stand with a presentation, demo(s) and hopefully a lot of discussion in the department B14, i.e. between halls A and C. Welcome to have a chat around “Smartphones – the new intelligence, personal and social media”!

Our high focused competence and lean cost structure are the elements to win customers in this high growth market. We are also just at the very beginning to see what role smartphones and tablets will play in our lives and hence also as marketing and customer service tool.

We started our vision by building and selling a productized solution of how to provide a mobile loyal customer service application to the market. However, after a significant amount of customer discussions within the big players of retail, media and services sectors, we have concluded that one size does not fit all but customers is want to differentiate. Clearly there are a lot of similar elements and we will leverage those but we provide to each customer something unique and something of high value but with a reasonable cost.

Now that it is trendy to talk about global recession, we see the impact of recession to the world of marketing as follows. First of all, marketing is the most important factor in keeping your market share and hence sales in the bad times. This is usually not well understood but it is a clear fact. Secondly, with the budget pressures it is about time to start changing the perspective in marketing. Companies have been throwing money on traditional media (print, TV, radio) in the situation where people use more and more time staring their computers and smartphones. Thirdly, we see that digital world is undergoing an enormous change in terms of technologies. The role of Apple and Google platforms will be huge as smartphones and tablets starts replacing desktop computers, laptops and mini laptops. The role of mobility and interactive touch applications will be growing tremendously and we definitely see it worthwhile to partner with those focusing on this growing domain. All in all, we do not see that the potential recession is not only a bad thing but also an opportunity for shifting marketing budgets much more significantly into the cost effective new media instead of pouring money to non-effective and (slowly) dying traditional media. It is very clear that at least consumers will turn their faces much stronger to this new digital life driven by smartphones and tablets.

We are happy to hear your comments to this blog entry and stay tuned for more stuff around this area.

In the branded applications an example is this pizza service in the US where you can pre-order your pizza from your iPhone.

Equally you have many applications where you can simply check e.g. store locations or the product offering for a retail store. This is all about good customer service but obviously the shop can in this context do also a lot of good marketing e.g. for new product releases ! One may say that there is nothing new here, i.e. the Internet has already changed this BUT this becomes even much more relevant when people carry this information always with them in their personal trusted devices. Every person makes the decision whether he or she is willing to carry that information or not on their screens. The success of this approach depends on your ability to provide continuously new, compelling and accurate information directly to their pocket and hence the great customer service!

Content is king also here! So obviously you need to first have a great idea, i.e. whether you want to entertain your customers or provide them with valuable information or what is the reason you expect them to take the burden to install the application. Without this you have really small chances to succeed. To get the best ideas you need creative minds that understand your business and particularly your customers but optimally also people who understand the potential of technology.

Even the greatest idea can be ruined if the designed experience is bad, so it is extremely important to design the experience well. One can easily find examples from many industries from failures in being able to deliver good enough experience although the original idea was good. In smartphone environments design of a great user experience requires strong combination of creative and technology skills.

To deliver the idea with the desired experience requires of course capability to pull it together so that it really works ! This is not obvious in smartphone environment as they are fairly complex combinations of software and hardware. However, this is getting easier over time and already today this is definitely affordable if you pick up the right implementation partners for you. And remember, what you pay here extra compared to the production cost for the traditional media, you will win in the distribution cost and of course in the far more engaging experience for the consumer.

That’s it, i.e. now it is done and I can just expect the money flow to the pot? Well, of course not. Now you need to know how to make consumers to take this application into use. Here your classical marketing skills are probably handy, i.e. definitely mixing with traditional media helps and you should exploit all the usual places where your customers have been looking for information about you. But do not forget about the new rules of Marketing 2.0 and e.g. that viral marketing is essential. And also in this phase, even though you have your own classical channels and web pages to tout this new application, experts in Marketing 2.0 might make the impact even greater than you thought.

Kii is focusing its business to deliver branded smartphone applications to help businesses to improve brand loyalty and customer services. We can help you with any of the phases above or all of them when you are considering to leverage this new phenomena in the same way the world’s greatest and sexiest brands and the most innovative start-ups already do. To learn more contact us here http://kii.fi/contact, follow @timokii at Twitter or start discussing in this blog.

Evian’s video of Roller Skating Babies was not only watched millions of times in the YouTube but it has also inspired a huge amount of different versions of this video with different sound tracks all over the world. This is a masterpiece of viral marketing. But note also that the content is here king, i.e. you have to have something that attracts the interest and makes people to share it – and at the same time simple enough marketing message behind it so that it is easy to remember and naturally attaches to your brand.
Any comments are welcome on the topic of what you think is relevant in planning and launching a marketing campaign in the Internet or how do you see this kind of things as a consumer.

But yes, we at Kii strongly believe in social media as a phenomenon and in its fundamental impact to the purchasing process and hence to marketing. This definitely is not limited to Facebooks and Twitters or any existing social media brands but to this very old phenomenon of gossiping and various other ways of sharing information to people around you who typically trust it more the closer they are to you.

Let me know your thoughts on social media and marketing, where it works and where it does not work and what kind of new angles to this topic could be found.

We believe smartphones (including also the tablets) are going to have the most dramatic impact to marketing since the invention of TV. They have also something in common with TV, i.e. that is the screen we stare. However, the difference is that we stare that smartphone screen regardless of place and time.

Furthermore, this new screen is interactive and hence allows us to get more value out of it or to be more playful when desired. In this new screen we also decide the “channels” and the channels we choose, we also typically trust significantly. And note, by “channels” I definitely do not mean any mobile TV (!) but any content on the screen. That can be simply images, videos, applications, web links or anything that people can view on their screens they carry with them all the time. And to be a true trusted “channel”, the content should somehow update from time to time.

Clearly the biggest opportunity is in using applications as the mechanism to deliver marketing messages in the way that adds really engages consumers. The impact of this opportunity will be phenomenal! If you follow what the top global brands are already doing, you can realize the trend. All this may sound like a no-brainer but still many of the marketing directors also have failed to be there in time for the previous trends with Internet and social media. Now is time to think what could smartphones mean for your business and how could you plan your marketing mix to take most out of this opportunity with a reasonable investment.

I will write more about this topic in my future blog entries. Let me know your comments, counterarguments etc. If you want to follow my thoughts more actively, you can e.g. follow me on @timokii at Twitter where I post links to these posts and potentially to some other interesting pages I may find useful for you.

Technology continues to change the marketing even more than what it has done during the past years with radio, TV, Internet, social media etc. In this game it is important to understand what is relevant for the marketing directors. In addition to marketing professionals we hope to get comments also as ordinary consumers, i.e. the recipients of marketing messages, because we all are anyways also consumers and know what kind of marketing works or does not work for us. And although consumers are more and more in the driver’s seat, marketing is not dead but needs to look at everything far more from the consumer’s perspective.

So although technology changes marketing, we try to keep the focus out of pure technology, because it is only a tool, i.e. fundamentals of marketing are still the same and not about geeky technology. If we fail in this goal, you are of course allowed to shout loud. :) So, marketing definitely should not get too geeky but we should remember that yes, we are more and more engaged with technology that allows better and better targeted marketing, customer service and efficient distribution of the marketing messages and hence better bang for the buck!

Software developed by Kii distributed via Nokia Beta Labs

Software developed by Kii starts distribution via Nokia Beta Labs. The application is an SMS reader for Nokia Touch devices utilizing Braille coding used by the blind and visually impaired people.

Kii has developed this innovative software utilizing the vibration motor and touch screens of Nokia devices such as N97 and Nokia 5800. We are now proud that Nokia can show its leadership also in this area of tactile feedback which opens a lot of new opportunitites for different usage of mobile devices and even more importantly, eases with this application the SMS communication by the blind and visually impaired people.

The user experience of Nokia Braille has been designed particularly with blind and visually impaired people in mind. It utilized not only the vibration but also high contrasts colours, large buttons, large fonts as well as combination of touch screen and device hard keys.

Kii Software delivers innovative, high quality, custom tailored smartphone software development projects for businesses. We can make difference for your business by taking more out of mobile, whether it is software targeted for your employees to increase your business process productivity or for your customers to engage your customers better with your products and services.

You can download the software from Nokia Beta Labs where also feedback is gathered in the blog. For more information you can also contact us here.