Dr. Windsor Holden, Research Director with Juniper Research (Interview)

Dr. Windsor Holden is a Research Director with Juniper Research. He has authored more than 40 full length reports for Juniper Research, including four editions of its much heralded Mobile Entertainment series. Windsor Holden has extensive experience in consultancy: he has led bespoke market sizing and forecast projects for a wide variety of Juniper Research clients, and has conducted due diligence on a mobile content aggregator for a leading financial institution. Droid Report recently interviewed Dr. Windsor Holden about his current role at Juniper Research, and discussed his latest report: Top Ten Tech Predictions for 2014 and insights on technology, mobile and business.

Dr. Windsor Holden, Research Director with Juniper Research

Droid Report: Hello Dr. Holden, Can you please tell us more about yourself, what your areas of focus are and your current role with Juniper Research? How long have you been with the company?

Dr. Windsor Holden: I’m the Research Director at Juniper Research. I’ve been with Juniper for nearly seven years now. I began by focusing on the area of mobile entertainment – games, music, mobile TV, gambling – but in recent years I’ve concentrated primarily on developments in the mobile payments sector, including remote and proximity payments, money transfer and mobile retail.

Droid Report: As 2013 draws to a close, your latest report: Top Ten Tech Predictions for 2014 draws up a list of predictions for the coming year, as the top trends for the technologies industries for 2014. What excites you here?

Dr. Windsor Holden: I’m intrigued – both as an analyst and a parent – at the educational possibilities afforded by tablet computing in 2014 and beyond. Even preschool children are now engaging with touchscreen devices; an increasing number of children now have their own tablets at home. Given the scale of interaction outside school, it’s critical to build on this, to incorporate these devices into both formal and informal learning processes. That’s why initiatives such as Google Play for Education are so important.

Droid Report: 2014: When Cities Get Smarter states within your report,“There are already a number of high-profile urban testbeds for smart technology, notably Singapore, Barcelona and Nice, where the introduction of connected sensors has improved parking, lighting and environmental monitoring. Juniper anticipates that the next 12 months will see a host of other cities follow suit, resulting not only in increased efficiencies but also in the provision of new business for the population.” What new cities may become smart cities? Which cities do you expect to benefit most?

Dr. Windsor Holden: In the short term you need to look at cities where you have support for initiatives not merely from the municipalities themselves, but also from national government. Certainly, France has been fairly proactive in encouraging and fostering development in this regards: certainly both Lyon and Montpellier have fairly well developed smart city strategies, and I’d expect to see significant integration of city services in both during 2014.

Droid Report: mAgri to Build on mPayment Success in Developing Markets trend for 2014 states, “While the business models to deliver sustainable services are still under development, we believe that 2014 will see a dramatic increase in the provision of micro-lending services which can enable farmers to buy goods or machinery to improve productivity and/or, through micro insurance, to protect against poor harvests. These will be accompanied by an increasing of voice and text-based services with the aim of providing critical information on crop management, product tracking or – like Farmerline in Ghana – enable rural agricultural workers to collect and share data on farming techniques.” Could you elaborate on some of these predictions for the future? What challenges may be faced?

Dr. Windsor Holden: In a number of countries across sub-Saharan African and developing Asia, we’ve already seen fairly significant uptake of mobile wallet services. Initially, these were used almost exclusively for person-to-person money transfer. However, as consumers became accustomed to their use, we’re seeing a raft of additional services being rolled out – bill payment, business-to-person payment and (albeit on a relatively small scale so far) micro-lending. With the introduction of micro-lending, we’re moving beyond simple first-time financial inclusivity (itself a critically empowering development for the individual) to an opportunity to positively impact on entire rural communities. The loans enable farmers to buy goods or machinery to improve productivity; the insurance can protect them if the crops fail. However, there are challenges, not least of which is credit scoring the individuals applying for loans or insurance.

Droid Report: Another report finding, Mobile Fitness Devices Diversify into mHealth Arenas states, “Juniper Research believes that the basic infrastructure supporting mFitness is now fully developed, allowing companies to create increasingly sophisticated, and useful mFitness devices that link to the smartphone and from there to a wide range of services. Though the mFitness market is in its infancy, in many respects it is ahead of the more complex, but ultimately potentially larger, mHealth industry. However, Juniper predicts that fitness and sports device vendors will increasingly begin to explore the possibility of extending their portfolios to other areas of the mFitness or mHealth ecosystem that are adjacent to their current product offering. While the fitness industry does not face the same pressures as the healthcare industry, it nevertheless provides an indication of how the changes required in the healthcare system may occur, and how some of the challenges may be addressed. Juniper believes that as consumer acceptance and adoption of mFitness devices accelerates through 2014, this is turn will have the knock-on effect of stimulating wider interest in mHealth applications, both amongst potential end users and critically amongst a still sceptical and wary healthcare industry.” What are your views on mHealth? How can it improve the health industry?

Dr. Windsor Holden: As we said, the healthcare industry is still extremely ‘sceptical and wary’ towards mHealth. At the present time, most mHealth initiatives are fairly small scale trials; the business models that will underpin them have still to be identified. While perhaps the issues are less from a technological perspective, there are still concerns on the human side, around data collection and data security. Nevertheless, mHealth has the potential to transform the industry, in both developed and developing markets. Through a combination of on-device apps and wearable devices, mHealth can significantly reduce the number of days individuals are required to spend in hospital; patient monitoring has the potential to alert physicians in the early stages of an illness. It can also reduce costs from a preventative perspective perspective, by delivering key information to at-risk groups. Certainly, there are a number of initiatives where it has already proved successful in this last regard, most notably the work done by MAMA (Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action) in India and Bangladesh.

Droid Report: Are there any core technology drivers you see as success for organizations within the next 5 years?

Dr. Windsor Holden: Clearly, the widespread deployment of 4G networks over the next few years has the potential to enable far greater data download speeds, so we should see further scaling up in rich media applications, video streaming and the like. The various technologies supporting wearables technologies should also see much greater traction in the medium term – given the fact that mobile handset usage is almost ubiquitous, the focus is shifting now to much wider connectivity: hence the interest in the smarter city.

Droid Report: Is there anything else you feel Android users or the Android community should know?

Dr. Windsor Holden: I think we’ve covered most of the key ground, with perhaps one exception – mobile retail. Increasingly the traditionally ‘bricks-and-mortar’ retailers are seeking to use the mobile device as a means of marrying their digital and physical assets, of driving footfall to their stores and of increasing engagement with the consumer. But in addition to the threat that online retailers present in terms of lower prices – and of convenience – the traditional retailers now have to face the problem of ‘showrooming’, where consumers simply use the physical store as a place to examine the goods on offer, before buying them from an online competitor! However, it’s interesting to see the strategies that some retailers are developing to combat this, from price matching to in-store mPOS (mobile Point of Sale) to reduce queues. I think we should see some particularly interesting developments of retail strategy based around mobile in the next 12 months or so.

We would like to thank Dr. Windsor Holden for taking the time for this discussion and Juniper Research.

Dr. Windsor Holden is a Research Director with Juniper Research. He has authored more than 40 full length reports for Juniper Research, including four editions of its much heralded Mobile Entertainment series. Windsor has extensive experience in consultancy: he has led bespoke market sizing and forecast projects for a wide variety of Juniper Research clients, and has conducted due diligence on a mobile content aggregator for a leading financial institution. Prior to working at Juniper Research, Windsor worked as an analyst with Analysys, Espicom and Kagan World Media. Windsor has a PhD from the University of Leeds and is also a former Research Fellow of the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds.

Juniper Research

Juniper Research specialises in the identification and appraisal of high growth opportunities across the mobile telecoms, content, and applications sectors. We offer market intelligence, analysis and research in the form of analyst reports, subscription databases and consultancy services.

A free report detailing the findings is available to download from the Juniper website today.