MOVE 2022. From an exhibitor's viewpoint

Mobility
This is currently right on-trend as a slogan and catchword. What does it actually mean, though? To me, the best definition is ‘the possibility of moving between any two points, A and B’. They differ, depending on various life situations, such as going to work, going shopping and going on holiday, for instance. As such, what we experienced at MOVE 2022 was a palette of solutions supporting the act of moving from place to place and simplifying it. We aligned MakoLab with that by presenting our solutions for the automotive and aviation sectors.
The first of those two sectors predominated at MOVE, with the car as an important element of the journey between two points. Its role is changing in terms of both its purpose and the way it is used. The car is becoming a part of a greater whole, where scooters, bicycles, public transport and even walking are often its equal. Transport for London, the local authority organisation which runs the city’s public transport, predicts that, by 2041, 80% of all the journeys within its environs will be made using the last four means I have just mentioned.
MOVE featured companies like Bolt, with complete systems comprising hardware and software. However, the dominant note consisted of systems for planning movement from one point to another, managing it and paying for it, using various operators. The popular Google Maps, which was also present at the event, is just a fragment of the spectrum of solutions.
Cars are being used for car-sharing arrangements with ever-increasing frequency, an approach which cities and towns struggling with congestion, a lack of parking spaces and pollution are actively promoting. During the conference, the mayor of Vilnius, Remigijus Šimašius, presented an interesting study on a conscious policy in this area. One response to the growing popularity of car-sharing could be seen at MOVE 2022 in the wide range of systems on offer for managing fleets and payments for using means of transport.
The car itself, which has thus far been an asset, which is to say, an item of personal or company property, is more and more often becoming a fixed stream of revenue on the one hand and of permanent costs on the other. This is a crucial change in the business model of companies in the automotive sector.

In Europe, there is now practically no question as to ‘if’. It has been replaced by ‘when’ and ‘how’. Solutions linked to electric vehicles in the broadest sense not only constituted a major part of what exhibitors had to offer, but also featured largely on the programme of presentations.
Everything connected with batteries and charging them represents a key challenge. This was certainly perceptible at MOVE. Let me turn back to Transport for London for another interesting point. Here and now, that organisation is planning the location of charging hubs for the city over the next decade. These hubs will be points with between six and ten charging stations. They will also feature spaces where people waiting for their vehicle to charge will be able to connect their laptops to the Internet and work, communicate or watch films. The concept is similar to petrol stations, but they also bear in mind the fact that charging a vehicle does take longer than filling up with fuel.
Again, this is bound up with changes in business models. It is anticipated that the fee for using a car could be calculated in terms of the cost of charging it. This would give us a situation analogical to the coffee served in many an office, where there is no payment for the coffee machine, but we are obliged to buy a specified quantity of coffee beans from the supplier. In the same way, we would pay not for the vehicle itself, but for charging it with a specified number of kilowatt-hours from previously determined suppliers.
When we talk about electric vehicles, our focus is on passenger cars… well, and possibly on means of public transport, as well. What about HGVs, though, especially those that carry large loads across long distances in places like the USA and Australia, for instance? Here, instead of batteries, they are fuelled by hydrogen. At MOVE, the director general of Nikola Motor Company, one of the leaders in this growing market, presented some interesting vehicles which are already in use, with engines powered by that fuel, tanks to hold it and stations to fill them.

This is another topic which featured among the presentations and drew my closer attention. I am delighted that the applications presented by MakoLab are equal to the market’s highest standards. However, that is not what I would like to address here.
During a talk on mobile and web applications, Nissan’s customer experience director referred to in-house research which has revealed that the underlying reasons for the majority of people giving up on their use of applications were difficulties in registering and lack of knowledge as to both why they should use the various functions and how to do so. This was despite user-friendly interfaces and it is why Nissan is intensely focused on creating easily comprehended manuals which will address the problems.
During another panel discussion, suppliers of Blockchain-based systems for reserving parking spaces signalled that clients can be put off by the very presentation of a product if it is overly focused on the technologies and their innovativeness. Leaving aside the fact that the primary group of users has no idea at all about what lies beneath the technical formulations, what interests them is what the application will do for them and not how it is made or how cutting-edge it is.
I also attended a presentation about the ‘twilight’ of UX. A supplier of an advanced fleet management system showed that UX is important when people figure in the process supported by an application. For fleet systems, in addition to the drivers, there are the people monitoring the situation and making decisions on the basis of the data, alerts and so forth that they are presented with. The point here is to automate people’s activities to the maximum, eliminating them from the entire process. The modern data we can obtain from various sources, including IoT platforms, and the techniques for processing them, such as the use of machine learning, for instance, makes this possible. In effect, we can have ‘UX-less’ systems, because the ‘user’ is completely absent from the process which a system is supporting.

At the root of all the trends I have looked at here lies data. MOVE 2022 confirmed that, in the digital economy, data are assets, non-material property and a priceless currency. Money can be earned from them in many and varied ways, whether by using them in digital services or simply by selling them.
Some scholars from University College London visited the MakoLab stand. Their field is customer experience and they were complaining about just how difficult it is for them to carry out their research when everyone protects their data and either only make them available commercially or refuse to make them available at all. One vital message for software houses and their clients to absorb is thus to be aware of all the data they process. The data going into the systems they create, the data generated as a result of their operations and the data sent beyond their organisation. New revenue streams and business models can be built from them.
I really enjoy focused events which take place over a limited time and make it possible to network and establish valuable contacts in areas of shared interests. That, indeed, describes MOVE 2022, which boasted an added plus in the form of the venue, which was the contemporary, comfortable and convenient ExCeL London. As befits a trade show and conference on mobility, it is excellently situated in terms of transport and easy to get to from anywhere in the city.

Translated from the Polish by Cary Swift