Between Brackets

Google announces yet another mobile search feature (currently US only) that allows you to consult nearby stores for product availability. It’s not only to find out if they sell the product you’re looking for but also showing whether or not it is in stock now. That allows you to decide to go to that store right away and pick up the product. Very convenient indeed.

Also interesting is that stores need to participate in the Google program tying them further to Google.

40+ people gathered last Monday to talk about publishing and marketing on the mobile platform.

Some interesting figures and facts were given by the speakers:

• The iPhone app from the De Standaard didn’t cannibalize the site, it added to the traffic (something that a Le Monde speaker also mentioned on a IFRA talk in Amsterdam)
• From an Orange study: using the classic internet and mobile internet channels combined to create brand awareness is the way to go. Brands can benefit greatly from the combination.§
• I’m not sure who said it, but apparently younger people tend to buy Android based phones (instead of an iPhone)

more to be found her: http://www.mobilemonday.be/event/publishing-and-marketing

Next week Monday March 1st it is Mobile Monday Brussels time again.

The theme for this evening is Publishing and Marketing, a joint networking event between IAB and Mobile Monday Brussels.

You can find program details and register here, make sure you’re there.

No, it’s not George Clooney’s own vanity website It’s a site that’s about sharing your medical data with other patients like you.

In the traditional healthcare system: you feel sick, you go to the doctor, she prescribes you some drugs, you go to the drugstore, you take your pills, and you -hopefully- get better.

PatientsLikeMe.com works around the notion that getting yourself involved in the process of listening to your body and symptoms, thinking about how and what you feel, makes you more conscious about your illness. Recording your medical data and sharing it with others, makes it possible to have a better view on your symptoms to yourself, others and doctors. Instead of going to the doctor and having a fuzzy description of what you feel, you can give the doctor a detailed description of what you have been feeling over many days, weeks or months.

The internet makes it possible to create bigger communities of patients suffering from the same disease than in the physical world. Often the small communities on peoplelikeme, are even bigger than the groups of patients that were followed during the clinical trials of drugs that treat their diseases.

People record all kinds of daily habits: what did I eat today? How do I feel today? …? And because they record it regularly, they have a lot of information when they go to the doctor.

Business plan? Peoplelikeme works together with pharmaceutical companies.

There’s many reasons why an organization could delay investing in their mobile presence. Compared to the internet 10 years ago, one can argue that penetration of mobile internet is still relatively low, so there’s still not that much people that would come by on your site.

Except that, different from the early internet days, there’s other forces at work this time: Facebook Mobile: 100 Million and Growing

Now that’s 1 in 4 accessing Facebook via mobile. And what happens if those people try to link through to your brand via a Facebook fan page, a friend’s link, or anything ?

Maybe it is time to re-consider the urgency of your brand’s mobile internet presence.

Another Mobile Monday Amsterdam is in the can, this time in a new venue: De Duif. Not a bad location at all.

Topic: mHealth. What is it? What’s its state? Where are the opportunities?

Bart Collet (owner of an Elderly Home, and mobile addict) gave us his view of the subject. I summarize very lightly:
there are two opportunities for cost savings in the health industry:
appointment alerts: please don’t forget your dental appointment tomorrow.
Treatment alerts: did you measure you blood pressure today? Did you take your medication?
developing countries are making a lot of progress in mHealth. They have limited budgets and therefore think differently. They also have more spotty networks and must therefor make their software very reliable. Finally they have less regulation, less lobbyists than in developing countries.
‘Normal’ device manufacturers (like Nintendo) are starting to enter the medical market as well. These are potentially disruptive forces in the medical appliance world, because these new players are agile, have fresh ideas, less legacy. Of course they don’t have the maturity and experience in mHealth yet.

Interesting opening presentation.

DM2PRO and Quattro Wireless (the last one recently taken over by Apple) published an interesting study (via Mobile Marketing Watch) end of last year that reports on current strategies and future plans of advertisers, agencies, and developers with respect to mobile and social apps in the US.

Interesting to see is that a significant number of parties plan significantly more mobile apps in 2010 as well as an increase in budget reserved for launching apps. As preferred platforms, both RIM and Android are mentioned, but iPhone still leads the pack in everything.

As the report concludes correctly, this flood of extra apps will mean that promotion of an app will become more and more essential in order to stand out of the crowd.

After a lot of speculation Google finally announced its own Android phone today, the Nexus One. Yet another Android phone, and this time from the Android makers themselves. Especially this last point is not unimportant, since it displays that Google considers Android and mobile phones to be important and that it will use its considerable powers to provide more and more useful apps for the Android platform. The Android platform grows a bit bigger with this announcement.

From a post on pinchmedia.com we learn that: on average an application on the App Store earns the developer $8,500 (not monthly, not yearly, but in total)

So unless you’re lucky you’re not earning a lot

Of course (just as with AdMob reports) we need to be careful and remember that PinchMedia only covers a slice of the market (those apps that include their software). But still, it’s interesting.

Seems that the only Smart Phone platform that didn’t grow the second half of this year in the states is the WinMo platform. This is according to a survey from ComScore.

The good news is that the smartphone market keeps on growing and that we’ll see more feature rich phones. This will drive the adoption of mobile internet, which we think is a good thing