Between Brackets

According to the internet (research) bureaus Jungle Rating, OMI2 and Multiscope mobile versions of (dutch) traditional sites are becoming more popular. One of the reasons (according to these bureaus) being the increasingly interesting tariff plans in The Netherlands for mobile internet. This doesn’t sound illogical at all.

Again according to these bureaus the companies offering mobile “versions” of their web site don’t take full advantage of what mobile websites can bring them or their users.

This is indeed something vital. You don’t just create a “mobile version” of your website by converting its content so it can be read on someones mobile. This may be the first step. But the very next step should be: taking the context of the user into account: probably using one hand, small keyboard, looking for relevance, maybe we can even pinpoint their location, personal etc.

But this is indeed good news.

(source -in dutch). More on the report (in dutch).

Plazes just announced that they have been bought by Nokia. This appears to be a smart move by Nokia, as they can now integrate user-recommended location information to their Maps via Ovi, giving their maps even more meaning (‘See what others have to say about this destination’, ‘Friend recommended places on your route’).

Here’s one very good example of how a real mobile campaign of the future looks like: the Nike PhotoID campaign.

The idea is very simple: use your phone’s camera to take a picture of something colorful and send it via mms to Nike PhotoID; Nike then sends you sneakers that have have the two predominant colors in the picture.

This is a true mobile campaign, in the sense that it takes your context into account: you’re on the go, you see something you like and want to immediately act upon it.

Nike PhotoiD, created by digital agency AKQA, was launched on June 16 in the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

A new month has gone and thus a new report had to come: the May report from Admob.

Highlights:

• Western Europe is now included (they finally understood it is slightly bigger than the UK )
• “Spain and Italy are leading broad and rapid traffic growth”: no surprise, these countries have been using cellphones like crazy since their introduction in Europe
• “The iPhone is grabbing market share in Europe”: good for Apple.
• “Symbian dominates Europe”: will Symbian be able to maintain its share (79%!), or will it become the Un*x of cellphones, while Apple becomes the Micros*ft of cellphones?

I guess that the biggest trend is that the Admob monthly traffic keeps growing…

Keep in mind that this report only includes sites that use Admob, and isn’t necessarily representative for the entire market. Maybe iphone friendly sites are more inclined to use Admob than other sites (because the apple has more screen estate for one).

But anyway, the report is interesting material. enjoy!

Social networks have integrated the ‘What are you doing?’ question that Twitter posed at an enormous speed the past year. You can tell everybody what you’re doing, and you can do it from mobile, for example on ShoZu.

Meanwhile, the trend in mobile phones to integrate more and more features has now firmly embraced GPS (see for example the N-series by Nokia and the new iPhone 3G, but also Blackberry, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are offering devices with GPS).

Mobile operators have offered a method to determine handset positions for years already but this has never really taken off on a large scale.

With more technology in place to determine positions, one can expect (and sees already) a plethora of location-based / position / routing services being developed, of which several are trying to answer the question “Where are you?”, frequently integrated within a mobile social network service. These days we see mobile social network services such as Sniff coming up that effectively use mobile operator network-based methods to determine someone’s position, next to pure play GPS-based ones such as bliin.

It is interesting to see that there are companies trying to patent this: Networks In Motion Issued U.S. Patent for Social Networking Applications Using GPS-Enabled Wireless Device. One can have doubts that this kind of service can be patented, and it seems a patent that is difficult to enforce, but it clearly indicates that there is money to be made with these new services.

Last month Vodafone bought Zyb. Zyb is a mobile social network service based on your mobile address book. Vodafone is a very large mobile network operator and one of the first operators to own a mobile social network itself.

Increasingly operators will follow this road and will buy popular mobile social networks. What this means for you as user is that your data is moving to a (potentially different) operator. You are for example T-Mobile-customer but your phone’s data now resides in the Vodafone environment. In the different press releases it is made clear that the service remains open to all (people with other mobile network operators), let’s see if it remains that way.

Some other questions that popped up:
- monetization: how are Vodafone going to make money on this service ? They position the service as “an enhancement to the range of communication services”, and they will probably keep the service free to allow it to attract as much new members as possible, but at minimum some form of advertisement is to be expected. Interestingly, when advertising they can distinguish between Vodafone-insiders and outsiders using the service, so maybe they start offering you specific Vodafone deals when you’re not a customer with them.
- lock-in: will they try and give Vodafone users preferential treatment ? Pre-installed Zyb-clients ? Upgrade and new features for Vodafone handsets first? Not release new features for non-Vodafone handsets ? There are a lot of small things they can do to make you more dependent or to increase your willingness to stay with them.
- dependence: using Zyb for social networking as a Vodafone customer will mean that you are depending on one party for your communications and social interactions, phone backup, etc. It is a bit early to see what consequences this will have, but it may be a disadvantage when you are contesting your last invoice.

All together this is an interesting development, of which haven’t seen the last yet.

It was again a very interesting afternoon with interesting speakers indeed. There have been many events on mobile marketing already, yet this one added something to the topic again.

The “Rooie Hoed” was packed as always. And imho this MoMoAms was waaay better than the previous one.

Some highlights:

Ben van der Burg from WebAds

Ben argues that the triangle “customer”, “operator”, “content provider” should actually be a rectangle “customer”, “operator”, “content provider”, “advertiser”.

I’m not sure which source told him that the triangle is the reality today, to my knowledge there are advertisers in the
mobile space. Anyway, his presentation was very fun to watch and his point about the rectangle is of course correct.

Antti Öhrling from Blyk

“Give the people what they want” is the populist thought behind Blyk, an advertisement funded operator that targets youngster aged 16-24.

According to Antti these youngster want three things of a mobile phone:

1. Voice
2. Text
3. Alarm Clock

So that’s what he gives them.

All you need to sign-up is to provide a bank account number so Blyk can to know that you really are who you claim to be.
And of course you have to be in the age bracket.

A second credo of his is “give the advertisers what they need”; and a precisely targeted group (youngster) is exactly what advertisers need.

What’s more, these advertisers interact with the Blyk subscribers through sms campaigns. And according to the figures in the presentation these campaigns have a very high response rate (average of 29%).

Ignacio Mondine from Daem Interactive

This was a very cool presentation on bar code reading with your mobile phone without ugly bar codes.

have a look at this Youtube movie to see how they recognize the Coca-cola icon and send the user a coupon. But off course this can be used to get more information on a movie by photographing the face of an actress on a advertisement poster of the movie (instead of an ugly 2D dotted bar code)

They do all sorts of fun stuff with it.

Doc Searls from Harvard Berkman center

He gave a very insightful view into the future of CRM VRM (Vendor Relationship Management): “It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.”

If you’re tired of being targeted by advertisers and spammed by all sorts of mailing list using companies, then you
should really read more about his work. The idea is that somewhere up the road in a -not so- near future we’ll be able
to tell companies what we’re interested in and not to bug us with other unwanted “information”.

Read more on the VRM project wiki

from the site of 112: “112 is the single European emergency phone number that enables everyone to call all emergency services across the European Union, from a fixed or a mobile phone free of charge.”

People calling 112 are connected to an operator, who is either trained to deal with emergency situations or forwards the call to the local emergency services. The operators must also provide the -approximate- position of the caller to the emergency services.

This is a very useful service introduced in 1991. But because too few European citizens seem to know about, the European Commission created a site to promote it.

So all you mobile people out there: put 112 in your contact lists