Between Brackets

Mobile marketing campaigns that want to invite consumers to join need to treat carefully. Consumers tend to be more annoyed by unsolicited SMS/MMS than email, especially with the potential of – often unknown – SMS costs involved.

Recently, the Mobile Marketing Association released a Global Code of Conduct that defines the use of obtaining explicit opt-in from consumers and no opt-out schemes as was (is) common practice on the net. It also defines the default to be for one program (campaign) only, unless very clearly requesting opt-in for multiple campaigns.

Now although the MMA defines this in the light of marketing campaigns, for mobile phone applications there should be no difference. The problem that people were ’spamming’ their own contacts when activating the program Loopt on their iPhone without even knowing this is a good example. This is not a marketing campaign, but still also for applications it must be avoided that other people receive such messages without opt-in request.

Interesting question is: how does one do an opt-in request when an application sends an SMS message to a friend ? Friend Finder Sniff does this by channeling all invites through their server and keeping track of people’s response to an invitation (centrally stored friendlist). Question is: is this sufficient or do you need to ask people to invite their friends directly to a service ? This is currently not completely clear.

As an aside, note that in Belgium in March 2008 the operators collectively agreed on a double opt-in for short-code based services.

The good people at Admob have written a new report. Of course to them it is marketing material, still to us it is insightful.

They added an estimate for the growth of the mobile internet; they estimated this by taking a fixed set of their publishers and track their growth over the past 12 months. For the statisticians this is of course not a relevant set of data, but it should give us a gut-feeling on what is happening and how fast. According to this report and way of measurement internet traffic to mobile websites has doubled.

Indonesian sites increasingly use Admob. Less Motorola devices are surfing Admob supported sites.

I’m not sure if I read the report right, but contrary to the statement made at the beginning of it “Apple once again saw strong growth“, I don’t see any relative increase (relative to the competitors) of requests being made to the iPhone (as can be seen on page 5 “Share Change = 0.0%”).
So yes they made strong growth, but not relatively to their competition, which is what matters most.

However, I’d be surprised if the share hasn’t increased by the next report (after the iPhone 3G launch).

Anyway, enjoy the report

Here’s an impressive example:

Pictures speak more than a thousand words, and also more than a two dimensional square of specks like this two-dimensional bar-code:
.

The concept is so intuitive and so simple that it is certainly one of the killing applications of the near future: take a picture of anything you’d like to know more about (be it a person, be it a logo, be it a movie poster), send it by any means (be it MMS, e-mail, IM) to a Visual Search Engine and wait for the information, coupon or whatever to come back.

Some companies in the VSE market:

• kooaba
• ViPR from Evolution Robotics (nothing on their site, but here’s a demo from their VSE)
• Daem Interactive (here’s a demo of their product a,d here’s an interesting presentation they gave on MoMoAms #6)
• SnapNow
• Mobot

Visual Search Engines are not that new, but only now we’ve reached a point where the “common” phones are being equipped with reasonable cameras and internet usage on mobile phones is increasing; the combination makes MVSE a powerfull tool in many areas: marketing, policing (think face recognition), social networking. For the latter MVSE could mean less maintenance for SN users: they can upload pictures and the MVSE can automatically annotate them with relevant information and links, thanks to this information the pictures can then be sent to the relevant people in your social network for instance.

We’re bound to see MVSE boom

Last Friday Mobile 2.0 Europe was held in Barcelona, Spain. The event provided an interesting overview of mobile startups and mobile ideas today in Europe. The agenda was interesting with a mix of panel sessions on the Mobile Social Media, how VC’s see the mobile start-ups, the view from Operators, and what business models to pursue. In between 3 series of start-ups were allowed a couple of minutes each to present their product or service. The crowd was really European with people from a lot of different countries taking part, and venue and catering were good.

What became clear throughout the day is that for a lot of the initiatives in the mobile landscape the lack of flat fee data plans (or at least acceptably priced data plans) is an important hurdle that needs to be taken in order to become a success. Especially the fact that it is not clear to consumers how much will be billed for what is a show stopper for data-based mobile services. It became clear that the cooperation between operators and start-ups makers is certainly not yet sufficient to overcome this problem.

Other important problems that were mentioned briefly that will request both operator and start-up attention are the increase in spam in the mobile networks and how to divide the customer service responsibilities, as operators tend to be contacted when problems with mobile applications occur. For this solutions need to be devised and worked out.

A topic not covered in depth during the day but definitely requiring attention in the near future is privacy. As a lot of the ideas focused on capturing and sharing the mobile owner’s current location and collecting more and more personal data to offer better services, this topic will become very important to be addressed properly, especially in the light of the recent Viacom – YouTube case happening on the internet.

Recently I have been trying out last.fm in combination with Mobbler. Mobbler extends scrobbling to your mobile phone (see also MyStrands and Pocket Scrobbler).

What would happen, now that an increasing number of phones have GPS on board, if you would do the same with GPS locations you are visiting. Have your phone sends visited locations to the “last.gps” service to be shared with others. Visited locations not being when you push a button, but when the phone detects you have been somewhere more than 10 minutes. If sufficient people do that, then you can find people with similar visiting lists, build location “playlists” related to a certain interest, and recommendations to locations to visit.

Current GPS tracking solutions handle mostly about “Where are you?” now. and uploading favorite place information is aimed mostly at bars, restaurants, concert halls and the like. Why not see where people have been in a historical sense, and base the network on that?

A drawback of course is that geographical locations both where you are now and where you have been are considered to be much more personal information than what music you are listening to. But if you get some interesting itinerary advice from like minded people that have been there, it might be worth the loss in privacy.

If you happen to come across such a service please let me know.