Between Brackets

Depending on the source this will be the year when Mobile Marketing took off (or not).

Some sources are not unanimous on the subject yet: Mobile Marketer’s got both proponents and opponents to the above statement.

Often the lack of penetration of mobile internet is brought up as the main argument. But that’s a lack of understanding of the many possibilities mobile marketing already offers without the need of a permanent 3G connection:

• texting is one of the major areas for the moment
• standby screen applications is another possibility
• branded applications (downloaded via Wi-Fi or side-loaded via pc)
• finally, the user can use Wi-Fi (instead of a 3G connection). Granted, the experience is not as full as having a 3G connection, but many people do it.

And from the many projects that are launched I can only conclude that Mobile Marketing has already taken off.

So, yes, classic online advertising is still bigger than mobile marketing, but they’re both growing. And from the statistics mobile marketing has the steepest growth rate.

When I read the title of a post on Mobile Marketer “Crippling worm attacks Symbian-powered handsets“. I immediately renewed my Kaspersky Mobile internet license (which had just expired 2 days ago).

After buying and installing the new license key, I read the post. I was both relieved and disappointed. For, for the “worm” to be able to inflict its harm, you need to click on a hyperlink that you receive via a text message, and you have to install the “worm”. If you ask me that’s not a worm (A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program), that’s more like phishing.

So all you downloading mobilistas out there, be careful what you download!

Meanwhile, I do feel better now that I’ve renewed my license key

Green mobile phones always been something mostly Asian, that being all mobile phones in bright colors that are offered over there. Now it seems that more manufacturers understand that more power efficient, renewable, and ideally solar chargeable mobile phones maybe the way forward.

Both Samsung and LG (via Engadget) have shown mock-ups during the Mobile World Congress 2009. Now Nokia did produce a real device – although not solar-powered – with improved charger and more use of recyclable material more than a year ago, called the 3110 Evolve. Not much has been seen of this after the announcement, so let’s wait and see what happens to the Samsung and LG initiatives.

Beter yet, during MWC the GSMA has announced that a broad group of mobile phone manufacturers will strive for more power efficient chargers combined with standardization of the chargers.

Europe has a voluntary industry initiative for several years already. As we have seen in other industries (cars for example) these voluntary initiative only go so far. It would be better that Europe combines these initiatives and transforms them into a real EU directive such that manfucturers must provide energy efficiency information of their phones. Environmental organizations can then stimulate consumers to start buying more energy aware.

On Engadget there’s a demo of the simplified mobile phone ‘OS’ that integrates with many 2.0 services.

Some key ideas behind their design:

• Keep the phone’s ui simple
• Do all heavy lifting (contact editing & deleting) online and synchronize it to the phone
• Make it so it can be installed on low-end devices (for the price sensitive youngsters, which are their target audience)

It is a great idea. It also seems to work very well (the synchronization part an all).
And I do add (or complete) most of my contacts’ information via a tool á la Outlook or via MobileMe or Ovi, and then synchronize the information to my phone.
But I sometimes also need to be able to enter contacts information on-the-go so I won’t be using this phone OS I’m afraid.

Maybe they should foresee the possibility of adding the information but hide it from the standard menu’s or something. Because it is true that including the many options that you rarely use in the standard interface clutters it.

A trend to watch…

Independent Artist Geoff Smith set up a site ringtonefeeder.com where he publishes ring tones for the iPhone as an RSS stream. You can subscribe to his service and will receive a new ring tone every week, which is automatically synched to your iPhone by iTunes.

Here’s an example of an iPhone ring tone Geoff made. Folllowed by a short on how the service actually works.
.

Yesterday Belgium’s biggest -and usually very reliable- operator Proximus had network problems (read in Dutch here). My wife and I couldn’t make a call for some time, and when we achieved to make a call it got interrupted after a while.

We’ve come to rely on our mobile phones so much that they are becoming critical. Certainly to people who only have a mobile phone (and have ditched their fixed line).
So maybe the time has come to start thinking about SLAs for these mobile networks. As well as planned (and communicated) network down times.

At the very least the operators should make these network issues clear to the public. They could for instance put a status block on their homepages so anyone can check online whether there is a network problem or not, why and how long it will take to resolve it. Yes, their competitors can use this information as well, but maybe this transparency is a good thing: today the consumer has no way of knowing how stable and reliable a network actually is.

When there is a network problem you will be told so when you call the support line of Proximus. But then of course you still need a working phone

Here’s an interesting article on why the Authors Guild of America finds that the Kindle”s 2 text-to-speech capabilities are a violation of the copyright laws.

Yet again people from an old industry apparently fail to see the opportunities at the horizon. They think -as the music business thought before them- that lawyers will keep the money flowing. While what they should do is embrace the new technology.
As the author suggests it would be best to make a deal with parties like Amazon. That would be a win-win for everyone; customers included who don’t really care about who’s got the copyright for what medium, but just want to read their books on their preferred device.

My guess is that the Authors Guild is just prepping the battle field with tough talk and that they will soon come to an understanding

Note that text-to-speech is around for a long time. So why is it they object to Kindle’s text-to-speech capability? Because it is becoming very good. It’s still not a perfect narrator, but it bears the promise of replacing the human narrator in the near future (5 to 10 years). And that’s what’s geared them up…

It’s a good idea to offer a way of finding belgian mobile sites, and that’s exactly what MobileWeb did. Of course others have done this before: here, here and here. But they focused on Belgian sites.

Maybe tags would have been even better, as it is not always easy to select the correct category for what you’re looking. And if you’re looking for something specific you’ll probably use m.Google. That, by the way, has been the reason why Google beat Yahoo and Altavista and others in the past: directories are difficult to find stuff in.

To discover sites, though, it’s certainly very useful (I’ve made it a bookmark of mine ).

Lately I’ve been playing around with the latest iPod touch a lot. It’s a very nice device (a bit too brittle to travel with for me). The integration with the AppStore is amazing. Searching for new software, paying for it and then installing it is a breeze (watch your wallets!).

But, what irritates me is that even though we’re supposed to be living in a globalized world not everything is available globally.
Take for instance the iFood Assistant from Kraft. It is an advertisement tool from Kraft (for which you have to pay in order to use it!) that supposedly helps people prepare fantastic meals. I say “supposedly”, because I can’t install it and test it for myself (without performing any tricks).

If you look for it in the AppStore you won’t find it (that is, if you’ve said you’re located in Belgium). When you try to download it via iTunes it becomes apparent why.

When will global companies stop acting childishly local. I understand they have local regulations to take into account (which doesn’t apply in this case I believe). Or that they need to tune some stuff to the local flavors. But, if you advertise something on the internet (global reach), then either clearly state it is not available globally (and mention why) or make it globally available.

PS: when I wanted to leave a comment on the site and specified a valid e-mail address the Kraft site told me to specify a correct e-mail. So I couldn’t leave them a comment

While I’m writing this post the new version of the Kindle (amazon’s amazing e-reader) is being unleashed on the public: engadget reports.

It has text-to-speech which seems to be listenable. better battery life, more storage, improved design.

They took it to the next level, but it still didn’t get to Belgium. Hopefully we will be able to welcome it soon.