Between Brackets

Here’s an interesting (albeit a couple of months old) youtube short about VISA’s mobile banking work in progress.

Nothing revolutionary if you’re used to the Korean way of living I guess But VISA is a big player, with the capability of rolling such solution out worldwide. So it’s good to see.

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.

The people at Nokia must have read the WWGD book not so long ago, since this is exactly what Google would do (or did some weeks ago): offer free turn-by-turn navigation.

I must say that this was also the biggest disappointment when I first used my N900 (in fact it forced me to use my old phone again).

And now my next wish is for Nokia to make it possible to sync my N900 with OVI. But that won’t keep me from using my N900. What now still keeps me from using it is that I can’t make a Wi-Fi access point of it, but once Joiku solves this I’m back to using it again.

Actually it’s pretty amazing how these days I tend to find it normal that software updates can be easily installed on mobile phones, and how they -more often than not- really improve the device’s capabilities.

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

Monday December 14 Mobile Monday Brussels organizes an event again, this time about MVNO’s. Register today and make sure you’re there.

Although there’s numerous posts, research, articles etc. to be found on mobile marketing on the web, apparently not everybody has read them. Ok, they might have read the rules on opt-in, but using mobile numbers that you provided as a member to one brand for marketing of a different brand seems to me like stretching the rules a bit.

Having received an unwanted SMS marketing message recently from a company that I did not know I tried my luck with the STOP keyword:

As you can see, this did not work. Now what ? Mailing / calling the company to get rid of this seems like the only way forward.

I expect I need to be even more careful when I hand out my mobile number to any company.

Let’s hope more and more companies make sure they adhere tot the mobile marketing rules, and provide a clear way to get rid of this kind of messages easily, otherwise we better expect a consumer backlash.

Nokia may well have the intention of selling off its handset business according to this article.

The iPhone (almost?) de-throwned Nokia as the most profitable handset manufacturer. But an even greater threat may be the Android phones.

Maybe the maemo OS may bring new live to the company (Symbian really is dated now). And then again, maybe Nokia does need to transform itself as IBM did a couple of decades ago.

Great times ahead.