The Mobile Advertising Cafe

LUUP gets mentioned in the terror financing debate

2007-07-11T17:25:00.000Z

FUNDING TERROR !!!

..> Funding Terror Terrorism Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld & John Wood March 17, 2007 We are on the cusp of a new era of terror financing, ... . .. .... Many companies in Europe also provide such services. LUUP, a Norwegian company with offices in Germany

in blog.myspace.com/Burglar13 · Authority: 25
The New Era of Terror Financing is Here

Mobile payments or "m-payments." are now available for terrorists and other criminals ... provide such services. LUUP, a Norwegian company with offices in Germany and the United Kingdom

in The Terror Finance Blog · Authority: 55
The Estonian Connection & FOFG4

I received an email from Robert, one-half of my Estonian partners, requesting that I resend the Luup files in a different format ... for Luup reviewing and cleaning up the tab for Fight Or Flight G4; I altered some fingerings in a few spots

in Claypool Music News · Authority: 1

LUUP in Arabic!

2007-07-11T17:21:00.000Z

LUUP featured on CNBC Al Arabia

Paul Ruppert on the Remittances market

2007-07-11T17:09:00.000Z

Next Big Thing in Mobile: Bottom of the Pyramid Plays

$1 Trillon over the Horizon: Mobile Remittances will be the awakening giant of the Mobile Inudstry

With the next billion mobile consumers to be drawn from emerging economies in Africa, middle Asia, and south of the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, the Mobile industry needs to start recognizing, and offering, services which will drive revenue and offer added value specific to the lowest per capita consumer. The clearest offering is Mobile Remittances.

Here's a sense of how globally scaled this market is. According to the World Bank, today there are 191 million migrants sending over US$ 270 Billion annually, with the G8 markets accounting for 46% of global remittance financial flows. The World Bank has started an initiative in concert with the US Agency of International Development (US AID) and UK's Department of International Development (DFID) with the goal of creating a new transfer mechanism with significant lower costs: Mobile Remittances via SMS.

In February, 2007, the GSM Association (GSMA) announced a mobile operator led initiative in partnership with the financial industries sector to reduce costs from 24% to "a few percent" on transactions of US$50 or more. The GSMA predicts the number of recipients could double to more than 1.5 billion, ten times what is today as a result of lower costs and broader availability provided by the mobile channel, while helping to quadruple the size of international remittances market to more than $1TRILLION by 2012. And yet, most the noise, most the attention in the mobile industry I love is always on what's the next "kewl-est" technical app, or what heavy iron infrastructure play such as "4G" will hypothetically provide to consumers around the world. Here's a dose of a disintermediating effect which will be driven by the massive commercial opportunity.

Remittance flows rank behind only Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as a source of external funding for developing countries. 2004 figures indicate, workers' remittances in developing countries exceeded US$126 Billion, far higher than total official development assistance and private non-FDI flows, and more than half of total FDI flows to developing countries.

Financial markets are developing instruments which securitize future flows of workers' remittances. Emerging market countries are resorting to future-flow securitization to access international markets, and to avoid credit rationing in the face of deteriorating sovereign risks. Workers' remittances have been frequently used along with other future-flow receivables such as oil and credit card receivables. In 2001, Banco de Brasil issued US$300 million worth of bonds, using as collateral future Yen remittances from Brazilian workers in Japan. The terms of these bonds were significantly more generous than those available on sovereign issues. Rated BBB+ by Standards and Poors, these securities were several notches higher than Brazil's sovereign foreign currency rating, BB+ at the time. This will all be transferred to mobile platforms within the next decade.

As a result of in-country experience with SMS top off transfers and "sachet" micro payments, both Smart and Globe, the Philippines leading operators, have introduced commercial means to have more informal processes around remittances via SMS powered micro payments sent to anywhere in the world. Using an M-Commerce platform that allows money transfer and micro-payment transactions via mobile network operators, users can send money and pay for goods and services such as utility bills, tuition fees, donations to charities and buy airtime using local services with off shore operators. Globe's service is "G cash" and Smart's "Padala." With close to 70% of foreign workers being women from the Philippines, these payment options ensure that their hard earned income is directed exactly to the intended destinations.

SMS is the current platform of choice, but Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) can provide the same platform for transfers. Sprint Nextel recently completed an internal trial using MIM as the platform, and US patent applications have been submitted.

Africa will be the source of the mobile service tsunami. Africa provides the last opportunity of mobile growth globally. ARPU levels currently exceed those of India and China. EBITDA margins average 40-55% for African operators. Africa has one of the world's fastest growing mobile markets and huge untapped demand. One third of African countries still have mobile penetration rate below 10%. And, although the mobile subscriber base is still small, Africa's mobile growth rate is 2-3 times that of other countries.

Research on low-income people in South Africa indicates mobile-banking is a more affordable service than traditional banking. No doubt in emerging economies this will challenge traditional banking methods, since for example, one third of people in South Africa and Botswana who do not have bank accounts do have either a) mobile phone, or (b) have access to one. Moreover, even the smallest "sachet" transfers, e.g. 6 to 15 US cents, create commercial opportunities for re-sellers, as indicated in Egypt for small time dealers and resellers of airtime, providing a viable and flexible business opportunity for a wide range of micro-entrepreneurs operating at the lowest economic rung of the ladder. This same commercial phenomenon exists in the Philippines today and will be spreading to the BRIC-like opportunities around the globe. Thus the flow through effects of remittances from the "tip to the tail" of these emerging economies ensures they will continue to grow, positively affecting the individuals at the lowest rung to the the largest enterprises, such as Mobile Network Operators, in the emerging economy countries.

In CK Prahalad's landmark book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, two parables apply to how the Mobile industry is to be affected. First, the BOP market opportunity cannot be satisfied by diluted down versions of traditional technology from the first world. The BOP market can and must be addressed by the most advanced technologies creatively combined with existing (and evolving) infrastructure. Second, distribution must be specially targeted that reach the BOP market, such as SMS and MIM. Innovations in distribution are as critical as technical products or process innovations.

Get ready everyone, this will have a huge effect on how and who we're going to be targeting as service cohorts in the near future regardless of where you are in the world

Paul Ruppert on the transformational potential

2007-07-11T17:08:00.001Z

Text M for Money

The Economist has a great article on mobile payments in its July 29th issue covering the use of SMS based mobile payments provided by Safaircom in Kenya. It covers much of the rationale I illuminated in my "Bottom of the Pyramid" postThe Transformation Potential of M-Transactions."Down load it here. of June 9th. This was followed on July 4th with Vodafone's release of a new white paper entitled: "

The Economist article specifically focuses on the African market which is an untapped opportunity for the global mobile segment, not just the locals, which is why Vodafone is becoming so active in this space, including through their recent aquisition of Essar in India.

The Vodafone report asserts that a new regulatory framework is required to jumpstart the mobile and financial services industry towards offering access to financial services in developing countries, recently referrred to as the commercial opportunity at the "Bottom of the Pyramid." At 52 pages it isn't blog length, but it outlines the lack of access to banking services, and that financail services are becoming critical for economic development and broad based financial services for the developing world. Interestingly it cites the same Safaricom program in Africa--where in Kenya there are 400 bank branches, 600 ATMs, and 10 million mobile phones--which I cited in my "Bottom of the Pyramid" post.

Key suggested action points the paper suggests to ignite wildfire growth beyond current conditions include a complete change from the current struture of retail banking:

Review of Deposit Taking: Current regulation of deposit taking is shaped around the needs of banks and present mobile systems are limited in the size of transactions they can undertake. Deposit taking regularion needs to allow new entry on a larger scale by M-transactions operators

Access to Clearing & Billing Systems: As new entrants, m-transaction operators must be able to access the clearing systems of both banks and mobile operators.

Adaptation of 'Know your Customer' and Anti-money laundering provisions: Personal Insight on consumer behaviour and status and anti money laundering rules need to be adapted to conditions in developing markets where formal documentation and access to photocopiers is limited. The customer data held by mobile network operators could, with appropriate safeguards, offer an alternaitve to existing forms of regulation.

Interoperability of M-Transaction systems: Interoperability of M-Transaction schemes must be implemented to enable operators to benefit from network effects but ensure that the intensity of compeitition in new markests and innovation is not chilled.

The report asserts that the development of m-transactions is "expected to introduce significant improvements in financial services, such as easier and cheaper international payments especially for remittances home, or reduced risk in domestic paymenst by near real-time transfers."

Paul Ruppert covers the Mobile Payments tipping point

2007-07-11T17:05:00.000Z

July 08, 2007

Mobile Payments: The Tipping Point

A compendium of 56 Mobile Payments press releases over the last six months( a ton of reading if you click on the links ) reveals that notwithstanding the mobile payments debates and dialogue centered in the carrier centric mobile industry, the real action is already occurring with trials in the financial services and retail segments, plus through government central bankers around the world. These are the concrete emerging COIs (centers of influence) for this developing market. The operators are just going to go along for the ride....

June
12 - PaymentOne launches its "PhoneBill" service combining broadband and landline billing capabilities with mobile payments, providing online merchants a one-stop shop for alternative "no credit card required" payments.
21 Verizon, the number two US wireless carrier, is to offer consumers the opportunity to make purchases and conduct person-to-person funds transfers via their mobile phones using technology from privately-held US based Obopay

26 - MSNBC covers offering of mobile banking by Bank of America, Citibank, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo and ING.
27 - Wells Fargo and Visa to conduct public mobile payments trial with up to 500 customers in the fourth quarter of the year.
29 - Javelin Strategy study indicates that Mobile devices embedded with chips will replace plastic payment cards over the next five years and will be used to make payments by around 50 million customers
29 - Chicago Fed Reserve article by Katy Jacob comparing the much anticipated but ultimately stalled smart card revolution of the 1990s with the current expansion of mobile payment platforms, and asks how mobile payments fit into the larger financial payment system. You can download it Download chifedmobilepayments2007_2401.pdf .

May
4 - US Tier three operator Cellular South adds Obopay m-payments platform to handsets
22 - Telsecure launches securePay m-payments system in UK

April
2 - Visa USA president and CEO John Coghlan at CTIA calls for closer collaboration between the payment card and mobile industries
2 - SmartPay and China Unicom team for mobile payments in Shandong
3 - Citibank launched a mobile banking application, called Citi Mobile, that customers can download to their hand sets through an offering by mFoundry.
13 - PayPoint to roll out mobile coupon scheme
16 - The Mobey Forum signs up Dutch banks ING and Rabobank and mobile operators Telenor, TeliaSonera and SK Telecom as new members
17 - MonVia, a specialty firm that helps accelerate the growth of early stage start-ups, today announced the launch of MobiBucks, a mobile payment solution
18 - Gresham Computing, the real-time financial solutions specialist, today announced the enhancement of its Clareti Connect product suite to include mobile banking
20 - Fidelity Express is teaming with e-payments Cyphermint to launch a service that will enable its customers to pay bills using their mobile handsets
24 - Morse is to spin off its mobile banking arm Monitise and list the business on the AIM exchange in London
24 - Altair Financial Services International has launched a totally revolutionary addition to Altair's Prepaid Card services that makes use of SMS on mobile phones
27 - MFoundry announced a formal agreement with wireless leader Sprint that will bring mobile banking to subscribers
30 - Analyst report : Opportunities and challenges for m-banking and m-payments by Katy Jacob and Caroline Boyd of the Centre for Financial Services Innovation
30 - Japanese telco KDDI and Mitsubishi-Tokyo-UFJ Bank have joined forces to launch a mobile Internet banking business later this year

March
9 - Marcus Theaters and Mobile Candy Dish today announced the pilot launch of a new service that allows consumers to use their mobile phones to buy movie tickets and more.
15 - US e-payments firm First Data is teaming with Germany's NCS to offer mobile payment processing services to its merchant and banking customers worldwide.
12 - FSTC and Clearing House Payments Company launch m-payments initiative
16 - Masabi, the secure mobile applications company, today revealed a working prototype of a graphically rich, secure mobile banking application.
16 - Vodafone is teaming with German rail operator Deutsche Bahn to develop and implement a mobile phone-based electronic ticketing and payment service called Touch&Travel.
20 - Belgian payments network Banksys and network operators Base, Mobistar and Proximus launched a system for consumers to pay for high street purchases via mobile phone.
23 - US mobile telco Cellular South is teaming with phone manufacturer Kyocera Wireless to launch a multi-city consumer trial of NFC-enabled wireless wallet technology.
27 - Monitise, the mobile banking subsidiary of UK IT services group Morse, is teaming with American fintech vendor Metavante to launch and operate a wireless payments and banking network in the US.
28 - Obopay announced the introduction of Obopay Checkout.
29 - Firethorn Holdings confirmed today that Verizon Wireless is working with Firethorn to introduce its mobile banking and payments solution.
29 - Visa USA president and CEO John Coghlan calls for closer collaboration between the payment card and mobile industries in order to realise the full potential for convergence between the two.

February
8 - MasterCard has partnered with Taipei Fubon Bank and Taiwan Mobile to launch an NFC mobile phone payment pilot programme across the island.
8 - Royal Bank of Scotland to offer mobile banking via MoniLink.
12 - MasterCard is to work with GSM wireless network operators to pilot an international remittance system using mobile payments technology.
12 - An agreement with Telus will bring ClairMail's mobile banking systems to a large customer base in Canada.
12 - Vodafone and Citigroup announce worldwide mobile financial remittance venture.
13 - Bank of America is to roll out a comprehensive mobile banking service to its 21 million online banking customers nationwide.
13 - China Unicom and SmartPay launch 'mobile wallet' in Guangdong.
15 - Morgan Stanley credit card unit Discover Network is working with Motorola to trial a combined mobile account management and payment service
20 - Cyphermint announced that it has released the PayCash Mobile Wallet.
20 - "Mobile Phone: The New Way to Pay" an industry briefing paper on the mobile phone payment market from Krista Becker, Emerging Payments Analyst from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is released.

January
2 - Online Resources announced the launch of its mobile banking and bill payment service
2 - US bank Wachovia is offering online banking customers a patent-pending mobile account information and intra-account funds transfer service
8 - Visa chooses Ecrio to launch its mobile payments platform
10 - Hybyte has launched AirPayment billing solution that supports PayForIt
23 - Norway-based LUUP has signed National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) to its mobile payments system
24 - Obopay, the first comprehensive mobile payment service in the U.S., today announced that it is entering the Indian market
27 - Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo "iteams" with McDonald's to enable payment for purchases via customer mobile phones.
28 - Citibank and Obopay launch a pilot person-to-person mobile payment service for its credit and debit card customers.

Vision Mobile publishes Active Idle Screen report

2007-07-11T16:58:00.000Z

VisionMobile Forum A think tank for mobile strategists.

Activating the Idle Screen

June 14

Andreas Constantinou

We recently researched and authored an extensive research paper on the subject of active idle screens; that is, the technology that turns the ‘front page’ of the phone into an ‘active’ real-estate for discovering, searching, promoting and advertising services. I expect the market value of this real-estate to rise very quickly. Why ? Put simply, the idle screen is the start and end of each and every user journey and as such is the prime inventory in the phone. This is uncharted and relatively virgin territory for mobile operators, manufacturers, content providers and newcomer advertisers who are keen to exploit the 1-billion-a-year piece of a real-estate that is more personal than most other consumer electronics toys. Active idle screens (AIS) is a busy market, too. Some 15 vendors are now offering AIS solutions, deployed by over 10 mobile operators to date, with Alltel, Orange, T-Mobile US and Vimpelcom being behind the most innovative and aggressive deployments.

Mobile Marketing reach is too small

2007-06-12T09:43:00.000Z

Mobile marketing reach is too small, too expensive

from SMS Text News by Alex

Link: Advertising Age - Digital - Video Report: Mobile Marketing Stymied by High CPMs, Small Audiences

Overly high cost-per-thousand expectations and audiences too small to matter are stymieing the development of the mobile phone advertising business, according to media buying executives at this week’s Mobile Marketing association Forum.

“Most of the brands for whom we do investment advisory are not going to buy $60, $70 or $80 CPMs, even if that’s what the market demand is right now,” Eric Bader, senior VP at MediaVest USA, the country’s fifth-largest media-buying agency, said about the cost of trying to reach a thousand people, a standard metric in ad sales.

Interesting. So what’s a good price? According to Eric Bader:

“When you start to look at how effective search and the yellow pages and directory services are, that’s who [mobile is] going to be competing against and those CPMs are down in the $8, $7, $4, $10 range.”

US Youth reaction to mobile ads - MoCoNews

2007-05-01T19:58:00.001Z

U.K. Study Shows Youth Tunes In To Targeted Mobile Ads

By Peggy Anne Salz - Tue 03 Apr 2007 01:18 PM PST

Mobile ads are as annoying as spam – unless the message matches the individual user’s interests, according to a survey by Q Research. It found teenagers are more than twice as willing to receive mobile ads on their mobile phones if they are relevant. The survey, which polled 1,500 teenagers in January, found that 71 percent would accept mobile ads related to their interests, compared to 32 percent who would accept random mobile ads.

Freebies increase the willingness of users to receive mobile ads. For example, 75 percent of teens said they would accept ads if advertisers offered discounts or special offers, and that figure rose to 82 percent if the offer was ads in exchange for top-up credit.

When asked about the types of ads they would like to receive on their mobiles, 70 percent said they preferred picture ads. Video ads were next with 53 percent (possibly because users were concerned about the cost of receiving a video ad on their phones, the survey said) and text came in last with 45 percent. Press release (PDF)

Mobile Posse - MoCoNews

2007-05-01T11:47:00.000Z

Embedded Mobile Ad Firm Mobile Posse Gets $1.5 Million Funding

By Rafat Ali - Tue 17 Apr 2007 04:06 PM PST

Mobile Posse, a McLean, Virginia-nased mobile advertising startup, has been in works for a while, and has raised about $1.5 million in funding (the money was raised in fall last year). WaPo has a short profile of then: The group, headed by former AOL executive Jon Jackson, includes Mark Ein of VentureHouse Group, Raul Fernandez, chairman of ObjectVideo, and two more former AOL executives, Jack Davies and Mark Walsh. From out of town, former NFL quarterback Bernie Kosar is an investor, as is Michael Rockefeller, who is on the board of Venrock Associates, the investment arm of the Rockefeller family.

It service: Users sign up to get Mobile Posse chips installed in their phones. On the main screen, a rotating series of ads from clients appear on the screen...the ad disappears as soon as the customer starts using the phone. The service is being tested by an Ohio phone carrier, Revol.

Sky sells Ads - MoCoNews

2007-05-01T10:28:00.000Z

Sky Digital Media Starts Selling 3rd Party Ads

from MoCoNews by james@moconews.net (James Quintana Pearce)

Sky Digital Media has started selling advertising on third-party mobile sites, winning the account to sell across Geek TV. “The broadcaster has its sights set on becoming the leading off-portal mobile site network and is in negotiations with operators about revenue-sharing deals for Geek TV, promoted on the 3 and Vodafone portals,” reports NMA. Geek TV is a WAP site run by Player X targeted at young males.

Related

Push-It on MoCoNews

2007-05-01T07:57:00.000Z

Singapore Firm Patents Technology To “Translate” Web Advertising to Mobile Phones

from MoCoNews by peggy.salz@gmx.net (Peggy Anne Salz)

It could be a boon to mobile advertising or it could expose users to a deluge of ads at every turn. Singapore’s Global Mobile Technology (GMT) has filed a patent for a new technology that will let web providers deliver their ads to IP-compatible phones. The company reckons about 1,000 devices are currently IP-compatible, potentially making this form of advertising available to 2 million users.

The system, aptly called Push-It, allows for the delivery of text, images, sound and/or video with embedded advertising to mobile phones. In addition to embedded advertising, the technology will also feature “click through” and “call through” capabilities. In a nutshell, Push-It pushes advertising to mobile phones – even if the user hasn’t opened the phone’s browser – which is delivered with a ring alert to let the user know the ad has arrived. The product is set to be released in 3Q2007. (I called GMT, which tells me it has already demoed the product. It’s hard to say if it was presented to web developers, advertisers or content providers – or all of the above. The company’s newly launched website says the Push It app is 25KB, and “does not require the preparation of WAP pages to deliver the data to the subscriber’s mobile device.” It takes Web pages and reformats the content prior to delivery. Thin on details - but I’ll watch it and report more as it comes in…) Press release

Interview with Omar Hamoui of AdMob - Knowledge@Wharton

2007-04-23T09:54:00.000Z

AdMob's Omar Hamoui: 'Mobile Is Going to Be a Larger Market Than Internet Advertising'

Published: April 18, 2007 in Knowledge@Wharton

Omar Hamoui could be called a "serial entrepreneur." Immediately out of college, he started his first business, a consulting company that grew to between 20 and 25 people. Then came what he characterizes as the one job he has ever had: a two-year stint working at Sony. After that, Hamoui created a series of startups built around the expanding ecosystem of mobile devices. He launched a company that developed software for cell phones based the Symbian operating system. (Symbian is a U.K.-headquartered supplier of operating systems for so-called "smart phones.") He next started fotochatter, a social network for photo sharing over mobile phones. Hamoui then joined Wharton to pursue his MBA. While he was a first-year student at the school in 2006, he came up with the idea for AdMob, a company that sells advertising for phones' mobile browsers. As he puts it, he "shifted gears, raised money, and decided to leave school." Since then, AdMob has been growing rapidly, and in the space of a year claims to have become the "world's largest mobile advertising marketplace."

How is mobile advertising evolving? How does it differ from conventional web-based advertising? Knowledge@Wharton spoke to Hamoui about these issues, among others, in his San Mateo, Calif., office. An edited version of that conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Let's start with a basic question: What does AdMob do?

Hamoui: We are a mobile ad network. We allow independent mobile websites to run advertising on their sites. They come to AdMob, drop some simple code into their [web] pages, and then those pages start serving ads. We also allow advertisers to purchase advertising on a self-serve basis. It works very much like Google AdSense or any other kind of self-serve advertising system, except it's for mobile [devices].

Knowledge@Wharton: How is mobile advertising similar to, or different from, web-based advertising?

Hamoui: It's pretty different. The devices are different. Technically, the way you have to integrate advertising into the page is different. All the advertising done on the Internet is syndicated with JavaScript. JavaScript doesn't work on mobile devices so you have to do it a different way from a technical standpoint.

The targeting is [also] very different. If you are an advertiser, you likely care what carrier the person is on, what handset they are using, whether the handset will support Java or [the] Symbian [operating system]; is it Microsoft Windows or is it Blackberry? -- all those things matter to you. Online, none of those things matter.

The web pages themselves are not translatable onto mobile [devices]. You have to have a different landing page. We would love it if we could just find an ad network to fill our inventory with existing online advertising. But we can't, because those ads would link to web pages which wouldn't render on the mobile device in the first place. [The mobile web] is sort of its own silo.

Knowledge@Wharton: How, then, do you get your advertising on all these various platforms with different capabilities?

Hamoui: That's why we exist, because it's hard to do that. So far we've dealt with the most basic type of advertising, which is a text link. Now we've gone into CPM [cost per thousand views] banners as well, which are graphical and are slightly more of a technical challenge.

A lot of the work formatting for the particular devices happens on the publishers' side in our case. They call us, they request a text link and then they figure out how it needs to render for all the different particular devices. We don't have to do that much heavy lifting when it comes to formatting it for those devices.

What's neat about AdMob is that when you create an ad, you just check off a few boxes and say, "I want this ad to run on Nokia [phones] that support polyphonic ring tones on [service provider] O2 in the U.K.," and your ads will only show up on those devices. We do very specific targeting for mobile. So as an advertiser you don't waste your money on devices that can't consume your content, or on somebody who can't make a purchase or do whatever you want them to do because they have the wrong device.

Knowledge@Wharton: So you are doing the negotiation between the various handheld devices and the advertisers?

Hamoui: Yes, sort of. Of course, it's all automated. We have about 1,200 independent publishers who have content on mobile [web sites]. Those sites contact AdMob and say, "Get me an ad. I have a Nokia and it's in Italy. Do you have an ad that would be appropriately targeted for this device?" And then AdMob effectively sends a response that says, "Yes, here's an ad for that user."

Knowledge@Wharton: Just so it's clear: You are targeting the native web browser built into a cell phone, Blackberry or handheld platform? You're not a Java applet or a WAP [Wireless Application Protocol] application. You're [targeting the device's] browser?

Hamoui: Exactly.

Knowledge@Wharton: Historically, the carriers have controlled what happens on cell phones. You are not linked to any carrier. Is that something the carriers are concerned about?

Hamoui: Not for the most part. We've talked to them and they are relatively ambivalent so far. There are a number of ways that it makes sense for us to work with them in the future. But in terms of growing quickly, for us it has been helpful not having to negotiate individual large deals with carriers as a small company....That has been a big bonus for us.

Knowledge@Wharton: The carriers don't feel that things are slipping through their fingers?

Hamoui: I think they feel that way anyway. There's a general consensus among them that "off deck" -- people browsing the web by typing URLs as opposed to visiting the carrier's home page -- is increasing and is unavoidable. I assume we are feeding that perception, but I don't think they think of us as the cause of it. We are just a company that's taking advantage of the state of the world, as it were.

Knowledge@Wharton: The other piece of the equation includes the consumers themselves -- people who have cell phones. Is there a negative reaction from them? Are people a bit put off by having advertising on their cell phones?

Hamoui: That's obviously an important question. I think that it would annoy people if you were sending them stuff, like pushing SMS [text messages] or MMS [multimedia message services] down to them, or something that's intrusive. [Then] it's like, "I'm on my phone and I'm in the middle of a meeting and you send me an SMS." That would be really annoying. But we don't do that.

These are people who are browsing the web on their phone. For the most part, people are accustomed to seeing advertising when they browse the web. It's a normal part of their experience. So, although we don't directly have interaction with the consumers because we're working through the publishers, we've had zero complaints from publishers that their users are upset about the advertising.

In effect, it's just like the web. If there's so much advertising [that] you don't want to use that site anymore, then you just don't use that site anymore. It's not something that you're obligated to do. We haven't experienced anything like that whatsoever. There have been lots of other issues within the company, but user dissatisfaction has not been one of them.

Knowledge@Wharton: What kinds of other issues have you encountered?

Hamoui: There are lots of issues. Some of them involve recruiting enough people, getting engineering up to par, dealing with publishers who are looking at other ways of monetizing their inventory, and dealing with publishers who are on the carrier deck and the carriers tell them, "You can't run advertising." This is just normal stuff that you would deal with as a company. [It's] not that we don't care about user dissatisfaction -- but it just isn't something that we've had to worry about so far.

Knowledge@Wharton: The one case in which web browsing on a cell phone may be different than web browsing on a desktop is that some people's data plans are paid by the byte.

Hamoui: That's true.

Knowledge@Wharton: Are you getting any push-back [from these customers saying,] "I'm paying to have you give me an ad and you're taking the profit off that transaction"?

Hamoui: In that case, that can be an issue. Because our [ads] are text it's been less [of an issue] than, perhaps, the guys who are serving mostly banner [ads]. I did a calculation once and -- even with the most expensive data plan -- it was like one-fiftieth of a penny extra to get the page [with the ad] downloaded.

There have been Internet plans where you pay by the kilobyte as well. We all remember that time. But, at the end of the day, those content providers have to make money from their content or they're going to stop providing it. As a user, if you don't want to download the ad, then you're not obligated to do so. I think the net benefit to them of being able to consume good content on their phone without having to pay for it -- or to pay 1/50^th of a cent for it -- probably outweighs the concerns there. But it's a valid point.

Knowledge@Wharton: The auction-based [system] for buying ads through your service sounds similar to Google's approach. What do you see as AdMob's competitive advantage? Couldn't Google implement its technology in your space and dominate this area like it has so many others?

Hamoui: What Google does right now is AdWords for mobile. You can buy mobile ads on their mobile search results already. So, they are already "in the space." What they don't do is syndicate yet -- which is the part of their business called AdSense.

So the next step would be AdSense for mobile. That would be much more directly competitive with what we're doing. And that's really when one has to worry about the fate of AdMob and how it will fare compared to Google. We're obviously building pretty aggressively ahead of that.

It's the same with any company that's competing with a large, multifaceted organization. We are smaller and this is a 100% of our focus, so we can move a lot faster and do a lot of things that they are not going to do. We are doing banners, soon we'll be doing video, we'll be serving ads inside of games and applications, we'll be dealing with things like analytics for mobile publishers, and there are a couple of other interesting things that we will be able to do for the publishers themselves.

The way that they will have to target their advertising is going to be akin to what they've done on the web. They will look at the context and they will be able to contextualize the ads. But, because their existing engine doesn't care about things like the device or any of the other small subtleties that occur in mobile, it is unlikely that they will be able to use their existing infrastructure to do that kind of intelligent targeting.

A user on a BlackBerry is different than a user on a RAZR, and these people are likely to care about -- and click on -- different things. Over time, we've built up a lot of data on that and we're going to be able to use it in some pretty interesting ways. That should provide us with a pretty interesting differentiator. It's not a foregone conclusion that any companies that are big in TV would become big on the Internet. And, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that big Internet companies will be big on mobile.

Knowledge@Wharton: Why haven't Google's engineers [developed an] AdSense-like [service for] mobile?

Hamoui: They're busy. They have lots of things to do and [that market] is not big enough. It's really hard to move the needle for a company that's bringing in however many billion dollars every year. If you talk to people at Google, like any large company, $100-million problems just aren't that interesting. How are you going to make a big difference in what we're doing today? They've got a lot of different things going on. They'll come, there's no question that it will happen, but Google is a large company now, and it has other fish to fry.

Knowledge@Wharton: You indicated that you have plans to move from text-based ads into richer media -- video and animation. Doesn't this [raise the issue of] platform differences? While it's straight forward [to deliver] video on some cell phones, on others it's impossible.

Hamoui: It's pretty tricky. The good thing is there are people who solve all kinds of problems in mobile that we can work with. Putting videos onto phones is not our specialty. But there are 20 companies that specialize in this. In a lot of those cases, we'll likely partner. Our specialty is getting a lot of people to see it, not figuring out how to do it.

We're open about working with other people when it comes to particular technology issues. We don't want to solve any problems that have already been solved by somebody else. All these companies have the same problem: They do really interesting stuff, but they can't get anybody there to see their stuff. We drive traffic. That's what we do. Anything else outside of that is stuff that we don't really want to do. And if we don't have to, we won't.

Knowledge@Wharton: Could you explain your two levels of partnership? There's a publishing partner and an ad source partner. Is that right?

Hamoui: In the beginning, we had two levels of partnership for publishers. We said, if you work with us exclusively, we will share this amount of revenue and if you work with us non-exclusively, we will share that amount of revenue. That was just too hard to police and deal with, so we just went to one revenue-share policy where there is no provision that you have to work with us exclusively.

Knowledge@Wharton: Who are the publishers that you're working with and how much traffic do you see?

Hamoui: We don't name our publishers, by and large. But we've talked about some of the publishers we're working with on the website. We work with eBay, we work with MTV, and we work with a lot of people you've never heard of probably -- sites like MocoSpace and some small names that have a lot of mobile traffic. We see about 600 million page views every month across all those publishers.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you see a willingness on the part of advertisers to experiment on the mobile platform or is there a lot of resistance?

Hamoui: There's not much resistance. I think they're all willing to experiment. Advertisers have, thus far, been the easy part. Finding the inventory and getting ads to run on it is harder than getting advertisers to be interested in it.

We have traffic from all over the world. Finding an advertiser who's interested in advertising in South Africa [for example,] is a little bit more difficult. The U.S. advertisers, at least, are pretty open to it.

Knowledge@Wharton: How does the U.S. market for mobile advertising compare with Europe or Asia?

Hamoui: There's a lot more ad money [in the U.S.], but there's a limited supply of places to put the ads.

Knowledge@Wharton: So there's a disconnect between where the advertising is and where the audience is?

Hamoui: Yes. In terms of the whole advertising industry, I think the U.S. is about 50% of the entire worldwide advertising budget. So, 50% of all the money spent on advertising is spent in this country. That's a lot of money. That means inventory in any other place is a lot less valuable. And inventory here is probably overvalued -- or overpriced, at least.

Knowledge@Wharton: What sort of economic models have you seen in terms of what the advertisers are trying to do on the mobile platform?

Hamoui: There are a couple of different things. There's brand advertising, which is mainly posturing to say: "Look, we're a forward-thinking company; we're doing things on a new medium." And, in some cases, it's pretty valuable.

For example, we did a campaign for Adidas for the World Cup. They were driving people in various countries to download backgrounds for their World Cup teams, like Team France or Team Italy. For a small amount of money, [Adidas] drove tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of downloads of [the background]. And once somebody has that on their phone, they've got the little Adidas logo on the bottom right-hand corner and they're looking at that [every time they] look at their phone. That's a really good return for a brand advertiser in terms of [gaining] mind share.

We have a lot of direct-response advertisers who are trying to get people to sign up for something -- they have a mobile application, they distribute mobile coupons, they have a free mobile gaming service, they have whatever it is they're trying to do. That's been big.

We're starting to see an increase in entertainment companies for tune-in types of activities: "Don't forget this show is on," "Don't forget this movie is coming out" -- that sort of thing.

The obvious thing that we haven't yet seen is the local stuff. The phone is always with you. Eventually you'll know where this person is. So, can't you tell them to come to my Italian restaurant or whatever? We haven't seen a lot of that yet, partly because there's not sufficient volume to [make it] meaningful. You need to have lots of people in lots of places before that matters.

Knowledge@Wharton: Any thoughts on where this market will evolve? What will the future of mobile advertising look like?

Hamoui: I think that it's going to take a lot from what happened on the web, [although] there will be some different nuances. The platform itself is harder to work in, but it provides some very interesting capabilities.

This is the first time there's been a connected device that you can actually associate with a person. With a computer -- my wife uses my computer at home, I use my computer at home, my kids use my computer at home -- it's a communal device. But the phone doesn't work that way. And it's always with you. Usually people sleep with it by their heads, so it's [with you] literally 100% of the time. There will be some unique things that happen.

In terms of size, I don't think anybody doubts that this is going to be a larger market than Internet advertising.

Google's CEO is basically saying the same thing. They consider it a big issue. If you look at just the sheer number of devices, there are 2 billion or 2.5 billion handsets now; there are half a billion PCs. There are a lot of markets where [people] just use [a mobile phone] to connect to the Internet. They don't even have PCs. I believe that it's going to emerge as a pretty significant market.

Knowledge@Wharton: Where do you think AdMob will be in five years?

Hamoui: I have no idea. I don't know where it'll be in five weeks! There are three possible outcomes: We'll either be out of business; we'll be a big, independent company, or somebody will have bought us. Those are the three possibilities.

Knowledge@Wharton: You don't have any way of handicapping those relative to each other?

Hamoui: I don't think we're going to be out of business. I think we're doing okay so far. Maybe that's a little bit boastful, but this doesn't strike me as something that's just going to vanish. There's enough network activity going on. There are enough people who have a stake in it. Once you have several thousand people on either side, there are enough people who are benefiting from it so that it tends to support itself. You lose one, but somebody steps in and takes their place. So, hopefully -- knock on wood -- we'll still be here.

Knowledge@Wharton: What keeps you up at night?

Hamoui: Lots of things. I have a five-month-old daughter. She keeps me up at night.

Knowledge@Wharton: Business issues?

Hamoui: From a business standpoint, it goes back to some of your earlier questions: How is this going to be defensible long-term? When the larger organizations train their guns on [our company], how are we going to compete? The goal is to build a sustainable business that's going to be running independently five years from now.

So, what I worry about is: Is that really going to happen, or are we going to have to take an early or unfavorable exit because we were unable to build sufficient differentiation for ourselves? It remains to be seen if we'll be able to do it, but that's what I spend a lot of my time thinking about.

Google Mobile user experience strategy - InformationWeek

2007-04-12T12:17:00.000Z

Google Lays Out Its Mobile User Experience Strategy

By Stephen Wellman,
01:16 PM ET, Apr 11, 2007

Just market the word 'Google' with any event these days and you can pretty much bet it will sell out. Last night I was at a presentation by Google on mobile user experience. If any other company gave this talk, maybe 40 or so people would show up. But because the speaker was from Google and the event was in the company's New York City nerve center, over 250 people packed out the Google auditorium. For those of us lucky enough to get a ticket, we received an upfront look at how Google designs its mobile applications.

The event, "Google Presents User Experience & Mobile Apps," was co-hosted by the New York City chapter of the Usability Professionals Association.

Google user experience designer Leland Rechis started his talk by re-iterating Google's mission: Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Rechis added that mobility is fast-becoming the key to making information "universally accessible," but he warned that without a solid user experience, there is no way mobile applications can be useful.

Rechis said that when Google plans to launch a mobile application, it looks at the potential app through six layers:

1. Understanding users, anywhere, anytime

2. Fits in your pocket

3. More personal than the PC

4. Consistency across modes

5. Localization is intensified

6. Integrated devices, modes, products

Rechis then broke out the company's mobile development and optimization strategy by each level.

Understanding users, anywhere, anytime

Rechis said that Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups:

A. "Repetitive now"
B. "Bored now"
C. "Urgent now"

The "repetitive now" user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The "bored now" are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don't offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The "urgent now" is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

Fits in your pocket

Rechis stressed the limitations of mobile phones. He pointed out that any mobile application has to be able to fit on a small screen and cannot require complicated text input. Also, since the third screen has no X-axis, layout has to clean, simple, but maintain the basic usability of the parent desktop application. Rechis also stressed that the "density of information" changes on a mobile phone, requiring designers to identify only the most essential parts of any given application. Obviously, juggling all this isn't easy.

In order to achieve usable mobile applications, Fechis reminded the audience that they have to be willing to test and re-test applications with users. Otherwise you can't get it right.

Also, building successful mobile apps requires developers and user experience people who are passionate about their subjects. He pointed out one Google employee who went to great pains to make sure that Google Maps gave directions correctly for Japan. Since street signs and markers in Japan are different than in the West, this employee had to go to great lengths to make sure that the app rendered maps and gave directions in ways that are useful for that country.

Consistency

Google always strives to keep the look and feel of any Google application consistent, both within the type of function (i.e. all blog search results look different than map search results) and on devices (a map search on a desktop looks and feels like a map search on a mobile phone and vice versa). If mobile applications are to be universal, then developers have to maintain patterns and designs across all screens.

Localization is intensified

Rechis said, bluntly, that the mobile Web is balkanized, "The Pangaea of the Web is gone." And don't expect this to change anytime soon, either. Thanks to carrier portals and off portal applications, there is no one mobile standard to develop for.

In the mobile world developers have to be prepared to optimize for different devices, browsers, languages, carriers, countries and cultures.

I was struck by a couple of things during this presentation. One, I didn't realize just how much care Google takes in creating its new applications. They are really dedicated to making things as simple and easy to use as possible. The second was how much Google seems to thrive on its vaguely anarchist internal structure. Rechis pointed out how Google structures its development teams and the process seems to account for a lot of internal dissent and even debate. I was amazed at how different this is from most development efforts I have ever been a part of.

The third thing I was struck by was the level of Google's commitment to mobility. I know they've been talking about it, but last night I was impressed by just how much they are working to build a truly useful mobile Web. I think everyone else out there making mobile applications should take note.

Jan's W2F podcasts at 3GSM

2007-03-13T17:48:00.000Z

Just saw that Jan is blogging, as well as posting the podcasts...

Mike Rowehl's response to the Nokia thing - This is Mobility

2007-03-09T17:06:00.000Z

Trying to Grok Nokia Ad Service

I heard about the Nokia Ad Service but didn’t have any concrete details. Does it tie into client software, is it an open publisher network, bidded marketplace, carrier integrated? It’s actually more my mobile geekery side more so than my interest as an employee of a competitor that’s driving it. Cause the initial info I got was pretty conflicted, and I couldn’t put the pieces together in a consistent way. And then I saw the post from Ajit, which added even more inconsistent pieces on top of what already didn’t fit together. I didn’t want to post about it though, cause I assumed everyone would just assume that I was whining about competition. Thankfully Eduardo Cruz has saved me the trouble and given me something to point at.

It’s the two parts about being off-portal and providing access to all Nokia’s customer base. Assuming that the system works like a traditional network of off-portal publishers (like what we do at AdMob) that definitely wouldn’t give access to “all Nokia’s customer base”. However if it operates outside of the publishers control, like the way that Openwave’s “Contextual Merchandising” solution does it can insert content anywhere and that would give a kind of universal access. I put Contextual Merchandising in quotes there cause that seems to be a mobile specific term, if we were doing this online it would be called framing, which is almost always frowned upon and frequently illegal.

I’m pretty concerned in general, and some of the points that James brings up on MoCoNews are some of the primary reasons. I actually don’t like advertising. There, I said it. I was railing against that part of my professional trajectory (I’m ex-”a number of advertising companies” on the technical side, one of them a little startup called Overture that the Yahoo folks in the audience might have heard of) because I considered much of the activity really detached from growing an ecosystem. The beautiful and envious outcome of Google AdSense was that it allowed lots of small publishers and individuals to fund and grow their business on their own terms and without having to compromise what they wanted to do as long as it lined up with a valuable audience out there on the Interwebs.

But it works because both ends of the system are hooked into the right endpoints and the incentives all around are aligned. Publishers bring in people, hopefully of high value, who advertisers pay to reach, and the publishers make money from the advertisers reaching those people. The publisher creates the value, reaps the value, and the network takes a share for facilitating the interchange. But what happens when the publisher creates the value and the facilitator collects the value with no feedback to the publisher? The publisher isn’t incented to create higher value content catering to a better audience, so the quality and value of the content out there goes down. So extracting the same value in advertising from the audience requires more and more intrusive and overbearing tactics. You end up with a Geocities type of problem, where the end results are a noxious mix of advertising and bad content that no one really wants to see. The goal of an advertising network should be to maximize the value being delivered to the publishers participating in the network, which grows the value of the system as a whole and helps to expand industries. That’s why I’m at AdMob, cause we have the chance to play that part in the system.

However I’m seeing more and more “advertising networks” pop up that don’t align incentives the way that the really successful efforts of the past have done. I worry about the users coming into mobile who might have to suffer through technologists figuring out that they don’t understand media. That’s always really painful.

Ajit covers the Nokia Ad Service Launch - Open Gardens

2007-03-06T18:50:00.000Z

Nokia ad service is launched! A potentially revolutionary milestone for Mobile advertising..

Today Nokia launched Nokia Ad service

The Nokia Adservice may well be one of the most significant announcements this year and I believe, it will transform the industry.

Here is my analysis on the Nokia ad service.

To understand why this is a seminal announcement, we need to understand that the advertisement model is very significant. It is the main driver on the Web (web 20) (and that includes all forms of advertising like video).

I believe that the Ad model will also be a major driver to the Mobile Web as I indicate in my book Mobile Web 2.0.

But there is a problem.

The good news is: we have billions of devices - more than PCs
The bad news is: that they have nothing in common except Voice and SMS.

For most part, neither of these are programmable.

To make matters worse, the device stack is fragmented and brittle. By fragmented, I mean, a Wintel like situation does not exist on mobile devices. And by brittle I mean that layers in the stack are too tightly coupled - making introduction of new elements very difficult

For advertisers, this is bad because

a) It is almost impossible to target advertising to customer profiles
b) The target audience is fragmented

Clearly, an appetite for advertising exists with the success of both Admob and screentonic, both of whom have reported a billion ad impressions.

But the impressions themselves cannot be targeted because very little USER information is available to the third party (advertiser). Some limited device information is available through mechanisms like UAprof but that means, ads cannot be targeted to customers (using the equivalent of cookies on the Web).

The other end of the spectrum are the Operators. Traditionally, they have always thought of themselves being the key players in leveraging advertising. For third parties, dealing with Operators is very difficult.

Further more, Operators in the West do not have the leverage on the actual device stack (much as they would like to have).

The result is: Advertising, as I envisage in Mobile Web 2.0 has not taken off so far ..

The Nokia ad service provides a very interesting alternative to third parties because it is an Off portal initiative across all Nokia handsets globally.

This truly changes the game from an advertiser perspective because:

a) They deal with one entity(Nokia)

b) They potentially access ALL Nokia devices ACROSS operators globally

c) They can target the customer base because the Web/Mobile gateways are run by Nokia (off portal)

From a third party advertiser perspective, working with a company like Nokia would be far more preferable than working with the many Operators globally and not getting anywhere.

In fact, a while ago, one Operator told me that:
'The whole problem we have in the West is - Operators have no control over device manufacturers. In Japan, DoCoMo writes the (device manufacturer's) f*****g catalogue - and here in the UK - we are like 'Argos' - we just browse'

Note: Argos is a shopping catalogue service in the UK. What this comment means is - NTT DoCoMo in Japan tells device manufacturers exactly what to build - and thus controls the device totally. In the West, that does not happen. Their point being, if all the devices would only come in line (under control of the Operator) - all would be well (for the Operator of course!)

This does not affect 'On Portal' - but on portal initiatives are really not taking off for most people

Hence, I believe that

a) The Nokia ad service will revolutionise the Ad serving market for mobile devices

b) It would help many companies to actually reach global customers(all Nokia devices) and also target global customers(since much more about the customer is known in this scenario)

c) .mobi is also a beneficiary - this may legitimise the .mobi market

d) The impact on companies like admob and screentonic is probably negative because they cannot hope to achieve the reach and the targeting of customers as Nokia is doing. But on the flip side, they will get a lot of interest because of the impact on Mobile advertising

With both the Snake game and Ringtones, Nokia has created two industry segments. This may well be the third

I would be blogging about this a lot more. Watch this space!
Well done Nokia!

Some notes below from the Nokia site:
>>>>>>>>
Nokia Ad Service provides a worldwide reach to advertisers through its network. Nokia.mobi, one of the largest mobile portals with over 100 million monthly visits in 120 countries, has already joined the network.

Campaign messages can be customized to any mobile phone in many countries. Advertisers can optimize their spend by delivering specific ads to target groups.

Planning campaigns
Targeting: ads reach the right consumer based on categories and profiles through our ad platform.
Creative management: artwork is delivered in various formats - including text links and banner advertisements- to match consumers? mobile phone capabilities.
Campaign preferences: Nokia Ad Service builds a campaign for maximum flexibility. Advertisers can adapt their strategy based on performance whilst running campaigns. They can use service options such as frequency capping and time-based sequencing to deliver advertising messages effectively.
Run your campaign
Trafficking. You are able to closely monitor the traffic at any time during the campaign.
Reporting. The results of your campaign are available immediately, at any time, via a secured internet site.
Running campaigns
Real time reporting: advertisers can closely monitor the traffic at any time during the campaign through user-friendly traffic reporting formats and measurement visualizations.
Optimizing: Nokia Ad Service campaign managers continuously monitor campaigns to maximize the return on investment.
Learning from campaigns
Understanding: Nokia Ad Service helps advertisers learn more about consumers' response during their campaign with online monitoring and reporting tools.
Reporting: campaign results are available immediately via a secured internet site. Nokia Ad Service customers can personalize their reports by time, by publishers, by creative elements, etc. A simple, effective, and transparent service. The opportunity to reach a wider audience.

Our mobile ad server delivers sophisticated campaigns. Publishers can capitalize on the following:
Categorization in Nokia ad network to receive relevant ads
Flexible setup of any mobile publishing service
New source of ad revenue without deploying ad sales and operations
Full technical support to help with implementation
Detailed user profile while respecting users' privacy
Users' data is secure, protected and maintained in our ad platform

The implementation of the service is a 3-step-process:
Step 1: create the order form to outline different formats of advertising,
Step 2: receive ad tags from Nokia Ad Service and place them in the desired location throughout your mobile internet service,
Step 3: access full reports 24 hours a day. Metrics are available on a flexible set of cross relational rules.

Jumptap does personalised ads with Openwave

2007-02-28T12:07:00.000Z

New mobile ad play from Openwave and Jumptap

08:45, Feb 13th by Tim Green at 3GSM

Openwave and JumpTap have combined to offer media brands a new mobile advertising solution based on both context and profile.

The two companies claim this hasn’t been done before in mobile. They say the collaboration will allow advertisers to target individuals based on deep personalization significantly. The system uses Openwave’s ‘Profiling and Personalization System (OPPS)’, which creates a profile based on user behaviour across applications and networks. It combines this with JumpTap’s ad and search solution to build a platform that can deliver relevant and contextual advertisements to the end user.

“While mobile data traffic continues to grow rapidly, the increasing uptake of unlimited data plans among consumers poses new challenges in monetizing this growing data traffic. As mobile consumers increasingly travel off-net, operators are looking for ways to more effectively monetise this traffic,” said Nara Rajagopalan, vice president of product management at Openwave.

Adam Soroca, vice president and general manager of Search at JumpTap comments, “Our search engine generates a wealth of information about what mobile customers want. We are using this data to pick the best advertisement for a particular moment in time, and Openwave brings an unmatched level of mobile Internet inventory where we can place those ad spots.”

NOC (barely) rewrites Robert Andrews 3GSM report

2007-02-23T14:27:00.000Z

Different mobile advertising models on show during 3GSM. Sector is still being talked up

2007 has been hyped as being the year mobile advertising models take off, however, it was clear from announcements and discussions taking place in Barcelona last week that no consensus has emerged on how to serve up ads to mobile users without incurring their annoyance.

While everyone at 3GSM was at pains to show they understand how to respect the user experience by not intruding on users’ personal space, there is little consensus on the best way to achieve that. Instead, a plethora of ad services were on offer interpreting that key rule differently.

“At the end of the day, you can say ads are good,” said ex-Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietila, CEO of Blyk, a free and ad-supported mobile service launching in the UK this summer. “It is not anymore “[this is just an] ad; it is [now] something that is useful, extremely enjoyable or surprising. Therefore the [notion of] spam or intrusiveness can be pushed aside.” Zed CEO Vijay Sundaram said: “Simplicity sometimes is extremely appealing. We have been surprised how good SMS ads can create positive reaction.”

But Rhythm New Media CEO Ujjal Kohli, who claimed to have signed up half of the top 50 biggest-spending TV advertisers, suggested reproducing TV-like ads on mobile was the only sure-fire way lucrative enough to make the medium worthwhile. “Mobile operators collectively generate half a trillion on the planet - if the revenues are [just] 600m, it’s noise,” he said. “It has to be 20 or 30 billion for it to be relevant from their CFOs’ point of view. So we have to come up with advertising models that are scalable. Television is brilliant because it’s very simple and highly scalable. In that lies a massive opportunity for mobile.” Rhythm has therefore hired producers skilled in repurposing television content for the small screen, Kohli added.

One company, Aditon, is even delivering advertisements to handsets’ screensaver-like idle screens. Content acquisition manager Margaret Gold said however, that determining the value of a screen that consumers are usually not watching was a tough sell to ad buyers (Aditon ads flash up on phones whilst idle twice a day), required some empirical evidence on effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the carriers are not buying into analyst hype about mobile advertising. O2 is yet to begin a three-month trial of ad-supported services, ending May, while Orange is currently polling consumers for their opinions, representatives of each company told a 3GSM session on the topic. They will not forge ahead until they are certain on how not to upset subscribers.

Which really just leaves Yahoo, whose aggressive push into the mobile search marketing space shows the heavyweights with internet experience already bring track record and inventory to this emerging space.

NOC report on mobile advertising

2007-02-23T13:55:00.000Z

How can broadcasters make up for falling ad revenues by utilising more mobile digital services?

It’s been a tough year for broadcasters from an advertising perspective. Increased competition for advertising spend from online and direct marketing initiatives, the arrival of DVRs and PVRs etc has reduced the number of eyeballs watching commercial breaks. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers ITV’s 2006 half year advertising revenue slipped by eight per cent, with its share of commercial adult impacts — that’s viewers to you and me — falling to 32.7 per cent, while the advertising price remained the same. Less viewers for the same money: not good.

Channel Five, meanwhile, reported less than a one per cent decline in revenue, but its share of commercial adult impacts fell to 9.9 per cent. Channel 4 increased its share of impacts to 17.3 per cent — and saw revenues fall to such an alarming level that it might not be able to up its investment in programmes next year.

This raises a number of key questions for all of the players in the TV advertising industry: How long can the price premium last for TV broadcasters? How can they maintain reach in the new media landscape – alone or with partners? How do broadcasters and media buyers develop and use a common measurement framework across media? And how will regulators refine their reviews and investigations in light of there being a wider market in advertising?

2006 was a year when ‘digital’ moved in to the mainstream advertising industry. As the landscape shifted from the traditional ad-based TV business model towards something new, media and advertising agencies have restructured, re-branded and a host of new players exploded onto the market. Online has established itself as a key plank in any campaign but many believe that the real potential for brands to reach targeted consumers is via the mobile phone.

This belief is central to the strategy behind Mobile Interactive Group (MIG), a global multimedia mobile services provider that works with brands, broadcasters, operators and ad agencies. MIG has been working with ITV, Fremantle and Celador for the past two years on programmes such as X-Factor, I’m a Celebrity, The Brits and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. MD Barry Houlihan says he is creating technical and creative play to cope with changing advertising landscape. He believes broadcasters have to look across all available platforms to provide their clients with value for money in these changing times.

“Broadcasters have to create a value-added proposition for their clients today. One where consumers can interact with the brand in a number of ways that will feed
back into their CRM and marketing processes,” says Houlihan. “Brands are looking at ways to take consumers on a ‘digital journey’ which is initiated by on-screen interaction triggered by the mobile phone.”

According to Houlihan, around 40 million people in the UK voted by text message last year to a TV show. The X-Factor now holds the record for the biggest number of votes cast for one show – 20 million in total, or 10 percent of each UK mobile operators’ customer base.

“We managed the SMS voting platform for the second year running but we were also responsible for delivering the pin code facility that allowed users to download an exclusive MP3 track for the winning song by Leona Lewis. The single was downloaded in excess of 60,000 times on night of the final,” Houlihan says.

Statistics like these demonstrate how mobile interactivity can trigger access to a host of other services provided by media companies and brands. “The key is to start simple and take small baby steps,” says Houlihan. “Most consumers are low-tech savvy and they wouldn’t know what a WAP page looked like so you use text short codes which guide the user to a WAP entry point where the journey begins.”

Melissa Goodwin, head of mobile at ITV, says the broadcaster is serious about mobile but adds that any package of products offered to advertisers must be able to cross all available platforms.

“We are the brand that advertisers think of when they consider a programme like Coronation Street. Our mobile portal, online and red button facilities enable viewers to interact with the programme in a number of ways and obviously banner advertising and sponsorship play and important role in this,” says Goodwin.

But ITV has begun to look at other ways in which advertisers can gain additional bang for their bucks. In January it became the first broadcaster to launch a new interactive service initiative which will allow advertisers and retailers to send mobile coupons to its viewers which can then be redeemed at High Street outlets. The service and technology, created by mobile specialists Eagle Eye Solutions, offers brands and stores the ability to directly link their advertising spend to sales generated, via data provided by the coupon system.

The plan is to place mobile short codes in commercials that allow viewers to get a 'mobile coupon' that can be redeemed at retail outlets, says Eagle Eye Solutions MD Julian Reiter.

“Where a till or chip and pin machine is normally used to take credit or debit card payments, we have created a platform allowing the till operator to redirect the till from the banks to our database, enabling the till to redeem the coupon in real time,” he says.

Reiter claims that although the system is Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) manufacturer-dependent, Eagle Eye has partnered with leading EPOS providers and system integrators to link retailers’ systems with minimal hardware upgrade for almost 70 percent of the UK’s top High Street shops.

ITV’s Goodwin says the initiative will be great if retailers can be persuaded to adopt it.

“We want to be involved with this and give it a try because it’s a fantastic opportunity for advertisers to open a direct dialogue with customers and provide instant ROI data while retailers will get additional footfall in store. We need to trial it first though and make sure all the integration works.”

Over at BSkyB, Paul Wright, head of business development for Sky Media, says that advertisers are looking for opportunities to target consumers across all platforms, but he believes that mobile has the potential to appeal the most.

“We’ve always been very proactive in putting our content online but mobile is becoming a key part of the strategy for advertisers. A lot of the advertising out there at the moment is transaction-based like Text2Win campaigns. Going forward this has to change because companies like Ford who advertise with us do it for branding purposes rather than selling cars. We want to be able to use mobile as an access point for branding and buy-ins from agencies. The problem is that the variety of handsets to which adverts have to be rendered and the operators’ data charges remain a big challenge for the industry,” Wright says.

One initiative BSkyB has been trialling an advertising campaign based on the drama ‘24’. Fans of the programme can find codes embedded in online and offline advertising which they enter via the web enabling them to embark on a ‘24’-style ‘mission’. The website asks for viewers mobile numbers so they can be sent text messages and video outlining the terms of their mission. Naturally, these messages carry advertising for brands who want to be associated with the show.

According to Wright, 56,000 user registered their data prior to the show airing and a further 52,000 visits were made to the website destination after the first show went on air. “To date, however, 166,000 users in the UK have interacted with game – a great result for the team here.”

Advertising agencies have started to think in joined up terms, says Wright, but digital is often separate to the main agency which makes cross-platform campaigns difficult to make happen quickly. “I think the media owners themselves are further down the track than the agencies,” Wright says.

MIG’s Houlihan agrees with this point. He believes that media owners have a clearer understanding of how to utilise brand contextualisation. “It’s crucial that you position the call to action in a context that the consumer perceives value in for themselves. The promotion has to fly off the back of the programme the viewer is already engaged with, for example, inviting viewers of a celebrity cooking show to enter a competition to spend a day in Jamie Oliver’s kitchen.”

But where does the point of interaction start? Ofcom’s advertising rules forbid a direct call to action during the programme so, Houlihan argues, the call must be wrapped around the show and this is where advertisers can seize new opportunities. “You have to do a lot of creative work around the TV show product. Executing this is the challenge and this is why MIG is launching a digital agency to overcome both technical and legal challenges.”

Mark Brandon, COO of Siren TV, a company that develops and manages telephony services for broadcaster Five, says advertisers and sponsors are starting to realise how much value there is in from collecting CRM data via mobile interaction. “To make this market rock the brand benefit has to be evaluated from the mobile experience. We’re activating this market by convincing brands over time what is and what isn’t of value to them. Helping them navigate the complex interrelationships between traditional and new media channels will deliver revenues back to the broadcaster in the end.”

Will mobile newspapers introduce ads?

2007-02-19T15:45:00.001Z

Newspapers, Publishers Gear Up for Delivery To Mobile

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Mon 19 Feb 2007 04:49 AM PST

The Guardian reports that the Daily Mail, a leading U.K. tabloid, has tied up with Microsoft to launch a downloadable digital version of the newspaper, paving the way for the publisher to deliver the daily paper to mobile phones, palmtops and personal media players. The offer is closely modelled on the New York Times Reader, which was launched last September.

According to the newspaper’s new media arm Associated Northcliffe Digital, the stories are automatically resized to fit whatever size screen. The Mail eReader (as it will be called) also automatically increases or decreases the space given over to text, pictures and advertising. Alan Revell, Associated’s COO is quoted as saying: “We absolutely don’t see it as being cannibalistic; research shows that people use the two things in a complementary fashion. We want the eReader to slide in somewhere between the printed publication and the website.”

Meanwhile, The Jerusalem Post has teamed up with Odiogo, a provider of software for mobilizing content, to launch of a new podcast service: The offer lets users listen to The Jerusalem Post’s online edition information streams directly on their iPods, MP3 players and mobile devices. Users can choose among feed categories including: Front Page, Middle East News, Jewish World News, Editorials and Opinion. Press release

MocoNews covers the 3GSM mobads panel

2007-02-19T14:45:00.000Z

@ 3GSM: Ad Services On Parade For Boom Still Longed-For

Posted by Robert Andrews
Thu 15 Feb 2007 11:18 AM PST

The mood so far this year, that 2007 would be a banner year (literally?) for mobile advertising, carried through into Barcelona. I was optimistic that, gathered at the congress here, the industry would have noted consumers’ own view that straight-to-handset marketing is annoying and struck gold with a formula to justify some of the recent huge valuations for the emerging sector. But, whilst everyone here was at pains to show they understand how to respect the user experience by not intruding on users’ personal space, there is little consensus on the best way to achieve that. Instead, a plethora of ad services interpreting that key rule differently.

“At the end of the day, you can say ads are good,” said ex-Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietilä, CEO of Blyk, a free and ad-supported mobile service launching in the UK this summer. “It is not anymore “[this is just an] ad; it is [now] something that is useful, extremely enjoyable or surprising. Therefore the [notion of] spam or intrusiveness can be pushed aside.” Zed CEO Vijay Sundaram said: “Simplicity sometimes is extremely appealing. We have been surprised how good SMS ads can create positive reaction.”

One company, Aditon, is even delivering advertisements to handsets’ screensaver-like idle screens. When I asked content acquisition manager Margaret Gold whether the screen that consumers are usually not watching was a tough sell to ad buyers (Aditon ads flash up on phones whilst idle twice a day), she acknowledged some empirical evidence on effectiveness was required.

John Wilson's comments on the Aditon momo demo

2007-02-19T14:41:00.000Z

Mobile Monday London 14 Jan 2007

Tonight's theme was bubble 2.0 and is the mobile/tech space overheated?

Azeem Azhar of Reuters had little to say other than cite Library House findings that reckons startup & series A funding in Europe was £24m in 2005 & already 84m in UK in 2006. He did suggest in response to a question on non-execs that they should be forced to invest; not receive any salary and paid in options. Whilst I endorse the sentiment, entrepreneurs have to recognise that if they want talented individuals to assist, not all not execs will be attracted to these terms of trade!

Sam Sethi of Vecosys pointed out the mismatch between entrepreneurs who only need small amounts of capital and VCs who are only interested in big deals in order that they can invest the huge sums they've raised. Sam picked on a skills gap as being a real issue in the space presently.

Madhuban Kumar of Doughty Hanson Tech Ventures endorsed Sam's point about the funding requirement from tech companies often being below the VC radar on starting threshold.

Jan Kuczynski of Wireless World Forum had nothing to say & spent 5 mins saying so. Didn't manage to refer to the topic once which left most people confused.

The evening's Demos were by:

Aditon
An ad funded mobile content discovery service. Free to consumers who select categories to have content served up & it claims to be "self learning" in what each consumer likes. Data charges are borne by aditon, who deliver pre-canned content overnight to your phone. Content manufacturer can deliver their content free as well, at least initially. Advertiser pays for everything!

This service looked good and I liked the idea of using network quiet time to deliver content down to the mobile. I'm cautious about the service acting as a screen saver on your phone - when you're not using the phone, why would you be looking at it? Also this could quickly eat up your battery life.

Juniper research report on Mobile Sport & Leisure

2007-02-08T18:55:00.000Z

Mobile Sport & Leisure Essentials

Juniper Research

05 December 2006

This Whitepaper is an extract from: Mobile Sport, Leisure & Information Content Opportunities & Markets, 2006-2011 (3rd Edition)

Mobile leisure and information services, especially sports-related services are emerging as key elements in mobile entertainment market development. Mobile phones are now widely used to access various types of information such as news, financial, traffic and weather updates; sports services are proving popular content services, particularly those associated with soccer; wallpapers and graphics remain core mobile downloads for consumers; and community applications are also developing rapidly as delivery platforms move to the next generation.

Advancement of network technologies and the improving availability of content in various formats are stimulating the growth of mobile leisure and information services and on the horizon is an explosion in demand for Mobile TV services, which will give an added impetus to the take up of other mobile leisure services. Moreover, the inexorable advance in mobile subscriber penetration rates, particularly in developing markets is also contributing to the growth of the global sports, leisure and information content market. As a result, operators are focusing on providing users with a wide assortment of fun, leisure and information products ranging from wallpapers and news alerts to mobile soap clips, live commentaries, video replays, navigation and tracking services, in order to provide enhanced customer satisfaction and generate data revenues.

Big events such as the FIFA World Cup provide additional on/off boosts to the take up of mobile leisure services – in this case sports services. The challenge for operators and service providers is to retain those new customers and migrate them to regular sport and leisure content services. The evidence from the 2006 World Cup is that despite creating substantial increases in messaging traffic and attracting a significant number of new users to sports services, the jury is still out on how many of these new users will purchase other sports content services, or similar content services in the broader entertainment world, in the immediate future.

Find out more about the associated report, visit the report homepage

Hearst goes mobile - MoCoNews

2007-02-08T17:05:00.001Z

Hearst Magazines Revamps Mobile Sites For Lifestyle Titles, Embraces Ad-Funded Approach

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Wed 07 Feb 2007 12:16 PM

Ad Age reports on Hearst Magazines' renewed push into mobile, launching fr*ee, ad-supported mobile sites for its Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Cosmo Girl magazines. The sites will replace earlier (and much simpler) paid-subscription destinations. They will showcase content, including advice, downloads, blogs and teases to the print edition of the magazine, as well as interactive features like horoscopes, quizzes, beauty tips and ringtones. Cosmo Mobile, for example, will offer Lust Lessons and a Bedroom Blog. Hearst hopes to have mobile sites for all its brands -- including Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Esquire, Popular Mechanics and House Beautiful - by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Hearst and Verizon Wireless have joined to make Seventeen Mobile available to Verizon users via Mobile Web 2.0-capable handsets. (Mobile Web 2.0 is a service package available to Verizon users for US$5.00 per month, plus airtime, if purchased as a standalone service.) The Seventeen Mobile service gives users access information on health, fashion and beauty reports, horoscopes, daily tips and daily traumas -- a popular section in the Seventeen print magazine. The mobile site also suggests movies to see, books to read and things to do. Seventeen joins Hearst’s CosmoGIRL! as the leading teen information sites on Verizon Wireless’ Mobile Web 2.0 service, the company said in a statement. Press release

Why MVNOs are hard to launch.....

2007-02-08T15:46:00.000Z

MobileESPN To Relaunch As a Content App Exclusively With Verizon; Dumps Sprint; MediaFlo Channel Too

Posted by Rafat Ali
Wed 07 Feb 2007 10:10 PM

The day is was announced that former head honcho Manish Jha left to join Vantrix as CEO, comes the news, via AP, that MobileESPN is relaunching, not as an MVNO but as a content application, exclusively on Verizon Wireless in a multi-year deal. The deal has not been finalized, this story says, but would be announced tomorrow, the story says.

This means ESPN has dumped Sprint, its MVNO backbone/network provider, or more likely, it went the other way around.

The multiyear agreement giving VZW exclusive U.S. rights to offer the MobileESPN application on its V Cast phones....also, the companies will also announce the mobile TV channel launch on its soon-to-come MediaFlo service on Verizon.

I guess ESPN put so much money into building the custom apps for its MVNO service, so it makes sense to modify and port it onto another network...though I am surprised about the exclusive-deal part. It had a big chance of finally going D2C in a big way, but seems like it won’t, unless a variation will be offered to other network and handset users. Also, the MedaFLO service launch might have also influenced ESPN’s decision.

Details:
-- It is to be included fr*ee as part of the $15 a month or $3 a day charge for VCast’s assorted multimedia offerings
-- The Mobile ESPN application will be adapted to all phones compatible with VCast, starting with perhaps a couple of models at the outset.

Updated: Also, looks like Verizon already has the ESPN details up, here, unless this is an older promo. And some more details on MobileESPN’s old site, here.
For everything MobileESPN, read our dedicated category.

Manish Jha Leaves ESPN Mobile; Joins Vantrix As CEO

Posted by Rafat Ali
Wed 07 Feb 2007 09:56 PM

Manish Jha, the high-profile head of the MobileESPN MVNO forays from Disney, as well as later the SVP of ESPN Mobile (the publishing arm) after that, has left the company, and has joined Montreal-based mobile content applications firm Vantrix as the CEO. The company enables delivery of rich media content to mobiles, including messaging, advertising, and live video and audio streaming.

Jha was at ESPN since 1991, and has various roles in new media at the company. More in release. This is not the first high level defection from that team, besides the layoffs that must have happened: Vladimir Edelman, the VP and GM of Mobile ESPN Publishing Worldwide, joined last year as the CEO of Soapbox Mobile, a mobile marketing and content solutions firm.

P.S.: Will find out tomorrow who is heading ESPN’s mobile efforts now....see the story above about Mobile ESPN application in an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless. Interesting timing co-ordination on both announcements.

Roughly Drafted on Symbian, OS X and the iPhone

2007-02-05T16:09:00.000Z

Readers Write About Symbian, OS X and the iPhone

Responding to Origins: Why the iPhone is ARM, and isn't Symbian, sources from Sweden and Finland offer a revealing look inside Symbian development and how the OS is regarded at Nokia, and what that means for development on the iPhone.

One developer writes, “In most regards, Symbian's reputation as a modern, robust, stable and advanced OS for smartphones is not well deserved. Sure, Symbian works, it has a very long feature list, and it's probably even the best smartphone OS available today. But it's mostly because the competition is pathetic than anything else.

“I have a done several Symbian projects and have a thorough knowledge and low-level understanding of Symbian. And I just hate it. It's a very bad and uninspiring OS even from a programmers point of view.”

Sources close to Nokia say that Symbian is secretly regarded inside the company--even among high level senior executives--as a "peace-of-shit-OS," explaining that “Finnish people usually have a very coarse language.”

A Symbian developer explains, “Nokia is more or less stuck with Symbian since it doesn't have the competence nor the time to make a new OS from the ground up. Its only alternative, in practice, is to go Linux, which it is of course experimenting with, but it's still not an easy path to go.

“That's one of the reasons why Nokia is investing so much in the S60 middleware used on top of Symbian. S60 is so large and complex today, that I would regard S60 an OS itself, with Symbian as the kernel. It gives Nokia more control to add and change things on its own.

“Sony Ericsson, as one of the other large Symbian owners and licensee, just bought UIQ in November last year to get control of its own flavor of Symbian. UIQ is quite similar to Nokia's S60 and should also be regarded as its own OS with Symbian as the kernel.

“From one point of view, there are no ‘Symbian’ phones in the market, but rather three incompatible and diverging OSs: NTT DoCoMo's Symbian MOAP for Asia, Nokia’s Symbian S60, and Sony Ericsson’s Symbian UIQ.

“To make it even worse from a third party developer's point of view, Nokia and Symbian made the new S60 version 3 binary incompatible to previous versions of S60. So none of your old Symbian apps will work on any new phones (i.e. if you actually bought any :-).

“And of course UIQ has never been source code nor binary compatible with S60. But still you get the impression from analysts and media that ‘Symbian’ is one stable OS.

Symbian Signed

“For S60 version 3, they have introduced a new security model where it's necessary to sign all apps with VeriSign to even get them to run. Something that costs several hundreds of dollars per year, just for the certificates, and makes shareware and hobby programming almost impossible from now on.

“Some operators are requiring the phones to be locked for any apps not carrying a ‘Symbian Signed’ certificate. Which means, you have to pay for a certification process where you are checked by Symbian, why you developed the application and why you want to use certain capabilities on the phone, e.g. read and store user data, using the telephony APIs, or the WIFI capabilities etc.

“All in the name of security, but of course it will be very tough to make programs, independently, that use functionality that's not in the interest of the operators, such as non-operator controlled Voice over IP.

“So much for independently third-party software development on Symbian compared to the ‘closed’ model used on iPhone. In practice the difference is not that big. Apple will, of course, allow close partners to develop apps like they do with iPod Games today.

Symbian Design Issues

“When it comes to the myth of Symbian being a modern and robust OS, I have several objections. Symbian is severely limited by design decisions made in the beginning of '90. The design decisions were maybe okay at that point in time, when the target was Psion's EPOC and EPOC32-based Series 3 & 5 with extreme memory and resource constraints compared with today's devices.

“I could make a very long list of the problems but I'll just summarize a few key areas:

Crippled C++ support. Symbian is C++ based—at least on the surface. When EPOC32 was designed (about 1993-1994 I think), there were very few good C++ compiler with full support for the newest C++ features like exceptions. Exceptions is the main feature in C++ for correct and efficient error handling. The other alternative is to use error codes like most operating systems use in their C APIs.

Symbian chose to select neither technique. They made their own home-cooked version of exceptions called Leaves. With an exception in C++, any memory or other resources in allocated objects are deallocated automatically in the correct order (deterministic destruction by calling each object's destructor). This makes it (relatively) easy to make correct programs in C++ for both small and large projects.

In Symbian when a error is signaled with a leave (‘throw an exception’) no objects are deallocated. They just leak, if you don't manually record each object allocated to be cleaned up. This process is extremely tedious, error prone and boring. The result is that it's very hard and time consuming to make correct programs in Symbian, on the verge to be impossible in many cases.

C++ is a great language because of the advanced features, like exception handling with automatic cleanup (search for RAII, Resource Allocation Is Initialization), the standard C++ library (formerly called the STL library with lots and lots of support code for handling of data in containers-like lists and maps and tree structures, strings, algorithms, support for template code and last but not the least—all the standard patterns, practices and idioms all experienced C++ programmer are using on all design problems they are faced with.

If you remove the foundation for standard C++ development, it all falls together. Every design decision means the programmer has to think from the ground up to make a completely new architecture for the design because the normal way of thinking and the normal guarantees C++ and experience gives, doesn't apply anymore. It really turns an experienced programmer into almost a beginner with lousy tools. It's a nightmare for both programmer and development managers.
•Confusing and limited string handling. There is no real support for a proper string handling. To use strings on Symbian you have to use a home-cooked and strange system of ‘descriptors.’ Every new programmer to Symbian spends the first weeks struggling just to understand how (and why) this system works.

The reason was apparently to save a few bytes on each string. But of course, today, that's not even close to being relevant. Maybe a small point but, it's yet another point that makes Symbian hard to use, hard to understand and hard to port programs to/from other platforms.
•Limited support for multi-threading. An important technique used on all other platforms but is not used on Symbian. They do have limited support for threads, but it's strongly recommended not to use threads since it ‘takes to much resources.’ That was hardly even a relevant argument in 1993 but it meant that Symbian uses ‘active objects’ instead of threads in almost all applications.

Active objects are just a very complicated variant of cooperative multitasking, where each object runs in sequence (unnaturally split into small subtasks) and are not able to preempt each other. It takes a lot of code to make this work, just to give the result of a system that is not very responsive, hard to program and port to/from other platforms. All for the aim of saving some CPU cycles in 1993.
•Bad development environment. The development environment and SDK for Symbian (S60) is very strange and difficult to use. It can take several days to just make a functional installation of the SDK and development environment. My first installation a few years ago took over a week to setup and was very fragile. On the Nokia forums there are postings with recommendations on how to make a correct setup. If you do just one step in the wrong order it fucks up. You cannot use the latest version of Visual Studio but need to install Visual Studio 2003 to make it work. But everyone that does Windows programming have VS 2005 installed. Nokia also provides several commercial alternatives, ‘Carbide,’ that is based on Eclipse etc. But it is generally a very bad situation if you compare with Xcode/iPhone or other platforms.

Analysts Wrong on Symbian

“I realize the arguments above are quite technical, but they are nonetheless real and makes it very slow, error prone, and generally difficult to make applications on Symbian.

“This is just one of the reasons I believe the analysts and media are very wrong about the outlook for iPhone. Most media in Sweden (and elsewhere) have reported that the iPhone is nothing new at all. It's mainly a nice package with limited/bad hardware and nothing particularly new on the software side.

“However, if you look at the speed and effort needed to make new applications on iPhone compared with other platforms it's two completely different worlds. You have all the Cocoa frameworks that make it possible to create applications on a level not even available for most desktops today.”

“Most people don't realize the huge difference in development speed (time to market), ability to make more advanced and useful applications with a greater user experience (read: Core Animation and other Leopard frameworks), code quality and maintenance ability—when you have full support for modern high-level languages and frameworks.

Existing Mobile Platforms vs OS X

“Of course, this is the same for most embedded programming projects: set-top boxes, mobile phones, stereo equipment, industrial equipment. But with phones, you are beginning to think about them as a small desktop computer and everyone tries to put in real applications in them.

“With Symbian (as well as WinCE, Palm OS, and I suppose also the Linux phones because they probably have a very limited number of Linux frameworks installed because of memory restrictions etc) you have a big problem to deliver on the marketing hype and media expectations because of all limitations. This is one of the reasons all mobile services are failing to badly—it's simply to hard and complicated to deliver the market expectations with today's platforms.

Five Years Ahead

“OS X and iPhone don't have these limitations. It's one of the reasons I believe Steve Jobs is more or less right in iPhone being 5 years ahead of the competition--of course there is slight marketing hype as well, but not that much an exaggeration as the media and analysts think. Making high quality, advanced applications with a superior user experience will be fast and easy with OS X. On other platforms it's like competing with a small Fiat car in a Formula 1 race against Ferrari and Williams.

“OS X is probably only programmable in Objective C instead of C++, because of the Cocoa frameworks being used. But Objective-C is famous for being easy to program and you can freely mix Objective C and C++ in the same program. In Leopard Apple also introduces Objective-C 2.0 with garbage collection and lots of new stuff that makes it even better than C++ in some respects. And the Cocoa frameworks are world-class on desktop computer—they were even famous in the NeXTSTEP versions.

“So when you put all this together, Apple has sharp weapons and shining armor to compete with lesser equipped competitors for future smartphone apps and wireless services. Most analysts and media don't have enough technical competence and knowledge to realize this.”

E-Plus's Cartoon Channel - MoCoNews

2007-02-02T17:02:00.000Z

Germany’s E-Plus Beefs Up Portal Content With Cartoon Channel

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Thu 01 Feb 2007 06:52 AM

German mobile operator E-Plus has added a new cartoon content channel to its WAP portal. CARTOON CITY will feature clips and episodes of shows, including Happy Tree Friends, Peanuts, Mr. Bean, Joe Cartoon and Cat Bastard, as well as Suicidal Squirrels, a series owned and created by Mobile Streams, a content producer and service provider. E-Plus tied up with Mobile Streams to manage the channel and editorial, as well as supplement the mobile TV offer with related content, including games, wallpapers and animated screensavers.

NMK's report on Beers and Innovation 7

2007-01-31T18:42:00.000Z

AN NMK TOPIC > Project Management

by: NMK posted: 2007/01/31

So do agencies innovate? The seventh in our Beers and Innovations series addressed an issue that's always been at the heart of the purpose of the series. Ian Delaney attempts to decipher his notes from the session.

Many thanks to our chair and panel: Frank Boyd moderated; the panellists were Nicholas Roope from Poke, Desiree Collier from Marsteller and Jamie Riddell of Cheeze. More information on our speakers is here. All were provocative and insightful. These events are not just about going to a presentation, though, and discussion points raised by every participant helped to extend and deepen the debate. Thanks, equally, to all of them. (But, no, you don't get a link ;-) )

The Problem

Agencies are expected to be innovative. But there are significant issues. Nik Roope started with a useful attempt to pin down exactly what we mean by 'innovation'. Perhaps it's more useful to start with what we don't mean: it doesn't mean being creative or doing something different. For Nik, it meant making things better. He felt the term was continually mis-used: "many creative agencies just pump out banners". What's really needed are new products and properties borne from new ideas that move things forwards.

Are UK agencies in a position to deliver this? No, said Roope, drawing attention to reports of problems at agencies Nucleus and Atomic over cash flow. Cash flow is a significant issue for many agencies. They need to get their jobs signed off and the money in the bank. This can make them risk-averse, which is obviously likely to stifle innovation.

Later discussions echoed this sentiment and expanded on it. Eachan Fletcher talked about the 'diminishing returns' of innovation - once an idea is out there it loses value rapidly. Rather controversially, he suggested that the pinnacle of innovation is to 'create a new problem'. Rufus Leonard said that 'all too often there is not a catalyst to innovate' in terms of a client's interest in something new.

Solutions I

There's a glimmer of hope, though, in the recent incidence of stakeholder relationships for agencies in viral campaigns. A viral that's generated from a clever idea might not take very long to make, but should ideas be charged by the hour? What about if agencies were remunerated as a proportion of the success of the campaign?

The difficulty has been in getting clients to agree to such a model. "The marketing departments are not biting," as one participant put it. One difficulty is that innovative models often require the buy-in of multiple departments at the client, which slows work down and often stops it altogether. However, one participant reported a recent deal along these lines at Orange. Lucy Ann Burke from BP said that one of the issues faced by her organisation was agencies not working together, that technical agencies and creative agencies sometimes appeared to have entirely different agendas despite notionally working to the same brief.

Roope said that perhaps another route would be to adopt the approach taken by Japanese car makers like Toyota, where everyone in the company has the power to stop the production cycle and is strongly encouraged and motivated to contribute improvements.

Solutions II

Jamie Riddell suggested that there were two types of innovation to think about - externalinternal. External innovation might result in a funky new widget for a client. However, internal innovation - changing the ways in which you actually work - might be needed in order for that to happen. If you can develop processes that save time and improve productivity, then that has a clear benefit. and

It also feeds into the chances of being innovative. If you haven't got time to do anything but crank out products, then your chances of doing anything fresh are pretty limited.

So the challenge is to allocate time and resources. Agencies are never given a blank cheque by clients to spend on researching and inventing. They therefore have innovate ahead of time.

Taking the example of Second Life, just flying about a bit in the virtual world isn't really going to sell the idea to a client. However, if you've actually invested time, maybe customised your avatar, mastered the contruction tools and built an office in the world, then when and if a client shows an inkling of interest then you've got a means to demonstrate the potential value of a presence in the world. Riddell stressed that this was pretty risky - with only two and a half million users, nobody really knows whether Second Life is going to be big. However, having done the research, it becomes another card in his hand to potentially play at the right time.

Discussion revealed some scepticism about Second Life. Some participants pointed out that it had all been done before in earlier, long-forgotten virtual worlds. Others stated that a virtual presence in Second Life could hardly be counted as innovative, since it's been done many times already: "it's hanging on the coat-tails of what's cool". In an excellent counter-point, one participant said, "Yes, but it really depends on how you establish that presence." Innovation, it seems, isn't just about the form, it's the delivery too.

Riddell said that innovation was the product life-cycle of agencies. He pointed out that there's a considerable amount of innovation going on in search engine marketing. Because that industry doesn't seem sexy to people in creative agencies, it doesn't get talked about, but nonetheless, it's pushing the market forward.

It takes considerable courage to be doing innovative things because you don't know whether they are useful or not until a long time after the investment has been made. The agencies are often 6-8 months ahead of clients, in terms of understanding what's cutting edge. Some clients now, for example, are asking for MySpace accounts, when that might seem passe to anyone working in the digital industry. Even worse, with larger clients, it might take a further 6-8 months to get sign off, meaning that your innovations better be pretty startling because the chances are that they'll be well behind the curve.

Riddell finished by saying that perhaps the way to lead clients into welcoming innovation is to think more carefully about what they need, as opposed to simply answering the question. Finding solutions to their needs can sell in innovation.

Solutions III

Desiree Collier made the point that her company Marsteller - an international PR agency - is very well-placed to rise on the innovation wave. For all kinds of companies, in all kinds of contexts, conversations are becoming key. So, in many respects, PR matters are at the forefront of companies' marketing concerns. Marsteller is in a position to be involved at different levels of the larger businesses it looks after. This can allow it to take a holistic view of the client's overall aims and try to ensure that their communications on these different levels are consistent.

Public Relations companies are now hiring digital experts to work alongside traditional PRs and extend the possibilities of their offerings. One enormous advantage that they have over many of the creative, digital agencies is that they are hired on a retainer basis. It's very rare for them to be asked to produce one or two objects. This advantage helps to suggest one answer some to some of the earlier concerns about creativity - finding the time and keeping the cash flowing.

The PR company's role is no longer just about getting column inches. And some of what they're doing is helping to create the conditions in which their clients are able to embrace innovation. One secret to innovation that came out of an earlier discussion was the necessity of getting as close as possible to clients' customers, something that agencies find hard to find the time and money to be able to do. Collier said that a lot of time at Marsteller was spent monitoring every aspect of their clients' communications and communications about them. This can lead them into a position where they're able to advocate models of best practice and can lead them into very deep involvement into the release cycle and positioning of a client's products and services.

This apparent luxury and involvement comes at a price, of course. Consultants are expected to be experts in any new communications ideas and techniques. They need to spend time and money researching the future of communications on an ongoing basis in order to have the answers within reach at all times.

Collier finished by pointing out the need for bravery in order to foster innovation. Agencies should not be afraid to question their brief if they believe their clients' needs actually demand a different solution.

Solutions IV

Frank Boyd recounted the story of the invention of the mouse. Stanford Research Institute came up with a prototype after considerable technical struggle. The only trouble was, once they'd produced this contraption, no-one had any idea what to do with it. They ended up licensing the design to Apple and Xerox at $50K apiece. The researcher in question apparently still wakes up thinking 'what if I had a dime for every mouse made since?' His point was that new ideas are one thing, but creating value is something very different.

One issue facing potential innovators is the nature of the pitch process. To win a pitch, agencies have to have done a substantial amount of the work before they are even in with a chance of earning anything. Naturally, innovative pitches tend to involve more time and money, and so are even more of a risk. Participants also pointed out that even if their innovative pitch is the best idea, it's not unknown for their prospective clients to take that idea and work with it using another, presumably cheaper, agency.

He described some of the work of the BBC Innovation Labs, part of which involves paid pitches. This is a practice that few of those working within the industry had encountered. The BBC, however, adapts the model it uses for commissioning programmes, whereby the programme makers retain intellectual property rights over the programme, and the broadcaster obtains the right to broadcast it a few times. The model allows Innovation Labs to adopt a very extensive in-depth pitch process, with four distinct stages. However, because companies are paid for their pitches and obtain intellectual property rights, it encourages innovation. Boyd was keen to establish that there are processes and a methodology to innovation, rather than it being the product of a mystical muse.

Learnings

The discussion continued late into the night, of course, and a lot of the arguments won't be settled any time soon. However, for the sake of neatness, I'd sum up some ideas that seemed to attract a lot of support from participants thus:

a) Agencies certainly want to be innovative. However, structurally, meaning both the structure of the marketplace and their own internal structures, they find it hard to be so.

b) Agencies can become stronger and more able to innovate by working with each other. Or forming loose associations with agencies that complement their own skill set to deliver 'full service'. They can become more like large organisations in this way.

c) Focusing on the client's wider aims and needs can help foster innovation to a greater extent than thinking about what they're asking for today. Your need to put money in the bank might work against this, though.

d) For agencies, both the pitch process and the way in which work is paid for discourage innovative solutions. Clients looking for such a thing might consider alternative approaches such as revenue sharing, IP agreements and paid pitches.

If you have blogged about the session, do let me know, and I'll link here:

Innovative Agency Theory or how to get a head in Advertising

Recipe for Innovation

Book for Beers and Innovation 8: The Attention Seekers here.

BBC coverage of Mobile Data report

2007-01-31T13:02:00.000Z

Mobile internet use 'increasing'

More phones than ever have access to simple data services

Mobile phone users in the UK accessed the internet via their handsets about 15.9 million times throughout December 2006, says the Mobile Data Association.

The association's report shows an increase of one million unique sessions over November 2006, the prior record.

However, much of the recent increase could be due to seasonal gift-giving said Thomas Husson, a mobile analyst at Jupiter Research.

In the past three months, mobile users accessed the web 45.6 million times.

Unique consumer internet sessions on the O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone networks were included in the report.

Despite the new numbers, Mr Husson said mobile data was "far from being mainstream".

More usage in 2007

He added that an increase in data use should be expected over the next year due to a larger installed base of internet-capable mobile phones, better user experiences, user education, and new consumer-friendly price points.

The question for mobile network owners is: can they convert web browsers into purchasers of other services

Nick Lane
Principal Analyst, Informa Telecoms and Media

Nick Lane, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms and Media, reiterated the importance of user education.

"The continued advancement of handsets means people are beginning to spend more time familiarising themselves with new services," most common of which are news, sport and weather updates Mr Lane said.

He said that by the end of 2007, 797.6 million mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, or roughly 25%, will include web browsing.

Location based services

Both analysts said that location-based mobile services should be a growth area for mobile data in the coming year.

In a recent survey conducted by Informa, consumers repeatedly ranked location-aware services like maps as a highly desirable handset feature.

"All the major players are starting to build services around navigation and maps, but they're still new," and aren't quite ready yet Mr Husson said.

"It's only a question of time" before location services will be added to the increasing amount of digital information available on handsets, he added.

Aditon's first live demo at Mobile Monday London

2007-01-30T13:20:00.000Z

MoMo London: "Bubble 2.0?"

This week's Mobile Monday, the first of 2007, featured a great panel discussion on the current innovation and funding boom, especially as it relates to mobile startups. Are we in a bubble and if so, is it all about to go horribly wrong...again? Well, the consensus of the panel seemed to be that there are some very real differences this time around. Watch out for the podcast, coming soon, for the whole story.

Roughly 200 mobile industry executives came to hear our expert panel of prognosticators pontificate on this portentious issue.

We also heard from some great startups working on mobile innovations:Aditon, OOKL, Quickal and Reporo. Many thanks to our panelists and to our great demoers!

Finally, we have opened up the voting for Mobile Monday London's entrant into the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards happening on the 12th of Feb in Barcelona (co-located with the lesser-known 3GSM event).

The vote is to be performed through SMS, one vote each and is sponsored by Telecom Express . Send in one of the following messages to 88088

MOMO JUVINO
MOMO OTODIO
MOMO 3GDOCTOR
MOMO WIDERWEB
MOMO PINPPL
MOMO OOKL
MOMO ACTIVEMEDIA
MOMO RAPIDMOBILE
MOMO MARMOT
MOMO PITCHTV
MOMO REPORO
MOMO ADITON
MOMO QUICKAL

This service is free but you will be charged your normal network rates to send the message.

posted by Dan Appelquist # 16:12

Aditon's first blog coverage

2007-01-30T13:17:00.000Z

courtesy of We Are All Going to Die:

Mobile Monday London Post-Mortem

I just got back from the Mobile Monday London event.

Some of the speakers were fairly interesting, although a bit too much stammering and faffing went on. A bit more get up and go could be useful.

There were a couple things I found interesting. They were talking about a Bubble 2.0.

I’m not really sure what that means, and I think that perhaps they should have agreed on what a “Bubble” is before they went into whether or not it was one.

Are some people going to make bad investments? Of course. Doesn’t that mean there is a Bubble, no… there are a lot of fools. Some of which maybe didn’t learn anything from the last tech “bubble”, or “correction” or whatever you want to call it.

Are companies like CMGI popping up? No, that makes me think there is no Bubble. That was a horrible idea.

But what about YouTube and MySpace? They don’t exactly have sane and rational valuations…
But I really think they are one-offs. There is too much VC money sitting on the sidelines to be hollering about a Bubble. The fact that it is a topic of discussion shows that there are a lot of shitty ideas.
Most of the companies that demo-ed were… not surprisingly, crap.

I liked AdItOn and I thought Reporo had some good ideas, if they were a bit narrow in focus.

The rest of them sucked.

MoCoNews interview of Lucy Hood, Fox Mobile

2007-01-30T13:02:00.000Z

Interview: Lucy Hood, President, Fox Mobile; Stratton Sclavos, CEO, VeriSign

The announcement of a News Corp.-VeriSign Jamba joint venture left a lot of questions unanswered. We can fill in some of the blanks now thanks to a joint interview with Stratton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign and Lucy Hood, president of Fox Mobile Entertainment. Hood will become CEO of Jamba when the deal closes; Sclavos was in her office on Maple Drive this afternoon.

Why a joint venture? Hood: What we’re all very excited about is designing the world’s first vertically integrated mobile entertainment company. You’ve got content and marketing and product integration in terms of advertising and so on from News Corp. VeriSign stands for technological excellence and Jamba is a great example of that, a platform that delivers content to 30 countries in languages that reach a billion people. Sclavos: We also believe this is the start of what’s going to be a great collaboration, many more new products and many more new opportunities are going to be in the future and we both have a lot to bring as a partner. We’ve worked long and hard on this and we’ve known each other for some time. ...
Would you have been able to sell Jamba as a whole? Sclavos: Certainly. We had several other offers to do that; we were not interested. We really wanted to develop the integrated approach to the market and have what we believe was the strongest partner in the space given the assets that News Corp. is launching right now.
You had a vision for the company when you acquired it (in 2004) and things didn’t quite pan out… what will make this better for Jamba than the past couple of years have been? Sclavos: I think as Peter Chernin has said, News Corp. has a relentless focus on the consumer and they have great content creation, they have great ability to build brands and capture customer loyalty. Those were not strengths of the VeriSign corporation. We bring ... the technology and the infrastructure and the ability to have the global footprint to deliver all these new and interesting ways and all these new handsets. If you put it together, it’s a pretty interesting combination.
You still see a lot of potential and a lot of growth in the market? Sclavos: I think what people have to remember is we’re only a couple of years into this and our expectation is most of the opportunity is ahead of us and probably for the next decade or so. Think of what’s going to happen on the network ... with devices, and how entertainment on these devices is really going to be probably the main driver of what people use their mobile devices for. We think this is a pretty exciting time to have a front seat.

How was the value arrived at? Sclavos: There were many tangibles and intangibles ... including News Corp.’s ability to bring additional value to the relationship through their content like The Simpsons and their other properties like MySpace ... Certainly the financial piece had both some amount of traditional external metrics as well as what we believe were the intangible assets.
How is this going to set up? What brands survive? Does Fox Mobile disappear? Hood: The new company will combine Jamba, Fox Mobile Entertainment and Mobizzo. Obviously, what we would do is migrate all the Mobizzo content to the Jamba and Jamster portals. That’s how we’ll approach the branding. We’re working on developing areas like MySpace. We actually have Simpson’s content ready to go so that will be a very exciting launch, which you’ll see on a global basis.

A lot of people don’t understand the relationship between Fox Mobile Entertainment and FIM. Can you explain a little bit? Hood: Fox has three digital verticals: Fox Interactive Media headed by Ross Levinsohn; Pay TV/VOD headed by Pete Levinsohn and then I oversee Fox Mobile Entertainment. First of all, we’ve collaborated for years and we have more meetings together than we do apart because clearly you’re seeing a lot of convergence in this world. At the same time, my group has a laser focus on the mobile market and the way we describe that is reaching subscribers through carriers around the world. Since there are two billion of them, we think it’s a pretty sizeable market. ... You’ll see specific collaborations, like the fact that Jamba will be MySpace’s m-commerce partner. Exclusively. ... Any kind of content you want to get via your MySpace page on your mobile phone—and there’s quite a lot of it—will be sold through our platform.
Stratton, was that one of the appeals to you? The ability to tap right away into this large marketplace that Fox Interactive has developed? Sclavos: Of course it was. ... First of all, it’s the pre-eminent community-based site and for the demographic that is going to be the mainstream demographic for mobile entertainment, they are today on MySpace ... They are doing new things every day, they’re including things like user-generated content ... I think that their expertise here and the community that they’re continuing to build, especially now that they’ve started to roll it our internationally, it’s really one of the most significant things we are hoping to learn from them.

You mentioned keeping Jamster and Jamba? How do you have those two co-exist? Will it be Jamster for the U.S., Jamba everywhere else? Hood: Jamba is one of the most recognized brand names in Europe. In countries like Germany and The Netherlands, it’s got 99 percent brand awareness so that’s very powerful. We also happen to really like the name Jamster, which is the English-language brand for Jamba. We’re strategizing and planning how these will roll out in the future. You’ve got two very strong brand names and that’s a great asset to bring to a partnership.

You were very excited about Mobizzo and the prospects for that? What happened? Hood: What happened is m-commerce is still in its early stages. We created a lot of good content for Mobizzo; Family Guy sold extraordinarily well. Our original product line did extremely well as well. But we really wanted to roll out faster on a global basis and, let’s face it, we were in one territory and Jamba is in 30. We wanted to be across multiple continents now.
If you hadn’t done this acquisition, would you have been in the position of deciding whether or not Mobizzo continues to exist? Hood: No. ... The company’s very committed to building a direct-to-consumer business in the mobile sector ... We’ve just accelerated our activities with this partnership with VeriSign.

More acquisitions coming from the JV or are you going to work with what you have for now?Sclavos: I think we should close the venture first. I think we both believe it’s a huge opportunity and the partnership gives us a platform to do great things.

Off portal ads growing - MoCoNews

2007-01-30T12:15:00.000Z

Off-Portal Advertising Flourishes, One Billion Ads Served in Six Months

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Mon 29 Jan 2007 08:33 AM

AdMob Inc., the mobile advertising marketplace for content owners and advertisers, has served a whopping one billion mobile web advertisements in the past six months. The total is news €“ but so it the spectacular growth in off-portal activity the company has seen in its first year of operation.
Admob has also collected so surprising data to match. Across the AdMob network the top five countries in terms of traffic are:

1. US - 20% (90 million page views/month)
2. South Africa - 15% (66 million page views/month)
3. India - 13% (57 million page views/month)
4. UK - 12% (53 million page views/month)
5. Romania - 5% (22 million page views/month)

Admob figures also reveal the most sought-after content. Publishers of community content generate the lion's share of traffic (45 percent). This category is followed by Downloads (44 percent), Portals (8 percent), Entertainment (2 percent) and News & Information (1 percent). Press release

IMG buys Nunet - MoCoNews

2007-01-30T12:14:00.000Z

Sports Firm IMG Buys Germany-Based Mobile TV Firm Nunet

Posted by Rafat Ali
Mon 29 Jan 2007 11:18 AM

IMG, the sports and other media management giant, has bought out Germany-based mobile Tv technology and content applications firm Nunet. The company says Nunet streams more than 200 channels for over 20 mobile network operators in Europe, Africa and the Americas, and clients include Vodafone Germany, Vodafone Global, A1 Mobilkom in Austria, Swisscom in Switzerland and Vodacom in South Africa.

Nunet will continue to operate its content aggregation and distribution services under its own brand, and be run as an independent business within the IMG Media Group. Nunet is based in Cologne, Germany and today employs 50 people. IMG plans to move its Cologne office into the NuNet facility, expanding the total presence of IMG Media in the German market to over 100 people.

Some more details in the release here.

2007-01-30T10:33:00.000Z

New Marketing Partners Help Make Sugar Mama from Virgin Mobile USA Even Sweeter

Deals with Jive Records, Levi Strauss Signature(R), Sony Pictures, U.S. Navy Expand Innovative Advertising Incentive Program

WARREN, N.J., Jan. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading U.S. youth wireless network Virgin Mobile USA is kicking off 2007 by offering customers new opportunities for earning wireless "airtime in their spare time" through its innovative Sugar Mama marketing program.

The company announced that several top brands, including Jive Records[Sony/BMG Entertainment], Levi Strauss Signature(R), Sony Pictures[Columbia/Tri-Star] and the U.S. Navy are sweetening the Sugar Mama deal for Virgin Mobile customers. The addition of these well-known national brands -- joining charter sponsors Xbox (Microsoft) and truth(R), the American Legacy Foundation(R)'s national youth smoking prevention campaign-- allows Virgin Mobile to bring even more options and benefits to its young customer base through advertising content specifically tailored for them.

Launched last summer, Sugar Mama is an innovative mobile advertising incentive program where customers opt-in to receive mobile and Web-based advertising content and are rewarded with free airtime for their Virgin Mobile phones. In order to receive airtime credit, customers simply interact with advertising or other marketing creative, then click through or text back responses to questions from partner brands. This interaction gives advertisers valuable feedback from a core target audience directly engaged with the product, while earning the customer one free minute of airtime for each spot viewed online.

"Virgin Mobile broke new ground with Sugar Mama, in terms of offering brand new way for marketers to engage with our customers," said Howard Handler, chief marketing officer, Virgin Mobile USA. "The response to date has been tremendous so we're excited to bring this new slate of forward-thinking brands into the Sugar Mama family." Since its launch, Sugar Mama has hosted more than 250,000 customers, with approximately 1,000 new users opting in each day. Virgin Mobile customers have earned over three million free minutes of airtime from Sugar Mama viewing.

In keeping with the Virgin Mobile philosophy, Sugar Mama sponsors are carefully chosen from like-minded products and services most valuable and appealing to Virgin Mobile's youth-focused network of more than 4.6 million customers. Each sponsor is able to offer content it feels will best suit both its needs and the Sugar Mama platform and audience. For Sony Pictures, that means movie trailers; for Jive Records, customers see portions of music videos. The U.S. Navy features spots similar to its TV placements.

Virgin Mobile recently enhanced the Sugar Mama platform with additional multi-media functionality including viral elements.

"What really attracted us to the Sugar Mama program is that it is truly a pull vs. a push tactic," explained Stacy Doren, director, media and online, Levi Strauss Signature(R). "The audience is electing to receive the message and interact with the Levi Strauss Signature(R) brand in order to receive the bonus air time. It provides a new and innovative way to reach our consumers and provides us with the assurance that our message is being heard.

"Virgin Mobile's main demographic tends to overlap with a core movie- going audience for many of our theatrical releases. The Sugar Mama program allows us to target those consumers in a unique way, have them interact with our branded movie content for our upcoming movie, The Messengers, and get rewarded with a relevant form of currency airtime," said Dwight Caines, executive vice president, Worldwide Digital Marketing Strategy for Columbia TriStar Marketing Group.

"The United States Navy is always seeking innovative ways to engage with our target audience, for whom technology is second nature," said Commander David Hostetler, director of advertising plans for the United States Navy. "Partnering with Virgin Mobile provides us with a unique and effective way to open a two-way dialog with potential recruits."

Virgin Mobile customers can choose to participate in Sugar Mama by opting in at http://www.virginmobileusa.com. Customers are required to be over the age of 13 and to provide limited demographic information. To earn airtime, they have the option of watching a streaming video advertisement or receiving SMS messages that contain advertisements, quizzes or discounts.

Virgin Mobile's Sugar Mama is powered by Ultramercial LLC, which provides the back-end functionality allowing viewers to watch and interact with a full- screen commercial and receive airtime that the customer would otherwise have to pay for by credit card or other form of airtime Top-Up.

About Virgin Mobile USA, LLC:

The nation's leading wireless youth network, Virgin Mobile USA

http://www.virginmobileusa.com provides more than 4.6 million customers with the most flexibility and choice in wireless products and services without long-term contracts. The company operates on the Sprint Nationwide PCS network, and is a joint venture between Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Sprint Nextel. J.D. Power and Associates has ranked Virgin Mobile highest in customer satisfaction among wireless prepaid services, and its own customers report a 91% satisfaction rate. Proud of its charitable and environmental programs, Virgin Mobile donates 5% of profits from downloadable content to The RE*Generation, its pro-social initiative to help millions of at-risk and homeless teens; and provides postage-paid return envelopes in every new package for customers to recycle old phones.

NMA on poor Ad engine support

2007-01-29T16:25:00.000Z

Digital agencies slam portals' inventory for limiting creativity

Article Type: News | Author: By Andrew McCormick | Source: NMA magazine | Published: 25.01.07

UK digital ad agencies have hit out at market-leading portals MSN and Yahoo! for failing to offer ad inventory that meets the needs of their clients. Speaking at music industry event Midemnet on Saturday, Tara Moss (pictured), head of communications strategy at Aegis media agency Isobar, said, "With a lot of attention from consumers shifting online, I'm very disappointed in online publishers like Yahoo! and MSN that have kept the internet as a 2D medium. In terms of motion and vision,...

Mobile Advertising for Operators - Analysys

2007-01-26T13:51:00.000Z

How can operators gain from mobile advertising?

By Andrew Kloeden, Analysys Consulting

25 January 2007

The latest column from Analysys explains why customer information is the key to unlocking revenue potential in mobile advertising.

Mobile operators worldwide are currently experiencing stagnating voice ARPUs as data services fail to generate significant new revenues. Mobile advertising, if correctly executed, may represent an opportunity for operators to create ARPU benefits from data services.

Although mobile advertising is still in its infancy, several business models are emerging (see Exhibit 1). The most established is SMS "push" advertising, which tends to be poorly targeted and largely bypasses the mobile operators. Prices for bulk SMS are very low and this business model does not represent a large revenue opportunity for mobile operators.

Exhibit 1: Mobile advertising business models

Exploiting Web-based content and multimedia
There are two developing areas of mobile content that are opening up opportunities for advertisers: Web-based content and multimedia services.

Advertising-funded Internet players such as Google and Yahoo! see mobile subscribers as the source of future growth. Yahoo! Go for mobile (which enables access to Yahoo! services and personalised Internet content) has been available on all Windows Mobile-enabled handsets since August 2006, and was available on Symbian handsets from the start of that year.

Similarly, Google has recently allowed developers to exploit the mobile version of Google Maps in order to promote new business models that will drive mobile advertising. The threat of these models for mobile operators is that the value-added services that generate premium revenues remain under the control of content generators, and mobile networks are reduced to simple data carriage.

The development of new multimedia services, such as mobile TV and games, has also given rise to several other new business models for mobile advertising. For example, in Germany, O2 has launched a youth-oriented mobile TV series in conjunction with Burda, a print media group, using product placement revenues from McDonald's.

In South Korea, a group of major broadcasters have rolled out a T-DMB network to offer mobile TV. This service is free of charge to customers who have T-DMB-compatible mobile handsets, and is funded wholly by advertising.

Advertising-funded downloads of games and other small packages of content are another potential market. Several big brands including Coca-Cola, Saab and Societe Generale have signed up to Orange France's current trial of advertising-funded game downloads.

The critical advantage of advertising-funded content is that, because it is discounted or free of charge for customers, a significant barrier to take-up is reduced.

The challenge for mobile operators is to capture the value created by this beyond simple data carriage. To succeed they must take full advantage of the main strength that they alone possess: their detailed knowledge of the end customer.

The customer is key
Mobile operators hold large databases of customer information that is potentially very valuable to advertisers. This includes demographic and credit data for post-paid users, calling and SMS behaviour and location behaviour. Such data can be used to target advertising efforts more effectively.

In order to maximise the value they can extract from mobile advertising, mobile operators must overcome a number of challenges, principally by:

Ensuring that they have the marketing, database management and data-mining capabilities to be able to target specific audiences. This is necessary to ensure high-impact, targeted advertising that has high value for advertisers;
Pushing the development of business models that do not bypass their networks, to counteract worrying developments for operators such as Yahoo!’s direct deals with handset manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola and RIM;
Overcoming data protection and privacy concerns.

In most countries, operators must ask permission to use customer information for advertising purposes. This may be overcome by offering content that is compelling enough for subscribers to opt in, thus allowing the use of their information, as has been successfully achieved in South Korea and Germany.

If mobile operators can successfully influence the business models that eventually dominate the market, and exploit their marketing, data mining and content aggregation capabilities, mobile advertising may represent an opportunity to extract significant new revenues from mobile data services.

Andrew Kloeden is a consultant with consultancy and research firm Analysys, global advisors on telecoms, IT, and media (www.analysys.com).

Amp'd and Virgin's Sugar Mama on MoCoNews

2007-01-22T19:00:00.000Z

Amp’d Joins Mobile Ad Goldrush

Posted by James Quintana Pearce
Sun 21 Jan 2007 05:06 AM

The New York Times (reg) has a piece on mobile advertising and the way it will subsidize content… it reports that Amp’d is planning an opt-in service that will give its customers fr*ee access to shows and other content in exchange for watching ads. That’s due sometime this year.
There’s also an interesting factbite on Virgin Mobile’s Suga Mama service: “Sugar Mama ... compensates its phone users with fr*ee calling minutes for watching commercials, reading advertiser text messages and taking surveys from brands. Since last July, about 250,000 phone users have participated, earning a total of about three million minutes, said Howard Handler, chief marketing officer of Virgin Mobile USA”.

Orange & Amobee to trial advertising in mobile games

2007-01-22T09:00:00.000Z

Orange France has signed a new agreement with Amobee Media Systems to trial advertising within mobile games.

Under the terms of the deal, Orange's subscribers will be offered the opportunity to download mobile games either at a discount price or for free - on the understanding that they will feature adverts.

The ads won't appear during gameplay, but in between levels and while games are loading. Users will be able to get more information about the advertised brands by visiting a WAP site, or can click to ignore the ads and continue playing.

The games will be supplied by mobile publisher Filao, and advertisers already signed up to take part in the trial include Coca-Cola, Saab, Travelski, Societe General and Mobifun.

The service will use Amobi's Handset Application Programming Interface, and the trial will run for two months.

"The mobile industry is willing to test the role that ad-funding could play in growing the mobile entertainment market," said Amobee's Patrick Parodi

"Similar trials in other territories have shown high levels of user acceptance - provided that the model is opt-in and controlled by the user. We are confident that this trial will further demonstrate a willingness among mobile customers to accept advertising in exchange for discounts or additional value."

Jerome Le Feuvre, head of mobile games and music at Orange France, added, "The objectives for Orange France are to understand how mobile users will respond to in-game advertising, and to engage with advertisers and agencies to better understand their expectations.

"The trial should enable us to gather live usage data about the impact and acceptance of advertising within a mobile game, and test the potential of new business models around mobile content."

Another reason to delay flat-rate subs

2007-01-16T20:04:00.000Z

NOC - News & Updates: "Skype not ready for mobility
16 January 2007

Oops - another reason to not introduce flat-rate data plans....

Skype's head of mobile access has said that until network operators stop charging by the quantity of data transmitted then Skype won't be available on mobile phones.

Skype is a popular VoIP service which offers free calls to other Skype users, but if the user is paying their network operator for the data they use then the calls can be anything but free.

'We don't want to be in a situation where we say: 'Skype is free' and then at the end of the month the user gets this huge broadband bill,' Eric Lagier told Reuters at CES.

When the idea of Skype on 3G was first mooted many networks responded that it wasn't a problem: given the amount they intended to charge for data they would make more money on a Skype call than a normal voice connection. But with the emergence of Wi-Fi networks, and Wi-Fi-capable handsets, unlimited connectivity is available; and with the promise of free calls such connectivity could challenge the dominance of network operators.

All this seems to make sense, until you remember that T-Mobile already offers a largely unlimited tariff with Web 'n' Walk ( capped, like most ADSL broadband connections ), and that 3 are already offering unlimited Skype calls though they aren't doing proper VoIP as they depend on the voice channel for the wireless portion of the connect"

Netimperative report on Digital Publishers flaws

2007-01-16T18:40:00.000Z

Digital advertisers 'critical of publishers' ability to deliver'

By Staff

16-01-2007 10:44 AM

Most online advertisers and ad agencies in the UK are critical of their online publishers' ability to execute fully, according to a new study.

The research, conducted by research group GMI on behalf of Operative, reveals that more than half (53%) say they are unconvinced publishers have the appropriate business processes, practices and infrastructure in place to deliver effectively on contracts.

When asked to judge publishers on customer service, ROI/accountability, campaign delivery, accuracy of responses to RFPs and ad trafficking, 70% of advertisers and agencies thought publishers were either average or under par.

Overall, many publishers agreed with their clients' views (67%). All parties agreed that customer service was the most important measurement criteria but only half of the publishers questioned felt it was something they were good at. Only 18 % said they believed they gave better than average to good ROI.

When asked about their three greatest operational challenges over the coming two to three years, 2 in 3 publishers cited the full integration of their current systems and tools, closely followed by improving customer service and streamlining operational processes.

All three of these areas of pain came ahead of staff training and development, and attracting more skilled sales and operational staff. The majority (68%) agreed that operational personnel are currently spending too much time on low value tasks that could be automated.

Nearly all (90%) publishers agreed that operational efficiency is becoming more important to helping them meet client expectations and 75% said they had plans within the next two years to invest in operational enterprise software.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the last 12 months have seen many advertisers dealing with more publishers than before, combined with significant hikes in online ad spend (by up to 25% in most cases during 2006) which they forecast will continue during 2007 at similar rates of increase.

Tullio Siragusa, Senior Vice President at Operative, said: "Without doubt, many publishers have key business challenges to address and overcome within the next 6-12 months. It is pleasing that the majority of publishers are eager to stay ahead of their competition through the implementation of operational improvements and changes."

The survey findings are based on responses from 50 UK-based advertiser/digital media agency decision makers, and 50 UK-based online publisher decision makers. Companies ranged in size from below £1 million to in excess of £100 million. Only those responsible for digital media planning/buying and digital media sales/operations were eligible to take part.

MoCoNews coverage of Endemol at NapteMobile++

2007-01-16T18:07:00.000Z

@Napte Mobile++: Endemol UK’s Mobile Experience

Posted by James Quintana Pearce
Mon 15 Jan 2007 02:47 PM

Rafat did the opening Q&A/Presentation at Napte Mobile++ with Peter Cowley, MD of Digital Media for Endemol UK. Most of it was very interesting presentations of shows that have little relevance for MocoNews, but there were a few interesting points that Rafat dragged out…
-- Cowley said that the new media audience wants bite-sized content that is new and fresh, and the real skill that producers need is to make that content available across all the platforms. So if there’s a successful TV show or mobile series (such as Get Close To The Sugababes) rather than just porting it straight to other platforms it needs to be repackaged to be suitable.
-- Endemol has a fund for investing in new media of 15 million pounds (US$29.5 million) which was announced six months ago. The reason behind this is that Endemol is good at doing big projects but not very good at being nimble in the marketplace and adapting to new technologies, so it’s investing in companies that are good at that—mobile, broadband and games companies. It’s good to see a major company recognize it’s weaknesses…
-- Some Norway shows indicated that “an audience that participated with a mobile show stayed with the show a bit longer than a passive audience member”, so interactive mobile TV is a good thing to target.
-- Cowley also gave some figures that indicated the broader reach of fr*ee content, with one show on broadband the downloads went from a few thousand to 24 million when it was switched to a fr*ee model. Big Brother downloads increased by ten-fold when it moved from an paid download model to a fr*ee, ad-supported model. That figure was in the six figures last year.
-- One of the major issues with made-for-mobile content is marketing and promoting the show. If the mobile effort is an extension of a popular TV show you can do marketing on the shows. With Endemol’s Sugababes effort it relied heavily on the carrier partner O2 for marketing. “Also in the show we had to find ways to get people to come back the next day… You really need a platform owner or distributor to get behind it and promote them in their community, and hopefully it will snowball as they tell they friends.”
Related stories:
--Interview With Michiel de Gooijer, Endemol
--Audio Interview: Endemol Plans For Tailor-Made, User-Created Content

Michael Krammer verlässt E-Plus

2007-01-15T10:53:00.000Z

Michael Krammer verlässt E-Plus

Michael Krammer, Vorsitzender der Geschäftsführung von E-Plus, der deutschen Mobilfunktochter von KPN, hat heute den Aufsichtsrat von E-Plus über seinen Rücktritt von allen Ämtern aus persönlichen Gründen informiert und scheidet Ende Januar 2007 aus. Krammer wechselte im Mai 2006 zu E-Plus von Tele.ring Austria. Stan Miller, Mitglied des Vorstands von KPN und verantwortlich für die internationalen Mobilfunkaktivitäten von KPN, und Thorsten Dirks, stellvertretender Vorsitzender der Geschäftsführung von E-Plus, werden die operativen Geschäfte zunächst weiterführen bis ein Nachfolger die Geschäftsführung dauerhaft übernimmt.

Stan Miller kommentiert Krammers Entscheidung wie folgt: "Persönlich bedauere ich das Ausscheiden von Michael Krammer. Während seiner Zeit bei E-Plus hat er unsere weitere Entwicklung als Herausforderer im deutschen Mobilfunkmarkt entscheidend vorangetrieben. Dennoch respektiere ich seine Entscheidung, danke ihm für seinen Beitrag als CEO und wünsche ihm und seiner Familie das Beste für die Zukunft."

Düsseldorf, 12. Januar 2007

E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH & Co. KG
Corporate Communications
Catrin Glücksmann
E-Mail: catrin.gluecksmann@eplus.de
Tel. +49 – 211 – 448 4140
Fax +49 – 211 – 448 4777
www.eplus.de/presse

E-Plus CEO Steps Down - Telecom News Wire

2007-01-15T08:55:00.000Z

Light Reading - Mobile/Wireless - E-Plus CEO Steps Down - Telecom News Wire :

"THE HAGUE, The Netherlands -- Michael Krammer, CEO of KPN’s German mobile unit E-Plus GmbH & Co KG, has today informed the Supervisory Board of E-Plus of his decision to resign from his post at the end of January 2007, citing personal reasons. Krammer joined E-Plus from Tele.ring Austria in May 2006. Stan Miller, Member of the Board of KPN and CEO of KPN’s international mobile activities, and Thorsten Dirks, the Deputy CEO of E-Plus, will assume responsibility for the day to day running of the company until a permanent appointment can be made.

Commenting on Krammer’s decision, Stan Miller said: “It is with personal regret that I see Michael go. During his time at E-Plus, he has played an important role in the further development of our mobile challenger business in Germany. However, I respect his decision and wish Michael and his family all the best for the future.”"

E-Plus Youth Brand - Wireless/News

2007-01-15T08:53:00.000Z

E-Plus plans youth brand, more shops, less management:

* September 27th, 2006
* 2:00 pm

German mobile operator E-Plus has launched its action plan called Be best challenger, including a focus on voice, SMS and price and a continuation of its multi-brands strategy. As part of the action plan, E-Plus will launch a youth brand in the second half of this year and invest in its network to increase voice capacity and indoor coverage where customer demand is for fixed-mobile convergence. In a presentation of the strategy, CEO Michael Krammer said that the company will not invest in mobile TV services because the EBITDA margin is almost three times lower than the mobile voice EBITDA margin.

E-Plus will also cut 40 percent of its current management jobs to 92 managers to increase the speed of decision-making and increase management productivity by 25 percent. The operator wants to reduce the FTE headcount by 10 percent or 300 FTEs from 2,900 to 2,600 and increase the number of customer-facing FTEs from 58 percent to 70 percent. To reach this goal, E-Plus wants to outsource network operations and certain back-office operations plus increase the number of own shops from the current 183, plus start opening more partner-franchise shops. The distribution channel increase will also lower the customer acquisition costs, increasing the profitability "

Orange tries Ad-funded content - Fiercewireless

2007-01-12T13:05:00.000Z

Orange France Launches First Ad-Funded Trial, Brings Coke And Saab On Board

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Thu 11 Jan 2007 12:54 PM

Orange France has taken the wraps off the country's first ad-funded scheme involving major brands including Coke, Saab, Travelski, and Mobifun. The operator will test the ad-funded model, a business model that uses advertising to help fund mobile content and entertainment services, for the next two months using technology provided by mobile advertising solutions company Amobee Media Systems (Amobee also has some intersting stats about the viability of ad-funded schemes). The trial will offer users the option of downloading a game, from leading games publisher Filao, at a reduced price or for fr*ee, if they accept advertising within the game. The ads are served interstitially during idle time in between levels or while the game is loading.

MTV mobile report on MocoNews

2007-01-10T20:13:00.000Z

MTV Forms New Digital Team, Focus on Mobile Content & Relationships

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Fri 05 Jan 2007 01:52 PM

Viacom-owned MTV Networks has formed a new Global Digital Media executive team with a brief to provide strategic guidance to the company’s portfolio of multiplatform brands. The team will be under Mika Salmi, President of Global Digital Media for MTV Networks, and will “help guide MTVN’s brands in digital distribution expansion, product development and technical support, and cross-brand programming”, and work with executives throughout MTV who have digital efforts underway. Staci at PaidContent has the in-depth details, on the mobile side the team includes Greg Clayman, SVP, MTVN Mobile Media, who manages mobile partnerships and content distribution and will support the teams at the individual MTVN brands in developing a wide portfolio of mobile content and apps.
According to Viacom’s press release MTVN publishes more than 600 clips and 30 hours of mobile video content per month in the U.S. alone.

Financial Times Mobile News Reader - MoCoNews

2007-01-10T18:39:00.000Z

Financial Times Expands Mobile Offering

Posted by James Quintana Pearce
Tue 09 Jan 2007 11:28 AM

The Financial Times has extended its mobile offering, launching a Java application based mobile news reader. The service offers access to news, comment, analysis, stock prices, a 30-day search function and premium content for subscribers, reports Press Gazette. There is also a My FT section which selects articles based on the users reading habits, which should make it easier to use. The application is fr*ee, and while there is no mention of advertising FT did indicate it would seek revenue from advertising a year or so ago. The other main difference between this and FT’s previous mobile efforts is that this is global and off the carrier deck, whereas previous efforts were through deals with specific carriers, mostly in the UK.
Related stories:
--Financial Times Expands Mobile Service With Video & Audio

Yahoo Go 2.0 on Clicz

2007-01-09T13:47:00.000Z

Yahoo Ups the Mobile Ante
› › › ClickZ News

By Kate Kaye | January 9, 2007

Yahoo is counting on user adoption of its new mobile search and content platform to boost ad inventory and create broader mobile reach for advertisers. Along with promoting the new Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 application to its huge online audience, the publisher hopes pre-bundling of the app on devices from Samsung and Motorola will also grow market share. The publisher's new wireless search service has also been designed to speed up information gathering for users in the hopes of boosting usage.

"With Go 2.0, we're now going to be able to grow the client [application] inventory," said Yahoo Senior Director of Global Mobile Products Ojas Rege. The company will now offer display ads targeted based on content and behavioral data, or targeted to specific carriers. No new advertisers are running ads in conjunction with the platform launch, Rege added, mentioning Pepsi as a recent mobile advertiser.

Yahoo will also continue selling sponsored mobile text listings, now through its oneSearch service, which will be the default search technology for the new platform as well as its other mobile Web and SMS services. Rather than listing Web links to traditional sites, the search service offers up category-specific data based on keyword searches. The content platform, now in beta, allows users to toggle from one content-specific area to another, accessing customized information and RSS feeds, and providing search results relevant to that category.

"The mobile search experience has to be completely different than the PC search experience," said Rege.

Indeed, recognizing the need to provide quick bits of information with minimal click-through, the new search service provides users who enter terms like "Broncos" or "Beyonce" with data on sports scores or celebrity break-ups instead of just links to sports or entertainment news sites.

"Applications like [Yahoo's] make mobile content easier to find," said Christine Overby, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "One of the reasons we find a dearth of [mobile ad] campaigns in the U.S. is it's so difficult for consumers to find things either on their phone or their network."

According to a mobile marketing paper published by Forrester last month, 11 percent of U.S. mobile consumers use the mobile Internet.

Go 2.0's segments content areas into categories including News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment. The Local section offers city guides and rated business listings, along with local news, weather and traffic. In addition to e-mail and SMS messaging, the platform also integrates Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing and management service, allowing users to tag and post photos from their phones to their Flickr accounts.

Besides promoting the mobile services to its Web audience, Yahoo has set up several distribution partnerships. Samsung will pre-load the new search service and content platform on mobile phones around the world, and Motorola will pre-install the Go 2.0 application in its mobile devices this year. Yahoo has also extended its relationships with Nokia and Blackberry maker Research In Motion, making the platform available to Blackberry and Nokia device users in 2007. In addition, oneSearch will be the exclusive search provider for Opera mobile browsers.

Mobile Marketing Association Executive Director Laura Marriott likens the approach to Microsoft's software distribution partnerships. The relationships "might help drive early adoption" by users, she added.

Yahoo also aims to derive revenue from its mobile offerings through alignments like the one it announced late last year with Vodafone; the U.K. wireless carrier is using Yahoo as its exclusive mobile display ad provider.

Samsung and Yahoo rival Google are also pairing up to promote Google mobile applications in Samsung phones this year. Selected handsets will include Google Maps and Gmail applications, and enable easy access to Google search. Google offers a mobile version of its AdWords text link ads.

When it comes to mobile advertising, "It's still too early to give a clear advantage to any one company, even a company with a brand as strong as Yahoo," said Forrester's Overby.

Lee Hancock, founder and CEO of mobile content provider go2, takes the increasingly competitive state of his industry as a promising sign. "I think the competition is very healthy….It will ultimately result in enhanced content to end users because the advertising business model will encourage a lot of competition in the marketplace," he said.

Communities Dominate Brands: Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users

2007-01-09T09:31:00.000Z

Communities Dominate Brands: Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users:

This is a great article comparing mobile growth to other major industry sectors such as car ownership, do give the whole thing a read... but here's the take-away:

"SO HERE IS THE BIG PICTURE

2.7 Billion phones in active use. There is a subscription for 40% of the planet's population. Maybe 10% of those are multiple subscriptions (in Europe and Industrialized Asia mostly) so perhaps 2.4 Billion people or 36% of the planet's population actually carry at least one phone.

During 2006 they sold about 950 million mobile phones. More phones sold last year than the total installed base of personal computers in use. Out of the 950 phones sold last year, two in three had built-in cameras, 30% had MP3 players. Four out of five had colour screens. All 950 million could access the web (at least via WAP), and all 950 million could send and receive SMS text messages. Over two in three were high speed (at least GPRS/EDGE/CDMA2000 1xRTT); while one in five phones sold last year was a 3G phone."

Sennari

2007-01-08T18:26:00.000Z

Sennari: "I believe part of the difference in volume comes from “discovery.” That is the process by which we find content on the handset. It’s just too damned hard to find what’s out there quickly. 3G makes the download process faster, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll actually find the content faster. There are three ways to fix the discovery process.

The first is for western carriers and handset manufacturers to change what happens when the phone is turned on. Immediately upon ‘boot up’ the phone should show me a portal interface, like turning on a web browser. The carrier shouldn’t charge data fees for this. Now the consumer can easily make a call, but just as easily read the news or buy a game. I will go out on a limb and say this simple change would change the nature of the mobile content business.

The second solution is for carriers to motivate alternate retail channels to use their billing systems. These channels include: SMS short codes via TV and magazine ads, pre-embedding content juke boxes onto the handset, carrier decks better integrated with the handset interface, SMS marketing of new content options, and wireless retailers getting into content via short codes or pre-embedding.

The third solution is for publishers to leverage 2.5 and 3G networks to integrate automatic customer registration and community capabilities with all applica"

Fireside Chat: The Long Tail - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

2007-01-08T18:22:00.000Z

Fireside Chat: The Long Tail - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals): "Chris, tell me more about this long tail of content aggregators. any examples in mind?
Chris
Well, we’re starting to see vertical Digg clones. We just started one, called Lipstick, that’s focused on fashion and celebrities. I can imagine thousands of those..
Tim
I could name a dozen already…
Chris
Tim/Dave: can you imagine vertical music sites? On Classical or Jazz?
Dave
I think maybe in classical because it is such a different set of problems to solve
Tim
Rhapsody had a classical and a jazz version when we first launched, but it turns out most folks want everything, even if 98% of their time is going to be spent in just one genre
Dave
In general, vertical music sites don’t work because people’s taste are very diverse and since there is little reason for us or Rhapsody to exclude someone, it is easier to use our services"

The Long Tail and Discovery - Peter D. Csathy at Digital Media Update

2007-01-08T18:16:00.000Z

Making Sense of the Long Tail -- the Key Role Played by Recommendation Features

In today's Wall Street Journal, Don Clark writes an article titled "Ticketmaster Invests in Music Site", underscoring that "[t]he deal is the latest sign of investor interest in 'music discovery' sites ..." -- this time, Ticketmaster's acqusition of a 25% stake in iLike.com (run by Hadi Partovi, formerly of MSN's digital music efforts, and his twin brother Ali).

But, digital media companies prominently featuring content "discovery" features -- such as music recommendation engines -- certainly are nothing new. My former company, Musicmatch (the services of which I still use today to power my in-home music experience), helped to pioneer music discovery -- we used music discovery in our messaging as a critical way to differentiate ourselves from the competition. Virtually all of the "big" digital music services today use some variation of collaborative filtering to power their recommendation features -- and some of the newer entrants (such as Pandora and Mercora have their own "spins" on music recommendation). You will find recommendation features (i.e., "discovery") front and center in upcoming digital video services by NetFlix and others as well (expect Netflix's digital distribution efforts to begin Q1 of 2007).

Why are "discovery" and its twin cousin "recommendation" technologies so critical to the media/content consumption experience? Very simple -- if they work correctly, recommendation features can help consumers "make sense" out of the millions of works of media (music, television, movies) now available online -- and they do it very efficiently, effectively, and in a very fun way. Yes, fun. Recommendation engines can help you re-discover not only those artists, songs, TV shows, and movies that you had long forgotten, but also those about which you were never aware (but are thankful that you found as a direct result of these seemingly "new" technologies).

For consumers, the pay-off is immediate -- more enjoyment of their overall online digital media experience. This leads to more consumption ... including, of course, more consumption of the long-heralded "long tail." And, what is good for consumers is also good for the content providers ...

Posted by Peter D. Csathy at 6:37 AM

Plusmo on Venture Beat

2007-01-08T09:55:00.000Z

Plusmo slides content across your idle mobile phone

By Matt Marshall 01.5.07 12:32 PM

Plusmo is a San Jose start-up that lets you fill your idle mobile phone screen with content — from news alerts to Flickr photos and blog content.

Plusmo is backed with $500,000 from angel investors, including Iggy Fanlo, chief exec of AdBrite, Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor who advised Google, Gil Penchina, chief exe of Wikia, and several others.

Like many other mobile companies, however, Plusmo knows that competition for users’ attention is cut-throat. Mobile content providers are numerous these days. And — surprise — people are still using their cell-phones mainly for voice and text (see Othmer’s column at VentureBeat today about this). Finally, it will take near a million users to sustain an advertising-based mobile content business, Plusmo’s co-founders estimate. Until Plusmo gets there, signing one good deal to distribute content for an honest price can trump the grandest of free distribution strategies. That’s what Plusmo has done, with cricket. More on that in a sec.

Plusmo says 200,000 people have downloaded its application since it launched six months ago. The application lets users load all kinds of blog and other Web content. The content is like a slide show on your screen (see Plusmo for example). Once you sign up, say for VentureBeat content, Plusmo pushes VentureBeat headlines to you — and they scroll across your screen — saving you from having to visit VentureBeat.com’s site. Or if you want to find out the nearest Starbucks, you can download the Starbucks feature, which offers you info on the nearest stores and click-to-call. Or you can register for all stories on Google and Yahoo news about Tiger Woods, and those pushed to you in a slide show of headlines. Each one of these services sit on your screen in the form of a box “gadget” — see image below. The plan is to then offer locally relevant advertising beside the content.

To be clear, people can get some of this content promised by Plusmo in other ways, too — Plusmo is targeting those who want content to scroll across their idle screen.

Of 80,000 people who have returned to Plusmo to request more content, 8,000 people do so daily, and another 8,000 at least weekly, says chief executive Krishna Vedati.

Plusmo’s biggest boost comes from users of its live cricket game-casting. Plusmo offers play-by-play text info for free, and video highlights to users paying $5 monthly. More than a thousand users have paid. With the cricket world cup in March, Plusmo expects up to ten thousand subscribers. But it gets only 50 percent revenue share from the rights owner — Willow. This has encouraged Plusmo to pursue cricket-casting deals with carriers too, but carriers will take a cut too. NFL games may come next. It says the revenue from these deals put it on track to make $1 million in revenue next year.

It serves BlackBerry, Windows Mobile/PPC and J2ME MIDP 1.0 & 2.0 phones with native clients. It plans to serve Treo phones by Q1 2007.

The company’s founding team — Vedati, Srinivas Mandyam & Kelvin Chong — hail from mobile company Covigo, a mobile middleware company founded in 2000 and sold in 2003 to Symbol. Krishna is also a Stanford grad, and has good ties with the start-up community.

It plans to raise another $500,000 soon, and then a venture round later this year.

Other mobile content players include Widsets and San Bruno’s Bluepulse. Widsets offers a very similar service as Plusmo. Bluepulse, another player, adds more social networking features like chat and text. Like Plusmo, it features content widgets, giving users access to specific sites — like Digg, Gmail and Flickr. Bluepulse also offers mobile IM, and focuses on developers, allowing them to deliver games. Plusmo doesn’t do games, mobile IM or social networking.

Another company, Onskreen, offers a product called Fusion, which offers news, ringtones and other content, but only in partnership with operators.

Handmark, of Kansas City, also offers content, from TV to games, but mostly through subscription.

Below are some of the “venture” channels and features offered by Plusmo.

Personalised ads on phones - BBC

2007-01-08T09:41:00.000Z

Personalised adverts on mobile TV

Mobile TV is a growing market worldwide

Mobile TV viewers in Norway will be served personalised adverts as part of a two-month trial.

Banner adverts will be sent to mobile phones and tailored to the individual user under the trial by broadcaster NRK, a mobile TV pioneer.

"Advertisers see value in people being interested in certain products in a given context," said Gunnar Garfors, director of development at NRK.

Two TV channels and four radio stations are taking part in the trial.

"Most people who watch mobile TV in Norway do so because they are bored somewhere, on transport, or waiting," said Mr Garfors.

"You can assume they are near a shop or service which may be relevant."

The TV and radio stations are streamed to the phones over a 3G phone network and are "near-live with a few seconds' delay.

Mobile TV is a growing market that is yet to hit the mainstream partly because of cost and partly because of competing mobile TV standards.

We are losing out on younger viewers and listeners when it comes to traditional TV and radio

Gunnar Garfors, NRK

The obstacles to TV's future

Unlike other "live TV services" on the market, the NRK trial is streaming video rather than broadcasting it.

According to research firm eMarketer there are 44.5 million 3G subscribers worldwide who watch mobile TV on their phone. Their report predicts the number will double each year, reaching 520.9 million by 2009.

The number of subscribers who pay for premium video services and watch them on their phone will go from six million worldwide to 121.5 million by 2009, it predicts.

Adverts from 20 different companies are targeted to the viewers, depending on the information given to NRK when they signed up for the trial.

Mr Garfors said: "We know lots about the viewers; we have their phone numbers, their name, sex and where they live.

"We can also determine their presumed interests when we see what they watch or listen to and what times they do it.

And we know where they are geographically because of positioning technology.

"When we put this all together we have a fair amount of relevant information which can give them more relevant advertising material."

While the trial is a "proof of concept", Mr Garfors said future developments could see adverts sent to phones dependent on the precise location of the viewer.

Target demographic

For example, companies could have adverts sent to viewers matching their target demographic who happen to be waiting for a bus close to shops where their products are on sale.

Adverts could be personalised based on location

People taking part in the trial download a small computer program - a Java application - onto their phones.

The application is also used to change channels on the phone as well as to give viewers the chance to vote interactively during programmes, and send audio and video messages.

"You can also watch or listen to on demand programmes."

Norway is pioneering mobile TV and radio, said Mr Garfors.

"It's beyond the early adopters. Most phones are 3G and they all have built in video players. It's quite popular."

Cost continues to be a barrier for many people, however, as mobile operators charge customers for the data - in this case video or audio - that is downloaded on to their phones.

Mr Garfors said: "One of the problems is that the operators have different price systems. It's still assumed to be quite expensive."

But the introduction of flat rate subscription services - for about £3 a month - could open the floodgates to more viewers.

Mr Garfors said NRK was pioneering mobile TV because of changing viewing habits among the younger generation.

He said: "We are losing out on younger viewers and listeners when it comes to traditional TV and radio.

"On the mobile platform they are big users. If we are just going to continue to do traditional TV and radio, who knows who long we will be in business?"

Customisation vs. Personalisaiton - VisionMobile Forum

2007-01-05T14:52:00.000Z

Customisation vs Personalisation: Setting the record straight

October 22

Andreas Constantinou

In the mobile industry, we often talk about customisation and personalisation interchangeably to describe how a service or a handset is adapted to the needs of users. I would argue that these two terms refer to very distinct concepts; in fact customisation is the exact opposite of personalisation. Let me explain why.

Customisation
Customisation (as in handset customisation) is the act of modifying a ‘vanilla’ handset by the operator to suit the goals of the operator (or in general the service provider). Handset customisation typically involves adding a hard key that leads to the operator WAP portal, changing menus and icons, and branding the handset user interface to promote the operator brand. In that same context, we can talk about service customisation, as in branding the operator’s WAP portal to use the operator’s trademark red, orange, blue or magenta colours as a tool to appeal to the operator’s key demographic

In general, we can safely define customisation as the act of modifying the mobile handset or service to suit operator goals. Examples are Orange’s home-screen customisation, and Vodafone’s Live customised WAP portal. The defining characteristic of customisation is that the same content, look & feel, settings, etc of the customisation handset or service are the same for all users. Whether you are Mary, John, Samantha or Bill, you ‘re bound to like seeing your handset painted in the same trademark red, orange, blue or magenta that matches the operator contract that you ‘ve chosen. Right.

Personalisation
Personalisation is the exact opposite of customisation. It is the act of modifying the handset or service by the user, to suit the user’s own needs. Think of changing the wallpaper and ringtones to appeal to the user’s taste. Or swapping the handset fascia to a bright pink or a solemn black. Or even having the user choose what shortcuts and icons to see displayed on the operator WAP portal, instead of using the operator’s one-size-fits-all content and branding.

Customisation and personalisation are two extremes along the same spectrum of possibilities. Interestingly, there are two more points along that spectrum, which offer a compromise between customisation and personalisation, as shown below.

Targeted customisation
Operators are making significant efforts to target niche user segments such as the young or the elderly. Targeted customisation is when the operator or service provider modifies the handset or service to suit the (perceived) needs of a specific customer segment.

A good example here is the Vodafone Simply range of handsets. Vodafone designed the Simply handsets for a consumer segment the operator calls ‘adult personal users’. This segment is the largest in Vodafone’s market segmentation, made up of 35-54 year olds, married with children, mostly female, with a low comfort or interest in technology.

Another example is the Sony Ericsson Robbie Williams special edition W800i walkman phone launched exclusively by T-Mobile in October 2005 to appeal to fans of the pop artist.

Targeted personalisation
Mobile service providers have explored yet another approach of a mass-market service that can be personalised to individual users and usage patterns. Targeted personalisation is when the service provider is able to profile each user and tailor the service to the individual characteristics of that user.

An example is the Financial Times offline portal developed by Leiki, where the ‘My’ page offers content tailored to each user. The service works by automatically classifying the contents of the FT articles read by the user and also allowing the user to determine which articles they liked or disliked reading. Another example is Vodafone’s Radio DJ, which offers a wide range of streamed radio channels, with a system which enables users to adjust the pre-programmed radio channels to their own personal tastes by simply pressing a button to indicate “like” or “dislike” while listening to a song. The radio channel automatically analyses song beat, harmonies, genre and mood to automatically feature songs with desirable characteristics.

Personalisation, the end-goal of customisation
Mobile operator customisation strategies in 2002-3 evolved around branding the handsets and services with the trademark orange, red, blue or magenta colours, assuming that the one-brand-fits-all approach would win customers, increase ARPU and reduce churn. As the operator strategies have been maturing in 2005-6, operators are realising that a low-key brand approach, coupled with strong elements consumer brands (read Google, Yahoo, Robbie Williams and Ferrari) are more successful at attracting consumers.

I would argue, that moving forward, the end-goal of operator customisation should be targeted personalisation, and pure personalisation – i.e. in the search for increasingly sophisticated market segmentation plans, there is no better segmentation than self-segmentation, that is when the user can be free to choose the service and device look & feel that best suits them.

Both Vodafone and Orange claim to focus on user personalisation, while the implementation of their strategies suggests otherwise. The branded hard key on Live! phones takes you to the central operator portal, and the ‘Your Page’ entry on the home-screen of Orange Signature devices is the very last entry of the menu structure.

If operators want to maintain a clear, desirable and sustainable advantage over competitors, they need to offer not only brand, but choice at each and every point.

2 comments

Mozilla Rev-share with Google - GigaOM

2007-01-04T13:46:00.000Z

GigaOM » Mozilla Discloses 2005 Revenues: $53M:

Written by Liz Gannes- Posted Tuesday, January 2, 2007 at 4:11 PM PT

While the most interesting thing about Mozilla is most definitely its excellent Firefox browser, it’s also noteworthy that the non-profit makes quite a bit of money. Today, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker wrote on her blog that the Mozilla Foundation (which owns the subsidiary Mozilla Corporation, created in part to deal with the cash flow) made $52.9 million in revenue in 20051.

Baker said the “bulk” of the money comes from “search engine relationships” like the crucial one Mozilla brokered with Google for default search box placement in the chrome of the Firefox browser.

These are some very profitable arrangements, ones that have opened up a new category of business model now used by browser and plug-in companies, such as Opera2. Mozilla spent $8.2 million in 2005, leaving $44.7 million in profit for what Baker calls “a reserve fund.”

Last year speculation ran rampant after the figure $72 million was floated as a yearly revenue estimate for Firefox. (Incidentally, this guesstimate originated3 with the CEO of Browster, a company we covered4 today under very different circumstances.) Today’s blog post is the first time Mozilla has publicly addressed the 2005 revenue information in detail.

Previous revenue figures of $2.4 million in 2003 and $5.8 million in 2004 are publicly available (if a little slow to be released) because the foundation is a non-profit. Mozilla has also added them⁵ to its own site. Baker did not give estimates for 2006 revenue, though she said it remained “steady.”

See more detail in this cover story⁶ I wrote about Mozilla for Red Herring

Buongiorno research on MoCoNews

2007-01-04T13:18:00.000Z

New Research Identifies Three “Tribes” of Mobile Users

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Wed 03 Jan 2007 02:42 PM PST

Mobile content distributor Buongiorno has published new research into how people view non-voice mobile services. The results (part of the company’s third edition of VASland 2006 report which surveyed a sample of 5,000 users from 10 countries between the ages of 14 and 44) show increased usage of non-voice services, and the growing perception of the mobile device as much more than just a phone. Indeed, respondents consider devices to be a Swiss army knife combination of “a camera, a games console, a music player, a pocket TV, a restaurant finder, an e-mail interface and a personal organizer,” the report said. “Consumers are also becoming more sophisticated and demanding, developing a tight relationship with their mobile: It is perceived as an umbilical cord connecting the user to the world, a second skin, some consumers say that there is all their life in it as a secret diary, others feel lonely when nobody calls.”

The highlight of Buongiorno’s research: Three new and colourful terms the mobile industry can use to segment the great mass of users. Roughly 48 percent of users are Symbiotics, a group characterized by an extremely close relationship with their mobile phones. In a nutshell, these users are linked to mobile devices as if by an umbilical cord. They are deeply into phone personalization and their favorite services are top 10 ringtones, and wallpapers. Rationals, a group that represent 25 percent of users, appreciate the phone’s usefulness and functional value, but have problems with an always-on lifestyle. They like services aimed at increasing phone functionality and prefer infotainment services. Fashionistas, 27 percent of the sample, are mostly young adults. They like to show off with their phones and view them as a status symbol.

The research also sheds light on user behavior in each country surveyed. (Predictably, German users appreciate handset functionality, while users in the U.K. and U.S. like time-killer applications, such as games and mobile TV.) Polyphonic ringtones are still the most popular downloaded content, appealing to more than 40 percent of users. What mobile content offers would users like? The majority (70 percent) like the idea of listening to interactive radio stations on their mobile phones while they “pick and purchase” ringtones and full track downloads; 63 percent would participate in a mobile TV program. Release.

ENPOCKET RELEASES MOBILE CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

2007-01-03T16:00:00.000Z

Ad Age covers the Forrester Report

2007-01-03T14:59:00.000Z

Mobile Marketing Has Potential (to Be Really Annoying)

Forrester Study Finds Consumers Embrace Data but Are Wary of Ads

By Abbey Klaassen and Alice Z. Cuneo

Published: January 02, 2007

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The good news for mobile marketing is that advertisers can target by location, demographic and create actionable responses. The bad news? More than three-quarters of Americans are annoyed just thinking about it.

Only 3% of consumers say they trust text ads on mobile phones.

Latest finding
That's the latest finding in a report from Forrester Research on the state of the mobile-marketing industry titled "Is the U.S. Ready for Mobile Marketing?" But while the answer to that question overall is yes, according to Forrester, 79% of online consumers find the idea of ads on their mobile phones annoying and only 3% say they trust text ads on mobile phones. And that means marketers must tread lightly when it comes to mobile advertising, offering something of value in exchange for the message.

Christine Spivey Overby, a Forrester analyst who co-authored the study, said she was surprised by those numbers until she started to think about what consumers were responding to.

"We've grown up with this view of the TV commercial interrupting our favorite program," she said. "There's this ad-equals-interruption mind-set that we have, and when you think about something as personal as the mobile phone that you hold in your hand and carry in your pocket, the idea of a marketer interrupting you while you have the phone, that's an idea that consumers hate. "

Public disdain
Much of that public disdain for mobile marketing may be fueled by bad PR, such as recent TV news reports about consumers getting spam on their phones -- and then having to pay for it through data charges. At first the major carriers were reticent to carry ads on mobile devices, citing the cost of handling customer complaints, and problems such as being forced to give consumers money back on their bills for products the consumers said they didn't request.

Sprint this fall became the first major carrier to announce it would offer ads on its "deck," the landing page for mobile consumers as they access information on the mobile web. (Ads have long appeared on "off-deck" websites, those sites accessed from outside a carrier's portal. Those sites typically are more difficult to access than a carrier's portal and carry far less traffic than a carrier's decks.)

Last week, Verizon Wireless became the second major carrier said it will place banner ads on its deck starting this year. Cingular Wireless, about to be renamed AT&T pending final government approval, has kept mum on its advertising policy. Mobile marketing spending has increased from $45 million in 2005 to an anticipated $150 million in 2006, and is expected to grow to nearly $1.3 billion by 2009, according to research firm Ovum.

All about value
It's all about value, wrote Ms. Spivey Overby with Forrester analyst Charles Golvin. The key is to avoid the mind-set that the marketing message will be an interruption and instead give consumers something they want.

"When you get into these intimate media like a mobile phone you have to change the way you think about marketing," Ms. Spivey Overby said. "You have to change the rules. It's a new mobile mindset-replacing the view of interruption with value."

The report outlines three ways marketers can use the medium: text messaging, such as offering coupons and short codes; advertising with banner ads on a mobile browser; or creating ad-supported applications and content. But there are pros and cons to each. While text messaging is the most ubiquitous with the highest consumer adoption rate, it's far less immersive and interactive than ad-sponsored games, for example. And carriers are still reticent to allow advertisers to support free content on their service because it cannibalizes what has become a big business of selling ringtones, wallpaper and games.

Right ads for the medium
Ultimately, Forrester advises that marketers consider the medium and the message. Keep the message abbreviated and be sure to measure the response, even using mobile responses to gauge the effectiveness of a broadcast media. Target campaigns to the people most likely to respond -- Gen X and Y are the targets most likely reached through mobile marketing. And adopt a mind-set of value -- Forrester advises finding a consumer who's unfamiliar with the campaign and asking him or her to find the value in it.

While it might be difficult for marketers to adjust their thinking, Ms. Spivey Overby said she sees some good early signs, such as what Toyota is doing with its Yaris brand by sponsoring Fox's mobisodes, a term for short videos for mobile.

Fox is "using shorter, punchier commercials," she said. "But many advertisers who aren't familiar in the space need to turn to their agency or a partner that understands the space to build for this medium."

Early success
And despite a negative public perception of mobile marketing, the study says there have been some early successes -- especially when ads are well-targeted and when the value of participating is clear. For example, the study discusses a Cambridge, Mass.-based grocer that replaced its loyalty cards with a mobile phone-based program. About 82% of shoppers now belong to the program.

"Marketers can't dismiss mobile," said Ms. Spivey Overby. "2007 is an exploratory year for most mainstream advertisers and we need to keep this in perspective because it's still a very new market."

Yahoo provides Ad templates

2007-01-03T13:49:00.000Z

MocoNews - Unhealthily Obsessed with Mobile Content - Channel - Mobile Adv & Mktg: "Yahoo Takes The Wraps Off Mobile Ad Platform

* Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
* Tue 07 Nov 2006 08:41 AM PST

Today marks a milestone at Yahoo: it begins the beta testing of an advertising platform that will serve up graphical banner ads and interactive sponsor messages (specifically tailored to mobile devices and all their limitations such as tiny screens and bandwidth constraints). Yahoo’s new service, available only in the U.S., also provides advertisers template options to choose from. These templates, based on Yahoo technology and that of its many handset partners, automatically display the ad presentation that is the best fit with the variety of screen-sizes on the market. This allows advertisers to better target the myriad of mobile devices.

PepsiCo will be among the first advertisers to try the new mobile platform. Yahoo’s Michael Bayle, senior director of a business that Yahoo calls Monetization for Connected Life, (quoted in this BusinessWeek article) is bullish about mobile advertising and the advantages of feature-rich ads on a mobile phone. “It is where consumers are going, and advertisers want to make sure that their brand is seen where consumers are spending time,” Bayle said. In his view, mobile ads will evolve the same way that W"

MocoNews - Advertisers Wary of Mobile Video Ads

2007-01-03T13:31:00.000Z

MocoNews - Unhealthily Obsessed with Mobile Content - Channel - Mobile Adv & Mktg: "Advertisers Wary Of Mobile Video Ads

* Posted by James Quintana Pearce
* Tue 21 Nov 2006 07:38 PM PST

Online Media Marketing and Advertising has a piece outlining the reality of advertisers’ thinking in the face of the mobile video hype. Concerns include an inability to buy ads based on a cost-per-thousand, lack of efficient measuring tools, the lack of reach of the medium and the high cost to get mobile TV/video, and the lack of an ecosystem. All these things will be solved with time, of course…"

MocoNews - Bluezone

2007-01-03T13:30:00.000Z

MocoNews - Unhealthily Obsessed with Mobile Content - Channel - Mobile Adv & Mktg: "Bluezone Builds Australian Bluetooth Network

* Posted by James Quintana Pearce
* Sun 26 Nov 2006 09:24 PM PST

”Mobile media company Aura Interactive is building a national Bluetooth-enabled network to beam advertiser-funded content free to consumers over their mobile phones in key entertainment, retail and commuter precincts.”
Cinema chain Hoyts is trialling the BlueZone service, and will activate content zones in four cinemas in Sydney and Melbourne from Dec 1, “giving people the chance to download a mobile phone voucher for a discounted $10 movie ticket that must be redeemed within a week...Film distributor 20th Century Fox is supplying ring tones, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from its movies for the trial, which will target the core cinema-going audience of 14 to 25-year-olds”.
By March Aura plans to have several hundred BlueZone regions across the country, which will offer localized news and information (probably branded) and various advertisements and promotions. The big pitch for Aura is that the BlueZone is time and location sensitive, so companies can target based on those two categories—they’ll still have to offer value to get people to download the ad/content though.
Related stories:
--Wild With Bluetooth
--Virgin Mobile�"

MocoNews - Vodafone Details

2007-01-03T13:28:00.000Z

MocoNews - Unhealthily Obsessed with Mobile Content - Channel - Mobile Adv & Mktg: "Vodafone Details Sharp Focus on Mobile Ads & Ad-Funded

* Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
* Thu 30 Nov 2006 08:44 AM PST

The Wall Street Journal looks at the mobile-advertising plans that loom large in Vodafone’s strategy to push ads to subscribers through a partnership with Yahoo. The article doesn’t cover new ground, but it does let us in on Vodafone’s thinking as detailed by Alan Harper, Vodafone’s head of strategy. For one, we have clear confirmation that Vodafone and Yahoo plan to use customer information to target their efforts. Yahoo’s technology, which Vodafone will use as part of the arrangement, enables advertisers to direct their message at people depending on gender, demographic group, location, and user behavior. “We can build up a social-interest profile over time,” Harper said in the article.

Vodafone will deliver ads only to customers who opt in to the service, in which case the mobile operator will collect details, such as the mobile user’s age and gender, at sign-up. Then, over time, it will build a profile of customers’ interests based on their activities over their phones. To sweeten the offer, Harper said Vodafone will offer users discounts on services such as mobile TV and games �"

MocoNews - Unhealthily Obsessed with Mobile Content

2007-01-03T13:22:00.000Z

MocoNews - Unhealthily Obsessed with Mobile Content: "Ads Cleared For Online and Mobile TV In UK; Similar To U.S. Extension Deal

* Posted by Rafat Ali
* Fri 29 Dec 2006 02:00 PM PST

In UK, ads will run in simulcast online and mobile TV streams for another year, without ad agencies having to pay a separate set of fees to record labels and actors unions for those runs, according to a new year-long moratorium deal reached among the various parties, reports Guardian. Ads featuring US actors and music will still need individual rights clearance.
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising has been working to secure agreement from UK rights holders since Channel 4 was forced in July to pull ads from its simulcast internet TV service due to breach of digital copyright fears. This also effects companies such as BSkyB, which ran mobile simulcasts of the Football League play-offs in May and the autumn cricket internationals; ITV through its mobile TV simulcast offering of ITV1 on 3 and Virgin Mobile TV; and Channel 4’s internet TV simulcast service and mobile service on Virgin.

Till now the ads were being stripped out.
The deal will be reviewed after six months and will then see how TV over mobile and online develops, so a more formal charging structure can be agreed. This is similar in spirit to the situation in "

Mobile Advertising not so great - MoCo News

2007-01-03T12:50:00.000Z

Vast Majority Of Americans Annoyed By Mobile Advertising, Report Reveals

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Tue 02 Jan 2007 04:45 PM

A new report from Forrester Research puts a damper on the excitement around the prospects for mobile advertising. A whopping 79 percent of consumers surveyed said they find the idea of ads on their mobile devices annoying. Among other findings: Most consumers expressed little or no interest in receiving ads -- even when those ads are part of a fr*ee content/app offer; a mere 3 percent of consumers said they trust mobile ads; and only 1 percent said they are, or would be, influenced by text ads on their mobile phones. (Forrester polled 11,134 US and Canadian households -- and used data from four other similar surveys.)

But it's not all bad news. The move by Sprint and Verizon Wireless (both operators have opened up to offer ads on-portal -- Verizon said it will place banner ads on its deck starting this year) lays a solid groundwork for a broad distribution of mobile ads. Now advertisers just have to follow up with well-executed campaigns. Despite consumer aversion to mobile ads, campaigns that fit the medium, and focus on delivering value, can produce positive results. Forrester cites several examples, including a grocery store in Cambridge, MA, that has replaced its loyalty card program with a mobile-only approach that delivers users promotions directly to their mobiles based on their past shopping habits and history. To date, 82 percent of the retailer's shoppers have enlisted in the program, the report said, and 64 percent actively use it.

Advertisers can choose from three methods to get their message across: Text messaging (often incorporating special offers, coupons and short codes), banner ads on a mobile browser, or ad-funded content/app schemes (a particularly tall order since Forrester stats show over 80 percent of consumers consider mobile ads to be a bother -- even if they get fr*ee downloads in exchange for watching them).

Still, success is in reach if advertisers accept that mobile abides by a new set of rules and requires a new mindset, Forrester concludes. This means abandoning classic marketing techniques and understanding that the mobile channel is abbreviated (users don't browse on their mobile, so marketers need to deliver value and relevance without extra steps); transactional (there's a tight connection between the call to action and the user response, so make use of it through methods like click-to-call); and measurable (mobile offers more information about users and their locations, profiles and preferences, so it beats zip-code based approaches by a mile); and integrated (mobile can be tied in with on-premise advertising at outdoor events, on billboards -- the works). As this article in AdAge points out, advertisers that get this (and companies including Toyota do) will eventually bridge the disconnect between industry enthusiasm and consumer acceptance.

FierceWireless predictions for 2007

2007-01-03T10:59:00.000Z

Intuitive navigation is the name of the game

Mobile operators have the content, the high-speed networks and data-capable devices, but where are the droves of customers using data services? 2007 will see a greater emphasis on helping customers better interact with devices and content. Easy discovery is the name of the game. If a customer can't find what they are looking for, they simply won't use a service. We know of at least one major announcement coming down the pipe in this area. Look for a host of players in the wireless data ecosystem work to make devices and user interfaces more intuitive.

Verizon to Allow Ads on Its Mobile Phones - NYT

2007-01-02T09:27:00.000Z

Verizon to Allow Ads on Its Mobile Phones

By MATT RICHTEL
Published: December 26, 2006

VERIZON WIRELESS, among the nation’s most widely advertised brands, is poised to become the advertising medium itself.

Beginning early next year, Verizon Wireless will allow placement of banner advertisements on news, weather, sports and other Internet sites that users visit and display on their mobile phones, company executives said.
The development is a substantive and symbolic advance toward the widespread appearance of marketing messages on the smallest of screens. Advertisers have been increasing the amount they spent on mobile marketing, despite lingering questions about the effectiveness of ads on portable phones.

Verizon officials said their initial foray would be a cautious one — they will limit where ads can appear, and exclude certain kinds of video clips — and thus may invite greater demand to place ads then they can accommodate.

“We know we can make significant dollars in mobile Web advertising in 2007,” said John Harrobin, vice president of marketing and digital media for Verizon Wireless. “That said, we likely will not — we want to take it carefully and methodically, and enable the right experience.” More generally, he added, “Mobile advertising is going to take off in 2007.”
•
In absolute terms, the amount of money spent on advertising on mobile phones has been small but it has been growing rapidly. In 2005, advertisers spent $45 million on such messages, and should spend around $150 million this year, according to Ovum Research, which projects that such spending will reach $1.3 billion by 2010.

The interest of advertisers in the medium stems from a theory that ads placed on mobile phones could create a particularly intimate bond with consumers. The gadgets are ubiquitous, personal, and messages could theoretically be tailored to individuals based on demographics like age, gender and location.

Numerous factors have limited the growth of cellphone advertising. Chief among those factors has been the reticence of carriers to allow ads to appear alongside news, sports and other information that is provided by their official content partners. These partners, from ESPN to USA Today and dozens of others, appear on the content menus that subscribers see when they use their phones to search for information over the Internet.
Carriers have also been concerned about annoying cellphone users with obtrusive marketing messages.

In October, Sprint became the first major carrier to allow advertisements to appear with content that is listed on its menus, or as they are known in the industry, their official content “decks.” Cingular, the nation’s largest wireless carrier, declined to comment on whether it would allow advertising on its decks.

The participation of the carriers would greatly broaden the potential audience. Seventy to 80 percent of what people view on their cellphones derives from links on these decks. The rest of the content is viewed “off deck” — on innumerable content sites that wireless consumers are free to access over the Internet.

Lack of access to these cellphone screens “is one of the biggest considerations right now,” and has limited growth, said Angela Steele, a mobile marketing expert at Starcom USA, a media buying and planning firm whose clients include Kellogg, Nintendo, Oracle and Allstate.

Even without cooperation from carriers, advertisers have been able to reach consumers visiting off-deck sites, and such marketing has grown in size and in scope.

The first advertisers drawn to mobile phones tended to be quick-serve restaurants and hotels — businesses that people might want access to on the go. But increasingly, there is traditional brand marketing, said Jeff Janer, chief marketing officer for Third Screen Media, a mobile ad management company that pairs advertisers and agencies with providers of mobile content, like USA Today and the Weather Channel.
Mr. Janer said an example of the evolution took place over the last few months as Unilever ran an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter campaign on mobile phones. The campaign, which Mr. Janer said cost $75,000 to $100,000, placed small banner ads on sites like the Weather Channel that urged consumers to click on a link to visit the “Kitchen of Love.” The link took them to a site featuring Fabio, the romance heartthrob, who is spokesman for the ad campaign.

“It’s the first consumer products group we’ve run on mobile,” Mr. Janer said.
Mr. Janer, echoing the sentiment of executives from traditional ad agencies, said that mobile phone ad budgets were growing. He said that a year ago, advertisers typically committed $25,000 for a campaign of four to six weeks. That figure is now $150,000 to $200,000, he said.

The ads have tended to involve simple banners or text messages, like those connected to the “American Idol” show, in which consumers are urged to send in a vote. Or they have offered digital coupons, like those that allow Dunkin’ Donut customers to show a coupon on their phone at the counter to get a 99 cent latte. Or they have involved sweepstakes offers.

Increasingly, driven by the growing capability and speed of wireless networks, they involve more intensive graphics, and, to a much lesser degree, video clips.

Despite these developments, advertisers continue to have serious questions about the effectiveness of mobile ads. While acknowledging there is potential for a particularly intimate relationship with phone users, advertisers say there is a dearth of data about whether the ads are motivating consumer behavior.

“There’s still a question of cost and value,” said David Cohen, executive vice president and United States director of digital communications for Universal McCann, an ad agency, whose clients include Microsoft, Sony, Johnson & Johnson and Wendy’s. The agency last week said it had signed a deal to use ad management software provided by Third Screen Media to deliver mobile ads and try to track their effectiveness.

Mr. Cohen said mobile advertising still appeared to be costly and inefficient. Because of a constrained supply of quality ad space, he said, the cost per thousand impressions is around $40, compared to $10 to $15 on the Internet.
•
David Goodrich, director of digital for the West Coast region for OMD, an ad agency, said he did not believe mobile advertising could be particularly effective until marketers could regularly and easily buy space for video clips.

Advertisers “are crazed to get information” onto the phones, Mr. Goodrich said. But the effectiveness “will be really limited until you’ve enabled site, sound and motion.”

That will not be happening anytime soon on Verizon, according to Mr. Harrobin. He said that during extensive tests the company did in determining whether to run ads, and how to run them, it determined that consumers find short, stand-alone video advertisements to be intrusive.

But Mr. Harrobin said that in the tests, consumers did seem to accept a single banner at the top of a page.
“What we don’t want to do is repeat the mistakes of the Internet — spam, interstitials, pop-ups,” Mr. Harrobin said. Bored, offended or inconvenienced consumers could quickly blame Verizon and leave for another service, hurting the wireless carrier’s core business and reducing its monthly subscription fees.

“We offer voice services,” he said of Verizon’s core business. Advertising “is tertiary on top of that.”

Third Screen Media on TV Week Blog

2007-01-02T09:21:00.000Z

Digital Dealmakers: Tom Burgess

By Daisy Whitney

The player: Tom Burgess, founder and CEO of Boston-based Third Screen Media

The play: Third Screen Media provides software that delivers ads to mobile phones and manages the entire ad cycle, from buying to reporting on the effectiveness of campaigns. The software lets ad agencies find inventory to buy, helps the content providers manage ad availability and also ensures the spots are targeted and delivered to the right person with the appropriate frequency.

The pitch: Mobile advertising is poised for growth this year, and Mr. Burgess said advertisers are building dedicated budgets for mobile. Third Screen Media's software works for advertising on mobile Web, mobile video, text messaging and downloadable cellphone applications. Mobile video is growing too, and 2,000 mobile video titles are available to Cingular, Sprint and Verizon Wireless subscribers, according to mobile research firm Telephia. The content providers supplying those programs are eager to get a payback on their investments with advertising revenue.

In the mix: Mr. Burgess has already struck deals with content companies including Weather Channel, ESPN, CBS, TV Guide and Tribune, as well as advertisers such as Ford, Lexus, American Express and Visa. Third Screen Media works with all cellular carriers.

The money guys: The company was founded in 2004 with about $1 million in angel funding. Third Screen has since raised about $15 million in venture capital from firms such as TD Capital and Blue Chip Venture Co. Mr. Burgess said he expects the company to become profitable in 2008.

Pros: Nearly 229 million Americans have wireless phones, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association. Since Third Screen aims to reach mobile consumers through a variety of cellular marketing models, the potential may be huge.

Cons: Advertising on mobile phones is tricky because consumers view their cell phones as personal devices and may resent unwanted marketing intrusions. It's also not clear whether Americans will embrace mobile entertainment as readily as have Japanese and Scandinavian consumers.

Numbers: In 2005, the average mobile advertising campaign cost $35,000. By the end of 2006, Third Screen managed campaigns that checked in at several hundred thousand dollars, Mr. Burgess said.

Competitors: Competition for Third Screen Media includes Millennial Media and Ad Mob.

Backstory: Mr. Burgess and the co-founders devised the idea for the company on the back of a napkin over dinner at a restaurant in Newport, R.I., in 2003. One of the founders still has that napkin.

Who knew?
Mr. Burgess, 42, was born in Boston and raised in New England. He earned a degree from Providence College and worked at startups such as Collegelink.com and 9th Square, as well as in the telecommunications industry. He is married with two kids and lives in Portsmouth, R.I. Proving his mettle as an avid sailor, in 2001, he and his wife sold everything they had-the car, the house and the furniture-and sailed around the world for more than a year, logging more 10,000 miles with two toddlers in a boat.

Mobile Advertising on MocoNews

2006-12-21T19:04:00.000Z

Question Marks Loom Over The Future For Mobile Advertising

Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
Wed 13 Dec 2006 08:07 AM

Mobile advertising is indisputably a potent way to generate value: Consumers are alerted to offers they want, marketers gain traffic by providing relevant offers, and mobile operators capture more revenue from increased mobile content purchases. But will the model really deliver? Courtney Jane Acuff, an associate director at Denuo, the Publicis Groupe consultancy who has studied the market, has her doubts. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, she lists the hurdles advertisers must clear before their efforts begin to pay off. (Research firm eMarketer forecasts spending on mobile-phone advertising will grow 58% to about $860 million in 2007.) The number one obstacle is privacy. Advertisers must be doubly careful their mobile campaigns are not intrusive. And even if they manage this, they face their second biggest challenge: lack of inventory. Certain content providers are offering inventory, such as ESPN, which has advertising opportunities that can include banners and logos. They offer the ability to sponsor text messages. Fox also has opportunities, and it has taken off a bit, where advertisers can create unique content for the mobile device. But there is still a long way to go to having traditional media embrace putting content on cellphones. Finally, there is the third barrier which revolves around consumer education -- or more specifically -- a lack of it. So, is the dream of mobile advertising a pipe dream? Acuff's research shows a willingness to participate by consumers if they feel they can get something out of it. While users are open to video entertainment on their mobiles, they're not warming to video ads -- yet. This means that there is a great opportunity to educate clients about how to best think about engaging consumers with mobile video. It is not an immediate proposition but something that we are watching develop with a hopeful eye towards the future. Overall, the outlook for 2007 is upbeat, provided all parties sit at the table and figure out how to move the market forward, Acuff said. Look for more banner ads on mobile phones (Sprint offers the Sprint mobile media network and, in Europe, Orange has also opened its portal to banner ads). Mobile advertising -- based on demographic targeting, behavior targeting, time of day targeting and even zip code targeting -- may also become more the norm.

Mobile Adv & Mktg,

Virgin Mobile inks deal with Jump Tap - MocoNews

2006-12-21T18:53:00.000Z

Virgin Mobile USA announced a partnership with mobile search developer JumpTap, to launch new search functionalities both within the MVNO's own content deck and off-portal across the mobile web. The new search engine, which goes live in February 2007, will direct subscribers to relevant content and will also offer recommendations based on purchases by users with similar consumer profiles. Building on the "SugarMama" mobile advertising incentive program introduced by Virgin Mobile earlier this year, the JumpTap agreement also expands the carrier's marketing initiatives by organizing and delivering relevant search information to subscribers through sponsored and organic links.

"Navigating through pages of WAP content, or trying to hit websites that aren't mobile-enabled to find that one thing you're looking for, will soon be a thing of the past," Virgin Mobile VP of mobile data services Dominick Tolli said in a prepared statement. "By simply typing in the name of a favorite artist or topic into their wireless handsets, customers will immediately pull up results of all related content from both Virgin Mobile and sites across the Web."

For more on the Virgin Mobile/JumpTap deal:- read this release

Asap.mobi on Netimperative

2006-12-21T14:27:00.000Z

New mobile ad platform set for launch

By Staff 20-12-2006 12:45 PM Related:

A new mobile advertising service and consumer search tool is set to launch giving users access to job, car and property ads on their mobile phones.
The asap.mobi service lets users select appropriate criteria from a variety of drop down boxes then the service will search its database and return matching results.

Findings can be sent to an email account in addition to being accessed through the mobile handset, and will arrive in the form of colour images and neatly summarised descriptions.

The software constructs a personalised homepage for each user, tailoring content to their individual requirements and adding relevant updates.

Furthermore, users also have the option of making direct contact with the relevant agent or advertiser via phone or text message.

The Directors of asap.mobi are presently raising capital for the company, and invite enquiries from potential corporate investors and advertisers, with an offer of subscription open until 30 December 2006.

asap.mobi Plc. was set up 12 months ago by entrepreneur Peter Holsgrove, and the service is presently in a planning and development phase, with initial plans for a consumer launch targeted at spring 2007.

Peter Holsgrove, asap.mobi Managing Director, said: “In developing the product, our focus has been on providing a comprehensive solution for the unique marketing requirements of the property, recruitment and automobile industries.

"Market research has exposed high levels of sustained consumer interest in these key sectors, and there is an ever-increasing need for advertisers to reach their audiences through new integrated channels such as mobile.”

www.asapplc.com

Doc Searls reminder on Gaping Void

2006-12-18T14:26:00.000Z

"there is no demand for messages"

From Doc Searls:

The bulk of advertising -- all $160 billion of it (which buys a lot of art) -- is a conversation between advertisers, media and agents for both. That conversation has enormous flywheels that were forged in the Age of Industry, and carry assumptions that are totally obsolete in a new age when the human beings we've been calling "consumers" are no longer dumb targets in a position only to absorb messages and displace cash.

Remember this essay's title? The main reason I got out of advertising and PR was this epiphany:
THERE IS NO DEMAND FOR MESSAGES

I concur with Doc. That being said, though there may not be a demand for messages per se, there's always going to be a demand for people who are better at selling your product [or idea] than you are.

And none of this is going to go away, no matter how evolved "The Intention Economy" becomes.

Posted by hugh macleod at 7:33 AM | Comments (1) View blog reactions

The Media Day of a Millenial - New York Times

2006-12-18T11:59:00.000Z

Online Marketing on Tagging

2006-12-18T11:47:00.000Z

Defining Tagging

Posted in Online Marketing, Web 2.0, Blog Marketing, SEO, Tagging - Bookmarking, Blogging, Blog Optimization |

This is a re-post, with minor edits, from my blog, Blog on a Stick. I felt that it was worthy of posting here too.
-Thanks Thomas

For those that are just jumping into the blog world, or the Web 2.0 world for that matter, there is a new idea out there called tagging. Much like folders or categories, it’s a way of keeping things organized.

Lets start out simple with folders.

On your computer you have folders. Maybe a documents folder for paperwork, pictures folder for pictures and so on. You’ve probably even created your own folders. “Christmas 2005″or “Work Documents” The idea is to keep your files organized on your hard drive. Simple enough.

The folder idea is our starting point for tags. Granted, folders have nothing to do with tagging, but the idea is the same.

Next, lets move to categories. Categories are set up on blogs to keep like posts together. This blog has categories like SEO, Online PR, Analytics and RSS because those are things that get posted on a lot. Categories should be specific to your blog and they make it easy for users to find information. If this blog was about cars, we may have categories like Ford, Chevy, 2006 Models, Used Cars, Hybrids and so on.

Now we get to tagging. Tagging is much like categories, only they are not usually topics you post on a lot. They are like mini categories almost. The idea is to tag each post with some specific phrases that are not in your categories, but that you feel are important to the post.

I’ve written about American Idol a few times on my blog, Blog on a Stick, but not enough that I feel the need for a category. So I’ve tagged each post with American Idol plus any contestant names that I’m talking about in the post. This helps when tag search engines like Technorati come by and index my posts. They’ll read those tags and offer them up in their tag based searchs. It’s also good to note that your categories will be read as tags too so there is no need to duplicate your category names in your tags.

Basically, tags are just one more way to increase exposure on your site. There are many more ways than regular search engines to get traffic and tagging is one of them.

So how do you tag? It’s easy really. Check your blogging software and see if they have a Tag or Technorati field. If so, just put your words in there and it’ll do the rest. Or, you can add tags to any post by adding rel=”tag” to any link. There is also a nice Tag bookmarklet over at Andrew Beacock’s Blog. That can just be added to your bookmark bar and clicked on when you want tags created.

Once your blog post is live, make sure you ping it by going to Pingoat or PingOMatic. Most blog software will automatically ping for you so you don’t have to worry about that.

If you have Wordpress, check out the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. It’s a great way to include tags with your posts and has many features.

A common misconception with tags is that your link has to go to technorati.com. That’s not true. Technorati will allow any link to be a tag as long as it says rel=”tag” in it.

A lot of Web 2.0 applications are also starting to use tagging more. You can tag photos in Flickr, bookmarks in del.icio.us and documents in Writely. These tags are for searches within their own system. Instead of categories or folders, they choose to use tags to keep your documents organized and searchable.

If you aren’t using tags, you’re missing out on traffic. Tagging is free and easy and can increase your blog exposure.

Interesting note: If you use a Mac and have 10.4, you can get info on a document and put space separated words in the comments area. Then, when you use Spotlight to search, they’ll show up. It’s like you have a tag search built in to the OS.

Helio on Marketing Daily

2006-12-18T11:28:00.000Z

Helio's Buddy Beacon Extends Positioning

by Emily Burg, Monday, Dec 11, 2006 5:00 AM ET

"DON'T CALL IT A PHONE" Helio, the wireless venture of EarthLink and SK Telecom, is building its marketing on the proposition that it offers unique social networking capabilities.

Its Buddy Beacon feature, available on the $225 GPS-enabled Drift handset, allows members to use satellite technology to broadcast their location to friends on their Buddy List. When they turn on Buddy Beacon, their Buddy List friends with Helio devices can spot their physical location on a map along with a nearby address. Members can add up to 25 buddies to their Buddy List.

Helio will explore ways to integrate ads naturally into this process for the coming year, said Craig Shapiro, Helio's head of content strategy and acquisition, at the Mobile Marketing Forum in Los Angeles earlier this month.

"Our demographic pays a premium for our services, so ads should feel natural," Shapiro said. "Local search is going to be big for us in 2007, and our devices with GPS capability offer a unique capability to add value."

Helio also just opened its first of five flagship stores on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, CA, in time for the holiday retail season. The 4,000-square-foot store was built to encourage Helio members and prospective members to hang out, incorporating a lounge-like feel.

"Helio stores are designed to be unlike anything else in the wireless world," said Helio CEO Sky Dayton, in a statement. "They truly embody the Helio spirit of design and the lifestyle of today's young consumers. Now people can experience Helio firsthand while they shop for new exclusive devices or test our cool services. Or our members can cruise by to meet up or just hang out with friends."

Helio, which has been a heavy advertiser on local L.A. radio station Indie 103.1, will be hosting in-store broadcast of the station's programming, as well as live music events, to promote the store's launch.

Helio made its debut seven months ago as the only brand allowing its users to access MySpace wirelessly from handsets. Targeting the same 20-something male audience as competitors Amp'd, Boost Mobile and Virgin, Helio needed to differentiate itself to get customers to buy its proprietary handsets (the least expensive of which is $100) and pay a monthly or a la carte fee for its suite of multimedia services.

Cingular Wireless is now finalizing a deal to put MySpace on its mobile phones.

Emily Burg can be reached via email at emily@mediapost.com

Yahoo Panama on Online Marketing Blog

2006-12-18T10:43:00.000Z

Yahoo Panama - Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

Posted by Lee Odden in Online Marketing, Search Industry News, Yahoo, Interviews, SEM, Spotlight on Search |

Spotlight on Search: Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

There has been quite a bit of buzz on the paid search marketing front with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Advertising platform aka “Panama”. At the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced the launch during a sponsored lunch. Dan Zarrella did a good a review of that session here.

Our YSM account recently went through the upgrade and we’re going through the process of getting familiar with all the new platform features. After talking to my contact at Yahoo PR as well as Mona Elesseily from Page Zero who has written a book about the Yahoo Search Marketing program, I thought it would be good to get some insight directly from Yahoo for Online Marketing Blog readers. John Slade, Senior Director of Yahoo Global Product Management was kind enough to field a few questions for me.

How has the upgrade roll out been going and when do you plan on having everyone moved over?

The upgrade has generally been going quite smoothly. We’ve noticed that most people experience a brief period of disorientation when they get started in the new platform – like when you move in to a new house and need to figure out where your silverware ended up. Once people make it through their orientation to the new platform, we’ve been quite pleased with the responses we’re hearing from customers. We are targeting a complete transition of all of our US advertisers by the end of the Q1 2007.

What are the major differences between the new advertising platform and Yahoo!’s legacy product?

The new platform represents an especially major breakthrough for advertisers because it’s:

Easier and More Effective: Yahoo! consulted hundreds of advertisers to develop a campaign management work flow that is more intuitive and will provide more effective controls and tools than other competitive products.
Action and insight-oriented: Our new campaign management application will provide advertisers with more visibility and insight into their performance and more control over how to improve it. This ultimately provides Yahoo! users with a better online experience.
Built for the future: With the launch of this new platform, Yahoo! will in the future be able to provide advertisers with many more targeting, format and distribution options.

What can you do now to run a campaign that you couldn’t before?

With the new platform, advertisers will have access to many new capabilities for managing their campaigns.

Geo-Targeting – Enables advertisers to display their ads broadly or to narrow their distribution down to specific metropolitan areas, allowing them to better target their customers, customize their ads and control their costs.
Ad Testing – Allows advertisers to easily test multiple versions of their ads to determine the message that works best for their customers. They can also choose to let our systems automatically optimize serving to the ad that performs best on clickthrough rate.
Goal-Based Campaign Optimization – If an advertiser has business metrics they’re trying to hit, such as a CPA, ROI or ROAS goal, our systems can automatically adjust their ad rotation and bids to help them meet those goals.
Campaign Budgeting and Scheduling – Allows advertisers to create, budget and schedule individual advertising campaigns for greater control over their advertising strategy and spending. Advertisers also have the option to place an account and/ or campaign daily spending limit to increase budget control.

What are the fundamental differences between the new Yahoo! Search Advertising platform and Google AdWords? What are the competitive advantages?

The new platform allows advertisers to:

See what kind of volume of leads is available for any given campaign or ad
Understand how search marketing campaigns impact immediate and deferred transactions
Define a standard business goal like “Cost Per Action” (CPA), then let the system automatically find the most cost-effective way to deliver against that goal
Take action on campaigns at the very point of insight
Manage campaigns with the level of control and at the level you want with the tools that best fit their needs/experience

How much of an impact on new Yahoo! advertiser acquisition do you think the new sign up process will have?

Our new sign-up process has been streamlined and simplified with the goal of getting new advertisers up and online as quickly as possible. We’re optimistic that this new process will make it easier for more and more advertisers to take advantage of the quality leads which Yahoo can provide them.

Can you provide an overview of the upgrade process for existing advertisers?

When an existing advertiser is invited to upgrade to the new platform, they will be notified up to two weeks prior to their upgrade date. When that date comes, two links will appear within their current Sponsored Search account – one that will take them to a preview of what their account will look like after the upgrade, and one that will allow them to initiate the upgrade process.

Once an advertiser sees these links, we recommend:

Logging into the account and accessing the preview. This will allow an advertiser to become familiar with how their current listings will be transferred to the new account structure.
Initiate account upgrade. If an advertiser is ready to upgrade to the new Sponsored Search, click on the “Upgrade Now” button that will be displayed within the account. Because the upgrade process can take up to eight hours (during which time advertisers will not be able to make any changes to their account), we recommend initiating the upgrade at the end of their business day, to minimize any disruption to the account.

We expect that many advertisers will want to upgrade as soon as possible, but Yahoo! will work to accommodate advertisers that wish to defer the transition until after the holiday season. Alternatively, advertisers that wish to upgrade even earlier than their scheduled date, they can request to be migrated as soon as possible through the upgrade reservation page.

What was the motivation to offer the upgraded version to new advertisers before existing advertisers?

We’ve been offering existing advertisers the ability to request upgrades to the new platform for several months now. At this point, in addition to that reservation system, we were confident enough in the platform that we wanted to offer the new, streamlined sign-up process to new and prospective advertisers as well.

In your video interview with WebProNews, you mention that the platform is built to be extended to support things like graphical advertising or mobile ads. Along those lines, what kind of enhancements do you have planned for 2007?

Plans for future versions of the new platform include introducing additional distribution options, targeting capabilities and pricing models, whether it’s by demographic, behavior or by combinations of these factors. In addition, the platform will be able to support all kinds of ad formats - from graphical to rich media – and many different kinds of distribution, from a cell phone to a television set.

What resources are available for advertisers that want to learn more?

We have a complete Upgrade Center for advertisers that want to learn about the upgrade process. It contains hints, FAQs, tutorials, and more. It’s available at newsponsoredsearch.yahoo.com.

Thank you Lee for this opportunity to discuss our new platform with you and your readers.

Thank you John! Readers might also be interested in the Yahoo Search Marketing blog.

Om Malik on a potential Google Phone

2006-12-18T09:58:00.000Z

Forget iPhone, Think Google Phone

Written by Om Malik Posted Sunday, December 17, 2006 at 12:33 AM PT

The Observer of London is reporting¹ that Google² might be working with HTC and mobile/telecom giant Orange to build a Google Mobile Phone, which could possibly have Google software inside the device, and would be able to do many of the web tasks smartly. The device, article speculates, could go on sale in 2008. (Of course, we would all have forgotten by then… if it doesn’t happen.) Orange and Google, both declined to comment.

Their plans centre on a branded Google phone, which would probably also carry Orange’s logo. The device would not be revolutionary: manufactured by HTC, a Taiwanese firm specialising in smart phones and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), it might have a screen similar to a video iPod. But it would have built-in Google software which would dramatically improve on the slow and cumbersome experience of surfing the web from a mobile handset.

It would be interesting to see if this comes to fruition. Google, in recent months has become increasingly aggressive about its mobile ambitions³, and is pushing into the carrier space, though there have been some snags⁴.

Google Phone, if you think about it is a reasonable speculation. Google has been aggressive in developing location based services, has amp-ed up its local search and mapping services. In addition, it has also been mobilizing its applications such as GTalk and GMail. YouTube, the video arm of Google, is beginning to embrace the mobile ecosystem.

Normally, one would not spend too much energy on this bit of news. However, presence of Andy Rubin on Google campus gives us a reason to pause.

Who is Rubin? He was one of the co-founders of Danger⁵, the company that makes the Sidekick devices. He sold his last company⁶, Android to Google for an undisclosed amount of money, and he has been holed up in Mountain View, California campus of Google, doing something.

No one knows what, but since Android was focusing on mobile, it is safe to assume that he just might be involved in Android. Danger, as you might know has become a multimillion dollar business based off the “compress web and take it mobile” technology developed by Rubin and others. Businessweek had reported⁷ that Android was working on a cell phone operating system.

One source familiar with the company says Android had at one point been working on a software operating system for cell phones. … In a 2003 interview with BusinessWeek, just two months before incorporating Android, Rubin said there was tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner’s location and preferences. “If people are smart, that information starts getting aggregated into consumer products,” said Rubin.

For Orange, this could be a valuable asset in its triple play ambitions. The company owns broadband businesses across Europe, and has access to 3G networks, and is owned by France Telecom. It could use Google’s web expertise to take on its rivals, by offering web-mobile hybrid phones, and at the same time get a slice of mobile advertising revenues. I know, sounds far fetched, but not out of the real of possiblity.