NY Times article on mobile advertising
An interesting
article yesterday from the New York Times provides an overview of recent developments in mobile advertising/marketing in the US. According to research by Ovum the size of the mobile phone advertising market was only $45 million in 2005, but is expected to grow to $1.26 billion by 2009.
Potentially the US could leapfrog the European mobile marketing approach by deploying the latest mobile software technologies. In Europe mobile marketing has been stuck for some time in the quagmire of simple text messaging campaigns. In contrast the US is already experimenting (see ESPN example below) with video advertising on handsets. This would allow for interstitial video advertising while waiting for a download of the latest iTune or mobile game to your mobile. In other words a short advertising message is played to the user while they wait for a content item to download. This is now very possible with 3G high bandwidth mobile networks.
This fits nicely with the alatto
Tribes approach which allows insertion of unobtrusive adverting banners while users browse the mobile web. See for example our
recent campaign with Lucozade.
Google acquires(ed?) Canadian mobile firm
Google has announced that they have acquired
Reqwireless "out of Waterloo, Ontario"
Apparently the deal took place last Summer for the proverbial undisclosed sum but only announced now. Nothing special just a mobile java browser. In other words users can access the internet from their mobile using the Reqwireless independent software tools instead of the embedded browser provided with the handset. There are several other providers of similar portable java browsing systems so the question is there anything special or unique about this offering. However the team behind Reqwireless are well regarded. Reqwireless raised USD400k in seed funding in 2003 so good to see Google not just interested in large companies. The Canadians are all excited but it would be great to see Google engage with a European company.
Has the potential acquisition of Opera floundered I wonder? The timing would indicate that this deal occurred before negotiations with Opera. However reqwireless could essentially be a much cheaper (and perhaps even technically superior) version of opera?
Two "new new" things: Yahoo mobile client and Plazes
A couple of interesting things on the blogs this morning.
Firstly Yahoo have released a Symbian client dubbed
Yahoo!Go - I am not sure where precisely to put the exclamation mark or marks!!
Interesting as it is essentially a mobile version of their web site including extensive synchronisation. I think this app illustrates a key point. Conventional PC based websites do not work on mobile handsets so there are really only two possible approaches:
A - build a functionally rich client optimised for the specific site
B - acknowledge that mobile browsing is DIFFERENT and build the service accordingly from scratch optimised for the mobile channel
Yahoo! have taken Option A here with the resulting drawbacks: special client download required and only works on a minority subset of handsets. This app is 1.8 Megs! and only works on limited handsets - in this case Symbian OS.
With
Tribes we take the "B" route and the service is guaranteed to work on all handsets with no download configuration.
The
other interesting service I saw today is called
Plazes. This looks like a very innovative service whereby users can register locations and provided information on a "wiki" open source basis for consumption by others. For example I have registered as a"Discoverer" of the busiest shopping street in Dublin Grafton Street
here.
The alleged benefit to me then is that I can start to resell location data in the plazes network relevant to this location. Hmmm.. so could be one of these services that really takes off or flop very quietly. Anyway I am now taking interested bids for Grafton Street via e-mail:-)
The annual Mobinet mobile data usage survey
This annual AT Kearney/ Cambridge Business School research is very relevant for Tribes.
See interpretive text
here and raw statistics are
here.
Headline statistics particularly relevant to
Tribes:
Penetration of data-enabled, multimedia phones has increased to
53 percent, with 56 percent of multimedia phone owners actually using it to browse their operator's portal, the internet or to access mobile email, and doing so at least once a month. This number stands in stark contrast to the 36 percent of users who used these services in 2004.
Doing some basic extrapolation of these data they imply that 29% of users in the surveyed 21 countries browse the operator's portal once a month.
More importantly this represents a
55% increase on 2004!. Looks quite probable that in 2006 mobile browsing will finally come of age.
BTW: This report is free!
and not only but also: Bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit!
