Category — Mobile Web

Today was a very exciting and exhausting day. Introducing some new people to the site, adding some great people to the team. Its amazing. Welcome to 2009.

I have an interesting perspective on what I’m doing. I learned my tricks from battling in the streets. When I first started I walked the streets with a blue  paper folder (the kind with the pockets), print outs from Word with a description of my new website.

“Thats, great kid. Let me know when someone else is on it.” - Ok

I learned that small businesses don’t really care about the internet. They dont care about SEO, they don’t care about fancy algorithms and pre-roll ads. They care about getting customers in their door and making them happy. I learned quickly that if you can make marketing easy for them they will listen. I learned that if you could show them new customers at a lower CPA than the local paper, they would not only listen - they would buy.

I have great idea’s everyday, I have a really great idea in my head right now and I know its 6-10 months away from happening.  In the past few weeks I got my girlfriend to start blogging, I think she finally understands how Twitter is cool and she even set up and iGoogle page this weekend. My parents have a computer in the kitchen (you have no idea about my parents - whats facebook?). People are using the internet to find things they need. - But of course they are Jamie! - Yes, but now they’ve realized they can find all kinds of crazy things they need on the internet easier than with their (insert non web-based tool). There are so many great things to do out there, the internet is going to explode when this economy recovers.

People aren’t leaving their neighborhoods like they used to. And if they are they are planning their trip from their desk, via the internet. They are searching for local businesses, for location specific activites and destination related things to do. This is what we mean by local. This is why Google introduced its OneBox (those bastards!) and its why everyone and their mother is started the latest and greatest local search site.

Well I didn’t figure out local was cool last quarter. I didn’t notice people were starting to ramp up local searches in June, not even of ‘07. I’m not telling you 2009 is going to be “the year of local” [trumpets sound]. But I am loving it. Loving the buzz, loving 2009 trend predictions from J.P. Morgan and Barclays. Loving the fact that a small company from Boston is dominating a huge billion dollar company with an almost identical name because its thinking small.

I’ll leave you with this, because you’re probably in the same game I am somehow or another. So cheers:

Internet activity continues to increase as the medium plays a more significant role in people’s lives, and this increased usage and dependence should leave Internet companies well-positioned when the macro environment improves.

- Barclays’ Doug Anmuth

Dear BlackBerry,

I love you.

I love you’re easy to use features. You’re quick response. The convenience key that lets me switch applications as fast as I need. I have loved you since I had the first BB, with the side scroll and the strange-at-first double letter qwerty keyboard. I loved my 8830 even more than I could imagine I would love a phone. I enjoyed that phone for nearly 2 years. Crushing google maps, downloading new apps and dealing with the adequate browser that could out Google an iPhone. Man do I miss those days.

I purchased the Storm the day it came out. I spent the weekend after playing with it, trying to love it. But it just wouldn’t happen. I customized it the way I needed it to be and the I wanted it. Touch screen is cool. I’ve avoided an iPhone because I didn’t want to give up my keyboard. I wanted an iPhone so bad, but it was on AT&T and my good friend couldn’t make or receive phone calls in his apartment in Battery Park. Manhattan. Really - you’re phone doesn’t make telephone calls in Manhattan - I don’t care where you are - this is the capital of the modern world here in NY. Your cell phone should work everywhere.

My Storm is faster than any iPhone with the browser, including the 3G. I haven’t used any special testing software to gauge milliseconds or nanoseconds - to the common eye it is significantly faster. Give me a first generation iPhone and you’re not even in the running. Verizon’s network is MUCH better than AT&T with everything that I have compared.

But RIMM, you disappoint. My Storm freezes. It displays the camera while I’m typing an email - for no reason. It gives me black screens - flashing sometimes, for who knows why. I try to change from side to upright - the accelerometer is slow to respond. I shouldn’t have to count and show my friends how long it takes to react.

Man am I pissed.

I did the upgrade that Verizon recommended. Worlds better. But still not good enough. Not good enough to compare with 3 years of faithful BlackBerry loving. This device is barely worth the Verizon name and is not anywhere near the value of a BlackBerry name. It is a really cool phone, but when I need to make a call/ text/ email and I have to turn it off, disconnect the battery, then restart because the screen is not responding. That is bush league. And BlackBerries should not be bush league.

I’m trading this back in for my Curve and getting an iPhone. I still hate AT&T and I would pay $1,000 for a Verizon iPhone. But the iPhone is cool, and it does work. And thats what I need in a phone I use for work. Not a fancy clickable touchscreen. Not even a touch screen. I need a phone I can depend on. To Google, to Map, to Email, to text. I can get all the fun stuff I want from an iPhone. But when I need it to work, well BlackBerry - the Storm just gets blown away.

I think 2D barcodes are so cool. As a marketer I am truly excited about the ability to quickly and easily capture an offline impression into a measurable transition online. Its a great way to get relevant data about how often my marketing is reaching a targeted person. Just as powerful as a Click-Through in my mind, only not online.

As a publisher, I’m excited to see this technology become commonplace and be used to validate buys and placement.

As a person, I think it would be intriguing to point and shoot at a barcode for a movie ad and watch the trailer on my phone right there. Or see and ad for 30% off that thing I was thinking about buying this week and buy it right now. There are some pretty cool mobile apps out there now that are doing similar things with actual barcodes. Oooh, imagine when that gets semantic….

Considering this is the end of August, last week was surprisingly full of news in the mobile arena. There were several market studies released in the past month, and they’ve got me excited about mobile again.

Jumptap just announced a very major Series D raise - $26 Million led by AllianceBernstein. They will be using the funds to build out and improve their growing mobile advertising platform, with the plan to capitalize on the growing mobile search and advertising market. In their release Dan Olshwang also points out that mobile devices now outnumber PC’s with over 3.3 billion devices in use worldwide.

“Internet advertising is currently growing at a compound annual rate of 18.3% and will reach $73 billion in 2011. What is really exciting about mobile advertising is its ability to eclipse Internet advertising,” said Dan Olschwang, President and Chief Executive Officer of JumpTap.

Those are some really smart people pouring huge amounts of money into Mobile search. Considering the overwhelmingly tight credit market right now, this is a really astonishing deal. And its really not getting any major press (at least that I’ve found). I had to dig all the way to JumpTap’s “News” page to find the release.

One of the reasons why there seems to be a recent resurgence of mobile is that there is data flowing out of  all the major research firms indicating significant growth in mobile use, both the volume and frequency. Gerg Sterling pointed out an interesting report from Nielsen Mobile that shows some intersting data on mobile search (and surpise - domination by Google of the market). According to the report about 89% of searches were in the three categories of “Information,” “Local Listings” “and Websites/Navigation.”

Most relevant to my local interests is that 29% of all mobile searches were for “local listings” and 33% were for “Information” (- thats a pretty broad term). In an August 12th report Neilsen Mobile noted that US and Eurpoean markets were “more mature” and mobile use was focused around email and search, compared to entertainment as the leading segment in Brazil, Russia, India and China. Entertainment doesn’t fall in the top 5 for US and EU - (But city guides/maps do!). This data goes along with a trend that JumpTap is reporting as well:

JumpTap notices a shift away from entertainment-centric searches, such as ring tones and downloads. It reports more navigational searches: Users looking for websites (such as specific social networking sites) and utilities (such as email) on their devices. (From msearchgroove)

This data points out that people are beginning to use their mobile devices for real life tasks, perhaps representing the beginning of the shift from computers to Mobile Devices. One of the frequent arguments against mobile advertising was that mostly people were going online to download wallpapers and ringtones for the phones (which is pretty uselss for any marketer not representing wallpapers or ringtones), but now a widespread adoption of mobile use is changing that argument.

The market is maturing and the huge investment by AB shows that the day when our phones replace our laptops is one day closer. I hadn’t put much thought into mobile until recently, but all this talk of Googles Android and their “Content Market“, iPhone and of course their apps, is hard to ignore. Will marketers begin to listen, or will old school execs continue their slow migration to online media one step at a time?

Ok, so the iPhone phrenzy has calmed down slightly and every major news outlet or blog has covered their view of the device. Now lets examine how the opportunities in mobile have evolved with this fancy new device.

The GPS capabilities have been upgraded so my iPhone friends will be able to easily figure out, not just who, but also where they are. This brings a variety of Location Based Services to the iPhone that are more readily available now. Local coupons, location aware information and a slew of soon to be spammy SMS services are sure to be around the corner.

I’d like to focus on an interesting new technology that is very popular in Japan, and I’ve mentioned before - 2D Barcodes. Google made these next generation bar codes available in their print ads. Heres an excerpt from their explanation:

Recently, you may have seen newspaper ads for ServiceMagic placed through the Google Print Ads platform. These particular ads include a Google Consumer Response Tag (CRT) with multiple response mechanisms: URL, search terms, phone number, coupon code, SMS code, and 2D barcode. This test is part of our efforts to make print advertising more useful for readers and more measurable for advertisers. 2D barcodes are an especially exciting part of this because they allow readers to “click” on interesting print ads with their cellphones and seamlessly connect to relevant online content.

Whats really exciting about these “Quick Response” codes, is that many features of these 2D bar codes will soon be reaching consumers and connecting them instantly with businesses. With their application to convert local search online to the real world (and vice versa) these QR codes could be extremely valuable to marketers and small businesses.

To the right is an example of a 2D Barcode from the website semapedia.org. Semapedia.org lets you take a link from wikipedia, wikimedia and several other wikis, create a 2D Barcode to link back to specific articles, then print it and place it where ever you wish. Their goal is to “connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.” Now picture this applied to your favorite restaurant, or take out place.

You’re walking down the street, right around the corner and you see an ad for the deli. You whip out your phone and snap a picture of the code and bang, you just got a free beverage if you come into the deli and order a sandwich in the next 10 minutes. Just bring your phone.

This technology has applications across many mediums, business types and ad types. Use it to get more information on cars at the bus stop, movies on the subway, hotel rooms at rest areas or just about anything - on demand, on location, while the consumer is in purchase mode. Talk about ROI, send the coupon to a tracking URL and see how many coupons are redeemed from your coupon.

No Nigerian Spammers, no number harvesting, just on demand information. Brilliantly simple.

I see an opportunity in a tinyurl style “QR” generator. Although there are a couple companies doing it in Europe and Japan (Kaywa seems to be the most friendly). They currently offer personal QR codes free as well as enterprise and API use for a fee. Unfortunately there is little traction in the market here in America, as usual we are behind the mobile curve.

Here is an example of mobile marketing from Sweden: Crossmedia Avenue ran a MMS campaign for a pension insurance company that invited users to send in a picture of themselves and see their face transformed 70 years in the future. With over 262k photos sent via MMS in one month! That is a powerful response in a country of 9 million people. I can’t imagine that we are more than 9-12 months away from these sort of campaigns coming to the US.

With over 14 million BlackBerry’s sold last year in the US, iPhone sales expected to reach 10 million world wide by the end of this 2008 and analysts expecting the pie to keep growing, the proliferation of smartphones into our lives is close to reaching a critical mass.

Now if only I could grow a second set of thumbs…

Last night Ryan Seacrest was on Larry King, and was speaking on a variety of issues, including the usual useless gossip, but he also touched on his BlackBerry Addiction. Larry asked him about the several businesses he runs and how he manages to keep them all together and when he sleeps. His response was basically that he turns his BlackBerry to silent, but wakes up routinely to check it through the night. I was watching this with my girlfriend and she informed me that Ryan’ BlackBerry use sounded an awful lot like mine.

Took a fairly last minute trip to North Carolina to visit my Grandmother, and we crushed the BlackBerry on the way here. Same old stuff for me that I’ve written about before, but it emphasizes how relevant it truly is. AT&T has announced that it will subsidize the release of the 3G iPhone this summer by as much as $200. BlackBerry announced its new “Bold” device (with 3G). Overall, the market for mobile phones and web-rich devices is growing enourmously. If people are able to buy iPhones for 2 or 3 hundred dollars, imagine how many they will sell.

Once everyday people, not just the early adopters and business savvy customers, but everyday Jones is able to access rich, mobile internet - then we will see the explosive growth in mobile advertising. I’m very excited to see what happens in the 4th quarter this year…

This week I saw a few examples of how mobile is finally beginning to cross the chasm between innovators and early adopters. Large players are seeing a shift in their advertising dollars, Google announced it was making a major partnership with Sprint, and launched their international portal for iPhones, iMedia Connection came out with a great overview of mobile barcodes, and also yesterday my BlackBerry was with out data for about 4 hours and I kind of freaked out.

The combination of these events, along with specific posts from two of my favorite bloggers (David Berkowitz on privacy and Darren Herman on privacy) led me to the conclusion that we are near the tipping point of doing something great with mobile (working on a very cool new mobile tool for our company).

If you read David and Darren’s posts, you’ll see that they feel strongly about privacy and the prospect of invasion of your personal space on a cell phone. I don’t see mobile marketing being a success if its seen as an invasion; however, mobile marketing becomes a success when marketers are able to reach people as they are in transaction mode. Transaction mode being any of the following: “Lets find a hotel nearby,” “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “I really want one of those…” etc. As marketers see the value in reaching users searching for this information, and the mobile device becomes more of a “pocket” notebook computer more dollars will flow across the mobile airwaves.

As the devices transition, the dollars will transition behind them.

I came across a few new interesting things this weekend. Here’s a quick overview as I’ve got a busy day and I’m stealing time right now…

Outside.in (http://outside.in/) Outside.in is an interesting example of aggregating local news and information. I discovered some new things happening in Providence, that I wasn’t aware of. It does a pretty good job of collecting different stories from different perspectives and on a variety topics, all focused around local. It does not, however, do a particularly good job facilitating an experience in Providence beyond the discussions being had on their page. Again, their revenue model seems to be based on supplying relevant content and serving your standard skyscraper ads from national brands (that don’t seem to be well targeted).

They claim to have discussions on 11,860 towns and neighborhoods on their site, but most of them seem to be large towns/cities in the Northeast / West Coast. (nothing new there). Anyway, an interesting take on local and I’m intrigued to see where they take it or what I can learn from it.

NY Times Mobile Real Estate: I noticed this ad on the back page of the Business section this morning as I was reading with my coffee. It basically allows you to text the number of a listing in the NYT to their number and it sends you back more details and a link to that listing’s mobile site. I tried it out, but the first listing I sent returned “We’re sorry but that listing is not available in NYT Mobile,” I tried it again and voila! it sent me the name of the property, the location of the property, the price, the listing agent and a link to the mobile site for that listing. The link took me a mobile site about the listing, and had every little detail I could want about the property (photos, taxes, schools, etc).

I think its a somewhat cool implementation of mobile for the NYT, however its not very out of the box. I am still tied to looking up these listing numbers either in print or on their website. A better and perhaps more useful application would be to incorporate location based services into this app and have it feed you back listings in your area. I walk to Chelsea and say, “I want to live here” and the NYT (or anyone else) tells me what is available literally in this area.

Those are my thoughts for the morning, what do you think?…

I spent this absolutely beautiful weekend in NYC. My college roomate’s 25 birthday party Friday night, and an afternoon and evening of exploring the upper east side with my girlfriend. Almost everything we did was facilitated by my mobile device (Verizon BlackBerry 8830). I love this phone, its my second BlackBerry and a HUGE upgrade from my last.

Regardless of the device, we used it for just about everything we did (even a bit of navigating in Central Park). On the train we read about a dozen different reviews to get a sense for what we were in for. We used its GPS functions to give us directions to the Club we went to Friday night (Azza @ 55th and Lex), after we got in the cab. Saturday, we looked up the Pope’s schedule using the browser (yes we saw him in the flesh, along with his 4 block motorcade). Then we found an excellent Brasserie on 79th Street using the Google Maps App. As we waited for our food, we looked at a Map of Central Park to figure out the best path for where we were heading (Belvedere Castle - man what a beautiful day). On our way home, we looked up Movie Showtimes.

The point of this story is that in the past 48 hours I used a mobile device to facilitate 3 transactions, and to find and research essential information that I otherwise would have had to look up prior to leaving my apartment. Each one of those was an opportunity for an advertiser to reach me, while I was interested, while I was about to make a purchasing decision, literally at that moment. How valuable would it have been to the Brasserie across the street from the one I found online? - $38. How much was it worth to Azza to get us there and not have us stop somewhere else? - way more than $38.

Why are people still so bearish about mobile? Nearly everyone in NYC has a mobile device capable of using the internet, millions of people are purchasing them everyday, and the state of Mobile in Japan and in Europe is way ahead of ours. And the Instant return for advertisers must be so appetizing to marketers.

The iPhone, BlackBerries, and all the new broadband capable mobile devices are facilitating easier access to valued information via the mobile web. Once marketers figure out how to reach this growing base of mobile users (which they are beginning to , see Amazon), its going to get hot. And quickly. Mobile has to be the next arena of growth, because everyone else is doing it.

Almost everything I do, I use my mobile device to help me do it better or faster. I read the news, blogs and email. I get directions to my appointments and meetings, I get the latest scores on demand.

There is so much that I do that I am transitioning to my phone. Remember when people started transitioning to the web? I see that happening with mobile.