Category — Mobile

There has been a lot of buzz around mobile coupons and QR codes in the past few weeks. I wrote about 2D barcodes way back in 2008, and its nice to see a second movement in that direction Target announced a national campaign to increase mobile coupons and the use of QR codes in their print ads, Sprint followed with a similar announcement, but particularly there was the launch of a company called stickybits.

Stickybits is a new company that produces a custom 2D barcode which you can print out and place somewhere, people can then use their compatible camera phones to “attach” a message or a link to an associated page that is tied to the physical location of the Stickybit you scanned. The location based implications of this technology being adopted by businesses is very exciting.

Businesses could place stickybit codes inside their physical location and could use that to store specials and “insider-type” information about their business. They could also use the stickybit to force a “check-in” to actually take place inside their business. They could use the location of the code to prompt reward systems and loyalty programs, adding a location based and mobile aspect to their existing program.

Sure the idea that individuals could leave “stickybits” all over the place behind them as they travel, leaving notes and tips is exciting and novel. Actually pretty darn cool. But for me and my train of thought, I can’t help but see the applications of this for local businesses.

With a simple way to approach it (I will creat an account and order some stickybits and report back on the level of simplicity), local businesses can be making a valuable and big step into local mobile marketing, while reinforcing their existing loyalty programs and driving in-store foot traffic, two things that mostly signal more business. And more business is something everyone can use.

The power of your competing with your friends for trophies has been a force since man first evovled from ape. Whoever killed the biggest animal fed the most people, and gained fame throughout the land. Today there are many trophies, many competitions and most of us have a bunch of friends. In today’s world of hyper connectivity, we can stay in touch with friends and acquaintances just as if they lived across the hall. This leads us to follow our innate competitive instincts and make a bunch of stuff over which we can compete peacefully. In this hyer-connected world, we have many examples of how games and trophies become popular, sought after and create successful businesses. The NFL is based on competition, Major League Baseball, UEFA,  The Olympics, all multi-billion dollar businesses built around the peaceful exploitation of competition.

But there are other levels of competition, ranging from who has the nicest car, to who has the most followers on Twitter. Us crazy people spend hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars and massive resources to win the imaginary trophies that the world offers to us. But alot of these games are fun, meaningless ways to interact with your friends and associates. Zombie Toss on Facebook, ReTweeting and now the ultimate example - Foursquare.

Foursquare captures all the potential of Twitter, and makes a fun game around who can go to more places and “check in” You can become the mayor of your favorite coffee shop, win badges for hitting multiple spots in a night, and show off your badges to all of your hermit friends. The intriguing game of checking in and badges is only the front of what could become a brilliant business idea, and I believe will capture the potential value of twitter to many of the small businesses staring aimlessly at a little baby-blue bird.

What Twitter first started out as, and what got me intrigued was the ability to broadcast where I am, to the people who cared. Now Twitter has become much more than that, but Foursquare takes that fundamental use-case, and makes a fun game out of it. It tracks and records where I go, how often I go, and withwhom I go (of course, only when I tell it). This information is absolutely invaluable to small businesses. Deli’s can learn their customers favorite sandwiches, discover problems in their offerings, and find out who their best customers really are. Then they could be able to send out offers to those customers who “checked in” They could build an email database to lure those customers back in. There are so many business applications to Foursquare, so many more obvious ones than for Twitter itself, I would buy Foursquare if I were Twitter - like tomorrow.

Foursquare is a fun application that takes human nature’s desire to see their friends and show off their trophies and turns it into a desire to go out more, tell the world where they are and win some meaningless badges. But all that adds up to great data for small businesses, great marketing opportunities for those businesses and a whole bunch more percieved immediate value than simple twitter feeds (to small businesses). Instead of trolling through twitter searches, I can just go to my business page on Foursquare and see what people are saying - and who’s coming.

I have several great takeaways from Foursquare’s app, but really its fun and it makes me want to go out more so I can check in again. Who doesn’t like badges?

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?

I was doing some late night number crunching and data research and I came across some interesting points. A few I touched on earlier in the week, but I’ve had some more time to address some of these and I wanted to talk about them. There are huge numbers involved here, and some interesting theories that I haven’t quite finalized in my head. Maybe these thoughts will help clear that up.

Check out this post form Conde Nast in February talking about the Yellow Pages. It is fairly amusing considering how just about anyone you ask in the Northeast will admit that they don’t care much for print advertising. (We hear this all the time) Note the comment:

If Nielsen can’t get TV viewership right after all of these years, how on earth can the Yellow Pages Association know how many times anyone “references” the Yellow Pages?

Thats exactly the point, you can’t track how people use the yellow pages, you can’t see which people read your ad, or how many times people read it and took action, or no action. There is no data to support their continued use.(or even to figure out why people aren’t using them anymore)

However, people still need to find stuff; restaurants, clothes, hotels, doctors, lawyers, whatever… simply now people are turning to the web for a quicker, easier search experience. And search is dominating the web these days. Google is raking it in, Yahoo and Microsoft are scrambling to get a bigger piece, and startups like Cuil and Mahalo are trying to get break into the scene. But however they’re gonna find it, people are going to use search, more specifically local search.

Local search will soon be the king of search, as the economy tightens, people are traveling less and are generally more concerned with whats happening in their community. (and thus more willing to spend their x dollars locally) A particularly powerful quote from A new report by Borrell Associates (which I referenced in an earlier post):

“Local online advertising,” defined as search, “local banners,” and video (classifieds are also in there), would reach $12.6 billion in 2008, with “local search” contributing roughly $5 billion to that total.

Those are big numbers, and there are big players already in and entering the local search market. But there are a lot of nuances in local, people are different, politics matter and most often they have no idea who Marc Andreesen is, they don’t care who backed your startup, they dont care about the fancy rails technology your site runs on. They want results and they want to talk to a person.

There is no concrete answer to the question of who will succeed in local search, there are many verticals and plenty of niches to tackle, but there is certainly going to be a battle over it in 2009. And I didn’t even touch on mobile, which Google’s Eric Schmidt thinks will one day be more profitable than anything else they do. Thats a scary thought.

Will the general population move towards mobile search, are we still two or three years away? Or will local search dominate 2009? I know there are other much hotter topics, but seriously if you are reading this you probably aren’t Joe Cleveland. (Ok, easy)

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…

The world of old media is degrading faster than ever. Newspapers have been suffering more than ever before, and are losing necessary traction in local markets. TV is beginning to embrace digital media as an alternative source of media, but as a new member of media is a step above print in the food chain.

So where does this lead us? How do the old guys (read newspapers, but include old TV guys), compete on a level playing field where consumers are more and more determining their place and time to consumer their media. (A great discussion of this topic can be found at Screenwerk)The rise of the internet, and mobile specifically should be seen by these players as bountiful opportunities. They have strong brand presence in their market, established goodwill and existing relationships in their respective communities. Except there is one thing missing from them: awareness of the opportunity vs rather than observation of the threat.

I had a meeting recently with some “old guys” interested in reaching a more engaged, younger audience via a partnership through with local search. They were smart, experienced and were using a pretty good model and having success with it. But 10 minutes into the meeting, I could tell they didn’t get it. They knew what I was talking about, but they didn’t get how the differentness of what we were discussing made it better. A classic “old way of doing something with new technology, vs new way of doing something” issue. And it wasn’t the first time I saw it.

Newspapers are still in trouble and now seem to be past “denial” of the threat the web poses to them, but they remain stubborn in embracing it. Local content should be celebrated and contributions should be encouraged, however the model of user generated content and social collaboration that has made so many online organizations successful continues to be rejected. Until Web 2.0 is embraced by old media, newspapers in particular, they will continue to falter.

Newspapers more than any other medium are most well positioned to capture value out of their local markets with the web. The lack of their expansion into other verticals is a prime example of their stubbornness. They would have to sack it up and realize that there is potential revenue through a different medium. Hundreds of other companies have realized this and have capitalized on these gaps. Yelp, every version of the yellow pages and all local directories are in existence today because the big players (newspapers) failed to act.

Now what is the next space that the new, big players will fail to act in?

We are working on developing an entirely new pricing structure, from the sales materials to the training to the handling of new and recent prospects to the web architecture that facilitates it. Whole new focus, which I’m very excited about. So far this month its taken on very well.

What I’m curious about is how other companies my size are handling the current economic climate. From a general downturn, to the burgeoning online economy. I’ve been hearing alot about some other startups in our field and laugh and wonder about some of their statements.

There’s alot going on in the local search market, and its only going to get more packed. Its a very exciting time to be involved in local, and we are getting after it.

Time will tell who will make it to the “next level”