MobHappy

Optimized Sites vs Optimizing Browsers

One thing that pretty much everybody seems to agree on is that browsing the Web on mobile phones isn't what it should be, The disagreement comes in on what to do about it. One the one hand, you've got people pointing to the content as the problem, offering up the .mobi domain as a zone for mobile-specific content. On the other, you've got mobile browsers that aim to deliver a desktop-like experience, such as Opera, and Minimo -- the release of a preview version of that this week having spawned this line of thought. (There are also proxy services to consider, like Google Mobile or AOL's new mobile search, but I think they're generally fairly frustrating and useless, so I'll leave them out).

So, basically, what should change? Should sites adapt to the user, or should we all just get Opera? While I'm interested in finding the right answer from the publisher/content provider side as well, I'm going to focus on the user experience here. My primary concern (and frustration) as a user is being able to find the right content. Knowing where to go for mobile content can be a real problem, as it always has been. There was never a standard for where to find mobile-formatted content: wap.site.com. site.com/wap, site.com/mobile, mobile.site.com, even the ill-fated mmm.site com idea. That's assuming the URL had any sense to it at all: ESPN's mobile-formatted site sits at http://pocket.espn.go.com/ or http://proxy.espn.go.com/wireless/espn/html/pocketpc. How the hell am I supposed to find and/or remember that?

The .mobi idea is to have something like ESPN.mobi. That makes some sense, but how do I know which sites support it and which don't? I guess I'm just supposed to check through trial and error. Using a browser like Opera's got a simpler solution: I just punch in espn.com like on the desktop. The page loads, sure (though I get a memory full error), and the browsers got some nice technology to render pages for the small screen. But the result isn't always real pretty.

The second issue is what content's there. I've got certain things I've grown accustomed to seeing or using on certain sites when I access them from my desktop, and it's not unreasonable -- or at least it shouldn't be -- to expect them to be available on my mobile too. An advanced browser promises to give you everything on a site. With the mobile-specific content of .mobi, that's less clear. This is what Tim Berners-Lee was talking about when he came out against .mobi because it promises to create device-specific areas of the web.

So I guess the score is 1-1, indicating the solution's somewhere in the middle. While I think .mobi is a pretty stupid idea, it does highlight the need to make it easier for mobile users to find relevant content. But why not just have sites sniff what kind of browser or device is being used and change what's displayed? On the other hand, just having a powerful HTML-capable browser is nice, but it creates a fair amount of usability issues.

The way forward: give me a browser that can handle whatever I throw at it, but make sites a little more friendly by realizing that I'm on a mobile device and don't have a 1600x1200 display. Design the mobile site so it's easier to use, but don't cut out services and content I can access on the desktop. Don't corral me over on one small part of the Internet, either -- walling me into a garden will just annoy me.

Neither having a great HTML browser on a phone nor having a bastardized "mobile-optimized" site alone is the ideal solution, and asking for both isn't unreasonable. But until phone vendors and carriers on one side make browsers a real priority and content providers on the other side begin to understand and respect mobile users, the mobile Net will continue to suffer by not meeting average Joe Users' expectations of the Web.

Heh, noticed just as I was publishing that I'm not the only person thinking along these lines today -- Russell Beattie's got a nice post on reformatting vs. rethinking for mobile.

Exclusive Deals Could Hold Back Mobile Music

British pop star Robbie Williams has signed an exclusive 18-month deal with T-Mobile where the operator will offer exclusive content, some of it embedded in handsets it sells. Williams is undoubtedly popular around the world -- he's sold 51 million albums -- but are these kinds of exclusive deals what's really going to make people believers in mobile music? It's doubtful.

While some die-hard fans may be convinced to switch to T-Mobile for the exclusive content, the vast majority of people won't care. When Apple launched iTunes, or Napster started, they weren't built around a single artist, and that's why they succeeded. There's an implication in these sorts of single-star-centric promos that unless you're a fan of this one particular person, that there's nothing in the offering for you -- and the number of potential users alienated by that far outweighs the number that will be attracted by it.

Cross-posted to The Mobile Music Blog.

Taxi Aggregator Launches

Crane Dragon appears to be a London, England based company founded by a bunch of bright, successful guys (no women on board - bad news) to create start-ups. A kind of next-gen tech uber-VC, that invests its own money in creating next-gen tech ventures. Very cool.

Except, I'm sorry to say, that its first concept is doomed - just my opinion obviously - which doesn't bode well for its future.

Texxi ("the taxi you text") is a Demand Responsive Transit Brokerage system. In other words, this means that if you want to order a taxi, you text in the Post Code of your destination. Then, Texxi's server aggregates your details with other travellers who want to go to the same place and confirms the taxi driver's name and badge number and tells you and your fellow passengers where to meet up to board the taxi.

In turn, the taxi driver gets an sms with his/her new passengers' booking references and is told where the hook up place is.

This sounds pretty cool on the face of it. The Texxi user pays a fixed price per journey of £5 ($8.77) in the launch city, Liverpool, which is probably lower that they would have paid on their own. The driver probably gets a higher fare than they would normally get for the same work. Oh ...and there's some laudable environmental benefits too, of cutting down on CO2 emissions and stuff.

So what's wrong with the business model? In my opinion, it's flawed on a number of levels, from simple usability to practicality to a failure to understand human nature.

The first (and biggest) problem is the classic Catch 22 faced by this kind of business. Taxi drivers won't sign up without passengers - and passengers won't sign up without taxi drivers.

Just supposing I'm in Liverpool right now and 1. Know about Texxi 2. Remember the not-so-catchy short code of 87222 and 3. Actually know the Post Code of where I want to go.

So I text my Post Code in and wait. The question is, how long will I wait? Because even in a city the size of Liverpool, the chances of finding even one other person wanting to go to the same location at the same time is actually pretty remote - let alone three or four others, unless they happen to be with me already.

Will I wait an hour? Very unlikely, as I'm either in a bit of a hurry (hence the need for a taxi) or it's late (and I'm drunk, which doesn't make me a patient passenger able to follow instructions very well.). So after 10 minutes, I get fed up and make other arrangements, forgetting (or I can't be bothered) to tell Texxi.

15 minutes later, the taxi driver rolls up to find no one there. Or possibly one person offering £5 for a £15 journey. How many disappointments will the driver experience before giving up and slagging the service off to all his driver mates?

Hmmm.

Their next problem is Taxi Driver Inertia (TDI). We've seen this problem with Zingo, which I've written about before. Zingo is a location-based cab calling service - you call a number and it puts you in touch with the nearest London cabbie. This has equally laudable benefits for drivers and passengers - but drivers just won't sign up. This means lots of passengers trying Zingo and experiencing disappointing results.

You might try something new, like Zingo or Texxi a couple of times, but if they continue to fail to deliver, you stop trying.

New ventures need self-belief and a management team committed to overcoming obstacles. But at some point before launch, they need to take a hard look at the idea and really tear it apart - or get an independent advisor to critique it. Texxi appears to have skipped this stage in its development.

I hate to criticize new ventures, especially as they need encouragement and nurturing, more than anything else. Equally, sometimes the best advice you can give a management team is "give up now". I'm afraid that's my take on Texxi.

Pic via Taxi Bot. Story: Green Car Congress, although I have a feeling I may have read about it on SmartMobs....

More Post-London Scams

Following the ICE virus scam Russell wrote about, there are a couple more hoaxes making the rounds.

The first one says that even if their phone has no signal, people riding the Tube in London can reach emergency services if they dial 112. The hoax says that "ALL phone companies have signed up" for a service that routes the calls to emergency services via a satellite connection. Clearly that one isn't true.

Down in Italy, the second isn't about mobiles, but is traveling via SMS, spreading a rumor that terrorists had poisoned the Rome water supply. With polls showing 85% of Italians fear a terrorist attack, the SMS seems to be a prank to cause a bit of panic, and the city's mayor has pledged to catch whoever was responsible.

Cable Companies With The Right Idea For Mobile Video?

My skepticism of mobile TV is no secret. I'm pretty bullish on mobile video, though, when it's part of making personal media time-, place- and platform-independent. It's been disappointing to see carrier and device manufacturer's efforts thus far focus on broadcast-style content that's either live TV or "made for mobile" fluff. But noise coming out of the US cable industry's yearly confab says that -- in a real surprise -- it might be cable operators that have the best ideas about mobile video.

Cable companies have been going for some time about offering the "quadruple play: video, voice, data and mobile. The mobile aspect thus far has just been as MVNOs in a few occasions rather than anything interesting, but (buzzword-laden) quotes from some execs seem to indicate that they have a good basis of understanding of how mobile video comes into the picture, such as how users "want this phone to do everything that their TV does and everything that their PC does."

But it's one from a Verizon honcho that does it: ""It's really going to be on any device anywhere... we talk about time shifting. It's going to be place shifting."

That's what's going to make mobile video big: giving people mobile access to their personal media, in this case what they've got saved on their DVR, their movies or their favorite shows. It's not going to be live TV -- which will be used for news and sports events -- and it isn't going to be these stupid "mobisodes" that are just ads for real television shows. If I can watch TV on my mobile device on the way to work, I want to watch something I'm interested in, not whatever crappy breakfast talk shows I can get. Time- and place-shifting something my DVR grabbed last night, now that's something I'd pay for.

Of course, part of the problem is that technology like DVB-H is better for sending video to mobiles than as streams over the network. But that's not something end users will really care about. If there was a market demand for mobile live TV, people would buy those handheld sets that were the sign of cool people back in the mid-80s. Just because it's going to be on a mobile phone doesn't mean that people will automatically take to it any better. They'll still complain that the screen's too small and the reception's no good. But make the hook something a lot more enticing -- by making it better than live TV -- and people will eat it up.

email v's Instant messaging

From time to time, we see surveys that are interpreted as claiming that teens and kids are abandoning email in favour of Instant Messaging. The implication is that email might die out in due course.

The latest is new Pew Internet and American Life Project, which claims that "Email, once the cutting edge "killer app," is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging (IM) and text messaging as ways to connect with their friends."

But this really misses the point as they're not competing technologies but complementary ones. Just because teens are using IM more, it isn't replacing email - in fact, it probably means that they're simply communicating more often, with more people.

Communication channels can simplistically be divided into two types - offline and online. Offline you have email, voice mail and texting - though this can be online too, which is one reason for its popularity. Online you have IM, phone and VoIP. If you fancy a chat and there's a good chance your pal is there, you'll try online first, very often, switching to offline if you want to leave a message.

So it's really horses for courses, not one or the other. Just as email didn't replace the phone, email's not going to be knocked out by IM - no matter how good a headline it makes.

Story source: Net Imperative.

Linux, Mobile Phones and Clay Christensen

I wrote last week about the remarkable growth of the Linux operating system in SmartPhones and how it and Symbian are relegating Microsoft into a bit player in the mobile phone sector.

Regular readers of MobHappy know that I think the battle to dominate the phone platform is a crucial one for winners and losers alike. Since the phone will become everyone's primary digital device, largely replacing the PC altogether, Microsoft's inability to make it happen in phones could have serious repercussions for the future of the whole company.

Now, no less a figure than Harvard guru and disruption technology authority, Clay Christensen, is saying pretty much the same thing.

He predicted that we wouldn’t see Linux taking root on desktops in enterprise networks but that it would become the dominant operating system on handheld computers.

"That’s the way Microsoft gets unwound," he said.

Christensen's theory is that, once in a while, new technology comes along that tends to be cheaper and comes in at the low, undemanding end of the market. Examples are cars replacing horses, or more recently, personal computers replacing minicomputers and workstations.

If you're an incumbent in the sector, it's almost always impossible to see what's going on until it's just too late. As an example, back in the 80's, Digital Equipment Corp had to decide whether to focus on selling the minicomputers for $500,000 each (at 60% margin) that its customers said they wanted or selling low performance PCs for $2,000 (at 40% margin) that its customers were saying they didn't want. Seems like a no-brainer, except we now know what happened.

Linux is poised to do the same thing - according to good old Clayton and me :-)

Maybe Microsoft will sit up and take note now. They MUST change their phone strategy or live to regret it, in the same way as photographic chemical producers must be scratching their heads today saying

"Where the hell's my business gone??"

Story source: i-Mode Strategy

Pirate P2P Users Spend More on Legal Downloads

A survey by UK based analyst, The Leading Question, has found that people who use pirate P2P sites, also spend 4.5 times more on legal downloads than other music fans. Typically, they spend £5.52 ($9.16) a month as opposed to the average £1.27 ($2.21).

Ahh, but ...... says the quaintly named, British Phonographic Industry, pirates typically spend less than average on CD's.

Well, they would wouldn't they? They're spending all their music money on downloads!

And if average spend is going down, it's surely because with downloads, you can choose the tracks you really want instead of all the shite stuff that pad out so many CDs.

But the other issue is the dilemma that this should represent for the BPI. Suing these pirates is also tantamount to suing your very best customers, which can't make much sense, commercially. Supposing, a Marketing Director presented a new campaign to her fellow board directors:

"Well, we've analyzed the market and drawn up a list of our top 100 customers. These people represent 50% of our revenues and 80% of our profits. It goes without saying that they're damned important for the future success of the company.

So, we've decided that we're going to really piss them off by taking them to court."

The fact is that piracy probably wouldn't enjoy nearly such high usage today if the likes of the BPI had agreed to the entreaties of companies begging them to authorize a legal download service in the closing years of the last century. But suing your customers can never be a sensible business strategy. It simply shows that you don't understand the first thing about how your industry has changed.

Via The Register. Pic from Talk Like a Pirate. This year TLAP day is September 19th.
 

Billboard Barcodes

We've written before about Shotcode and Semacode and other mobile codereaders, but over in Japan -- where QR codes are  commonplace, as shown by a recent announcement from Amazon -- i-mode Business Strategy reports (via Tom Hume) that NTT DoCoMo is working on a cameraphone ad server that would let people snap a picture of a printed ad or billboard, then get sent to a web site or be sent more information from the advertiser.

It's not a new idea: barcodes are already used for this, even going back as far as the CueCat, which failed spectacularly. Although DoCoMo's new technology does require some handset software, it's different because it doesn't require ads to be changed in any way, and will also work with existing advertising. This makes much more sense to me than trying to advertise via bluespamming; this seems like an easy way to offer potential customers a way to reach out to advertisers, rather than just throwing a product or message in their face.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Just as we're finally getting MMS interconnect here in the US, O2 over in the UK has figured out yet another way to screw up MMS, says the indefatigable Alfie Dennen. The carrier used to send MMS to email addresses with the image simply attached, but has now reverted to the old "here's a link to a Web page" message instead -- a method I thought had been ditched some time ago (even here in the states). The result is that users of Alfie's moblogUK UK service on O2 now can't use MMS to send pictures to their blogs.

What's the point? Just to make more money? To deliver the photo in such a way that there's an opportunity for O2 to advertise? To try to encourage people to use its own photo-sharing service instead of an outside one? The answers to any of those really don't seem sufficient. All users will see is a broken service, and a reason to switch carriers.

Every time it seems like some progress is being made to get operators to understand that throwing up obstacles for their users never works, we're reminded that sadly, there are plenty of companies out there that just don't get it.

Smartphone Sales Figures

Russell took a look a couple weeks back at the sales of smartphones broken down by operating system, and now a research firm has released its view of smartphone and PDA sales for the second quarter.

The firm in question is Canalys, and every quarter when they release these and other numbers I struggle to figure out what to take away from them because they frustratingly insist on lumping in sales of PDAs -- whether or not they've got local-area, wide-area or no networking connection -- with smartphones and other mobile phones. So you end up with a bunch of numbers that aren't as valuable as they could be: comparing Symbian smartphones versus sales for Palm PDAs and phones, or Nokia phone sales versus HP PDAs. And then their terminology (which helpfully isn't defined anywhere on their release) leads to more confusion. I realize this is a personal bugbear, and I apologize for sharing it. But the upshot of it is that while I'm sure there's information of value in here, I don't want to make assertions based on my misunderstanding or misinterpretation of their terms.

So, in any case, here's what I can figure out:
- Nokia's smartphone sales are booming. The report says it shipped nearly 6.7 million of them in the second quarter, a 240% increase over 2004 and 24% over the first quarter. Consequently, it's the clear leader in this market, whether "this market" means smartphones or smartphones and PDAs. If it's the former, it's got a 55% share.
- Palm's sales are fairly stagnant as sales of non-wireless PDAs fall. Its sales were off 1% from last year, and up just 5% from last quarter, when the entire market grew 13%.
- RIM keeps chugging away. It should pass the million-devices-in-a-quarter mark very soon.
- Motorola came out of nowhere to #4. While it's only selling 8% as many smartphones as Nokia, it saw a torrid 637% growth over last year. My best guess is that this is from the growing number of Linux phones, rather than the strength of any of its few Windows Mobile products.

The overwhelming takeaway from this is that PDA sales are (still) dying, which is the same conclusion I've reached from any Canalys PR I've looked at, so no real news there. I'd also venture that sales of PDAs with just Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, rather than any cellular connectivity, are dropping pretty steadily too, but there's no way to tell. The only other observation I've got is to look at the Palm and RIM numbers in comparison to other smartphone vendors, Nokia in particular, which sold 3 times as many devices. Then compare the amount of press, particularly in the US, devoted to Blackberrys and Treos versus smartphones from other vendors.

Mobile Implications of Yahoo-Konfabulator

Yahoo has bought Konfabulator, which makes software that lets users run widgets -- generally single-task-focused mini-applications that do a wide variety of things like check the weather or stock quotes, control other applications like music players or check Web sites for updates. Whether for Konfabulator or Apple's Dashboard (which pretty much stole the Mac market out from underneath Konfabulator), developing widgets is based on common, open technologies and -- to these untrained eyes, anyway -- looks relatively easy. This makes it all very long tail, as there are widgets available for a number of esoteric things since anybody can make one.

The thing is, though, widgets, or something like them, are pretty perfect for mobile, too.

People use the net in a fundamentally different way on their mobile devices than when they're behind a computer. While browsing on the PC may typically be just that, browsing, use of the net on mobile devices is overwhelmingly task-based: I want to find the football score, or the movie time, the address of that shop, and so on. Yahoo's mobile services already reflect this, to some extent, its top menu organized around tasks like checking email, instant messaging, or getting directions. And so it's not so hard to see widgets jumping to mobile now, either.

One of the great things about widgets (in Dashboard for me) is that for common tasks, they're easily and essentially instantly available. I move my mouse to the bottom left corner, and my widgets pop up. Some simply push information to me: the weather, for instance, is always updated, so I can see the current information and forecast without having to go to a bookmarked Web page, and a package tracker keeps tabs on my latest Amazon purchase winging its way towards me. Others pull information from the Web, like the dictionary, Wikipedia or Google Maps widgets. Either way, they're all very task-specific, and tend to do that task pretty well.

That sounds pretty perfect to me for mobile devices. In addition to a standard browser, have widgets to handle common tasks, particularly pull ones: instead of loading up a browser, connecting, surfing to a page you might have bookmarked, then entering your query, you just pull up the relevant widget and run your search. But it would make pull better, too, just like RSS could, by letting users define information they want to always have updated and available on their devices.

This kind of stuff shouldn't replace a browser, but it should be offered in addition to it. Leave the browser and its open access intact for the times when it's right -- but make everyday task-based surfing simpler, faster and easier.

Oh, So Predictable

I saw the highly speculative post on Engadget titled "Could Nokia dump Symbian?" last night before I went to bed, and knew I'd wake up to plenty more speculative FUD, and I was right. I also knew I'd already found something to write about...

I was going to go through and analyze why I've got a really hard time buying into this at all, but Rafe over at All About Symbian has done a pretty thorough and convincing job of it already. I don't doubt that Nokia is taking a long, hard look at Linux and will use it in some devices, but I also don't doubt the company's not ready to throw away all the resources (cash, time and human) they've put into Symbian and related development.

I should reiterate Rafe's refutations of two of the prime pieces of "evidence" the analyst report that started all this cited: Nokia's licensing of Microsoft ActiveSync in addition to Symbian's licensing it, and the claim that most Series 60 applications are written in Java. Like many of the licensing deals Symbian signs, its licensees must ink separate deals with the original companies (MS in this case) to include the relevant technology on their devices. The Java app claim is disingenuous -- a fair comparison would be the number of Series 60-specific Java applications compared to native Symbian applications.

One interesting point to ponder, though -- how much of Symbian's dominance comes from the Nokia brand on the phones on which it's sold? When somebody picks up a Windows Mobile device, there's little doubt that it's a Windows phone. Symbian/Series 60/UIQ doesn't enjoy that same notoriety -- which keeps the OS brand (admittedly less important) in the background, where it doesn't compete with the device manufacturer's imprint.

Contactless Payment Systems Poised for Growth?

The fellas at ABI Research must have analysed the analysis market and come to the conclusion that there's a gap in the market for hyperbole and overblown claims. A few months ago they pronounced the Mobile TV market "a goldmine", now they're equally hyped about contactless payment systems, describing uptake as "Shocking and Welcome".

Now, bear in mind that ABI sell reports primarily to vendors of technology. These vendors use the reports to justify and rationalise selling the said technology to their customers. So a report that concludes "the market for contactless payments is likely to be very limited as retailers wait to see what their competitors are going to do about this new technology" ain't going to sell reports.

So let's read between the lines and see if we can get at another version of the truth here.

Firstly, contactless payment via the mobile phone is where you wave your mobile (or smartcard for that matter) in the direction of a terminal, which then authorizes payment to the retailer. The technology is usually based on RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification), or the more recent Phillips' NFC (Near Field Communication).

What happens then is down to the individual system, but essentially the money can be debited from your bank, prepay payment account or mobile phone bill.

The great advantage with this system is that it's quick and easy to use, thereby passing the first test of any mobile payment method that might stand a chance of taking off. In other words, it's as quick and easy to use, for both user and retailer, as cash or credit card. That is, provided there aren't some convoluted secondary security tests, over and above possession of the mobile phone itself.

As an example, if you have to wave your phone AND input a PIN, it'll slow things up. If you have to wave your phone, press "confirm" that you authorise the transaction and then input a PIN, it'll slow things even more. So a balance between security and usability needs to be established. What's the betting that security wins, by the way?

The great disadvantage with this system is that it requires a significant investment in systems and hardware to get this up and running. Imagine replacing all the terminals that currently process MasterCard transactions and you can see that it's a billion dollar investment. No wonder ABI are so effusive about all the reports they're going to sell the size of the market.

I can't help wondering however if the contactless payment system isn't a little like what Clay Shirky calls the Nearlynet in his seminal essay; Permanet, Nearlynet and Wireless Data. It's a must-read if you haven't already.

Clay suggests that the instinct with new technology is to go for a purpose built, expensive and perfect solution to the problem (permanet). The subsequent issue is that it is frequently too expensive for users to actually afford. The solution that therefore takes off is the nearlynet one - something that kind of does the job (with some quality glitches) but is cheap and cheerful. Skype could be a newer example of a nearlynet solution.

This clearly leaves the companies investing in the permanet ideas with huge white elephants they must continue to subsidise or quietly and humanely put out of their misery.

So if the contactless payment systems might be the permanet in this instance, what could be the nearlynet? I'd say in many cases, it could be plain old sms authorisation, especially if the sales process is automated (at vending machines, for example). Sending an sms "to" the vending machine with a code representing the product you wish to purchase, is a perfect nearlynet transaction process.

So, I see the mobile payments system polarising into two different markets:

1. Automated and low transaction/micro payments = nearlynet.
2. Face-to-face and higher value transactions = permanet.

Of the two, the biggest opportunities for new entrants, are in the first area, in my opinion. The permanet area is likely to be dominated by existing big companies, like the banks or mobile operators. This may leave a sizable and highly lucrative market for the fleet of foot to quietly exploit in the nearlynet.

Story spotted on iMode Strategy

George Orwell on Video Phone Design

The New Yorker had a recent and rather wonderfully whimsical article on Raold Dahl, best known for his brilliant, if curmudgeonly, kids' books. A couple of sentences have a lesson for video camera use - or lack of it.

Dahl shared with George Orwell an acute sense of why small children often see adults as unsightly or intimidating. “Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upward, and few faces are at their best when seen from below,” Orwell wrote.

I've observed many times that one of the problems with video phones is that if you hold them where it feels comfortable and natural, you're going to hold them somewhere around your stomach level. Which means that the video captures you from below, resulting in even Kate Moss waifs looking more like Jabba the Hut.

This is especially bad news if you're looking to use video for dating applications, which seems to be the one last bastion of hope for this white elephant right now. Who wants to look awful when looking for a date?

Maybe Dahl has the solution too:

Dahl once said that adults should get down on their knees for a week, in order to remember what it’s like to live in a world in which the people with all the power literally loom over you.

Maybe that's what video phone designers should be doing......

Link via Kottke via BoingBoing.

Guidelines For Your New Mobile App

The blogosphere is sorta like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Everybody's got the sites they read (you can see Russell and I's suggestions), and like Kevin Bacon movies, there's some overlap, and it's always sort of interesting to see when two seemingly unrelated sites you follow touch on the same topic at the same time.

That happened to me yesterday, when Paul Whitaker and Charlie Schick separately posted some of their thoughts on things to consider when building mobile apps and services. Paul succinctly highlights three areas he says developers or providers must get right to be successful in the mobile space: consumer education, simplified user experience and cost. I'd agree that without having all three of these down pat, you're not going to have much luck.

Charlie's list is a little bit longer, and features what he sees as the attributes of a compelling mobile app: while he says they're in no real order, I don't think it's coincidental that simplicity is the first thing he lists!

While neither of these lists offers a roadmap to create the perfect mobile app (you should be so lucky), both of these posts can serve as valuable checklists and guidelines for anybody deploying an application or service.

RSS Feed Move

We've started a new FeedBurner feed for Mobhappy, mainly so we can keep track of how many people are subscribed. While the old feeds will still work and you're free to use them, we'd appreciate it if you changed the feed URL you're using to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mobhappy, if it's not too much trouble :)

Thanks!

Vodafone Germany to Block Skype

Vodafone have announced that they're going to block all VoIP calls over their network from 2007.

Actually, look at the fine print and you see they've already done it according to Hartmut Leuschner, MD of Off the Record GmbH, writing at W2F (subscription needed):

For its new datacard tariffs, Vodafone has doubled the available data volume for the same price. Great! But when you look into the small print it says that VoIP usage within these tariffs will be "technically disabled" from July 8th.

While this was entirely predictable (actually I wrote that it was going to happen in February), it's also entirely the wrong thing to do, representing more of a a knee-jerk reaction, than a mature business strategy. Rather than a panic response, operators must face the fact that VoIP is inevitable and trying to ban it is simply pointless.

If it's inevitable, banning it from your network is an invitation to all your customers to switch to a network which does allow cheap VoIP calls. Because someone will offer VoIP - someone with less to loose and everything to gain. Probably someone like a nasty MVNO will do the dirty deed and make a hell of a lot of money from the process.

When a sector is faced with fundamental change (and VoIP is such a shift), the right course is the counter-intuitive one - you MUST embrace it or you will end up far worse off.

In this case, Vodafone should be promoting VoIP like crazy. This will be good for the customer and there will be no reason to switch to another carrier. This move will cannibalize revenues to an extent, but the carrier gets to keep the customer and benefit from a continuing, if reduced, revenue stream over the longer term.

So what's next? More carriers will certainly follow suit - if Vodafone are doing it, it must be right! We'll probably see some attempts at rubbishing the quality of VoIP or the security, which are the two apparent vulnerabilities, in technical terms.

I don't see security as a real issue for most users, most of the time, though paranoid corporates might see it as important. The kind that ban camera phones, for instance.

Quality of VoIP is variable, but many people will accept reduced quality for those magic words "cheap" or "free".

Despite this, I would anticipate some marketing campaigns along the lines of "Isn't she worth a real call?" with a bloke calling his dear old Mum, just so she can hear his dulcet tones clearly (and expensively).

That approach won't hold back the tide though and carriers will realize that their customers are voting with their wallets, forcing them to back down and offer VoIP grudgingly and too late for many of the lost customers.

That's also assuming that they're not forced to back down by some legislative move before hand.

Sometimes you have to wonder who is in charge of thinking at operators. Or am I wrong? Leave a comment and tell me what you think about this. Short-sighted, muddled thinking or unappreciated business genius? You decide.

On the subject of Skype, Om Malik has a story about CNET Net News estimating that Skype's (undisclosed) revenues are $6 - $10 billion or about 3 times Google's. How's that for stupendously, atrocious reporting? Maybe $6 - $10 million, but even that seems on the high side to me, given that most of their products has zero income.

Original article TMC Net. Incidentally, they have my vote for possibly the most annoying interruptive advertising message I've ever seen. The screen sort of peels off to reveal an ad, totally obscuring the content. Come on fellas, don't insult your readers with this kind of cheap trick.

Ringtone Piracy

A survey by QPass, has shown that the ringtone industry has lost $40 million since Q1 2004 and will loose a further $123 million by 2007.

The problem is that many pesky kids are saving the (free) preview tones and putting them on their mobiles.

While this does certainly happen, I suspect it's dwarfed by the same pesky kids sharing their ringtones with their pesky pals - whether they obtained the original legitimately or not. Ask any 12 - 16 year old about their tone collection and it becomes pretty apparent that they don't pay for many of them.

But, back to the QPass survey. The point of the research is to prove that there's a problem in the first place, as QPass want ringtone vendors to use a digital rights management system to protect their tones from such nefarious piracy. Like their very own Qpass Content Delivery Platform, as plugged in the original press release.

So they ran some tests:

The Websites tested included 42 mobile carrier portals and 58 online entertainment and music stores offering full track music downloads. Out of the sites tested, 40 percent of carrier sites and 31 percent of other portals such as online music stores and entertainment sites were unsecured.

So what they've proved so far is that some sites are vulnerable to preview piracy, which is an interesting fact, but one that's certainly known to anyone who studies the young mobile phone users.

But they couldn't let it rest there - they wanted an eye-catching headline, which means quantifying losses. So, as far as I can see, they made up some big numbers, doubled them, divided by 3 and multiplied the resulting figures by the Marketing Director's birthday to come up with their $40 million.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, they can't possibly quantify losses any more scientifically than this, as they're trying to measure something which is, de facto, unmeasurable and undetectable.

In fairness to QPass, their little PR sally does seem to have worked, with even even the good old BBC rushing to help plug their DRM system. While at the same time managing to convert dollars into pounds by using the Euro exchange rate, according to James at Moco News. Oh well, we can't always get everything right.

The ringtone business does have immense problems on the horizon, which includes P2P sharing and self-created tones. These will make this little problem appear as no more significant than the middle name of your great, great grandmother.

Story via Moco News. Pic of the original pesky kids via Classic TV.

Sousveillance Hits the Big Time

I'm not real happy to revisit this topic, but after examining how mobile phones played into media coverage of the earlier London attacks, I was interested to see the Metropolitan Police make an appeal for cameraphone images and other footage taken in the four relevant areas before or at the time of the incidents today. People can submit via the www.police.co.uk Web site, or via MMS to 07734 282 288 (is an operator or messaging provider going to stump up and support this for free?).

Looks like sousveillance is playing out -- and this instance will only bring it further into the mainstream. It's hard not to see phrases along the lines of "This guy was creepy, so I took his picture with my phone -- just in case," becoming commonplace.

Turning Bluetooth On Doesn't Constitute Opting In

Justin Pearse over at NMA reports on the division in the UK marketing industry over Bluetooth, with no clear mandate on the legality of sending unsolicited marketing messages using the technology. Evidently the "Electronic Communications Regulations" say explicit consumer consent is needed for marketing messages, and that's a chicken-or-egg problem for marketers that don't have any other point of contact with consumers than their Bluetooth bots.

Accordingly, many people using Bluetooth marketing have decided to interpret a phone with Bluetooth set to discoverable as opting in to their messages, which seems a bit like a spammer justifying what they do by saying they only send messages to people with email addresses. One marketing agency person says "Operators need to advise people how to put Bluetooth protection on." I'm not sure exactly how he means that, but it sure sounds like he's saying that it's the receiver's responsibility to do something to prevent being hit with the messages. Again, seems an awful lot like spammers.

Some agencies are trying to figure out a better way, using clearly defined Bluetooth "zones", like a corner of a club or a floor mat. I'm not sure those will work too well, after all, how do you make sure a Bluetooth signal doesn't spill over the mat, but it's a start -- and far more responsible. Email marketing has been made ever the more difficult because of spam, and spamming mobiles -- whether from a legitimate business over Bluetooth or a shady ringtone seller via SMS -- will only dent mobile marketing's prospects in general.

It's unclear how long it's going to take people to understand that interruption marketing isn't too effective anymore, regardless of how new and technologically advanced the medium is which it's delivered is. Consumers the world over use different means to avoid these messages, whether it's skipping ads on a TiVo, blocking pop-ups and stripping out ads in Firefox, or using spam blockers. It's unclear what part of that makes some marketers think intruding on peoples' mobiles will be well-received, even if their Bluetooth is on.

Mobile Monday Austin

Just wanted to put the word out to our readers (if any) here in Austin, like me -- a Mobile Monday group is starting up, with the first meeting August 1.

Visit mobilemondayaustin.com for more info and to RSVP. Hope to meet some of you there.

BT's Privacy Measures Outrage Call Centre Industry

Let's assume you're free and single and in a bar looking for some action with a member of the opposite sex (or same sex actually as we're not homophobic here. Oh no, many of our readers seem to come from a certain gay chat room according to our logs, and very welcome they are too).

There's a choice of 2 candidates you can choose from. You know that one of them will be open-minded to your approach and you have a pretty good chance of success. But the other one will slap you in the face, scream "looser" and stomp off and tell their friends how you harassed them.

What person in their right mind wouldn't want to know that information, before making their approach?

Well, a very similar situation is happening in response to BT's latest initiative - BT Privacy. (BT is the UK's largest and incumbent fixed landline operator, by the way). BT Privacy offers to sign its customers up to the Telephone Preference Scheme (TPS), which bars telemarketing people from calling them anymore.

This is being greeted with howls of indignation among the telemarketing industry. But you'd think that they'd welcome it wouldn't you? The call centres wouldn't be pissing people off and they'd have a higher conversion rate to boot, as they wouldn't have to talk to people who definitely weren't going to buy their products and services.

But no. These traditionalist marketers are so wedded to an interruptive model (and it's hard to know what could be more interruptive that a phone calls when you're eating supper) that they can't see that this model is deader than a dead thing on Planet Dead. Idiots!

As for BT, they should be applauded. This initiative could really be a result of listening to what their customers want. On the other hand, it would be a canny way of preventing their competitors from poaching their customers.

Either way, it's a smart move.

Linux Beats MS in SmartPhone Shipments

Last week, I looked at the share of the SmartPhone market held between the two operating system leaders, Symbian and Microsoft. In that battle, Microsoft was being battered and outsold by 8 to 1.

I didn't examine too closely the Linux position as it was very much a niche play according to the stats I had at the time, though I did predict that this might change.

But latest Gartner stats show that Linux is now bigger than Microsoft, accounting for 14% of shipments in Q1 2005 vs Microsoft's meager 4.5% share.

SmartPhones are the fastest growing sector of the market and is forecast to account for 200 million handsets in 2008. But, there's more to this sector than just raw numbers. The real power-users and opinion leaders in mobile all have SmartPhones. I do. You probably do too - and if you don't, my guess is that you're unusual among readers of MobHappy. Drop me a comment if I'm wildly wrong here :-)

This means that Microsoft are loosing the battle for the hearts and minds in the SmartPhone sector, if they haven't already lost it already anyway.

This puts Microsoft in an incredibly bleak position in the mobile world, which will become bleaker still when they finally realise that the mobile will do to them, what they did to the mainframe - accessing the digital world by PC in 10 years (maybe less) will be a minor eccentricity, like hand writing a letter now if you're under 20.

So what can they do? With plenty of cash, I think they'll have to buy a handset manufacturer and lever their way into the market that way. The current strategy clearly isn't working and there's no real future for them in sticking to the PC. It would be like a buggy whip maker doggedly continuing to turn out buggy whips in the early years of the last century in the face of a market about to embrace the motor car.

Who will it be? Motorola or Sony Ericsson would be my bets, but what do I know?

Image from projects.Linux.Wine

 

Prepay Data Card: No Good, Either

Jupiter analyst Julie Ask (she of the ringback tone trial saga) pointed out a new prepaid data card offering from Vodafone UK, saying the pricing model might help it compete with hotspots for business users' access -- if for no other reason than there aren't many people that can justify the high monthly cost of mobile data access to their employer.

But the new offer doesn't escape a typical pitfall of prepaid data in the consumer arena -- the ridiculous price premium over contract tariffs. The Vodafone card costs 200 pounds, with data at 3 pounds per meg in the UK and 9 pounds per meg when roaming. That price isn't likely to win over many hotspot users.

So, then, if operators feel like hotspots are costing them mobile data customers, how to move forward? The current plan seems to be to open up hotspots of their own, then charge exorbitant fees. Perhaps the only benefit of those is you don't need a $350 card before you can even get started. But why not just make cut prices? I'm not saying to give things away, but at least make them reasonable.

Part of the reason people don't want to use mobile data is because so many tariffs take the worst part of voice tariffs -- overage charges -- and implement them on a grander scale via an unclear metering method. Say your first MB costs $5, then it's $3 per MB after that: it's pretty easy to tell when I've been talking on the phone for an hour, but what the hell constitutes a megabyte? And my example data charges are pretty low, particularly for some European carriers. It's an issue for business users as well as consumers -- how do you explain to your boss that getting Rick's bloated Powerpoint presentation, with all its nifty animations, cost you $50? Reasonable flat-rate pricing makes sense here: if a company knows they're going to pay X per month for mobile data for each employee, regardless of use, it's much easier to go for than something with a cost that can skyrocket very easily.

Proponents of metered pricing build their argument on a couple red herrings. First, they assume that with flat-rate, unlimited pricing comes abuse by users sharing connections and so forth. That's not the case: if prices drop to a reasonable level, operators can lessen the incentive to "steal" service. Second, they assume that on flat-rate plans, usage will leap up and cause network issues. This, too, isn't necessarily true. Revenues and usage are two separate metrics that aren't necessarily related. For example, I pay T-Mobile $20 per month for an unlimited Wi-Fi subscription I rarely use. I don't really need it, but it's come in handy quite a bit, and the $20 per month rate is low enough that I don't mind paying every month so when I do use it, I'm not hit with the 10 cents a minute or $10 per day fee. Bringing mobile data pricing down to this level will catch a lot more users, but won't necessarily deliver an equal uptick in usage.

Price elasticity of demand is an interesting thing -- and it's hard to believe that operators haven't heard of it. It's similarly hard to believe that $80 per month is the spot where they think they can maximize their revenues.

Picture from Wikipedia.

TheFeature Archives Now Available!

I'm happy to report that the archives of TheFeature.com are now available at thefeaturearchives.com. I'm still waiting for Google to index the pages, so the search box isn't much help yet, but you can browse by topic, though I know that's not too elegant either.

But, after spending the bulk of the day messing with mod_rewrite, I'm glad to say all the existing links out there to TF articles should still work. That's all the content I've got, though, so links to anything else on the site (journal entries or user pages, for example) won't work.

In any case, enjoy. I'm glad that I've been able to resurrect all this great material. Thanks to Nokia for letting me host it, as well as Dennis Yang and Matt Croydon for their technical support.

BlogRoll

Rather than feature our HUGE BlogRoll on the home page of MobHappy, we thought it would be altogether more managable to post it here and then provide a link from the home page.

This way you get to find all the excellent blogs we like to follow, without having it rammed down your throat on every visit.

We hope you find some great new bloggers here. But if you're not on the list or feel we've missed someone out, feel free to add a comment or drop us a line, pointing out the error of our ways.

Unabated Optimism On Handsets

Got an email from Gartner just now saying they've upped their handset sales estimate for 2005 to 779 million units. Their initial estimate for the year was 720 million, which got bumped up in May to 750 million. Gartner also adds its prediction that handset sales will break the 1 billion per year barrier in 2009, when it says there will be 2.6 billion mobiles in use.

This comes as another analyst said last week it sees sales growth slowing to just 6 percent this year, whereas Gartner's 779 million prediction would show about 15% growth -- though that's still off from the 30% growth from 2003 to 2004. Gartner adds that sales remain strong around the world, with growth in emerging markets outpacing mature ones, but replacement sales in those mature markets continue.

My initial take on this is to lean towards Gartner's view, but like many other people, I'd like to wait for Nokia's announcement of its second-quarter results before committing to anything. Gartner says average selling prices are on the way down, too -- a development that's less harmful to the bigger, high-volume vendors. This looks to be playing out in second-quarter earnings reports already: number-four global vendor LG said falling prices and increased competition were behind its quarterly loss, while number three Samsung and number five Sony Ericsson both saw margins fall in the quarter.

Meanwhile, Motorola reported a very strong quarter, shipping a record number of handsets and gaining 3 points of share, which likely came from smaller competitors. Moto execs' comments also seem to echo Gartner's view that demand remains pretty high across various locations and demographics. There's a lot of expectation that Nokia will also report market share gains on Thursday, and strong, growing results from these two market leaders -- which together sell more than half the devices in the world -- would seem to indicate sales across the board remain solid.

ICE Virus Scam

Last week, I wrote about the ICE idea, where it's suggested that you prefix an entry on your mobile phone with ICE or "In Case of Emergency". That way authorities know who to contact if you're involved in some kind of incident.

This is perfectly legitmate and you should do it, if you haven't already.

But in a bizarre twist, hoaxers are trying to spread another rumour to the effect that prefixing an address with ICE will somehow empty your PAYG account. For example:

I have just received information from XXXXXXX Solicitors that there is a new mobile phone scam concerning Pay as You Go (PAYG) Mobiles.

The scam is that you are asked to set up an "In Case of Emergency (ICE) Account" on your PAYG mobile.

Apparently this is a modular system that searches for the word ICE text and then changes your phones setting and takes any PAYG credit left on your phone.

Please ensure that this information is circulated to all staff and please pass on to family and friends.
Source Hoax Slayer

I've seen similar mesages in chat rooms recirculating this kind of advice from CTOs of Global Banks.

It's rubbish, of course. Pure and simple bollox. Ignore it and laugh hard in the face of anyone who tries to convince you and walk away shaking your head sadly.

Spammers' Response Rates

Have you ever wondered what spammers' response rates were?

Maybe you assumed that a very, very, very tiny proportion of people responded to spam and were thus responsible for keeping the spammers in profits and free to carry on annoying the rest of us.

According to emarketer, a new survey by Mirapoint (yep, there is a vested interest) by Radicati Group, reveals that a massive 11% of users purchase products and services from spam e-mails - even though 9% of them have lost money to e-mail scammers in the past.

It gets worse.

39% of people admit to clicking on embedded links within spam - thereby alerting the spammer that they're a "live one". And 54% of these guys (surprise, surprise) receive more spam as a consequence.

So we can't really pretend that it's a small minority of the terminally stupid who do this kind of things. It's likely to be your colleague at work or even your partner. Or even YOU.

So the message to anyone reading this is PLEASE STOP IT. Find reputable merchants, porn sites or mortgage providers and give them your business.

And stop supporting spamming before it moves over to the mobile channel too.

The Finnish Mobile ID Card

The Finns are in the process of putting the mobile phone right at the heart of their National ID card system - perhaps the British Government should consider going down that route too.

Digital Lifestyles reports that the Finnish Ministry of the Interior has partnered with mobile specialist, SmartTrust, to help Finns to securely identify themselves and thus digitally authorise goods and services across a range of public and private sector providers - all with just their mobile phone.

Examples of services are banking, filing tax returns, authorising payments online and buying mobile content. The system works with a new type of SIM card.

"The mobile phone and SIM card have, by default, become the world's most pervasive smart card / card reader combination," explains Paul Cuss, CEO of SmartTrust. "Unlike the existing credit-card sized ID cards that Finns carry around in their wallets, the SIM-based certificates do not require the user to be present when authenticating himself via an independent card reader. In this instance, the handset acts as the card reader, requesting the user to authenticate himself through a PIN code request, and sends an electronic digital signature to the service provider."

The great advantage of going down this route for National ID cards, is that it's not obviously politically driven, unlike the UK's unpopular system will prove. Society and the business community benefit from a new and better payment system, already integrated into most people's lifestyles and expectations. The fact that it's also an ID Card isn't nearly so controversial - it's an ID Card sneaked in through the back door, if you will.

Furthermore, by involving the commercial sector, it doesn't end up being solely funded by the tax payer, which effectively counters that other big objection - cost.

Finally, with just smart cards, people can always protest by refusing to carry them. They'd be hard pressed to refuse to carry their beloved mobile phone.

The British Government should seriously consider this approach before finding that they have another Poll Tax situation on their hands.

BBC Creates Virtual Graffiti

Textually writes about the BBC's latest experiment - virtual graffiti, though they're not calling it that.

The BBC have partnered with Hewlett-Packard Labs and Gavitec, to support a new series, Coast. They've created 39 interactive coastal walks around the UK, including 12 you follow using your Series 60 Nokia phone.

"The trial will allow roving ramblers to reach for their phone and call up site-specific extra audio and WAP content from the programme using "visual triggers" and their mobiles phones"

Data codes are used to access the information (not dissimilar from bar codes), although it's not entirely clear how these work, at this point. However, it sounds similar to Shot Codes in that people take a photo with their phone and get taken to the appropriate WAP site.

I believe that this concept is going all the way to mainstream, as we increasingly link our physical worlds with the digital one. One example of how this might be used is to have a physical Wikipedia, for people to find out more about their surroundings. I'm giving a speech at Wikimania in Frankfurt in a couple of weeks, if anyone's interested in this area. Just have to write the bloody thing first ;-(

Naturally, the technology will evolve so that the phone sniffs links out for you, rather than needing to click on a physical hyperlink. Then you just need to tell it what kind of thing you'd like info on and it'll alert you accordingly. Obviously, if you have a few minutes to kill, you'll be able to browse links manually too.

My hope is that if I can get the Wikipedia expertise, energy and execution skills on board, that we could really make this happen.

Pocket Choice Launches Mobile Marketing Portal

According to DM Bulletin*, Pocket Choice have launched a new website to help mobile users control inbound mobile marketing messages.

Putting users in control is all very laudable in this age of rising concern about mobile spam. So how does this actually work?

Users sign up to Pocket Choice, then Pocket Choice, goes and sells that database to advertisers who want to send mobile marketing messages to opted-in users. Apparently, users will be able to fine tune permissions and preferences to ensure that only advertisers they want to hear from get through. There's no evidence of how they do this yet, but let's assume they will once they've got a little more established.

But we've been here before, I'm afraid. The Mobile Channel, for example, started off in 2000 with much the same idea, apart from they gave a reason why people should sign up - they paid people to receive messages. This model doesn't work either, but at least they tried to think why someone would want to sign up to an unknown and untrusted service in the first place.

The Mobile Channel gave up in the end and changed its business model to research via mobiles.

Pocket Choice, also can't even specify who might be advertising with them - in fairness, they have only just started - but it hardly builds the trust that's so important for this type of proposition. It also demonstrates why this model is so hard to launch - no advertisers = no users, no users = no advertisers.

I also know this model intimately myself, having been involved in a very similar idea 5 years ago - ZagMe. ZagMe was a location-based opt-in mobile marketing channel, that recruited 85,000 users, 150 advertisers and ran 1,500 campaigns for the likes of Burger King, Reebok and The Body Shop. If you'd like a copy of my free, detailed White Paper on the model and its lessons, send me an email using the link on the top left of the blog.

While we did manage to make the model work (up to a point) it was very expensive (£3.1 million/$5.4 million) and I don't think we could have scaled it easily outside the two malls we were operating in. Furthermore, we had strong, funky branding and a more immediately powerful user proposition than the Pocket Choice site, which is trying to address too many audiences with the same channel.

So, unless there's more to Pocket Choice than is immediately apparent, my advice to them is - give up now fellas. Sorry to be so blunt, but I do know this area rather too well. Others have tried and failed and there's nothing new here that indicates a different result. Invest your undoubted talents into something that hasn't consistently failed as a business model.

By the way, what's with the "Donate" button on the website? Why would I, as a potential user, wish to give a donation to a company, like Pocket Choice? Most odd.

Anyway, this downer doesn't mean that there isn't space for a trusted filter for mobile users to employ to manage their mobile preferences. What I'd like is a system that does this:

1. I divert all my messages to a trusted third party - let's call it ZagMe, for old time's sake.
2. I go to the ZagMe web/wapsite and upload my mobile's address book, which authorises all my contacts to be allowed to pass straight through the ZagMe filter.
3. I then set my preferences as to the kinds of commercial offers I'd like to receive and complete basic profile info (especially age and gender).
4. All commercial messages are automatically routed via ZagMe now and must pass my filter rules to get to me.
5. ZagMe can also proactively approach advertisers to use the channel and work with them to ensure best practice mobile marketing was applied.

Best practice mobile marketing is also covered in the White Paper by the way. It might seem like common sense, but as I've written before, common sense is normally a learned set of behaviours. If it was common sense, why would professional digital marketers like MyOffers get things so wrong, as ex-ZagMe, Helen Keegan wrote about recently?

I appreciate that my ideal scenario has technical, as well as commercial challenges - not the least is how you get users to sign up. But the signing up issue is solved by common sense marketing, after all :-)

*Image from DM Bulletin. Note to editor - you really should update your photo library, unless you're using this old Nokia in a retro/ironic/amusing way, like me :-)

Text and Win, But Mostly Just Pay

Jim Hughes pointed me to an interesting SMS auction the Times is running. It's a reverse auction with a bit of a twist: users SMS in a bid for a Lotus Exige car, in pence and between 1p and 1,000 pounds, and the lowest unique bid wins the right to buy the car for the amount of the bid. So, whoever wins will get a 30,000+ pound car for under 1,000 -- but the real winner is The Times, which is charging 1.50 for each SMS bid.

There's some neat touches to the auction, apart from its format and prize. After each bid, users get an SMS giving them the status of their bid, indicating if it's the lowest unique, unique but not the lowest, or not unique. They'll get another should the status of their bid change at any point before the end of the auction in a few days. Apparently the company behind these has also run them before for other British newspapers.

But while the auction might be interesting in its execution, the 1.50 per bid fee (hiding down below in the fine print) -- and some of the marketing around it gives it a slightly off feel, almost like those odd car raffles in London's airports -- particularly the line "You can bid as often as you like, and you may like to use your first bid as a tactical 'testing of the water'." Sure, but that testing the water will set you back 1.50, like all your other bids.

It's hard not to see the Times raking in a good amount of cash from this promotion, but the mobile industry needs to be a bit wary of these types of deals, as they can leave everyone in general with a black eye. There's already some of this going on in the ringtone business, with many companies concerned that the business practices of one firm will put people off the market as a whole -- a valid concern. While the short-term revenues on offer may be hard to pass up, the long-term ramifications of delivering sucker punches to users and grabbing their money may be much more dear.

PR Solutions

Last week, we wrote about a tiff over PR practices between bloggers Russell Beattie and Steve Rubel, who represent different ends of the argument.

Russell takes the line "all PR people are morons" and wants to be left alone by the whole industry. Steve, a PR man himself and a Blog Relations expert to boot, welcomes all approaches apparently, as he likes to sift through everything to find the odd nugget.

With this range of opinion, some PR people are recommending that the whole blogging scene is avoided altogether, which seems a shame for both sides, potentially. If PR people can feed us stories our readers might find interesting, that would be a good thing for everyone, surely?

So we've come up with a solution, that we hope will be adopted by all our blogging friends and noted by the PR industry as a whole.

We've designed a choice of three simple logos for bloggers to display on their blogs, which spell out, at a glance, what they'd like PR people to do:

is for bloggers who, like Russell Beattie, want to be left alone by the entire industry. Don't approach these people under any circumstances. You'll only have yourself to blame if they flame you or arrange to publicly sauté you or your client's products.

Do NOT approach!

is for bloggers to display if they don't care who approaches them with what. But let's be a little reasonable, you PR people. Just because they say they're happy to be approached, doesn't mean that you can't try to be targeted in your pitches. Someone writing about technology, for instance, isn't going to be interested in cat food or knitting. So for the sake of your own credibility, try to play the game, OK?

is the middle ground, which will probably be most of us, to be honest. This will allow PR people to click on the logo to see what the blogger's policy towards PR pitches is, before approaching them.

MobHappy's policy, for instance is:

With some rather large caveats, we welcome pitches from PR people or anyone wanting to promote their website, product or service.

Our caveats are:

1. Please make sure that the information is about mobile technology, or at a stretch, technology generally. Read the blog - is there a good chance we might publish it?

2. If you keep sending us rubbish, we won't read your pitches any more.

3. Keep it brief please, in the first instance. We can always ask for more info.

4. Don't use the comments section on our blogs to blatantly promote your or your client's products. It REALLY pisses us off. You have been warned.

<Policy ends>

We hope you like this approach and if you're a blogger, please feel free to download one of the logos for your own site.

We'd also love to hear what everyone thinks about the idea, so leave a comment or tell us if it makes any difference.

Carlo adds: I just want to reiterate the second part of Russell's fist caveat: read this blog before you pitch. It wouldn't hurt to try and build some sort of relationship with us, either via reading and commenting or privately. And also please keep in mind that if the only reason you can come up with why something is interesting is because you're promoting it, it's safe to say that almost without exception, we won't be interested.

How Broadcasters Forced Bob the Millionaire to Become a Pirate

Many of us have commented on the idiocy of broadcasters, publishers and media owners trying to stagger country and region launches to suit their own purposes.

The new Harry Potter book is not due in German for some months, but already, you can download German translations, produced by teams of people for free, just because they think kids here should have Harry at the same time as everybody else in the English speaking world.

The irony of wanting to legally obtain something, being unable to buy it (for any money) and so having no option but to download a superior quality pirate copy is explored in this great cartoon of How Bob The Millionaire Became a Pirate.

Continued at Eirikso.................

So if you know anyone at any of those afore-mentioned companies, let them have this cartoon, as it really spells out in very simple terms, what troubles they're causing - and storing up - for their own industry.

Via MobileRead

Birds Only Have Monophonic Ringtone Capability

German ornithologists say wild birds have learned to imitate mobile phone ringtones as they adapt to their environment, which over the last several years has featured a growing number of phones. Jackjaws, starlings and jays are reported to be the best mimics, and good enough to fool even "practiced birdwatchers".

But, bi