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Irakli (a fellow immigrant Munchener) interviewed me last week for PSFK Trend and TRND, a sort of German language equivalent.
The interview is actually on their subscription site, IF. But whether by design or some worm hole in the space:time continuum, you can read it here if you want. Well, you can when I'm writing this anyway.
That's me, by the way, in the photo. No comments please, it's not Hot or Not.
Today is Blog Day, in case you missed it. A day to celebrate blogs and blogging everywhere.
The idea was thought up and promoted by Nir Ofir of SparkArmada blog and jolly good it is too.
There's two components:
1. If you're a blogger, list 5 blogs on your site that you enjoy and think your readers will too. Flatteringly, Nir recommends MobHappy in his 5 - thanks Nir!
It's better if they're newer blogs, or less well-known, as it would be frankly rather boring for everyone to recommend blogs you probably know about and read already.
I also haven't included any of the 14 Essential Blogs available on our Free RSS Reader for your mobile.
2. Tell a non-blog reader about blogging - just send them a link by email to a site you think they'll like.
I'd also add a third point - why not switch to subscribing to your favourite blogs by RSS, if you don't already? A blog reader like BlogLines is free to download and very easy to use. See what Seth Godin wrote yesterday.
OK, here's my 5 blogs in alphabetical order (pause for much head scratching):
Alfie's Blog - Alfie Dennen is the man behind a top UK moblogging site and OrgasmaTones. Always an interesting snippet or two or some original point of view.
Blueserker - Long live the niche! This site just writes about unusual Bluetooth stuff, with narry another headset review in sight.
Distraction Culture - Mark Curtis has been around the UK digital scene for ever and this is his blog. Always original, thought provoking and insightful. I'm interviewing Mark about his new book of the same name later this week.
Musings of a Mobile Marketer - Helen used to work with me at ZagMe and has carried on with hands-on mobile in the UK. This makes her a veteran of the mobile scene. Her informed observations and ability to "see it like a user" make her required reading for mobile marketing enthusiasts.
Pasta and Vinegar - Quirky kind of art-meets-academia-meets-location stuff.
Sorry if you didn't make, but I deliberately selected the smaller guys, for a change. And sorry if you're included and a actually a mega-blog blogger - no disrespect intended. I just used the number of BlogLines subscribers as a rough, rule of thumb size measure.
So there we go - Happy Blog Day to you!
Update by Carlo: I'll stick mine here, too. These things have gotten more difficult now that I'm working with some of my favorite writers, like Russell here and Mike Masnick at Techdirt. I'll try to stick to Russell's rules and post some perhaps lesser-known favorites:
Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect - With fear of misdescribing what exactly it is Jan does, his blog features photos from around the world showing how people use their mobile phones and how mobility is working its way into society -- generally in interesting and/or unexpected ways.
Lifeblog - Charlie Schick - Charlie was te marketing manager for Nokia's Lifeblog product until recently, and his blog was sort of focused on it, but as he's poking around looking for his next project, it's become much more generalist on mobility and marketing. But that generality hasn't made his blog less interesting, it's made it even more so.
Line of Site - Steve works for Feedburner, so he's got consistent insights on RSS and mobile, which is handy. He's also got good taste in music and is a soccer fan, which helps too.
Tom Hume - I'm breaking one of Russell's rules by including somebody in our top 14, but I really like Tom's blog. It's the perfect combination of very focused writing and interesting links.
PinkDome.com - Covers Texas politics with all the snark they deserve. So named PinkDome for the pink granite used to build the capitol building.
I posted several months ago on TheFeature some thoughts on how RSS could change the way information's distributed to mobile devices. There hasn't been a lot of action in the space, but I'm holding to my original idea. I should probably also reiterate at this point I'm not talking about using RSS on mobile phones just to read standard web feeds, as there are plenty of applications today that will let you do just that (check out the free reader Free News built for us featuring our 14 favorite mobile blogs for a start). I'm talking about using RSS to deliver all kinds of information and content to mobile devices.
Russell pointed out how Bloglines can deliver weather reports, which is a good basic example of how my idea could work: an application on a phone pings an RSS feed every so often, and downloads any updates to the device. That way, the most current information's sitting there on the device, and a user doesn't have to go surfing for it. Plenty of the things that are now delivered via SMS or basic WAP services -- sports scores, news, movie showtimes -- could be delivered in this way. Macromedia's Flashcast is built around a similar paradigm, based on Flash Lite.
In any case, I've been a little surprised not to see more happening in this area. If I thought of it, surely it couldn't be that hard (though perhaps it's just not a very good idea). But, I did see something this morning that might indicate things are starting to change: I was looking at Sony Ericsson's site about one of the forthcoming Walkman phones, the W550i, when I noticed under its entertainment features "RSS Feeds", saying "Use your phone to view up-to-the-minute news and other content from selected websites and blogs."
Ok, that sounds more like the RSS I wasn't talking about that the one that I was, but I still can't think of a phone that's got a pre-installed RSS reader, let alone a mass-market model. It opens up the possibility for carriers to embrace RSS for information delivery, but also for the same type of third parties that got into the SMS alerts game. The delivery mechanism seems pretty simple, now it's just a question of getting information available in feeds.
Sadly, not for you -- unless you happen to be in Bengbu, China. Some vendors there are using free pornographic video clips to entice people to buy phones, using them to demonstrate the video playback capabilities of devices, then loading them on the phone after purchase. The police there haven't figured out how to crack down on it yet, though they could take a page out of Malaysian cops' books and do random spot checks of people's phones.
Perhaps my dour outlook on mobile porn was off-base -- or maybe it's just that the business model's being approached incorrectly :)
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the problem of filtering content to make sure kids don't get exposed to undesirable stuff from the net on their phones. With a computer, there's loads of filtering options, including perhaps the most effective of keeping it in a communal part of the house and making a point of looking over their shoulders, from time to time.
With a mobile phone, it's essentially a personal, private medium and unless you're the kind of parent who never lets your child out of your sight until they're 18, this is going to cause a problem. How big this problem will really be and how much inflated by the media and activist parental and religious groups it's hard to say right now.
A new survey by Ace highlights the problem, admittedly by way of promoting their service - that's right, ParentPatrol (TM), which allows parents to control how their kids use the phone. Having said that, the research does appear to be genuine enough, based on an online survey of 1,000 kids.
Here's some of the findings:
71% claimed to have unsupervised and unrestricted access to their mobile phone
38% claimed to send sms to friends during school
30% played games during school
26% used their phone to talk to people their parents wouldn't approve of
Kids spend as much time on their phones as they do on physical activity (that little, huh?)
The ParentPatrol product does sound pretty good and flexible, if this is the kind of way you think it best to manage your kids. You can restrict access and use to certain times, specify permitted numbers or allow an agreed number of minutes usage. All this can be done via a web interface, that your average teenager will probably hack before you've worked out how to log on to it.
The survey also highlights the best way to punish these pesky kids. As I've pointed out before, banning them mobile access is far more effective than say banning them from TV or their iPods - or that most old-fashioned punishment, grounding. Take away their phones and you've ruined their social, dating and sex life. It's the disciplinary equivalent of going nuclear.
As the market for kids' mobiles increases though, I can't help feeling that a better solution to all this is to stop kids using phones altogether until they're old enough to be responsible and won't be too traumatised by some of the content they'll get exposed to - maybe 16. Added to this is the ambiguous health risks concerning kids' usage of phones. Plus the issue highlighted by Carlo, writing over at TechDirt, where some terminally misguided parents are using phones as a cheap substitute for proper and responsible child care.
At the risk of sounding like an old fart (as well as looking like one) should we consider banning mobile ownership under a certain age, like we ban cigarettes, driving, having sex and adult material? While it obviously wouldn't be popular with the kids - the politicians wouldn't care, as kids can't vote. And it might actually be a real vote winner with many of the parents.
I think that this might actually happen. Not everywhere. But some countries and certainly some States in the US will seriously consider and maybe even legislate over age controls for mobile phones within the next 5 years.
The image comes from Family Safe Media, which sell a variety of tech solutions to protect your little darlings. These range for the I am Big Brother software (does this mean that it arrests them and extracts a confession by torturing them with rats?) to profanity filters for your TV, DVD etc. Wonders will never cease. Image disappeared!
One of the most innovative online music initiatives in recent times, has been the subscription model. Services like (new) Napster, Yahoo and Rhapsody offer you as much music as you can cram onto your hard drive for a fixed monthly subscription of between $5 and $9.95 a month - provided you keep paying your subscription.
I'm not going in to the pros and cons of subscribing vs "owning" (whatever that means these days), as both models have their supporters. Not as many as them that support, "free" but you can't have everything.
But whatever you think of subscription, it does seem that the music industry should be praised for once, for allowing something new to happen and exploring new business models.
But then greed has kicked in, rather predictably. The arrangement under which these services have been working is only a temporary one - in place since 2001.
By way of comparison, the deal that the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) agreed to charge for Internet Radio is 5.25%. The deal agreed for downloads is 8.5%. The deal that they've proposed to the Digital Media Association (DiMA), which represents the main subscription companies is .......17% of revenues - double that they levy for downloads.
I suppose you could argue (and I'm sure they are) that in the case of a smaller pie, they want a bigger slice. But what about the companies who have gone out and created the market in the first place and handle all the tech, billing and the customers? In other words, the real wealth creators in the value chain.
Talks have broken down now, after DiMA counter-offered 6.9% of revenues, which is a very wide difference.
So what's next? The NMPA must think that they have Yahoo et al over a barrel, as now they've launched the service, it would be difficult to withdraw it, both from customer care and an investment write-off point of view.
It needs someone over at the NMPA to think big, long term and in the spirit of partnership and interests of their members to rescue this. But my take-out is that if you try to do a deal with people who treat partners like this, don't launch something on the basis of a temporary deal.
Source: CNet News
Following yesterday's update on the subway perv, two more examples of criminals being exposed via mobile phones popped up this morning:
- A New York man has been able to give police images of the guy that stole his phone after the thief unknowingly uploaded all the photos he took of himself, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's rear end to a Sprint web account. Apparently whenever a picture's emailed off a Sprint phone, it gets cc'ed to the web account, so the phone's owner was easily able to track down the thief, who then obligingly responded to one of his emails with his real name. Smart.
- While this one doesn't involve a cameraphone per se, it's pretty amusing as well. The MoDaCo Windows Mobile enthusiast site recently had a meetup in the UK, and Orange had donated a phone for them to raffle off. Before they could give it away, somebody swiped it. Not figuring how stupid it would be to steal a phone from a bunch of phone geeks, he was pretty easily tracked down when he tried to unlock the phone to use it on a carrier other than Orange. Nice one, Einstein.
One of my bug bears is the lack of creativity in mobile marketing campaigns. About the most exciting it gets is yet another Text and Win promotion. So it's great to see something that gets my marketing heart beating a little faster.
The on-pack mechanic invites people to register for the promotion by sms, sending in the name of their town. Then, within 24 hours they get an sms from Lucozade to get down to their ZONE (a local, named stockist) to win an iPod - first there wins.
If there isn't a local promotion in your area, you also get a chance to go to a virtual ZONE by sms. This involves the quickest answer by sms to a series of questions. I'm sure that the response to this part will be very high.
This reminds me a lot of the promotion we ran for Reebok at ZagMe. They were opening a new store in the mall, so simply wanted to let people know where they were and build store traffic. We sent out an sms saying that the first person to enter the shop and say to the manager "I've been Zagged" got a free pair of Reeboks.
The first time we did this I was watching the shop with the Marketing Director. We sent the message out and waited. And waited for about 3 minutes - this felt like an awfully long time. Then there was the sound of running and about 50 people ran into the store shouting "I've been Zagged!!".
I realized at that moment that, if done well, LBS marketing was a very, very powerful tool. What other mechanic could you use to make people run?
Interestingly, Lucozade are also supporting the initiative with a WAP site - something that we'll see happening more and more.
So congrats to R2S for adding a much-needed spark of creativity, fun and zest into mobile marketing. And to Lucozade for having the vision to do the unusual, rather than the safe and boring.
There's a promotional website here.
A new study by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) makes worrying reading for mobile and fixed line operators alike.
The research found that users of retail VoIP services had more than doubled in the last year, from 5 million to 11 million at the end of July. But this doesn't include computer-based services, like Skype, which claims to have 51 million members worldwide.
And Google Talk, launched last week will inevitably boost the market further, even if pundits are disappointed with its features. However, if it works properly, it's hard to argue that it's not going to succeed, even if it never catches Skype.
If VoIP starts to tip, which seems pretty inevitable, as it's hard to argue with "free" or savings of 80% for retail services, it's going to inevitably impact on operator revenues. The OECD predicts that fixed line operators will fight back by offering more chargeable services, such as domestic and small business wi-fi networks putting more pressure on their mobile cousins.
When a business is faced with a fundamental change like this, it can do one of two things. Hope it'll go away. Or offer their own version of the service to keep its customers, uncomfortable and suicidal though this may feel. But at least the latter course allows you to retain the customer albeit at lower margins than you enjoyed historically.
So far, most operators seem to be taking the denial route, or maybe they're just waiting for the right time. I hope hope they don't leave it too late.
A footnote in the OECD report also has bad news for TV companies. As more and more people start to view TV on the net, this will lead to a decline in audience and thus ad revenues.
"May you live in interesting times" as the Chinese curse allegedly says.
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I posted last Thursday a woman snapping a cameraphone picture of a guy that exposed himself to her on the New York City subway, and how she'd posted it on Flickr and given it to police. The story's now a dual-meme phenomenon (with citizen journalism, sort of), as the New York Daily News ran the photo and a story about it on the front page of Saturday's edition. Hopefully this well help get the perv caught.
There's been a lot of talk lately about converging mobile and fixed lines with technologies like UMA. The common thinking goes that mobile networks will grab traffic from fixed lines when users can take advantage of the benefits of mobile networks and the cheap prices of fixed VoIP in a single device -- but I'm beginning to get a little skeptical converged products will live up to the hype.
There's no doubt that something like UMA sounds great. I'd love to be able to get the rates of my Vonage connection, particularly on international calls, on my mobile phone from any hotspot. Just thinking about what that could do to ridiculous international roaming rates sounds great, too. But there are a couple obstacles I see. First is the assumption that converged mobile services will grab a lot of traffic from fixed lines. One study recently said that two-thirds of Western European mobile calls are made from the home or office, which says to me that people aren't always choosing the cheapest alternative.
Granted, there's a lot of uncertainty in drawing my conclusion solely from this figure -- there's no distinction between incoming and outgoing calls, for one thing, and it gives no indication of how many calls still go out over the fixed lines. So are users as interested in always using the lowest-cost option as we assume? Perhaps that's where the automatic technology can come in, choosing the lowest-cost network available at any given moment. But that can create a pricing problem, since it may not be clear how much a user's getting charged at any given moment.
The second, and bigger obstacle, is the carriers themselves. The iTunes phone has been conspicuous most by its absence, with some of the delay attributable to carriers being reluctant to introduce a device that essentially cut them out of the value chain. How will carriers with fixed-line corporate relations take to offering a product that will serve to cannibalize fixed-line revenue?
I'm expecting virtual operators to lead the way with UMA, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them use it as a way to get into virtual broadband sales as well. I also expect incumbent carriers to resist offering it as long as they can -- after all, why cut prices unless you have to?
In response to my completely unprovoked attack on the advertising industry earlier in the week (42% of Advertising Executives are Dim, finds McKinsey Research), Chris of Aerodeon, a veteran mobile marketing company in the UK, took a slightly more reasonable approach in his comment of explanation.
Thanks Chris for the comment of the week:
Because ad execs make most of their revenue from TV advertising - the sums involved are thousands of times the magnitude of the typical mobile marketing campaign - it's a sad fact that they are recommending media that supports their bottom line and not the clients objectives.
For all the talk of the death of TV advertising - there is still no better way to communicate your brand to a mass audience and influence consumer buying behaviour in a short period of time to a national population - this will change with fragmentation of TV but the process isn't going to happen as fast as everyone believes.
The mobile industry may want ad dollars that are destined for TV to be rerouted to to SMS/WAP campaigns but consumers needs to catch up too. I think mobile will be very important part of the mix and we'll see it commanding more and more share of digital budget every year from here on in, but TV won't go away - its just too damn effective for brand Goliaths who want to hit 10 million people in a 30 second spot.
Just because operators in Europe are reluctant to get into location-based services and their cousins in the US are dragging their heels over implementing Directive 911, doesn't mean that the rest of us have given up on LBS.
Pasta and Vinegar reports that The University of Southern California has launched a Location-Based Mobile Media Course, for students who want to find out more about this area and who may well be the true visionaries of what LBS can deliver in the future.
The course, led by Julian Bleecker (pictured) promises to be pretty hands-on, requiring students to "design and develop a project that addresses the opportunities presented by locative mobile and pervasive media concepts". I'm sure that they'll do better than the current rash of kid and employee tracking. Yawn.
One of the course papers is worth a read if you're into this area - The Geospatial Web: A Call to Action. What We Still Need to Build for an Insanely Cool Open Geospatial Web by Mike Liebhold. In this, Mike explains the true vision of what this is all about:
We'll be able to view and utilize tags, pages, and graphic data about places far richer than the current yellow pages and commercial POIs (points of interest): environmental details; live, in-place cultural information, entertainment, and games; history, mythology, and social information about people nearby; geodemographics; micro-local commercial information; safety information based on data about health, accidents, and crime; political data, facilities details, and local public services; physical objects' material composition and origins; links to manufacturers' sites and help desks; instructions on uses; stories about prior use; user annotations; digital graffiti; user-created art; and location-tagged messages.
Couldn't have put it better myself.
It can be too easy to focus on the mistakes operators make when you're blogging - a bit like restaurant critics usually have something to critisise with even the best meal. After all, a constant diet of "Golly gosh, it was just scrumptious and the service was fab" would be a little boring for the reader.
But operators do frequently do admirable things and it's only fair that we recognise this too.
O2 have just announced that for their forthcoming i-mode launch in the UK, they're sticking to the spirit (if not quite the percentage) of the revenue splits i-mode offered content owners in Japan. O2 will keep a more than reasonable 14%, leaving their partners with a generous 86%, if you need help with the maths.
So if you're a content owner in the UK, guess which operator is now first on your wish list?
This comes a mere few weeks after O2 showed that they were listening to their customers, as well as bloggers, and changed the way they delivered MMS.
Anyway, this is great news for the UK content industry and a hearty congrats to O2 for getting it right. Let's hope the other operators follow your lead in due course, though this might be a bit too much to wish for right now.
Gartner's come out with its assessment of the second-quarter handset market, and there aren't any surprises, really: Nokia and Motorola continue to eke out gains, while Samsung continues to drop, along with Siemens.
Most stories compare the current quarter's results to the same quarter last year; I think that looking at last quarter's share percentages provide a better idea of a company's momentum and recent execution against its rivals. For instance, in the second quarter of 2004, Samsung had 12.1% share, while in this quarter, it has 12.8%. Those figures mask the fact that the company lost half a point of share from the first quarter of this year.
So here's how things look comparing this quarter to last quarter:
| Company | Q205 Share (%) | Q105 Share (%) |
| Nokia | 31.9 | 30.4 |
| Motorola | 17.9 | 16.8 |
| Samsung | 12.8 | 13.3 |
| LG | 6.5 | 6.2 |
| Sony Ericsson | 6.2 | 5.5 |
| Siemens | 4.7 | 5.5 |
| Others | 20.0 | 22.3 |
The biggest movement is from Nokia and Motorola, which are consolidating their lead at the top of the pack. The is reflective of a wider trend of consolidation -- the share of companies outside the top 6 dropped by a couple of points. Nokia's price cuts and the low end and the filling out of its mid-tier look to be helping, while Motorola continues to ride the popularity of just one model -- the RAZR. Sony Ericsson, too, looks to have its latest reincarnation of the T610 midrange handset in the K750. Samsung, though, keeps falling. My guess would be that consumers are tired of its one-trick-pony approach to handset design and turning away from its ever-present silver clamshells.
I guess it's a little late to be outlining the challenges for the manufacturers for the third quarter, since it's nearly over, so we'll say the challeges "going forward": Nokia's got to continue filling in its product line, not the least of which the middle and low tier and in 3G, where it's only got 17% of the market. While the N series and 8800 are nice phones, they're just too expensive to move in mass quantities.
It's a similar story for Motorola: it's been riding the RAZR for a good while now, but where are the rest of its hot new designs? The delay of the iTunes phone has been well documented, and all the signs says that when (if?) it ever comes out, it's going to be a real disappointment, a real step back in looks from the RAZR. There's supposed to be a slew of models to follow in the RAZR's footsteps, in terms of both design and annoying names, but they better get a move on lest somebody else seize the Motomomentum.
Samsung's got to find some new designers. The silver flip stuff has gotten old, and their other designs -- or rather their other design, the slider -- doesn't inspire much confidence. Sony Ericsson is well-placed, with the aforementioned K750, and it will be looking to get a boost from its Walkman range. Sometimes I get the impression SE doesn't mind being a minor player in the market: I think its products are generally pretty solid, and it's got some hot models in Japan it could adapt for the West that would go over very well. One final question mark is what will happen to Siemens' market share, as it's hard to see BenQ hanging on to it.
The idea of mobile sousveillance/coveillance/equiveillance has got legs. Today, Boing Boing links to a Flickr post by a woman that says she snapped a picture of a guy that exposed himself to her on the New York City subway. She later took the photo to police, hoping it would help them catch the guy, but apparently he's still at large. His face (and moving hands) are all over the Web now, though.
One of the annoying side effects of living in an iPod world is that I frequently find myself having to repeat what I just said, as the other person turns off/down their iPod.
And at the risk of sounding like a real old fart, I'm always muttering warnings to my kids like "it's too loud, you know" to which they respond "What?" as they turn down their iPods. At which point, I repeat myself (again).
It's gratifying then (at least for my personal credibility) that doctors in Australia are saying that iPod users (well, any MP3 users actually) are risking long term hearing loss as they are playing them TOO LOUDLY.
In fact, a random survey found that 25% of owners were listening at dangerous volumes - which is thought to be in excess of 80 decibels. By way of comparison, a busy street is 70 decibels and a pneumatic drill is 100.
Apparently, the first danger sign is a ringing in your ears.Or that could just be because your companion has just slapped you round the head as they get fed up with saying everything twice, everything twice.
You have been warned.
Story via W2Forum (registration required). Image from iPod Lounge.
One of my pet themes here is that we're moving steadily to a world where it's increasingly easy to access digital data via the mobile phone. As broadband download speeds become the norm, using your mobile to see web pages, will be as commonplace as calling someone.
Of course, many people are already doing this already via WAP, despite relatively slow speeds and that many websites aren't optimised for mobile access. For instance, in the UK, the ugly duckling (remember WAP is crap?) has grown into a 1.8 billion page impressions a month swan.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg and the use of WAP is limited to a few sites and tasks (like looking up train times) and can't really be argued to have reached the mainstream yet. This is going to change.
It's difficult to imagine all the consequences of this. But one struck me this morning, reading an article in The Guardian Online, Reviews on a Plate, about London Eating. London Eating is a pretty simple idea. It's a site where ordinary diners can post reviews of restaurants - citizen restaurant critics, if you like.
This has proved to be pretty popular, enjoying 100,000 new posts every month and getting 650,000 unique visits, which surely must be a serious percentage of regular restaurant diners in the London area.
The great thing about this is that because they're written by ordinary people, they reflect the kind of service that you or I would probably experience.Because if restaurant staff see AA Gill or Michael Winner (two famous restaurant critics) walk in their door that evening, they're obviously going to pull out all the stops for them, even if it penalises other diners. And these guys are just too well known to go incognito.
Now, this is bad news for a not-so-good restaurant. Many people are obviously influenced by such a site when planning a meal out.
But if this guide were easily usable with your mobile phone, imagine what it might do to passing trade? If there's three or four restaurants in the immediate vicinity, the review on your mobile is certainly going to have an influence on where you decide to spend your money.
Clearly, there are problems with such a system. Competitors can fake reviews or customers with a unjustified grudge can unfairly critique you. But as more and more people start to post to these types of guides, the faux review will start to stand out and we'll learn to spot the genuine.
This will clearly be an unpleasant and un-nerving experience for many restaurateurs. But if they consistently deliver good value, good service and good food, they have nothing to worry about.
Another example of the shift of the balance of power to the community.
There have been plenty of people, err... pumping up the mobile porn market, not the least of which the mobile porn sellers themselves, billing the content as the ever-elusive "killer app" for mobile. The numbers have been a little suspect all along, whether it's saying half of Korea has accessed mobile porn, or the supposed billions mobile porn will pull in. But a piece in the Guardian does some calculations, and comes to the conclusion that maybe things aren't as big as they're made out to be (no pun intended).
If you buy in to the analyst prediction that mobile porn will be worth $2.3 billion in 2010, there's a few takeaways: first, that's not tremendous growth in dollar terms from the $1 billion market they say mobile porn will be this year. Second, there should be well over 3 billion mobile users by 2010, compared with 1 billion today -- so porn spending per subscriber won't even hold steady. Finally, that $2.3 billion would represent just 5% of the overall mobile content market, hardly making it a killer app.
There will always be porn consumers. But it's hard to believe there are that many dedicated enough to want porn on their mobile phones, as opposed to the TV or internet. As Mike points out at Techdirt, porn helped cable and satellite TV, VCRs, DVD players and the net thrive, mainly because each successive technology offered an improvement in the viewing experience. The only benefit mobile porn offers (alongside a few drawback) is portability, but how many people want to watch porn when they're on the go, out in public?
But the most interesting comments come from one Julia Dimambro, the MD of mobile porn purveyor Cherry Media, who alleges operators are playing down porn because they don't want to be seen as promoting it. While carriers do have a love-hate affair with porn, their restraint appears to have more to do with reality about the level of demand setting in than any puritanical leadings, and Ms. Dimambro's numbers about the popularity of her company's site seem to prove this.
She said back in February it was getting 1 million hits per month. Now, the Guardian says it gets 300,000 hits a month. The fact that hits are a useless metric aside, the figures raise two possibilities. Either the company's playing fast and loose with its numbers to try and make the market look bigger than it really is, or it's seen a dramatic drop over the last six months. Whichever is true, neither one reflects too well on the company or the mobile porn industry.
The Pondering Primate pointed out a press release from an SMS gateway provider that lists the top ten ways businesses in the UK are using text messages:
1. Recruitment agencies: people looking for temporary work can now register to receive SMS alerts about potential work from recruitment agencies. By sending a broadcast SMS to suitable candidates recruitment agencies can save considerable time and money.
2. Entertainment information services: SMS is being used to deliver an variety of entertainment information services such as ringtones, logos, jokes, competitions and horoscopes to customers. This generates significant revenue for many organisations.
3. Clubs and bars: many clubs and bars are using SMS to notify customers, who have opted in, about special drinks promotions and events for when they are in the area.
4. Internet service providers and hosting companies: SMS is being used to notify engineers when systems go down or if suspicious criminal activity is occurring across a network, meaning that problems can be dealt with quickly and efficiently.
5. Couriers: courier companies are using SMS to provide information to their couriers as to where to collect and deliver mail. Additionally it is being used to alert customers when items, such as concert tickets, are being delivered, so that they can ensure they are around for the delivery or can reschedule for a more convenient time.
6. Schools, colleges and universities: students and parents can now be alerted by SMS if buildings are closed due to bad weather, etc. This saves them having to wait for updates on local radio or having to call to find out if buildings are open, etc.
7. Hair salons, dentists and surgeries: individual patients can now receive automatic text reminders telling them the time and date of appointments. Patients can also postpone and reschedule appointments via SMS meaning that appointments are less likely to be missed.
8. Mechanics and body shops: mechanics are using SMS to notify customers when their cars are ready. This can save both the garages and customers time, because as soon as a job is logged as completed the customer can be automatically alerted, whether they are at home or at work, etc.
9. Charities: charities are using SMS in a variety of ways ranging from using it to alert people about fundraising activities or as a means to collect donations with enabling people being to make a pledge via a text shortcode with the donation being taken from their next bill.
10. Insurance companies: mobile users can now receive quotes and cover confirmation from insurance companies via SMS, which has helped to enhance customer service as users can have access to information 24 hours a day.
Okay, it's great that companies are adopting SMS, but is anybody doing anything interesting? The vast majority of these are simply voice call or e-mail substitutes. Feel free to share any good ones you're aware of in the comments.
I've been meaning to post this from We Make Money Not Art for a few days and finally got my act together.
MobZombies is a location based Zombie fleeing game, where virtual zombies chase the real world you. The longer you survive, the more zombies appear and the better they are at chasing you.
But, the game deliberately doesn't take account of the real world, which is where the fun might be. So maybe you have to run through a wedding party to avoid being caught or climb a 10 foot wall.
Another example of the digital world meeting the physical.
You know how some web sites have a fascination that's almost voyeuristic - I'm thinking of things Hot or Not, still going strong after all these years.
Now there's a another one, in the form of a new feature from Treasure My Text, the sms online storage company I wrote about last week. It seems that many users are quite happy to publish their sms for all the world to see and it's rather compulsive.
Messages vary from the obscure and personal to witty or sexually explicit (and I do mean explicit!). You can even sign up to an RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest.
Treasure My Text are calling it a Slog (SMS Log) and I can see that Slogging (by which I mean reading Slogs) might be the big thing this Autumn.
It's been 8 months now since we looked at Java game downloads in the UK, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the market has developed since then. After all, 8 months is a whole generation in terms of technical and user development in mobile.
According to ELSPA's Official Mobile Games Java Download Chart, compiled from data provided by the 5 main operators in the UK (ie Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile, Orange and 3) the state of the universe looks like this:
1 LEMMINGS - IFONE
2 WALL BREAKER - INFUSIO
3 TETRIS - IFONE
4 PUB POOL
- INFOSPACE
5 WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE - GLU MOBILE
6 SWAT SNIPER -
INFOSPACE
7 LMA MANGER 2005 - JAMDAT
8 PITFALL GLACIER - DIGITAL
CHOCOLATE
9 MINI GOLF CASTLES - DIGITAL CHOCOLATE
10 PITFALL JUNGLE -
DIGITAL CHOCOLATE
There's a couple of things to note here, though.
Firstly, we have no data about how much each title sells, which is a little disappointing. It's also worth noting that a game promoted by a larger operator can sell less per user than a smaller operator, yet still be ahead in the charts. So, we really do need volumes to be able to usefully coment.
Secondly, it is only games sold via the operators. Since we've seen recent claims that off-portal sales of content have now reached about 70%, we are in theory only looking at 30% of the market here. This could be very skewed in terms of results, as gut feel tells me that most savvy mobile users and gamers would be buying off-portal, leaving the laggardly rump buying from their operator.
If that is the case, the operator chart would reflect an innate conservatism and a preference for games that don't exactly push the envelope.
So here's a call for a better chart for us play with, which would include off-portal sales too. This doesn't have to be exhaustive, but certainly some of the bigger indie games sellers and resellers.
Anyway, with that in mind, what does the chart tell us?
Well, certainly oldies are still dominating the download scene. Are they really better, or are developers failing to get to grips with the new medium of phone-based gaming? Or is it a reflection of the type of gamer buying from operators, we discussed above?
The other interesting development is the sudden arrival of Digital Chocolate on the scene, with 3 titles in the top 10. This is the company founded by Trip Hawkins, who previously founded Electronic Arts, which practically invented the modern computer game. Trip is a master of the sound bite (he describes mobiles as "social computers" and "sieze the minute" is a nice description of mobile gaming) and founded the new company specifically to take advantage of the new mobile medium, attracting some impeccable investors on the way.
It looks like he might just be able to pull off that very rare trick of creating two hugely successful companies. Sure, it's early days, but signs couldn't be much more promising.
UK text-message figures are out for July, and the number of messages sent continues to grow, hitting 2.7 billion last month. This made me wonder how US figures stacked up, and I was a little surprised to find that the CTIA says 5 billion messages a month are sent in the US.
Of course, there are more than three times as many mobile users in the US as there are people in the UK, but I have to say these numbers still come as a surprise, particularly when that averages out to roughly 25 messages per subscriber per month -- though I guess that's easily skewed by kids, particularly those messaging IM networks (the average is 45 per person per month in the UK). In any case, it shows there's a solid volume of text messages being sent in the US -- so bring forth the content and applications.
TechDirt reported last week about a phone developed by Fujitsu for DoCoMo for the elderly. Among other features, it slows down speech to 70% of real time, so old folks can understand what you're saying to them on the phone.
Frankly, I'm not sure oldsters need to slow speech down - they may be a little deaf perhaps, but do they need this?
Anyway, I think a great application for this technology would be for when you're trying to talk to someone in a language that isn't your own. I live in Germany, for instance, and struggle daily with the fiendish tongue. But when on the phone, I just go to pieces and pathetically ask "sprechen sie English?" to which the normal reply is "a little bit", followed by perfectly constructed sentences that most Brits wouldn't be capable of.
But if I could slow them down a little, it would actually give me half a chance of understanding.
Also, if I could insert one of these things into my wife's brain (she speaks English and German exceptionally quickly) we might be able to practice German conversations as a family, from time to time.
The good thing about the approaching Oktoberfest (a must-visit attraction at least once in your life) is that "Ein Bier" is pretty easy to ask for - one of the first language skills I mastered.
An article in New Media Age says that "only one in 20 business people understand the difference between Wi-Fi, 3G and GPRS technologies" according to some new study. I'm stuck trying to figure out why that's important. It's an indictment of carriers' marketing and service failures more than a sign of user ignorance.
There's no reason an average user should have to, or be expected to, navigate all these acronyms and technical terms, either in marketing or as part of the user experience. The marketing part is pretty easy -- quit selling technology and start selling services (ie picture messaging, not MMS and the Internet, not GPRS). Perhaps the user experience is a little trickier, but I'd venture that the only time a normal user would run into these terms would be when something goes wrong and they've got to fix (or try to fix) something. While maybe that's not preventable, it could be handled better.
WAP, 3G, GPRS, MMS -- these are all meaningless terms. What concerns a user is what their phone can do, rather than how it does it. Do they care if it's 2G versus 3G? The likely response is "what's a G?"
It's one of Russell's favorite rants to decry (and rightly so) the fiasco of getting handsets set up properly for MMS, so I won't cover that ground again. But the point is still valid: a customer shouldn't have to do this stuff, or have any technical knowledge to make this stuff work.
Is it too much to ask for users to be able to walk into a shop, go "I want that one" and walk out with a phone that can properly access the services they're interested in and can clearly understand, at an easily digested tariff?
I spotted a column by Dave Birch in the Guardian from last week (when it looks like Emily posted it on Textually as well) that's pretty interesting about how mobile phones are being used to facilitate payments in African countries.
It's nothing advanced as Simpay or PayPal for mobiles or anything like that -- it's using prepay credits as currency. We've seen operators that allow P2P airtime credit trading, which has spawned micro-resellers in places like the Philippines, but this sounds a little different. It's a grassroots use of prepaid credits, which carry enough value to people that they're accepted for payments -- and even as bribes by government officials.
It works by people buying scratch-off vouchers, then texting the voucher number to the payee, who then applies it to their account. The only drawback is that while somebody could pass the number on to pay somebody else, they can't split up the credit. Yet, anyway -- it seems like if the operators there are smart, they'll do like the Filipinos and make their systems open to this kind of thing, and reap the benefits.
A few years ago, as a fairly new and keen young parent, my wife and I went on a First Aid course to learn what to do if a child was injured.
One of the themes of the course was that, to an extent, kids have to learn themselves what's dangerous and the consequences of that danger - the hard way, unfortunately. They gave an example of a paranoid parent worrying about her kid getting his fingers trapped in doors, so she simply took all the internal doors out in her house.
Sure enough, the kid never got his fingers trapped in a door - until the day he went round to a friend's house. So, he had to go through the learning and howling process, at some point.
Mike Masnick makes a very similar point at TechDirt today, making an appeal that we should be teaching kids how to use the internet and avoid the "bad stuff" rather than just filtering it out. He says, like the finger in the door story, that sooner or later, kids will find them on a computer without filtering and won't know how to handle this.
This is a very good point and one that I'd endorse wholeheartedly, with a small caveat. Very young kids use the internet these days - certainly 5 and 6 years olds, if not younger.It's difficult to teach these kids anything to apply critical judgment and I think it's this kind of age where filters are useful. Once they're maybe 10 or older, you can start teaching them to think for themselves and they certainly should be capale of this, at that age.
Once they're about 13 or 14 though, they're going to look at the bad stuff anyway and they'll be able to bust out of any filtering attempts you care to put in place. So while I'm not advocating encouraging them to try the stuff - like you wouldn't give them packs of cigarettes to try - if they want to look, they will, as that's juts part of growing up.
The place where filtering is much more useful, for all ages, is filtering out the nastier examples of spam email that pervades all our in-boxes, including our kids'. Irrespective of how tolerant you are as a parent, no one can possible thinking advertisng stuff like bestiality and worse, to children is anything but completely unacceptable.
Of course, these issues are about to be faced by mobile as well as the computer based access. The difficulty here is that, unlike a computer which can be relatively easily monitored (just keep popping into the room they're using, unexpectedly from time to time) the mobile is almost impossible to police. This means that we're going to see a lot more debate as the media and parents wake up to the possibility that their kid can look at nudey ladies on their phones.
The venerable consultancy, McKinsey, has just published some rather extraordinary research, in the latest edition of McKinsey Quarterly. Well, it's extraordinary to my way of looking at the world anyway.
They questioned 124 Advertising Executives from 39 European counties asking them a very leading question indeed, as the interesting part of the findings would be in the second, supplementary question.
So the first question was:
Would you allocate more ad spending to a channel, offering attractive ratings growth - for example, via new technologies such as SMS?
This clearly invites a positive response. As in, "would you like to increase the effectiveness of your marketing programmes" or "would you like to be paid more money and be more attractive to the opposite sex?".
How can you say "no" to this?
Anyway, 14% of respondents weren't sure - how can you call yourself a professional ad-person and not have an opinion on increasing your advertising effectiveness? A further 28% said "no". Concluding that 42% of Ad Execs have shit for brains. Nothing new there :-)
But what of the bright sparks who spotted the "right" answer and said "Yes"?
They obviously accounted for 58% of the survey. But 54% of them then got stuck in D'oh land as they didn't know where the money for this activity would come from, bless 'em.
The remainder said that it would come from new investment (32%), which frankly doesn't seem very likely the way most corporates work, or reallocation from the print budget, which was chosen by 14%, who are the winners in this little "How to be a Vaguely Credible Advertising Executive in 2005" survey.
So if you're an Ad Exec, or better still, took part in this research, please defend yourself by leaving a comment. Why wouldn't you allocate more spend to a channel offering attractive ratings growth, huh?
Cartoon courtesy of Gaping Void, which I hope it's OK to use. Check it out if you want to know what happens next after Dr Market calls time on his patient, Tristan Terribly-Eighties-Advertising.
Story spotted on MocoBlog.
We love it when you leave a comment on our posts. No really, we do - it takes this blogging thing into a different dimension when we have some interaction with the people who read our thoughts.
We get some brilliant comments here, so we thought it would be cool to have a Comment of the Week, as an occasional feature. We'll run this when we think it's justified - not necessarily automatically every week - but then we think there's something worthy of your attention in case you missed it.
The rules (as Butch Cassidy said) is that there are no rules. We'll just post stuff which catches our eye. You don't have to agree with us or write a 500 word essay.
No prizes, just a little whuffie.
First winner is Mike Rhee, who posted this about Carlo's widely quoted post Why DRM will Kill Mobile Music:
Carlo-
I think some of your points invalidating DRM are true. Currently,
it's mostly used as a tool for exclusivity in both software and hardware,
limiting the user's ability to use music freely. But the problem is no different
than the evolution of the phonograph to the cassette or the cassette to the CD.
As we all move towards a physically intangible digital medium of music, each of our personal collections are going to be slowly decimated. We have to deal with that. I know some people who are still "getting around" to converting their LP collections. Sometimes it's hard to let go, I know. As far as DRM goes, it's still a technology in it's early phases. Eventually the choices will narrow down, by nature of the market. We'll have to see if the best technology prevails.
I think your overall argument that DRM is choking the future of digital music is flawed, primarily because it's grounded in the now fading era of the LP. A record used to be something you owned, could physically touch, and look at, unfold. The idea of the album as a physical entity is dying. But with that, we enter a realm of access to music that's unlimited, instant, and unbounded by physical or temporal limitations.
Take the digital rental music service paradigms that are out there now; Rhaphsody, Yahoo, Napster. These services take the ownership element out of music, an element that didn't belong in the art form anyway. I think people shirk from the idea of renting music because we lose the tangible element. Even psychologically, it's kind of weird. At least with an iTunes purchase we can rest assured the songs will be there for as long as we maintain the file on some storage medium.
Using digital music is going to require a shift in mindset for all of us who grew up buying CD's and leafing through the booklets while it spun in our players. But the idea of sharing music as a digital community, constantly circulating new songs that link to other new songs, passing over one album to the next, finding new artists, all without the constrictions of availability or individually purchasing each record, is a fascinating idea. This Utopian music fantasy is a ways off, I know. But if this is where music is heading, it's going to be an exciting place.
Following my talk at Wikimania about bringing Wikipedia into the real world, via our mobiles, Textually reports that, using Interactiv's Java-based JOCA app, "mobile phone users are able to screen the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia within a few seconds".
This is great. Now all we need is a way to link the physical world to it and we can do what I was talking about.
And that'd be very, very cool.
Following on from Carlo's post yesterday about finding easy ways to transfer data from one phone to another (usually old phone to new phone), I thought I'd my Euro 1.64 to this one.
Carlo mainly focused on transferring contacts, which is a no brainer, as he suggests. But just as important are messages - sms mainly, as not many people send mms.
Many, many people, and especially kids, treasure some of the sms they receive, from friends and lovers alike. The idea of junking them with their old phone is pretty hard for them, as they'll lose their "Sweeeeetie bunnikins luvs soosie xxxooo" messages that have a special place in their hearts.
Professor Richard Harper, who's done a lot of observation analysis about how we use phones, was writing about this 4 years or so ago. Even then, many kids were citing not losing old sms as a real reason for not upgrading.
Since then, we've had at least one commercial service launched to provide this, Treasure My Text, that backed up centrally and subsequently, launched a product to save sms on your iPod. I haven't heard how they're doing, but my guess is that they'd be limited by finite marketing budgets from making the service a rip-roaring success. And also that many kids would resent paying for a service that they think the operator should be providing - and preferably free.
How difficult would it to automatically store the last 20 or so sms you sent, accessible via the web, giving you the option for longer storage if you want? It could even be a revenue source, but it's far better looked at simply as a way of improving customer service for minimal investment.
As the industry gallops into commoditisation, such small things are going to make a big difference between success and failure for operators.
Why? Because, it'll show who is customer-centric and listening to their customers and who's paying lip service to their customers' issues and continuing to focus of the technology and infrastructure - the key issues of the past.
The age of the customer is upon us - never have they been quite so powerful, had so much access to information and been capable of quickly self-organising into active and important communities if they're not listened to.
Operators need to start taking this on board and looking at the minutae of their service and asking how they can make it better for their customers. This dies require a change in mindset in many case (in fairness, some have started to listen), but failing to do so means failing as a business in the longer term.
I was talking to a friend the other week who'd just switched mobile carriers, mainly because he got a new job. In addition to the screwups that seem to be par for the course when porting a number, the biggest problem he had was figuring out how to easily transfer all his contacts from the old phone to the new. Every simple method wouldn't work: saving them to the SIM was out since the phones were locked to different carriers; one phone only had Bluetooth while the other only had infrared; one would sync fine with his computer, the other couldn't, and so on. I think he eventually had to just re-enter them all by hand.
Sure, this isn't a big deal, but it's symptomatic of an attitude in the mobile industry that thinks it's okay to leave pointless obstacles for customers. Just as application and service developers need to take things a step futher, operators and handset vendors need to be about removing those obstacles. In an industry that's synonymous with poor service, anybody that can straighten these things out will enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage.
Let's go back to the contacts example. If a carrier wants to attract users to switch from its rivals, it needs to make the process as simple as possible. Having to key in all your contacts in by hand might require enough effort to dissuade some people from jumping ship -- so why don't carriers offer to take the contacts from their old phone and transfer them to the new one? Technology for this exists already, so why not implement it? The same goes to handset vendors. Again, this is a small issue -- but that means it (and sync in general) should have been solved long ago!
I saw news this week that a Portuguese operator is offering a backup service to its users, which saves contacts, messages and photos. That's a no-brainer: operators keep contacts synced to the network (like on the Danger Hiptop), so if a device gets lost or broken, they can be easily and immediately downloaded. Adding a web interface also makes it easy to add contacts from a computer.
It's these types of things that need to be happening. Has nobody at an operator ever lost their phone and had to re-enter their contacts? Have execs of handset vendors never tried to use PC sync software and seen what a mess it is? I find it hard to believe that people could be so out of touch with their own products and customers.
This is, after all, a blog about mobile technology, in case you hadn't noticed. As such, we thought it would make sense to be able to read MobHappy on a mobile phone too.
So we've teamed up with the guys behind Free News and come up with our very own RSS Reader - FREE to all MobHappy readers - the full version costs $20 a year. Instructions for downloading are at the end of this post.
But that's not all. Our RSS Reader includes 14 other essential mobile blogs that we've chosen for your delight and edification. It wasn't an easy choice, by any means. Some favourites we left out as they weren't specialist enough, like Regine's wonderful We Make Money Not Art and the gadget people like Engadget and Gizmodo.
We only had 14 entries available, so both Carlo and I had to leave out some personal favourites. So to get round that, we've introduced a special Guest Slot, that we'll change from time to time. The first Guest Blog is Mobile Diva, Darla Mack - enjoy!
Here's a run down on the rest:
i-mode Business Strategy. No one can fail to notice that much innovation in mobile comes from Japan. And historically, i-mode has done a lot of that innovation. It's therefore pretty essential to follow what's happening there and these guys do a great job of keeping us all up to speed with events.
MobHappy and the link blog. Well, we weren't going to get left out of our own gig :-) The link blog is stuff we think is interesting, froody or quirky enough to be worthy of your interest, but which we don't really have anything to add to.
Mobile Burn. Michael focuses on the really important stuff - with a handset bias.
Mobile Weblog. Russell started this site, but Oliver Starr has ably taken over with news and insightful comment.
MocoNews. Another highly authoritative and comprehensive news source, with some incisive comment thrown in. Sister site of the prolific Paid Content.
Om Malik's Broadband Blog. Om is highly prolific and his inside knowledge and vast array of contacts means that he's often breaking important news.
Phone Scoop. Important news and comment from the mobile world.
The Pondering Primate. Makes us think, with a constant stream of new ideas.
Russell Beattie. It's a little known fact that to be a great mobile blogger, you need to be called Russell and have a surname beginning with B. This Russell focuses on usually one quality post a day and very much opinion based. We say it's essential to know what he's thinking.
SmartMobs. This multi-authored blog, led by Howard, is a news based blog covering how mobiles are changing the world. Inspired by Howard's book of the same name, it's essential reading.
TechDirt Wireless. Carlo's other blogging gig and a must-read for mobile enthusiasts. Mike Masnick also has an annoying habit of pinching our stories - before we write them, leaving us with nothing more to add.
Textually. Emily's blog empire also includes Picture Phoning and Ringtonia which combined cover everything there is to know about mobile news.
Tom Hume. One of the oldest blogs in the UK and winner of a Net Imperative blogging award, no less. Always something new here, which you won't find anywhere else.
We may update all these from time to time and we'll certainly feature a new Guest Blog pretty regularly. You don't need to do anything to get this new content, by the way. Just carry on using the reader.
The MobHappy RSS Reader is for you, so if you think we've left someone off or would like to nominate someone for a guest slot, leave a comment or email us.
How to Download Your Free MobHappy Browser
It's pretty simple actually.
Just point your phone's browser to http://mh.mwap.at and download the application. Or if you're a download and sych to your phone kind of person, point your computer's browser here, and if you need the Palm version, A< href="http://64.122.184.169/midmh/palm/MobHappy.jar">get it here.
Most phones are supported, but it doesn't work on Verizon and if you have a Treo, you'll need to download Java. For a more complete guide to compatibility, click here.
That's it. We hope you enjoy your RSS Reader. Tell your friends!
A new study says 27 percent of US mobile users play games on their handsets. That doesn't seem too high, though it's up 7 points from last year. One part of the problem is that apparently just half of US users have a phone capable of downloading games, but more significant for carriers and developers is that just a third of those game players pay for downloads, with the others sticking to free or pre-loaded games. What's more, just 6% of non-gamers said they had an interest in starting to play over the next year.
So what's the way forward? Casual gaming, for one thing. The study says the top motivation for mobile gaming is to kill time, and the average session is 11 minutes. This dictates games that people can start up and play easily with a quick learning curve rather than involved, deep games that drag on and on, like on consoles. Mobile is still different from console in that there really isn't a need to always be pushing for better graphics and sound -- when you've got a weak processor and tiny screen, quality of gameplay becomes paramount. Look at casual games on the desktop, like Windows' Solitaire or Minesweeper. Flashy, complex graphics and sounds? No. Still popular? Yes.
Building up casual gaming will also expand the demographic reach of mobile gaming, which is heavily skewed towards kids 13 to 17. Obviously these kids are going to have different interests than their parents when it comes to games. And while a puzzle game might not give a developer the street cred of some first-person shooter, there's a market there to be addressed.
Both of these also mean the exclusive franchises that publishers are so fond of might not mean much. Young gamers aren't going to buy in if your Lord of the Rings game is weak, and older gamers probably won't buy in period.
And like so many other things in mobile, people aren't fans of predatory pricing. In this case, it's pricing games like services -- giving them a per-month cost, with access to the game blocked if you don't pay up. People aren't stupid, and realize they're buying a product, not a service. Paying a $5 one-off charge is much more realistic than $3 per month. Make a service element if you want to charge that way: build in some interactivity, let people play against others on the network, something that generates a real recurring revenue stream rather than just inventing one.
Perhaps the success of ringtone downloads has bloated the mobile games industry, leading many to believe that people will willingly and blindly pay for anything shoved down their throat. But people are getting wiser, as evidenced by the backlash against the greedier ringtone sellers. In a market with reasonable, rather than torrid, growth, land-grab techniques won't work. People want good games at good prices.
