How to build a killer mobile database

Thanks to iMedia Connection for this post:

By Andreas Roell

Mobile opportunities

Every year is the "year of mobile." There have been expectations from the outset for this advertising platform to revolutionize the industry, and if mastered, marketers could tag along with consumers everywhere. While mobile marketing has not had a breakthrough yet, there are enough statistics and predictions circulating within the industry to keep experts forecasting its probable success -- year after year. The most appetizing is the continued increase of usage and penetration rates. If mobile advertising has its big break within the next two years, as many predictions forecast, it is time for marketers to begin bulking up their mobile databases right now.

What are the opportunities with SMS messaging?

The most obvious advantage of SMS messaging is the immediate access to users. With email, there is an inconsistent lag between when marketers reach out to consumers and when those consumers actually get the message. Mobile advertising allows marketers to reach users wherever they are during the day, not just when they are at a computer, in front of a TV set or in the car listening to the radio. This timeliness can be a crucial element for advertising campaigns such as sweepstakes, time-sensitive promotions or other incentive campaigns.

An advantage for mobile advertisers is the accessibility of the user -- consumers are attached to their cellphones. Marketers can factor this into their messaging strategy, making their communications particularly timely. The mobile platform also has tie-in opportunities with other advertising forums like social networking to help promote multiplatform campaigns. For example, a beer company that advertises during the Super Bowl can give users the opportunity to express play-by-play reactions as a part of an advertising campaign.

For the full article please visit:
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19644.asp

From iPhone with Love

This technology could put a whole new spin on Emoticons - just image what you could draw and send! Thanks to Telecoms Korea and NGT for this post:

Send Mobile Messages in Your Own Handwriting

A new SMS allows users to send a handwritten message over mobile networks. KTF announced the launch of Font of Your Own service.

Unlike existing SMS giving a choice of ready-made fonts, Font of Your Own is the first service that allows users to create personalized fonts for message writing.

To use Font of Your Own service, users have to download necessary applications and set up the idle screen before opening the folder and generate the font by sending the mobile photograph of 33 handwritten letters.

Download of applications and registration of fonts is free of data use fee. Customers can create or change fonts on the PC, using a font editor program.

http://www.telecomskorea.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5832&Itemid=2

Business trends to look out for in 2008

Thanks to FutureLab for this post:

Endless Innovation Business Trends: June 2008
by: Dominic Basulto

Largely as an outgrowth of client work over the past quarter, I've put together a brief overview of four business trends that are worth keeping an eye on over the remainder of 2008:

(1) Social Data
(2) Micro-Payments for Online Social Experiences
(3) Content Mashups
(4) "Live" experiences (that really aren't "live")

For the full article and corresponding powerpoint slides, visit: http://blog.futurelab.net/2008/06/endless_innovation_business_tr.html
OR// http://www.slideshare.net/basulto/endless-innovation-online-trends?src=embed

Women - Smarter than men?

I refer to an article I posted on Tuesday called "The new shake 'n' make" in which i challenged you to come up with a new iPhone application for your brand... well, seeing as though women are increasingly buying into the technology at a faster rate than men, lets target those applications at women and see if we can't help them find a new way to manage their weight, or chose what's for dinner tonight? Beef casserole anyone?

Thanks to the below blog from the NY Times:


Smartphones Now Ringing for Women

By LAURA M. HOLSON
Published: June 10, 2008

If recent history is any guide, roughly a third of the people snapping up Apple’s new iPhone are likely to tote it in a purse.

In the last year the number of American women using smartphones more than doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men, according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks wireless trends.

The trend is mirrored in sales of the iPhone. In October, nearly one out of four owners of the iPhone was a woman, according to Nielsen. By March that number rose to one in three. The iPhone model announced Monday, with faster Internet access and mapping features, may accelerate the shift.

Smartphones are cheaper now — as little as $99 for the petite BlackBerry Pearl — and are better designed. Women have been using them for years in business, of course, but many are finding that the phones can also help manage their families’ hectic schedules and keep them in touch with friends.

“You are not seen as a geek anymore if you have a smartphone,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner Group, a research firm. “Women, including wives and mothers, need to keep track of their busy lives, too.”

The phone makers and service providers increasingly see women as the path to the entire household. According to Verizon Wireless, 71 percent of women make the decision about their family’s wireless choices, including phones and service plans. (Smartphones require data plans that can cost $30 or more a month.)

As a result, smartphone makers are beginning to market specifically to women. Research in Motion, based in Waterloo, Ontario, has taken out ads for its BlackBerry phones in Elle, Martha Stewart Living and Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O.

For the full article visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/technology/10phone.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Google rates ad quality

Thanks to PinkAir for exposing this nugget in the below post.

The rate card that rates you

Not many companies are as interesting as Google. From their basic technology to how they make money, they repeatedly make you think "Okay, so that means..." and a bunch of new implications come spilling out.

Today's NYT outlines the workings of Google's "ad quality" team. Because the creative and placement variables of Google ads are relatively few and are controlled by Google, they can experiment with them and directly measure the results. This helps them determine how to price ads which makes them more money.

Even more interesting, one of the variables they incorporate into their pricing and placement model is the quality of the consumer's experience after they click on the ad:

Over time, the company also looked beyond click-through rates to rank ads. Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads. Soon, the loading speed of a landing page will also be considered.

These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google.

Yikes! Better service (and can better products be far behind?) leading to lower ad rates? Some advertisers are confused and angry ("many advertisers complain that the company was, in essence, deciding who can and cannot advertise on its system") but Google seems to believe that the overall health/value of their ad system is increased when consumers believe that Google ads represent relevant and high-quality suggestions.

Most media discriminate among advertisers in some way. You're not going to see a Hooters ad in Vanity Fair anytime soon. But I've never heard of a media company digging so deeply into the post-ad consumer experience and using it to directly affect rates. I can feel the possible implications radiating outwards...

http://www.pinkair.com/2008/06/the-rate-card-t.html

Euro 2008 Fan Kit

Google’s euro 2008 effort - A nice example of aggregating existing content, and a little bit of development work to create something new:

The 2008 European Championship lasts for 23 days this year, which means 23 days of thrills, hopes, tears and cheers.

To celebrate those 23 days, Google and YouTube have put together a fan kit, so you can share your passion for football with thousands of other fans from around the world!

The Google Fan Map

Explore all the locations for the European Championship and view the latest news and information about your team. Find your favourite spot to watch, play or celebrate football, then share it with the world!

YouTube Fan Diary

Be a part of the YouTube Fan Diary:  http://youtube.com/23days

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/23days/

The Hottest Thing in Town

New service letting you visualise where people are via your mobile.  Great for marketers but limited for consumers? Thanks to TechCrunch for this post.

Location-Tracking Startup Sense Networks Emerges from Stealth To Answer the Question: Where Is Everybody?

Erick Schonfeld
What if you could look at your cell phone and see a heat map of where everybody in the city was at that very moment? The more people at any given location, the redder it would appear on the map. That’s what Citysense does. It is a mobile application that is supposed to help you figure out where the hottest clubs and night spots are so you can go there (or avoid them, depending on your preference).

It senses where the most popular places are based on the location information emitted by everyone’s cell phones, shows the places with the most activity, and then links into Yelp or Google to help you find out what is at that location. Over time, it learns about where you like to go (fancy restaurants or punk rock clubs) and shows you other people like you, and where they are—right now. And it does all of this anonymously. (You can’t see your where your actual friends are). Citysense only works in San Francisco right now. It is available as a mobile download for the Blackberry and soon for the iPhone as well.

The application is essentially a demonstration for a startup called Sense Networks that is emerging from stealth mode today. Citysense is built on top of the company’s main technology platform, Macrosense. The company ingests billions of data points about people’s location from cell phones, GPS devices, WiFi, and even taxis. The company also collects geo-location data from everyone who downloads Citysense, or any future app (although, the company considers the data to be yours, and you can delete it from the database at any time).

Using machine-learning algorithms, it then indexes all of this location data and ranks places in the real world much like a search engine ranks Websites. But instead of looking at Web links, it looks at how much data (i.e., people) are moving between locations. The company makes money by selling this data in the aggregate to professional investors and financial institutions, who are keen to find out things like where people are shopping.

Sense Networks was founded by MIT computer scientist Alex Pentland and Columbia computer scientist Tony Jebara back in May, 2003. But it remained pretty much a research project until the company was incorporated in 2006. In April, 2008 it raised an A round from hedge funds (including Passport Capital, Drobny Global Asset Management and the Challenge Funds) and angel investors. The amount was not disclosed, but VentureWire reports that it was $3 million.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/09/location-tracking-startup-sense-networks-emerges-from-stealth-to-answer-the-question-where-is-everybody/