mobilemarketing

The BBC has dismissed critics who’ve questioned the public value of its plans to launch mobile applications, arguing they fit within its public service remit.

MillerCoors has added to its iPhone portfolio with a new application called Tip ‘n Spin launched to coincide with March Madness and the NCAA basketball tournament.

The National Football League has teamed up with Verizon Wireless to give its fans the ultimate football experience via their mobile devices.

New York Daily News has taken a cross-platform approach to its mobile strategy with the launch of mobile applications for iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

Pearson IT Certification introduced its new Cert Flash Cards application that helps IT professionals interested in pursuing technical certification.

Hoover’s released its new application to provide sales and business professionals access to location-based business information.

ULocate Communications has introduced of Where Ads, a hyper-local mobile advertising network that uses location-based targeting to increase the relevance of small businesses’ ad campaigns.

Mobile Commerce Daily today - Columbia Sportswear outlines mobile commerce strategy; Has mobile giving reached a tipping point?

That the mobile is a great tool for interacting with our consumers is without a doubt. One thing that has become a very common phenomenon in the mobile marketing space, even to the extent that its often not even considered to be mobile marketing, is mobile fund raising.

We saw that the disaster in Haiti made the rest of the world wanting to contribute to rebuild the country. Texting donations simplified the process and money could quickly be raised. The first lady went on YouTube and on TV urging Americans to contribute, leading mobile ad networks joined forces to let the red cross banners run free across their network and we all managed to support and contribute in one way or another with the help of our cell phones.
Mobile Active has created a guide on mobile fundraising, which might be worthwhile looking through if you are planning to do a campaign. You will be able to read more about it on their webpage mobileactive.org.

Media and education company Pearson has appointed Juan Lopez-Valcarcel to the new role of director of global digital product and consumer technology.

Quick and Easy Integration into the Jumptap Mobile Ad Network Opens the Door to Hundreds of Leading Advertisers

GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA — March 9, 2010 — Jumptap, the leading mobile advertising solutions provider, today announced a new self-service application for publishers of mobile websites and mobile applications, including iPhone and Android. Publishers can quickly and easily integrate their properties into the Jumptap mobile ad network and gain access to hundreds of leading advertisers looking to reach consumers on mobile sites and in smart phone applications.

Feel the Love

Jumptap is showing its love for new members in the network with a special time limited offer. As one of the first 100 app developers or sites to join our mobile ad network, you will get to keep 100 percent of the ad revenue for the first 100 days. Additional information can be found at www.jumptap.com/feel-the-love or visit us at the Moscone South Hall, Esplanade, exhibit number TT29.

Smarter Network Delivers More Revenue

Jumptap leverages its highly-advanced, sophisticated algorithmic engine and unique intellectual property (IP) portfolio to match the right ad to the right person at the right time. Text, banner and innovative rich media ad units enhance the user experience and engage users more effectively. Reaching mobile audiences with highly relevant and appealing ads drives increased click through rates and higher conversions. Jumptap’s technology ensures the most relevant ads are delivered, and that app developers and publishers realize the highest potential revenue from their mobile properties. Superior performance rates drive increased advertiser spend, which result in high fill rates and the highest effective yield (eCPMs) for publishers.

“Jumptap is committed to continually adding value to our network and this is a great means for app developers and site owners to take advantage of our exciting growth,” said Paran Johar, CMO of Jumptap. “Preliminary data shows in app ads are driving click through rates five times higher than online advertising, increasing demand from our brand and performance advertisers. This presents an enormous opportunity for developers to earn revenue from their applications.”

Simple and Easy to Get Started

Getting started is simple! Just sign up, install the ad code, and start making money. Our console gives you real-time reporting to monitor your revenue and enables you to control the relevance of ads that run on your properties. Get started here.

“Our Intuition: Mom’s Assistant is the top personal assistant app for moms and women on the iPhone and iPod Touch platforms,” said Greg Rose, Sr. Director Business Development at IconApps. “We are focused on bringing the best mom-focused local offers and deals to our users. Jumptap’s proven ability to reach mobile consumers with the most relevant innovative and interactive ads – and the resulting revenue potential for publishers – has made us more than eager to become a part of their mobile ad network.”

GoMo News covered the launch of a new voice-powered mobile social network in India in early February. Modeled on Twitter, “Bubbly” allows users to record and send short voice recordings to all of their followers. Two weeks after launch, the creators of the service are claiming over 500,000 users, and a growing portfolio of Bollywood stars.

How does it work?

The service is ENTIRELY based around SMS - essential, given it’s an Indian service. It’s tightly integrated with regional networks, so it doesn’t require any downloads or registration. To use Bubbly, Indian phone owners just dial a shortcode to record and post a voice message. Anyone who is following them gets sent an SMS with the instructions you need to hear the “Bubble”. To follow someone, you just input their number after the shortcode. Simple!

At the moment, users follow each other by word of mouth - there are no real discovery options. In time, Bubble Motion (the creators of Bubbly) intend to publish a directory, but for now you just have to know a persons number to follow them. For celebrity users, they get assigned a special shortcode so that followers don’t get their actual mobile number.

Celebrity users?

Much like Twitter, Bubbly is attracting Indian Bollywood stars. Well, I SAY stars, but I don’t really know. According to Bubble Motion, Kareena Kapoor, Aamir Khan and Bipasha Basu are all using Bubbly. To be honest, I don’t know who they are - I don’t follow Bollywood news.

What we think?

According to the release, Bubbly now has over 500,000 in Indian - that’s pretty good for a service that’s two weeks old. A big part of the reason it’s popular is because Bubble Motion has some very serious operator deals in place. So new users don’t need to do anything beyond what they’re used to - it doesn’t require apps or a long set up process. You simply dial the shortcode and speak.

Mobile navigation services have been swarming into the spotlight in the last year, giving traditional Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) a pretty good kicking. But TomTom and Garmin don’t need to shut the offices down just yet - at Navigation Day at the massive CeBit trade show in Hanover, Strategy Analytics claimed there would always be a place for PNDs.

GPS Business News interviewed Joanne Blight, Global Automotive Practice Director at research firm Strategy Analytics. The entire 7-minute interview is included below, but the salient points are as follows:

- despite the figures showing a massive reduction in the market for PNDs, the future isn’t all gloom and doom.

-  research indicates that there’s still a very strong interest in PNDs amongst consumers.

- while the market WILL slow down and flatten, there will still be an opportunity there in the future if PNDs get connected to a wide variety of useful on-line services.

- consumers are willing to pay for good maps, navigation and location-related apps. But the price needs to be right. The challenge is for PNDs to get not only the service right, but also the pricing.

- free turn-by-turn navigation is all well and good, but it needs to be packaged with other good location-based services and content

- consumers really like in-car navigation. Lower-end services will probably be replaced by smartphone applications, but the highest, most premium in-car navigation will always come from specific PND devices

As of the first of this month, mobile operators must now cap the usage of mobile data for roaming customers. This is thanks to new EU regulations that are intended to protect customers from bill shock and unseen charges. But just cutting people off isn’t enough, according to mobile service provider Redknee - operators needs to start providing more transparency and control to roamers.

How will they do that?

Why, with the new product from Redknee, of course!

Joking aside, Redknee actually does have a valuable proposition here. The awkwardly named Next Generation Rating and Charging platform (NGRC) is designed not only to give customers a far more clear view of how their data use is affecting their bill, but also to give operators more options when it comes to charging subscribers for data usage.

Example?

Ok, so the EU requires an operator to limit the amount of data roaming someone can do based on how much money they’ve spent. But NGRC wants to open up the options when it comes to limiting factors. Why just money? Why not movies, or applications? Using NGRC, an operator could offer a roamer a “two movies over three days” bundle, or “five hours of application per week”. Those two examples might not be everones cup of tea, but offering that kind of flexibility opens up new customer options.

This would be on top of basic functions that allow a roamer to check how much data they’ve used, how much it is costing them, and how much they have left before they hit the cap.

What we think?

Transparency, transparency, transparency. It’s so important. But so are lower data charges. When I went to Barcelona this year, my operator detected that I was roaming and immediately sent me two texts, outlining all of the roaming charges I would be subject to for voice, data and SMS. And that was great - it gave me a clear sense of how much I could use my phone. And that amount was VERY LITTLE. The data charges were nothing short of draconian. Transparency is all well and good, but it alone won’t stop consumers from completely eschewing mobile data when roaming.

Mobile navigation is seeing a new force enter the market. There are two sides to the current battle. There’s traditional navigation devices from companies like TomTom and Garmin. But new navigation applications from Nokia and CoPilot (amongst others) have been putting a serious dent in GPS device sales. And now a new front has opened up, supporting the mobile application side. CloudMade is a mobile navigation company that uses maps created by OpenStreetMap - a vast, crowd-sourced mapping service with 230,000 “mappers” constantly updating it.

What’s the story?

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is basically a map version of Wikipedia. Anyone can edit, anyone can add information. A broad variety of free tools are available on the site for anyone who wants to jump in and start creating maps. The detail on the service is actually pretty excellent - I checked out my own location, and discovered that OSM had just as good info as Google Maps did.

What CloudMade does is use the map info from OSM as its source for a suite of mapping applications for mobile and web. And today, it has announced what it is calling Navi Studio - this is a set of tools and products that will allow a third party to make its own navigation applications from OSM. Cloudmade doesn’t go as far as to call this an SDK, but it does claim that everyone from developers to OEMs will be able to use Navi Studio to incorporate turn-by-turn directions, location-based mobile advertising and other navigation services from OSM.

Quality concerns?

The problem with crowd-sourcing is that it’s crowd sourced. At the moment, it looks like OSM is actually very detailed and accurate. CloudMade scorns the 12-14 month delay that the big mapping companies have when it comes to updating their maps to include changes - it claims that since the OSM maps are supported by a motivated volunteer force, the updates are instantaneous. And sure, that’s true now, but motivated volunteers don’t remain motivate OR voluntary forever.

However, for right now, OSM actually looks really good. The number of regularly active mappers has surged hugely over the last year, from 80,000 during 2008. If those growth trends continue, it will have 1,000,000 by the end of this year. The site has this to say on the matter of concerns over how accurate a crowd-sourced map will be:

“All maps have mistakes in them, often because a building or road has changed since the map was made. OpenStreetMap maps also have mistakes, but unlike other maps, you can fix them. We think that OpenStreetMap maps will be better than other maps. Take a look at this map of central London and remember that just a few years ago there was no data here at all. Now the map is far more detailed than other maps of London, with footpaths, parks, buildings, pubs and car parks, as well as all the roads you find on most maps.”

Any examples?

Yes, actually. A German company called skobbler has released a navigation app based on the CloudMade tools. Skobbler itself is a spin-off of a navigation device maker called Navigon, which uses Navteq maps. Skobbler made the decision to switch to OSM so that more interaction could be provided to the users:

The app is available in Germany for 3 euro - which is a damn sight cheaper than competitors like TomTom and CoPilot. The app has been enjoying some success since launch, having reached the number 1 position in its category and the 3rd position overall.

What we think?

It’s always hard to know what to think when it comes to crowd sourced databases. A lot of people accept anything that’s published on Wikipedia as gospel truth - but the information on that site can often fall under the “truthiness” heading. I imagine it will be the same with OSM. Overall, I’d say the maps will be pretty good. But at times you’ll encounter something that’s just plain wrong.

And how is that different from the maps provided by Navteq and Tele Atlas, you ask? It isn’t, really, as anyone who has been told “turn left, now” when they’re driving beside a river will tell you.