This description didn’t sound quite right to me - a little contrived and clumsy - so I offered up “mobsessed” as a neater alternative. The phrase has taken off in the Twittersphere, largely due to the influence of Tomi Ahonen, Godman of all things mobile. This has led to a Twitter meme where people are writing:

You know when you’re #mobsessed when…

or occasionally

You know when you’re not #mobsessed when..

Some of the best so far are:

You know you are #mobsessed if while on vacation,you value a place because its 3G network coverage @oscarb

You know you’re #mobsessed if you’ve turned to your wife and said, “honey, they’re playin our ringtone” @SonyEricssonDev

You are #mobsessed if you and your wife squabble over the phone chargers (even though you have one in every room of your house) @mike_bradford

You’re #mobsessed when you go to toilet just so you can #tweet legally without being seen as #twitterholic in office @cchhaann

You know when you’re not #mobsessed when your ring tone is the default Nokia tune. From me.

Have a go yourself - if you Tweet it, don’t forget the hash tag ie #mobsessed. Or just leave it as a comment.

On a peronal note, I’m off on holiday for a couple of week tonight, so leaving Uncle Carlo in charge.

Toodle pip.

Russell

I went to buy some lovely Full Sail LTD 03 beer at my local liquor megamart the other week, and was greeted with the above sign pasted on the front door. Being the adventurous type, I figured I’d turn on my Bluetooth and see what they were up to… but my Bluetooth was already on and by the time I finished that thought, I’d already gotten their first message (I’ll skip over the “What Constitutes Opt-In?” debate).

That first message? A business card with the store’s address and phone number:

I’ve never called my local liquor megamart, never had the need to and thought “if only I had their phone number!”, nor do I foresee such a need arising in the future. But thanks anyway, I guess. I then got a second message:

Sweet. If only I liked vodka and/or Red Bull. The targeting isn’t poor, so much as non-existent, but what I really didn’t get was how this was any better than setting up a display of this brand of vodka in the front of the store, just past the entrance, touting the offer. Wouldn’t that have actually been better? That way, it’s not limited to the small subset of folks who bother to turn on their Bluetooth, it doesn’t irritate those whose BT was already on, and didn’t want the message, and anybody who’s interested doesn’t have to go searching through the store for this particular brand of vodka and then find the Red Bull.

What is it about mobile marketing that makes people forget so much of what they know about marketing in general? It’s as if people get so besmirched with the idea that they’re doing something really cool by sending messages to peoples’ mobile devices, that any good sense goes out the window.

I see this quite a bit here in Vegas, and it perplexes me. The casinos spend so much time mining customer data and tracking behavior and all sorts of things through their loyalty cards and direct-mail programs. They’d never think of sending out some sort of promotion that they couldn’t track through their traditional methods, since they’re constantly trying to figure out the most effective ways to get consumers to put more money in their machines. But when it comes to mobile, very few of them do any sort of tracking, or really, do anything very useful.

For instance, I signed up to receive text offers from one major strip casino, and received an SMS offering a 2-for-1 drink at one of their bars. First, this was at 8 in the morning. Second, paying for drinks isn’t that big an issue on the Strip, assuming you’re gambling. Third, if you are the sort of customer who will be lured in by such an offer, how much value do you offer to the casino? Finally, they don’t know anything about me, and don’t have any way to track the responses. Furthermore, I can simply forward the message to anybody who’s interested in some cheap drinks. Perhaps the point for the casino is that any additional traffic is good, which at this point in their business cycle, might be true. But it’s hard to see how effective the message will be — not that the casino has any way to really measure it.

Granted, the revenue path is better in the Apple store than others (assuming you can get your app approved by the great gatekeeper), but it remains that fewer developers are really raking it in than many people would believe.

This is largely because although Apple, and to some extent, the other players, have solved the distribution issue, but they haven’t cracked the discovery nut. Maybe browsing is a little easier on the iPhone, with its large display and easy scrolling, but that’s not exactly a solution. Browsing in the Ovi Store was so bad that I haven’t been back since I played with it at launch. And the problem of “Top Downloads” and “Most Popular” lists remains exactly the same: once apps get on those lists, it’s difficult to get them off.

It’s important for developers to realize/remember/remind themselves that app stores are just distribution channels — not marketing strategies. It’s no different than any other product scenario: getting that product in a distribution channel alone isn’t enough to generate and drive sales. People see stories like the guy who’s made a lot of money with an iPhone birdwatching app, but fail to read far enough to realize that he only got the big boost after his app got featured in an Apple TV ad.

So for developers: get your app in the various stores, and make sure users can find them easily with the search function in each one. Then get your marketing efforts going. You deal with fragmentation of the stores by being in all of them, and push users with “search for it in your app store”.

The takeaway for app store providers: get the distribution right, but if you really want to drive downloads and developer success, do it not only with the usual suspects like revenue-sharing levels, but give them some real marketing help, too.

Update: See this post over at GigaOM for some good insight into the long tail of iPhone apps, courtesy of AdMob data (AdMob being a great way to both publicize and monetize your apps, right Russell? ):

I suspect the success of a particular app relies on one of three things:

* You are already a huge, successful company, expanding on an existing product. See: AIM, Facebook, ESPN.
* Apple decides your app is worth promoting on the front page of the App Store.
* Your app is really good, and all your users rave to their friends about it.

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) pre-dates even the first mobile, being first deployed in the 1970s and really taking off in the 1980s. Uses ranged from annoying customers to screening calls in call centres (Press 1 to book a ticket etc), to voting, entertainment (and sex) and pre-recorded information, such as weather, horoscopes (and sex). To give you an idea of scale,Wikipedia claims that today “Currently, IVRs are serving more customers than all fast food and coffee chains combined”, although a citation or geographic area for the information is missing. But it’s big.

A parallel theme (bear with me a moment) is that in developing countries, the mobile is the de facto digital device for many people. In countries like India, Indonesia and China, many more people have leapfrogged the PC and do everything from make calls to surf the mobile web on their phones. AdMob has nearly 500 million page views a month in India, as an example, and it’s our second largest market. In China, 5 Billion mobile web pages are viewed every day.

Another theme we’ve been writing about is that companies like P+G are looking for their next Billion consumers in order to continue growing outside the saturated markets of the West - after all, it’s hard to get us to use more soap powder or toothpaste, but many of the developing markets represent virgin territory for these products. At the same time, traditional media has little reach and impact for many of these consumers - they don’t read the press, watch TV or have PCs. But they do have mobiles, making it potentially the only media option available.

So where am I going with this? One of the final megatrends in developing countries is illiteracy. India has 250 million people who can’t read or write. There’s at least another 100 million in China - and that’s the number they admit to. In reality, it’s probably far more. And in total an estimated 1.2 Billion people in the world are illiterate.

This raises all kinds of issues for us as a society as a whole. Illiteracy is strongly correlated to poverty. Illiterate people are usually poorly educated too, making them vulnerable to extremist ideologies and propaganda.

But while illiterate citizens might not be able to read or write, they can speak and understand speech, which means that mobile IVR is a perfect way to level the playing field for these people. They can compete and use telephone services on an equal basis to their literate compatriots, whether these might be mobile banking solutions to education programmes, or social media to job seeking.

There may also be a role for advertising to play in this programme, by doing what it always does - providing the funding model for free-to-consume media and services. Perhaps advertisers interested in reaching out to this market might be in a position to fund and produce the content. Could yesterday’s Soap Opera become today’s Soap School?

So if you’re reading this and looking for your next big idea, please have this one with my compliments. There’s an addressable market of 1 billion+ people out there, which by any definition is a big one.

He’s always great value as a writer and as a speaker, so if you haven’t seen his TED talk on mobile, twitter and a few other areas, watch the video I’ve embedded below.

Clay picks up on a lot of the themes we’ve been writing about for a long time at MobHappy, including the idea that mobiles will be one of the first technologies where reverse global tech transfer takes place. In other words, how people use mobile in developing countries will influence how we use them in the developed world. The example he gives is vote monitoring in Nigeria was transferred to monitoring the US elections, but we’ll see many more in areas like mobile payments, social media, recruitment and indeed, politics.

Another case study he gives concerns how politics is using social media. In Obama’s case, to establish meaningful dialogue (ie two way) and in China how the ruling party is losing control of the political agenda. I think that eventually, we’ll see Direct Democracy arrive to replace representative democracy, but that’s another story.

Have a look.

If microfinance is a new idea to you, it has really exploded in the last few years, ever since the Grameen Bank pioneered the concept in Bangladesh. Read more about Nobel Prize winner and founder of the industry Muhammad Yunus here, but the basic concept is lending tiny amounts of money to the poor in developing countries to enable them to start or expand businesses. It’s distinct from charity, as the entrepreneur is expected to repay the loan in due course.

Mobile Movement takes the concept to the mobile - actually a more relevant channel than the PC in many ways, certainly as far as the borrower is concerned. In developing markets, people are far more likely to have access to a mobile than a PC, as any MobHappy reader knows.

However, not only is mobile used to facilitate the loan and subsequent processing, it’s then employed to provide ongoing mentoring and support to the entrepreneurs via sms and email, as well as allowing the entrepreneurs to feedback progress, including via MMS photos. The MMS idea sounds fabulous, although not sure how practical inter-continental interoperability is in real life.

Read more at Springwise, but let’s hope that they’re on to a winner.

I think that this is the year when creativity comes to Location and some very interesting things happen as a result - albeit in a small way. We’ll start to move away from find-my-nearest and simple buddy trackers and start to see innovation.

So, I was interested to see Skyhook’s Ted Morgan’s presentation, which came out of the big Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona last week. I’d love to have been there, but had a clash. Hopefully next year!

Since January 2009, you can see that innovation has indeed exploded by doubling the number of location services in the market - largely led by iPhone, of course. Creativity has also come to call, with a whole bunch of services from tracking your location history when you’re out drinking, seeing claimed UFO sightings in your area and a kids’ car game based on spotting state licence plates (the furthest away states are worth more points).

Of course, one of the visions behind these types of services is hyperlocal advertising, which will provide an important part of the commercial engine, much as AdMob does today for many Apps, especially in Apple’s Apps Store. However, this has many logistical and supply issues to overcome , where technology can only help in a limited way.

Anyone interested in Location Based Advertising would be advised to read my free White Paper (email me for a copy), as everyone else in this game seems to have a copy. I’ve sent out more than 5,000 in the last 8 years!

Some great posts as usual, so head on over there to feast your eyes and delight your mobile soul.

If you’re interested, be sure to enter by June 30. The entrants will be narrowed down to a list of 50, and then VentureBeat readers will vote on the final 14 to present at the event, and two winners will be picked by a panel of expert judges. So if you’ve got a startup, get yourself entered… and if you’ll be in the area on July 16, get yourself registered to attend.