Almond Peak

Big In Asia

2011-09-19T15:33:00.010+02:00

In a recent info graphic by Burson-Marsteller, a leading global public relations and communications firm with offices and affiliate partners in 81 countries, results for top social networks used across the Asia-Pacific were revealed. Considering just how large the population of the region, it’s worth noting just how massive the contribution is from the Asia-Pacific in contrast what we see online everyday.

In a recent info graphic by Burson-Marsteller, a leading global public relations and communications firm with offices and affiliate partners in 81 countries, results for top social networks used across the Asia-Pacific were revealed. Considering just how large the population of the region, it’s worth noting just how massive the contribution is from the Asia-Pacific in contrast what we see online everyday.

American smartphone users are consuming lots of media

2011-07-18T12:02:00.007+02:00

By Dean Takahashi

The culture of the smartphone has arrived in the U.S. And cell phones aren’t just for calling and texting anymore.

A new study indicates there’s a dramatic shift to “smartphone culture,” where users are engaging in social media and downloading media such as games on their phones, according to Magid Media Futures: Mobile 2011. Among the findings, smartphone users spend more on virtual goods in games than social networking users do.

“We are seeing a smartphone culture radically change the way we interact with content and media,” said Mari Baker, chief executive of PlayFirst, which makes a wide variety of web, social, tablet and smartphone games. “This is a big wave of change and it gives us confidence in the platform.”

For years, American cell phone usage lagged behind that of Europeans and the Japanese. The survey was conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates and sponsored by casual game firm PlayFirst. The survey says nearly half of non-smartphone owners are considering buying a smart phone to replace their feature phones in the next 12 months. Smartphone ownership grew 35 percent from 2010 and the installed base is expected to reach half of the U.S. population in a few years.

Nat Geo's Partnership with Velti on Mobile Marketing Campaign

2011-06-17T16:42:00.003+02:00

By Mobile Marketing Watch

National Geographic is praising its partnership with Velti, the world’s largest mobile marketing platform, which helped launch National Geographic’s first mobile marketing campaign to promote its film “The Last Lions.”

According to the venerable publication and cable channel, National Geographic capitalized on the full breadth of Velti’s mGage mobile marketing platform to target and engage animal lovers, movie-goers and conservationists.

Essentially providing a case study on what a successful mobile marketing campaign can accomplish, National Geographic says its mobile initiatives achieved the following:

More than one quarter of a million visitors to its mobile site with a 3-minute average visit duration (or “stickiness”), twice the industry average;
Raised participation in the sweepstakes with 12 percent of entries straight from mobile;
Increased traffic to the mobile site by 200 percent by using SMS movie ticket purchase alerts.

What Does Google Wallet Need to Succeed?

2011-05-31T17:08:00.003+02:00

By Mark Hachman

What does Google need to do to make its Google Wallet mobile-payment system a success? Give people confidence. Then make it a habit.

Think about it. So many slight modifications to our daily lifestyle mean so many millions to manufacturers, especially as they're repeated, day in and day out. And, once established, the cycle self-perpetuates.

Checking email on a BlackBerry. Tweeting. Checking in on Foursquare. A few more actions in CityVille. Planning the fastest route to your destination on a traffic app like Inrix. Keeping tabs on friends in Facebook. All actions that can be performed in a minute or two, several times a day.

The problem with financial applications is that people are afraid of giving up access what they consider to be their most valuable possession: money. My father, an engineer, avoided carrying a pager, a cell phone, or an ATM card until his employer (and his family) dragged him into the twenty-first century. I still haven't joined Mint.com because, deep down, I'm terrified that my financial information will leak out. For Pete's sake, Intuit can't even keep their cloud services up consistently, it seems.

Read more here.

Choose your tablet!

2011-03-02T23:52:00.008+01:00

Could carriers become the next credit card companies?

2011-02-10T19:06:00.000+01:00

By Rob Woodbridge

I’ve been thinking about the tectonic shifts that the mobile industry is going through right now. As with every upheaval in the technology cycles there are winners, losers and surprises that come out of left field and mobile is poised for some serious surprises.

One of the things that I’ve contemplated is the crumbled wall that now surrounds the carriers pristine garden. I remember a time when you had to walk on water in order to get a J2ME app or game on a carrier deck – literally. It was the hardest thing to do but, in some cases, the only real way to scale a company and sell product.

Smartphones have put a dent in that revenue for the carriers and we haven’t even reached 30% penetration yet. So what do the carriers do as the number of feature phones dwindle taking their app revenue with them? I think they become micro lenders – a low-balance credit card.

As the ability to pay via a phone becomes easier and easier through technologies like NFC or QR Codes or SMS, the easiest way to pay could be just adding it to your phone bill just as you would when buying an app from the carrier deck.

Applying for credit

How would this work? There are a few easy ways that this could happen but the most realistic would be a small credit facility attached to your account – say $200 to start. It would be similar to a secured credit card with a cap based on your payment history with the company. The other way would simply be prepaid cards – similar to the way prepaid phones work today. If you want to regulate purchases for your children but want to make sure they always have money available to them in case of emergency, this would be an easy way for sure.

Read more here.

Mobile Year in Review 2010!

2010-12-30T19:50:00.000+01:00

Augmented Reality To Ramp On Mobile

2010-12-06T18:12:00.000+01:00

By Mark Walsh

Augmented Reality is generating lots of buzz as an emerging platform for mobile marketing and e-commerce, across areas like search, retail and gaming. But AR is still a long way from being a widespread reality on mobile devices. A new report from Juniper Research projects the technology combining the physical world with virtual imagery and information will generate only $2 million in revenue next year.

But the U.K.-based research firm expects that figure to grow dramatically to $714 million by 2014, with revenues derived from paid application downloads, subscription- based services and advertising. Growth will be driven by wider adoption of Android phones and the iPhone as well as the spread of technologies like digital compasses and accelerometers that help to power mobile AR.

Juniper predicts AR will initially gain a foothold through location-based search but that mobile games are where the technology will first show substantial revenue. It should also be increasingly attractive to brands and retailers as user base increases, with AR ad networks able to charge higher CPC and CPM rates because of location relevance.

Separately, Jeremiah Owyang of digital strategy firm Altimeter Partners, suggested in a recent a post that mobile is where AR is mostly likely to go mainstream. "Expect Google to develop a product that maps physical products with their online information, making them yet the middleman for Internet advertising -- again," he wrote. "Furthermore, it gets really interesting when a brand can 'hijack' another company's brand by creating augmented reality experiences on the boxes of their competitors."

For now, he calls AR as "the victim of 'shiny toy' syndrome" since the benefits to brands and businesses aren't yet clear. Most mobile marketers in the near future are smarter to focus on building out mobile-friendly sites and less more basic applications before moving on to more costly AR-centric projects that may not deliver sufficient return to justify the investment.

Should You Rely On Facebook For Mobile Marketing?

2010-10-29T10:44:00.005+02:00

By Holly Kolman

Some people still don’t understand that Facebook is not their own personal website. Today, for example, someone asked this question on LinkedIn: "Will Facebook Fan Pages eventually replace websites? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each platform for a business?".

Facebook Fan Pages will not replace websites for savvy marketers. Facebook, although it looks to be the entire internet for some people, is just a single site.

Here’s the basic question you want to ask: who owns your data? If you run your own domain name, and your own permission-based email list and/or your own mobile marketing shortcode database, you do. If you rely on Facebook, you don’t.

Facebook was down for an hour or so last week. I wasn’t able to message any of my contacts there. Fortunately, I also had their email addresses and phone numbers, so it wasn’t a total loss. However, had I relied solely on Facebook, my database would’ve been unavailable. For people who have had their accounts disabled, it’s game over.

Depending on the business you are in, you will also find that a large number of your customers will not even have Facebook accounts, despite the popularity of the site.

From a developer standpoint the back end code of Facebook itself is changing from FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to frames. Did that set off any red flags, mobile developers? It should. Frames are not supported on many phones, so this is going to be a problem that takes a lot of companies by surprise. So, it’s my educated guess that they are going to switch back when everyone starts complaining, resulting in more time and money spent on development (not that there’s anything wrong with that for developers, but for business owners, that’s another story).

Facebook pages are great for a secondary communication channel, and if you are running Facebook Ads, it’s good to have a page within FB for a landing page. It has great value in the search engines. But, it is not “yours” and the minute we forget that is the minute we risk losing our position in the marketplace.

3 Button Mobile Interface

2010-10-22T17:56:00.002+02:00

DoCoMo Market is a Portal not a Store

2010-10-12T12:42:00.004+02:00

By Wireless Watch Japan

There has been plenty of ‘discussion’ about the DoCoMo Market for Android apps, this article should help explain matters.

DOCOMO made headlines in Japan early this year when it announced the April launch of “DoCoMo market,” a mobile Internet portal providing easy access to mobile content and apps around the world. Today, a half-year later, the portal is helping more and more smartphone users in Japan discover mobile apps and content.

As a Japanese-only service, however, the portal has received less attention overseas than in Japan, so we’d like to take this opportunity to update our English-speaking readership on DOCOMO’s open initiative to nurture Japan’s smartphone apps market.

The new service is not actually a store, but rather a portal to sites offering mobile applications and content. As explained when the service was first announced in January 2010, DoCoMo market is targeted at Japanese users who are unfamiliar with smartphone apps.

Most apps currently are offered overseas, and in English, which complicates searches for Japanese-speaking users. Moreover, the overwhelming number of apps now flooding the market can make searching extra tedious.

In response, DOCOMO decided to launch a portal that conveniently aggregates the world’s best and most popular apps, and then explains them with handy descriptions written in Japanese, thereby enabling users to quickly grasp the app’s purpose and suitability to individual needs and preferences. Read more here.

Riding the Consumer Mobility Wave in the Enterprise

2010-09-22T18:10:00.000+02:00

By Andrew Brown

Much attention has been focused on consumer mobile devices into the enterprise, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. The main cause of “consumerisation,” is that end-users are growing frustrated with the limited choice of tools available in the workplace, given the range of tools available elsewhere and arbitrary decisions around who qualifies for smartphones.

This shift is happening for a number of reasons:

Gaps in the capabilities (in either functionality but mostly ease of use) of existing corporate tools;
Employees incorporating their favourite social and collaborative tools into working practices;
The low/free cost of most consumer-grade tools and economic pressure to do more with less;
Narrowing of the differences between tools designed for the consumer and those built for enterprise.

From an employee point-of-view, that frustration is understandable. If you’ve found a tool that would clearly help you in your job such as Twitter, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) or Skype, the chances are you’ll want to have it in the workplace at all times, even if your employer isn’t prepared to approve its use. In fact many IT departments run scripts upon user network login to remove consumer tools such as Skype, from computers.

But there are three main issues as to why consumer tools pose an inherent challenge for enterprises:

Security: many consumer tools lack the level of security or robustness required by enterprises. Moreover, companies adhering to GRC cannot afford to have information leakage. With the increasing proliferation of smartphones, popular consumer operating systems such as Android and applications that run on them, are also becoming subject to attack.
Support: Consumer tools often lack sufficient levels of support for enterprise usage, often because they are free and widely distributed. It is often difficult to know who to contact, or where to go for support, so depending on them is a risky business.
Stability: Many consumer tools simply do not last the course: take the example of Google Wave, that wasn’t given long before it was pulled from service. Also, many consumer tools can change without warning, the antithesis of stability inherent in business applications. This creates a need to monitor impact on important enterprise tools. However, rapid uptake of consumer tools can cause confusion among users and also render significant financial investment in enterprise software redundant (although in truth, most enterprise tools are borrowing from the best facets of consumer tools in any case).

So what is the best way to handle the wave of consumer applications in the enterprise?

Educate users on the potential risks and challenges of using consumer tools within workflow processes. Have a clearly defined policy of what applications are used for what functions, but a change of attitude from IT is needed in the approach to the use of consumer tools.
Understand what tools and what aspects of consumer tools are most popular with users, look at what could be useful to your own company and potentially implement sandboxed trials to assess the relative merits of different applications. Implement controls that have different policies for different applications.

While many of these issues are highly relevant now, it is highly likely that the gap between consumer and business applications, particularly in the areas of social networking and collaboration, will narrow. In the mobile space especially, the challenge in achieving a simple user experience and getting users to actually use enterprise tools is critical…and it is in this area that enterprise ISVs can learn to shape and develop their products to offer the simplicity and ease of use that makes consumers so willing to use consumer tools.

Microsoft Launches Mobile Ad Exchange

2010-09-17T18:08:00.001+02:00

By David Kaplan

Microsoft Advertising has released its Mobile Advertising SDK for Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft Advertising Exchange for Mobile, which it claims is the industry’s first real-time, bidded ad exchange in mobile. While ad networks are still the primary vehicle for mobile advertising, Microsoft believes it can create an early niche. But more importantly, it hopes to encourage display ad serving for Windows Phone 7 app as it moves further into the mobile ad space that is already dominated by Apple and Google.

In a blog post, Raj Kapoor, global director for product planning and marketing for Microsoft Mobile Advertising, said in addition to the company’s own sales force and adCenter ad marketplace, the exchange is partnering with several outside mobile ad nets, including Millennial Media, WHERE, InMobi and MobClix.

Microsoft’s ad exchange business has been fairly quietly trying to build up that service since it bought AdECN about three years ago. The introduction of the mobile ad exchange will likely be another small step as it works to begins to mount a challenge to Google’s established ad exchange with Doubleclick as well as Yahoo’s Right Media.

Ovi, Numbers and Future

2010-09-15T18:09:00.008+02:00

By MobileGamesBlog.com

Ovi pushes out 2 million downloads a day. 90% of the Ovi visitors actually find something they want to download and 85% of the traffic is returning traffic. Carrier billing is the most popular billing method.

Carrier billing is supported in 91 countries and preferred by about 66% of their consumers. The Nokia Ovi Store is installed on different mobile phones in over 190 countries and in 30 different languages.

When it comes to the future of Nokia’s Ovi store, that is looking bright if it is up to Orange UK and FR. Both operators have agreed to list Ovi alongside their own app store offering. Nokia will implement Orange’s billing and authentication systems so consumers will have the joy of having one ID and one bill at the end of the month.

To extend flexibility for developers, the Ovi Store will also be fitted with in-app purchasing methods and Nokia will be introducing their own mobile advertising platform. In-app purchasing is demonstrated with the help of Rovio who included it in their Angry Birds game.

Finally, Nokia has announced it will take care of signing apps and games to reduce the costs of development. Though this is not so important to the big publishers, the indie developers will certainly be happy about this one.

Read more on Nokia's new initiative for Ovi Maps here.

Games Dominate America’s Growing Appetite for Mobile Apps

2010-09-10T10:29:00.008+02:00

By Nielsen

Americans continue to hunger for mobile phone apps. According to the latest edition of The Nielsen Company’s Apps Playbook, the average number of apps that smartphone app downloaders have on their phones is now 27, up from 22 in December 2009. Broken down by the three major operating systems (Apple’s iOS, Android and Blackberry), owners of iPhones have the most apps with an average of 40 on their phones, up from 37 last December, while Android owners report having 25 apps on their phones (up from 22 last December) and BlackBerry owners report having 14 (up from 10).

This edition of Nielsen’s App Playbook is based on an August survey of more than 4,000 mobile subscribers who reported having downloaded a mobile app in the past 30 days. Jonathan Carson, CEO of Nielsen’s Telecom Practice, is scheduled to unveil more detailed findings from the App Playbook in a keynote speech at the AppNation conference in San Francisco on Monday, September 13.

Games continue to be the most popular category by far, with 61% of smartphone owners and 52% of feature phone owners reporting using a games app in the past 30 days. Weather apps are the next most popular category. But while all categories of applications are more popular on smartphones than on feature phones, the difference is more pronounced in categories such as Maps/Navigation, where more computing power, larger screens and touch interfaces deliver a more satisfying experience.

Facebook is the most popular individual app on all of the major operating systems. Twitter is among the top five only on the BlackBerry, perhaps because the device’s physical keyboard is optimized for typing. And while YouTube is popular on Android and Windows Mobile, it doesn’t make the top five on either the iPhone or BlackBerry operating systems.

With the ongoing growth in popularity of connected devices such as touchscreen tablets, eReaders and media players, mobile apps are likely to flourish beyond phones and on these devices as well. Games are the most popular app category on all connected devices, just as they are on smartphones and feature phones, while the iPod Touch currently leads all connected devices in apps downloads. Nielsen is currently conducting a separate research study that will delve deeper into the role of connected devices in mobile media.

The Recipe For A Successful Mobile Strategy For Your Brand

2010-09-07T18:09:00.001+02:00

By Guillaume Arth

‘Get into their pockets and you’ll get into their minds’ could be the slogan soon underpinning any new marketing manifesto. Indeed, mobile commerce has become core to the strategy of mainstream brands as it empowers new forms of customer engagement.

Mega brands like eBay have taken strides in mobile as an extension of their online presence through mobile websites and applications. eBay’s iPhone app has already been downloaded 11 million times. The online auction giant expects to make $1.5 billion from mobile this year compared to $600 million in 2009. Retailer brands like Best Buy use apps to offer specific promotions or gifts in the process learning a lot more about customers.

Interestingly, traditional media have been quicker to adopt a mobile strategy as many advertising budgets are moving online. Since this summer, the Wall Street Journal, The Times, and Wired magazine (to name a few) have all launched iPad apps signaling a shift in premium print media. Similarly, TV channels like MTV are also embracing interactive, social apps, either designed as companion apps or offline versions of TV content. As reported by Advertising Age recently, brands like MTV “focus on two approaches to its iOS apps: first, co-viewing apps that capture the social-media chatter around TV and awards shows and second, apps for video on the go”.

Moreover, borrowing lessons from Foursquare and Gowalla new types of apps allow you to ‘check in’ to TV shows and movies. A good example of that is the TV chatter app, which enables users to do their own programming and interact with Twitter live streams and post their own.

However promising these developments might be we will have to wait another 12 to 18 months to see whether print and broadcast media can truly leverage on mobile.

Getting your brand experience right

Through their scale and prolonged web presence EBay and Best Buy have successfully faced the challenge of multi-channel integration as well as getting visibility and ‘placement’ of their mobile commerce apps on stores. For these reasons they still remain exceptions. As a mobile gaming exec put it to me recently, ‘you have to be at least in the top 100 apps on iTunes if you want to make any kind of money. You have to market yourself in a way that can create actual retention, not just hype at the back of a free app’.

Indeed, some free apps may enjoy good download stats but those don’t necessarily translate into good reviews and recurring users as the Gucci app recently showed.

Some brand strategists argue that it is still ‘early days’ and that a ‘wait-n-see approach’ is more sensible; after all market penetration of higher-end devices like the iPhone and Android-based handsets is still only around 5% of devices sold worldwide in H1 2010. However this figure hides that we are in fact talking about high value, high ARPU customers with the biggest propensity to actually try out a branded mobile app. Additionally with more 150 million smartphones sold we have passed the point of only talking about early adopters. This is now a mass-market phenomenon, which has opened up new and more direct routes to consumers for brands.

So how should a brand go about developing a mobile strategy?

Before enlisting a highly paid musician to create a DJ-like app experience or hiring a top-notch programmer to start churning out software code, it is important to consider what factors make some apps successful and other mediocre:

Firstly, understanding users. A successful app will capture the imagination by being relevant, useful and delightful. Indeed users are prone to quickly veer off to something else in disappointment so understanding what makes them tick is important. After all your brand is trying to take a piece of someone’s busy schedule. Hence pilot first and then scale appropriately. One can draw lessons from successful games that offer a basic, yet addictive experience which is then enhanced with a bigger feature set at a 2nd stage. Then it becomes easier to convince existing users to come back and possibly pay a small premium (a good example of that is ‘Hungry Shark’ part 1 and 2 by Future games of London.)

Secondly, a deep understanding of mobile as a medium is essential. No matter how amazing your ideas may be, it is worth keeping in mind that mobile is a tactile, impulsive and intimate medium that doesn’t tolerate too much ‘fuzzing’: basically users need ‘to get it’ in a matter of seconds and… it needs to work! Taking the brand’s website content and ‘over-specifying’ an app is likely to fail. One can think of the 2010 Roland Garros app whose flawed design, and overly complex feature set probably didn’t achieve much for the tennis brand. Here is a prime example of how a flawed approach to an app can possibly damage a great brand especially when competitors or peers (the other Grand Slam tournaments in this case) have done a much better job.

Based on good design guidelines, a mobile app should aim at creating a brand narrative that will work in the mobile context rather than throwing ill-conceived ‘marketing junk’ as one can often read in app reviews. App marketing can be a double-edged sword and because of its immediacy and interactivity, brands must have their ears on the ground, learn and react quickly ensuring negative feedback doesn’t spiral out of control.

Thirdly, having a longer-term app roadmap where the mobile brand extension evolves and engages with its customers. The mobile app roadmap should grow gradually and elegantly, adding features and customer engagement opportunities on the way. Brands can build more loyalty by letting their essence shine through the simplicity of its mobile incarnation.

Last but not least: pricing. One million free downloads equals to zero direct revenue and too many apps are free making it difficult to solicit direct revenues through branded apps. But revenue shouldn’t be the only goal of a brand-extension strategy; the main goal should be engagement. After all, who would be willing pay for ‘walking into a shop’? One shouldn’t repeat the same mistake as mobile operators portals have done with charging users for just browsing. Providing a ‘free-entry’ experience is an important consideration which can then be followed by a premium (paid-for) experience.

Sowing the seeds for deeper customer engagements

With mobile, brands can equip themselves with a powerful and interactive marketing platform that forms a key pillar of a ‘multi-touch’, digital media presence. The entry of brands into the mobile domain is being encouraged by four recent developments:

1. A new breed of mobile natives who have greater access, understanding and trust in the mobile medium as a more personal and less ‘mediated’ experience for shopping or entertainment

2. Devices evolve at a very fast pace. Thanks to the widespread support of XHML/HTML, Java script and CSS, (More than 250m devices now feature the open-source WebKit browser engine, as seen in the 100 Million Club) and greater set of APIs, devices offer richer media experiences: audio, picture, video, social, messaging, location…and the list goes on.

3. The greater availability and affordability of cloud-based technology open source APIs, as well as packaging and rendering solutions for mobile websites, allow new entrants – like brands – in the market (‘BK Render’, a mobile rendering solution from french start-up Backelite is a good example there)

4. The accelerated development of mobile transactions from operator billing to bar coding, I-Tunes, Google checkout, PayPal, NFC and others.

‘Convergence marketing’ is the new frontier

At the core of the ‘new mobile economics’ brands and service providers are increasingly empowered to create new experiences and new business models. With the caveat that there is no current “write once, run anywhere”, I argue that brands are better positioned than ever to work around consumer and platform fragmentation through ‘convergent positioning and marketing’. Essentially rather than feeling daunted by technology, it is about looking at what the brand is trying to communicate and push a consistent message across to all users whatever digital medium they are using.

Users. Where are they? They are everywhere and ‘ubiquity’ is their destination. The user journey starts with a phone in each pocket, device connectivity and grows to digital ecosystems spanning across tablet computers, laptops desktops, TVs and many more places tomorrow. This creates a connected environment of opportunities for brands to express and market themselves in new ways, with social apps and blogging leading the way. Costs and barriers to entry to digital are lowering and marketing and retailing of digital goods is becoming mainstream.

Further down this new crowded high street, Apple, Google, Samsung and to an extent LG and Sony are embroiled in the battle to conquer our living rooms with internet TV services, through VOD, apps and widgets. At present, joint communications and Internet TV services are mostly ‘beta’ services on trial with operators including Verizon (US), Sonaecom (Portugal) or KT(South Korea). Orange recently signed a partnership with LG, where Orange provides billing and customer care while LG provides IPTV services.

There are also handset apps that act as a remote control – Free.fr in France for example (Free.fr app) – signaling that mobile might take over as the ultimate ‘EPG’ (electronic Programming guide). Currently 10-20% of IPTVs are connected to a broadband going up to 50% with higher broadband penetration. Samsung expects to sell 35 million TVs globally in 2010. In comparison, it took Microsoft 3 years to sell as many Xbox units. As TV remains the most popular consumer electronics device in the home this presents significant opportunities for any IP-based service or a brand looking to market itself through digital. With an installed base of millions it is only a matter of time before mobile app stores users are migrated to the big screen.

Apps and mobile services are good place to start for any brand but as we have discussed it is only the beginning. For instance, Nokia recently argued that ‘context devices, rather the apps, will be where the money is’.

With the digital switch over completed in most developed markets by 2012, ‘Convergent marketing campaigns’ will soon become a reality. Of course being successful will require adjustments and some juggling with technology but I believe that within 18 months, brands, service providers and advertisers will be at the intersection of a bigger phenomenon than the app stores as digital grows exponentially.

Now is the time for any brand to plan and leverage on those exciting developments and – through deeper customer engagement – turn new experiences into new revenue streams.

Major Growth Forecast in Mobile Payment Transactions

2010-09-04T18:03:00.001+02:00

By Mobile Marketer

It seems the contemporary growth in popularity of mobile payment transactions is just getting started.

According to a new report from MarketResearch.com, the prospect for growth in the future of mobile payment transactions is enormous.

The report and subsequent analysis in question is dubbed “Mobile Payment – Advanced Technologies (NFC), Strategies And Future Of Remote & Proximity Payment In The U.S.” Based on the findings and forecasts, mobile payment transactions in the U.S. could reach $56.7B in 2015, growing at a CAGR of 49.19%. The share of U.S in 2015 will reach approximately 10.6% of the global mobile payment transaction.

This spike represents a significant elevation over the $5.2 billion in mobile payment transactions documented in 2009.

Another fascinating tidbit presented is that the market for NFC (Near Field Communication) mobile payments in the U.S. is “in the nascent stage” with an adoption rate of only 1.7%. “This represents a huge opportunity for early movers offering the same,” the reports suggests.

As many suspect, adopting NFC mobile payment will open new revenue channels for banks as well as mobile operators as more than 94% of the U.S. population owns a mobile phone, and 60% of these have a card slot in their mobile phone.

“With the help of NFC technology, banks will be able to tap micro transactions made by cash, representing around 20% of the total transactions in the U.S. This will also help banks to capture the growing GEN Y population as well as the huge underbanked and unbanked population.”

Who Wants Mobile Ads? Parents, Apparently.

2010-08-30T18:05:00.001+02:00

By Sarah Perez

A new mobile marketing survey from Harris Interactive says that the demographic group most interested in receiving mobile advertising is mobile owners with children. This group is interested in receiving opt-in alerts from brands, says the study, and the adults in households with children are also generally more "promotionally active" than others, meaning more likely to take part in marketing promotions like couponing, discounts and daily deals. Those with children under 6-years old were the most receptive to this form of advertising, with 35% in favor of opt-in alerts that arrived via their mobile phone.

Parents Interested in Mobile Alerts

Those interested in opt-in alerts about new products, sales or promotions from their favorite merchants, stores or restaurants also included parents with slightly older children, those aged 6-12. In that group, 32% showed interest in this type of mobile marketing.

Meanwhile, 25% of those without children were interested. However, even if "only" a quarter of mobile users sans kids are interested in alerts, that's still an attractive number to those building services using this sort of technology, we would think.

No Shocker Here: Moms Like Coupons

Also of note, those with young children are the most active online coupon users (e.g. Groupon, etc.), with 36% showing interest. That's double the interest of those without children (18%).

Not surprisingly, if somewhat stereotypically, this group of engaged savers is comprised of more women than men. Twenty eight percent of women between 35 and 54 stated interest in mobile marketing initiatives, compared with only 22% of men.

Study Details

The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive in May with over 2,000 U.S. adult participants. Like many studies of this nature, it was commissioned by a company with an interest in the area, in this case, Placecast, makers of various real-time and location-based technologies for mobile alerting and ads.

According to Placecast's CEO, Alistair Goodman, these findings point to the potential for marketing to people with kids via mobile devices. "Mobile Moms and Dads may not have the time to open an app and search for information, but they see the value and ease of receiving text alerts," he says.

This survey is only one part of the research conducted by Harris Interactive that's attempting to identify trends in mobile marketing. More research is now available on Placecast's blog, where the company examines overall consumer receptivity to mobile marketing initiatives.

Here, for example, the study's findings state that one-third of Americans who have currently signed up for mobile marketing alerts indicate that such services impact their decision to go into stores, and 27% report that mobile programs have impacted their decision to buy products in physical retail locations.

Marketers Warned Off from Foursquare, Gowalla and other Location-Based Social Networks

Another figure that jumped out at us from this additional research was the limited impact of "check-in" services like Foursquare and Gowalla, findings that back up Forrester's recent research that essentially called the services "hype" (for now).

Placecast (via Harris' research) found that only 7% of men and 3% of women showed interest in these types of location-based social networks. In comparison, 40% were avid users of text messaging. "With check-in services only available on smart phones (which comprise roughly 21% of all mobile phones in the U.S.), reach for marketers through these platforms is still a question," notes the Placecast blog post.

Will Emerging Technology Improve Our Productivity?

2010-08-17T14:10:00.003+02:00

Social Media Marketing Report 2010

2010-07-29T11:31:00.008+02:00

Mobile Payments Set To Exceed $200 Billion By 2012

2010-06-21T11:04:00.005+02:00

By Mobile Marketing Watch

Juniper Research has published a new study/forecast for the mobile payments and M-commerce industry that boasts some pretty strong estimates. The company predicts that the value of digital and physical goods that people buy with their mobiles will reach $200 billion globally by 2012, compared to just less than $100 billion this year.

Consumer intimidation and fear of overall security remain leading hindrances to its proliferation, but Juniper forecasts that those fears will continue to subside as the availability of secure, easy-to-use payment applications and industry regulation continue to evolve. Juniper also underlined that retailers and merchants need to communicate the cost of transactions clearly so that people are not discouraged from buying via mobile.

North America and Western Europe will lead the adoption of mobile commerce, the study suggests, and in that sense Juniper sees a “significant opportunity” for brands, retailers and merchants to increase their revenues through highly targeted marketing campaigns, using apps and mobile web payments as a convenience play for users. The study titled “Mobile Payments for Digital & Physical Goods: Players, Markets & Opportunities, 2010-2014,” can be downloaded here.

Consumers See Mobile Phones As Retail Tools

2010-05-24T07:20:00.000+02:00

By Mobile Marketer.

It’s a safe assumption that never before in the history of cell phones have mobile users been more comfortable with using their handsets as a veritable retail assistant.

An recent online survey conducted by the Mobile Marketing Association asked 1,000 people how they use their mobile phones. 17% admitted using their handsets to purchase applications or other digital content. 6% acknowledged using their phones to obtain coupons or other promotional discounts. And another 6% purchased goods, services, and other “non-mobile” content from their phones.

“It’s taken a couple of years, but they’ve figured out the mobile phone is really a tool kit, and one of the tools it unlocks is this thing called the retail environment,” observed Peter Johnson, vice president of market intelligence for the MMA. “If we had done this survey two or three years ago, I would guess almost all respondents would have used it to purchase ringtones or wallpaper.”

The findings also indicated that the primary users of mobile commerce are adult owners of smartphones who are between the ages 25 and 34. Better than half of those smartphone owners used their iPhones or BlackBerrys to purchase content within the past month. And never before have so many purchases made from mobile phones been related to the aforementioned non-mobile content.

“This is a change not just in quantity, but quality, too,” says Johnson. “This strong and growing adoption highlights the reach, effectiveness and trustworthiness of the mobile channel for a wide variety of purchases, including physical goods and services.”

U.S. Mobile Data is Exploding with Verizon in the Lead

2010-05-18T13:09:00.002+02:00

By Chetan Sharma

The US wireless data market grew 5% Q/Q and 22% Y/Y to exceed $12.5B in mobile data service revenues in Q1 2010 - on track so far to our initial estimate of $54B for the year.

In a significant milestone that went largely unnoticed, Verizon Wireless edged past NTT DoCoMo - the decade old leader in mobile data revenues to become the biggest mobile data operator by data revenues. Helped by its 93M subscriber base and high ARPU, the Verizon juggernaut is steamrolling. Rest of the 3 top US operators also occupy leading positions amongst the top 10 global mobile data operators.

The US subscription penetration was approximately 94% at the end of Q1 2010. If we take out the demographics of 5 yrs and younger, the mobile penetration is now past 100%. While the traditional net-adds have been slowing, the “connected device” segment is picking up so much so that both AT&T and Verizon added more connected devices than postpaid subs in Q1 2010. Given the slow postpaid growth in, operators are fiercely competing in prepaid, enterprise, connected devices, and M2M segments.

Data traffic continued to increase across all networks. US has become ground zero for mobile broadband consumption and data traffic management evolution. While it lags Japan and Korea in 3G penetration by a distance, due to higher penetration of smartphones and datacards, the consumption is much higher than its Asian counterparts. Given that it is also becoming the largest deployment base for HSPA+, LTE and WiMAX, most of the cutting edge research in terms of data management and experimentation with policy, regulations, strategy, and business models is taking place in the networks of the US operators and keenly watched by players across the global ecosystem.

We are starting to see the inevitable changes in broadband pricing starting with T-Mobile and MetroPCS. Over the course of this year, we are likely to see newer pricing models that tie usage to pricing and add multiple devices to a single data bucket.

The fabled iPad landed in the market and it is a winner. Apple’s latest gizmo has created a new user experience category of casual and couch computing that will foster growth in the connected device space. Kids of the now generation are growing with connected electronics that is fundamentally altering the behaviors and expectations of interaction, communication, consumption, and monetization.

Privacy brouhaha has been brewing for some time and the polity class is getting interested in stepping in. If people are really serious about tackling privacy, OEMs and carriers should build a physical/soft privacy button on the device with 3-5 levels (just like for the ringer volume) that allows users to open/close privacy across all applications and services with the touch of a button. All apps and services should adhere to the principle via APIs. The other mistake companies make about privacy is by treating everyone the same. Privacy is about the perception of control and transparency. If it is given back to the consumer, they are likely to engage more and have a more positive impact on revenue streams that are likely to flow.

In an another global milestone, Softbank became the first major operator to have more service revenues from data services than voice services. In Q1 2010, 55% of its service revenues were attributed to data services. (While Smart and Globe have been reporting 50%+ revenues from data services for a long time, the total revenues are not at scale with the leading global operators. Incidentally, for the first time in many years, the data revenue % slipped below 50% for the both operators in Q1). Based on current projections, US is likely to cross the 50% data revenue threshold in late 2012 or early 2013. NTT DoCoMo is next in line to cross the 50% mark this year.

All this has setup an absolutely fascinating period in the communication/computing industry. Convergence is everywhere and is leading to fundamental reset of the value chains and ecosystems.

Smartphones Account for Nearly Half of All Mobile Ad Impressions

2010-05-02T11:51:00.003+02:00

By Mobile Marketeer

While it’s no secret that smartphones play a vital role across the contemporary digital advertising landscape, a new report from Millennial Media reveals that smartphones now account for nearly half of mobile ad impressions in the United States today.

Millennial Media – a mobile ad network with an expansive reach that covers better than 80% of all US mobile subscribers – also delineated ad serves on other devices beyond mobile phones. This is providing mobile marketers with a unique opportunity to learn about ad serves on everything from iPads to mobile gaming devices connected over WiFi.

The break down shows that, all told, mobile devices capture a significant chunk of all ad impressions, with iPad impressions in particular exploding some 713% in the first full week of the Apple tablet’s release. iPhones, however, continue to lead the pack and “dominate impressions” in the smartphone category – a category that claims 45% of the mobile ad impression pie.

In addition to the sizable chunk of ad impressions captured by smartphones, feature phones are responsible for another 34% and connected devices round out the rest with 21%

In the big picture, Apple is clearly becoming a bigger player in the mobile ad space than many realize. But as Millennial Media illustrates, don’t count out others – especially the Android, whic has surprisingly gained a good deal of ground against Apple, likely the result of “high customer satisfaction” and its availability from a variety of manufacturers and carriers.

Celebrating 2 years of Almond Peak!

2010-05-01T18:03:00.002+02:00