The mobile phone really is changing the society in some quite surprising and hard-to-predict ways.

LA’s famous airport, LAX, is opening a mobile phone parking lot, following requests from airport users.

“A number of motorists have asked for convenient waiting areas in close proximity to the airport, where they can await a call on their cell phones,” said Kim Day, executive director of the agency that runs the airport.

This will catch on, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, Halifax Live News’ headline is “World’s Smallest Baby, About The Size Of A Cell Phone“. When did the mobile phone start to enter our consciousness as something to compare the size of something to?

And I wonder what we’d have used before?

Story sources: KFMB TV and Halifax Live News.

When I was heading up the Marketing for ZagMe, a location based marketing channel, I knew we’d succeeded beyond most Marketing Director’s wildest fantasies because of one incident. While we had stunning feedback from our customers, one day, one of them phoned up Capital Radio (London’s biggest radio station) and dedicated a song to “ZagMe and the cool offers they send me when I’m at Bluewater mall”.

In an age where kids are increasing cynical about marketing, we had managed to create a passion, not dissimilar from how some people feel about sports teams. Furthermore, we’d done this on a diddly squat budget and with an under-resourced team.

The guys at Flickr must be feeling the same way about this site. yourcompanynamesucks.com is normally used by disgruntled customers and ex-employees to whine and bitch about your company. Check out this and this, by way of example - I am not endorsing these sites, incidentally, but they are in the public domain for you to visit.

But if you go to www.flickrsucks.com, you get this:

The domain was purchased by an adoring fan. Thanks to Business Logs for spotting it (on Web Word).

To me this is a strong indication that Flickr will be one of the winners in this market, despite the launch of a plethora of rip-offs. People who feel this strongly, won’t be easily persuaded to go elsewhere. And having cornered the market for the Alpha users, who teach everyone else how to use technology, they’ll be teaching people how to use Flickr, not some Johnny-come-lately entrant.

A further reason why they’ll succeed is that sites like Flickr have a strong inertia factor working for them. Having uploaded all your photos, you’re going to have to have a very compelling reason to go through all the hassle of uploading them to someone else’s site.

Having said that, ZagMe failed despite the passion of the staff and customers alike. But that was probably more a factor of poor timing than anything else. Sorry to repeat myself, but if you don’t know, I’ve got a free White Paper based on the story of ZagMe. Email me if you’d like a copy. russell at mobhappy dot com.

Talking of passionate customers, I had a little rant a while ago about the “c” word - “consumers” in this instance. I hate the word and companies who talk about consumers, as opposed to customers or clients.

It seems that the legendary Doc “Cluetrain” Searls is thinking the same way. Writing about successful marketing is our post-mass-advertising world, he says:

purge the old mass marketing lingo. Forbid the terms “consumer” and “message.” The first insults your customers, and the second is something nobody demands. Face it: neither conversation nor relationship are about “messages.” I know this makes what we used to call “message development” really hard, but that’s too bad. A good clear description ó yes, good copy ó beats the crap out of a “message” any time.

Yep, I agree with that.

Following yesterday’s post on Strap Ya, a website dedicated to selling mobile phone straps, Reuters has more on this market.

It seems that it’s pretty massive in Japan, worth an estimated Yen 6 billion ($60 million). And big fashion names have noticed and launched their own versions, with Hermes, Gucci and Chanel selling straps for about $300 each.

Strap Ya is a site dedicated to selling….mobile phone straps, admittedly with a few other accessories.

Rather..ummm…niche.

The pic shows a sushi strap.

Spotted on Tom Hume’s Blog.

As if you needed convincing that the Chinese mobile sector was big, Textually reports that this year 220 Billion SMS’s will be sent by its 315 million mobile phone users.

If my maths is right, that’s 700 SMS’s a year each.

That’s a rather mind buggering number.

The picture, by the way, shows the legendary late comedian, Tommy Cooper. He used to say:

Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. And there are 5 people in my family, so it must be one of them.

It’s either my mum or my dad. Or my older brother Colin. Or my younger brother Ho-Cha-Chu.

But I think it’s Colin.

The BBC has a story about a gamer buying an island in a a game for….$26,500 in real money. The island exists in Project Entropia, a Role Playing Game (RPG) and was put up for sale on eBay.

The Beeb goes on:

Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia.

The purchase of the island is not an eccentricity, however. The new owner can tax visitors to his island and sell off sub-plots to other gamers. This can either be further eBay sales for real cash or for the game’s virtual currency, the PED. PED’s have an exchange value for real money too, so this amounts to the same thing.

I remember in the dotcom era when Beenz (the web’s currency) was launched with a great fanfare. “Some day” gushed a spokesman “we’ll see day traders in Beenz, earning a living that way.” Since their cunning business strategy consisted to selling $5 notes for $10, that seemed to be unlikely to me at the time.

However, it is a very likely scenario that MMORPGs will actually provide some gamers with the opportunity to earn a living in this way.

It’s also a fascinating idea in that unlike real land, virtual land can be simply created at will - almost like printing your own money. This means that it’s no longer a scarce or finite commodity, which has always been a key economic driver behind the real world value.

Instead its value comes from its desirability to other gamers, just as beach front land in Florida is more desirable and costly than an isolated wasteland in Siberia.

How intriguing.

My pals over at Net Imperative had a story last week about Vodafone commissioning Digital Chocolate to develop games to showcase the more advanced capabilities of 3G.

The games are Beach Mini-Golf 3D, Ferrari Experience 3D and Extreme Air Snowboarding 3D, all based on Java.

It’s great that Vodafone have got here with their thinking, but it’s arguable that such showcase should have been planned prior to their launch. With any new technology, it’s essential that the first adopters (called variously innovators, sneezers, mavens or alpha users, depending which guru you follow) have something to show to their friends. This is how adoption moves on to a wider audience.

But if you don’t give the innovators something to show off to their friends with, they can’t do their job properly, which is recruiting new users for you.

I don’t think that this initiative goes far enough though. I’d recommend doing something that goes right to the heart of the brand and its communication. Why not commission a game that puts the handset through its paces as part of the marketing campaign? So you create a game playable on the handsets. Players can interact with the game with cutting edge graphics, but also with other players and game characters in a combination of video, email and SMS. This would really give them a 3G tour and workout.

Think Nokia game on steroids.

Winners can be rewarded with prizes, which in turn becomes an incentive to get 3G in the first place - “Win a Million with Vodafone Live! with 3G”.

That would be joined-up marketing.

The New York Times has an article about “adult services” being sold over mobile phones in the US.

It seems that many operators aren’t getting into the sector, fearing it might compromise their brands. Bearing in mind that they’re not trying to ban access to porn, merely refusing to sell it themselves, I wonder if they’re right to be concerned.

I appreciate both the rise and rise of the prurient religious right and the strong stance that the women’s movement has against this industry. But I wonder if the carriers are right to take this moral stance in this context. Isn’t it a bit like the credit card industry refusing to allow you to buy porn with their products?

Playboy has been a mainstream brand for years now and allowing them, as an example, to sell product in association with an operator would surely be acceptable to most people, wouldn’t it? Obviously, assuming that suitable controls were put in place to prevent kids accessing it.

Or perhaps the US market wouldn’t stand for it?

That said, they are turning their backs on that will surely be worth billions of dollars.

Proving another cultural difference, the article also blandly states that the guy in charge of Playboy’s content distribution is called Randy Nicolau. This makes us Brits chortle uncontrollably as “randy” in our English means err… “horny”, I guess is the nearest word.

Please excuse gratuitous use of semi-clad female, but I thought the story needed it.

Leapfrogging is an interesting concept that is highly influential on the growth of the mobile phone market right now.

Wordchanging explains:

“Leapfrogging” is the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps. We see this happening all around us: you don’t need a 20th century industrial base to build a 21st century bio/nano/information economy.

The best-known example of leapfrogging is the adoption of mobile phones in the developing world. It’s easier and faster to put in cellular towers in rural and remote areas than to put in land lines, and as a result, cellular use is exploding. As we’ve noted, mobile phone use already exceeds land line use in India, and by 2007, 150 million out of the 200 million phone lines there will be cellular. There are similar examples from all over the world.

Of course, that’s only really half the story - the cause, not the effect, if you like. The effect is that that phones will have a far higher penetration than PC’s in these countries. And ultimately, internet access by phone will be far greater than by PC, on a worldwide basis.

Who knows what radical changes this is going to spark off?

For instance, there’s a real need to find better ways of keying in data to phones if the mobile is going to replace the PC, which is certainly my theory.

Leave a comment if you have any ideas. Hell, just leave a comment to say Hi!

Link spotted on Moore’s Law.

I’m currently working on my predictions for next year, which can be fun and can be surprisingly accurate - or not. Actually I’ll review my 2004 ones at the same time.

Do you have forecasts you’d like to share with the Mobile Weblog readership?

Drop me a line or leave a comment.