According to the BMRB Internet Monitor 49% of 20 - 24 year olds in the UK have used the internet on their mobiles and 21% of all users have bitten the bullet.

This is pretty amazing considering:

- Many, many phones still come with the wrong settings. This means that the purchaser either has to change them or just give up at that point. Be very afraid if the head of engineering at an operator ever switches career and starts designing cars - you’ll be expected to put the wheels on yourself.

- WAP marketing promised the earth, such that even a broadband type of speed and experience would have been a little disappointing. The sloooooow speeds and painful waiting around was just awful.

- Even now, there’s actually surprisingly little content that looks good and is easy-to-use over WAP. The vast majority on web pages aren’t optimised.

Now admittedly the survey is only looking at sampling - in other words, users may well have tried it, only to die of boredom during the process. However, the Mobile Data Association shows around 1.8 billion page impressions a month now and this is still growing at abut 24% year on year, so clearly many are finding the service useful enough.

With 3G speeds, the mobile internet is not only going to get better, but it’ll really start to resemble a small screen version of a broadband connected computer. At that point, someone of any age will be unusual if they didn’t use the mobile internet.

The way this scenario will eventually play out is that the mobile will become the primary way most of us access the net and I think this’ll happen within 5 years.

Via The Big Picture

Time once again to clean out some links that have piled up again. Here goes:

TechFaith: A Firm Grip On Handset Design - A short BusinessWeek article that’s interesting reading about TechFaith, one of China’s leading handset design companies. TechFaith employs about 1,800 designers and engineers (that make an average of $1,000 a month) that churn out handsets for 9 of the top 10 Chinese manufacturers as well as NEC, Kyocera and Mitsubishi.

Freeware support from Symbian” - One of the big concerns about the implementation of the Symbian Signed program was that it left small and individual developers out at the expense of “security”. Well, no more, apparently. Freeware developers will be able to get their apps signed for free.

KDDI’s EZ Channel - Wireless Watch Japan has a video about the EZ Channel video offering from KDDI that offers 30 different “channels” of video content that delivers clips to subscribers late at night and early in the morning. It’s hard to make a judgment on the content, but the delivery is interesting — the clips are transmitted when there’s excess network capacity and then stored on the user’s handset for whenever they want to watch.

The Mobile Device Detection Problem and Transcoding sites for a mobile can be tricky - A couple of posts for Charlie Schick that are good reading for anybody that wants to develop for the mobile Web.

Vodafone Australia changes ‘Mobile Internet’ pricing from kb-based to time-based - I’m no fan of per-KB or per-MB data charging, but time-based is about the dumbest thing I can think of.

I got a new phone last week, a Sony Ericsson K750i. I thought maybe it was time to stop using smartphones for a while and go back to a featurephone. I’ve been really impressed with the UI on the phone, and for mass-market I really like it a lot better than Nokia’s Series 40. The only issue thus far has been finding non-game Java applications, but I’ve found 2 winners in Opera Mini and WorldMate.

Anyhow, I’ll put up some further thoughts on it after I’ve used it some more. But in the meantime, feel free to share any tips, tricks or cool programs in the comments.

A while ago, we looked at both handheld gaming wannabe, Gizmondo, firstly questioning their strategy and then looking at some very dodgy goings on in terms of management remuneration and benefits.

On the eve of their US launch on Saturday, Chris Morris at CNN has got his hands on a device and is singularly unimpressed too. The game portfolio is poor, controls are errr…..poor, video playback is pretty poor too. See a pattern emerging here?

But the thing that beggars belief is that they’re “launching” without any retail support. Oh, they do have 14 stand-alone kiosks in malls around the US. So that’s OK then.

Call me naive, but how on earth can the management justify their million dollar packages, with performances like this? And why on earth would people keep investing in this company?

I’ll leave the last word to CNN, lest you think I exaggerate. Bear in mind that Gizmondo is priced at $150 more than the PSP, for its unsubsidised model:

Regardless of whether the Gizmondo’s launch is in stores or online, it probably won’t make a big difference. The system is sub-par. The games are barely worthy of mention. And the extra features just won’t appeal to the gaming audience the company is targeting.

A couple of posts over at MocoNews this week caught my eye and joined up in my head. The first mentions how a prominent media figure in the UK is starting a company to buy up rights to distribute TV and video to mobiles, even though he’s got no idea what the business model will be — which also seems a roundabout way of saying he’s also got no idea if it’s going to be successful. The second points to an NYT article that says content producers are equally clueless about what will work for mobile video, but that the producers of the “24″ mobisodes found out that wide shots don’t work and that they had to double the size of the bullet holes and use more fake blood.

Two different angles, but the same point: nobody’s got any idea what’s going to work. This shotgun approach, though, doesn’t really seem to be the best way to figure it out, but it seems about on par with the creative thinking that comes out of the entertainment industry these days. There are a few problems here, all stemming from a lack of understanding of how the mobile device fits into people’s personal media landscape.

People’s media devices — TV, computer, DVR, stereo, iPod, phone and so on — all need to be a part of the same pool of content. I listen to music on my computer, stereo, MP3 player. I play DVDs on my TV or on my computer, and TV shows come from my DVR or BitTorrent. The idea that any one of those devices or any of that content are their own islands doesn’t fly.

Modern media is about control. I control what I consume; I control where and when I consume it, and how. Mobile, especially mobile TV and video, has to fit in to this. Video content only accessible on a mobile phone is generally pretty pointless. I want access to my content, not just what somebody decides to give me. This doesn’t give live TV broadcasts a free pass, either. If people are already looking to time- and place- shift “normal” TV, tying them to broadcasters’ schedule on their mobile phone probably won’t work either.

The idea that people will maintain different and separate sets of content for different devices is outdated and outmoded. Everything’s got to work together. The sooner people pushing mobile video and TV realize this, the better off they’ll be.

Continuing the “ads on devices” theme, Tom Hume writes that 3G UK network operator, 3, are planning to become an advertising channel as part of their new strategy, in addition to the See Me TV move that Carlo reported yesterday.

The idea is to open up their 3.2 million users to targeted advertising, which might include Push as well as Pull.

Previous experiments with downloadable video ads for the iPod and cult film “It’s all gone Pete Tong” led to 100,000 and 160,000 downloads respectively. (By the way “Pete Tong” is Cockney Rhyming Slang for “wrong” - it wasn’t a documentary on the DJ, as some reported).

This represents about 3 - 5% of the user base, or even as high as 8% if there was no duplication between the two, which admittedly seems unlikely. However, it’s also worth nothing that the novelty effect will have inflated results and the more videos are available, the more competition there’ll be. So I’d expect average response rates to fall off pretty dramatically. Of course, skilled advertisers might still achieve even better numbers if the ads are truly great and have real viral potential.

This level of pull-based response is pretty impressive, even though, as I wrote earlier, the number of brands who can create this kind of work is going to be pretty limited. In particular, making ads exclusively for a channel that gets 100,000 views is going to severely restrict production costs, unless it can be proved that these 100,000 are super-sneezers. In other words, they go out and show it to all their friends, who transfer it to their phones (via an unrecordable channel like Bluetooth) and they go on to do the same with their friends.

Having said that, while it may pain ad agencies hugely, we don’t have to look at high production values to produce an effective ad, especially given the medium. How much do you think Ringtone Dancer or Numa Numa cost to make? I’m guessing nothing in either case, though admittedly, they weren’t hampered by a brief to sell product.

So much for pull based stuff, but 3 claim that they’re going to look at push based marketing too, or that’s what I take this to mean; “customers willing to receive communications that correspond with their interests could be targeted directly”.

This is a dangerous game to play if it’s not done incredibly well - it’s not something they should attempt half heartedly. Even assuming permission is granted, wrong targeting or poor timing of the message quickly turn it into Spam. And if they’re perceived to be spamming, permission is withdrawn permanently - there are no second chances in mobile marketing.

At the very least I hope they’ve read my White Paper on this area Drop me an email using the link on the top left, if you’d like a free copy.

Original story via The Guardian.

There’s been tons written about the launch of the iPod with video and especially the deal with ABC to sell popular TV programmes via iTunes for $1.99. You can download episodes like Lost and Desperate Housewives the day after broadcast.

On the surface, this seems like a clever move for ABC. They can make the sale twice - firstly via their network and secondly via iTunes. Plus, they can put their customers in danger of acquiring programmes legally.

But the major impact this is going to have, assuming it takes off, is on the already beleagured ad industry.

Not only are they effectively locked out of the channel, as the situation currently stands. But if it’s represnetative of things to come, it appears to kill off the idea of advertiser-funded or subsidised content via these new channels - mobile included. This is because at $1.99 a programme equates to a mind buggering $1,990 CPM or cost per thousand viewers. This is way beyond any brand’s budget that I can think of.

Since ad-funded content has oft been mooted as a possible way forward for mobile, this must be seriously worrying.

In fact, according to Reuters last night, advertisers are already worried by this and are starting to come up with some increasing wild ideas. This includes pressurising ABC to leave in the ads, as originally broadcast - which conflicts with Apple’s statement that they wouldn’t allow ads on the iPod. But then they said that they wouldn’t launch a video iPod either, so this could just be a negotiating stance.

Other ideas include offering a subsidy to viewers if they watch an ad first. This has regularly been tried as a model and always fails, but I come back to the point above, that no advertiser could possibly afford to meaningfully subsidise programmes at these cost levels. Do you think people would be interested in a 10c subsidy on a $1.99 purchase, for instance? I don’t.

A possible future for some advertisers might be to offer ads that are so good, viewers will want to download them to watch without another incentive. I can see this happening with work of the quality of this new Guinness ad, for instance. But brands that lend themselves to this kind of execution are few and far between - there’s no hope in this approach for Joe Soappowder.

Are we going to see a return to advertiser-created content along the lines of the old, original soap opera? Or perhaps huge growth in product placement, such that advertising and content can’t be separated on the iPod, mobile or by the PVR?

Certainly these things will be tried.

But I suspect that this model is now broken and beyond tweaking or repair. The future will belong to marketers who understand this and seek to engage with their audiences using new and altogether different techniques.

I pointed out last week a company’s new offering that tracks users’ content on mobile networks and gives them rewards if it gets passed around by other users. Today, as part of its “new strategy”, 3 UK announced See Me TV that pays users 1p every time their video gets downloaded by another user.

Users upload a 30-second video clip, which then gets put on the channel with other submissions, and every time somebody clicks, the user gets a penny (which is then PayPal-ed to them once they’ve racked up 10 pounds — or 1000 downloads). 3 gives a few details about navigation, saying the clips will be divided into categories, with the most popular clips at the top of the menus — which sounds like it’s going to be the content deck scenario all over again, where the top entries get all the clicks. I’m assuming there will be a way for users to send “check this out” messages about specific videos to their friends as well.

The press release also mentions “editorial guidelines” — which presumably means the videos will be reviewed to make sure they’re not happy slapping vids or something. Seems like if this takes off, that would be an awful lot of overhead.

Mobile e-mail company Visto says that it will add the ability for users of its mobile e-mail service to respond to messages with a recorded voice message. “Voice is the next logical step in the progression of mobile email, providing mobile professionals with the freedom to choose how to communicate, depending on the situation and the business need,” says the company’s CEO.

Um… hasn’t this functionality always been there, pretty much since the beginning of mobile phones, let alone mobile e-mail? It’s called a voice call?

I’ve documented the problems of MMS many times and two of the central problems always come back to ease of use and cost.

ShoZu might just solve these issues, making it much easier to upload your photos as you take them on your camera phone and share them with friends and family.

ShoZu is a simple application you can download to your phone. Once installed, it offers to upload a photo to your Flickr account every time you take one. It’s as simple as that.

Assuming (and it’s a big assumption) that your phone’s internet settings are correctly enabled, that’s all there is to it. No complicated installation or software to learn. And no costly MMS charges - just the cost of the data transfer one time and you can share photos on the web and via email.

I don’t know what the business model here is. It’s a free-to-download application currently, so maybe the plan is to sell this once the product has moved out of beta stage. I’m also a little surprised they don’t offer a choice of the more popular photo-sharing sites - Flickr might be the darling of the chattering classes, but there are others like the insanely popular WebShots, as an example.

It’s also interesting that they’ve gone for a B2C model, unlike Cognima, who have focused on providing white label services that do pretty much the same thing. Cognima raised $12 million in the Summer to expand.

I’d say the value in the chain here is a B2C play, if they can make it happen. B2B invariably gets commoditised, squeezing margins until someone comes along with a way to make it happen cheaper than you’re prepared to do it.