I’ve been playing around with the PPC-6700 from Sprint (otherwise known as the HTC Apache), their latest EV-DO Pocket PC handset. There’s plenty to like about the device — QWERTY keyboard, 3G, Wi-Fi — offset by some minor annoyances, but overall, it’s pretty nifty. If you’re looking for a PDA phone, or an alternative to a Blackberry, it’s worth checking out.
The PPC-6700 sports a smaller footprint than other Pocket PC phones I’ve used, though its slide-out keyboard makes it a fair amount thicker. My only issue with the form factor is the external antenna. It’s not only goofy-looking, but sticks up about 3/4 of an inch from the top of the device, plenty of room to get caught on things and be bulky in the pocket. But, I guess at this point, you’ve still got to accept some tradeoffs for all the functionality.
There’s an impressive list of features here (visit Phone Scoop for a comprehensive list). At the top is the EV-DO data functionality. Surfing the web and checking email with it is almost enough to make you forget the pain of CSD, the perpetual waiting of GPRS and the inevitable disappointment of WAP, and it blows away my (albeit limited) experience with UMTS in Europe. The Wi-Fi works well enough, but to be perfectly honest, I really didn’t use it much. The EV-DO was plenty fast, but I guess if you’re wanting to save on bandwidth bills, it could come in handy. I was also able to tether the device to my Mac, which was great.
Probably the most striking physical feature is the slide-out keyboard. It’s decent enough, but not great. The white and red backlighting of the keys was particularly problematic for me, especially outdoors. Like most mobile keyboards, it’s not something with which you’d want to write a novel, but it’s perfectly fine for short emails and text messages. I’ve got a few other hardware quibbles — the camera button on the side acts only as the shutter button; pushing it any other time doesn’t open the camera application (ah, I just discovered you have to hold it down for a good 4 or 5 seconds to fire up the camera app). That’s okay, I guess, except that it’s the opposite reaction of the voice recorder button on the other side of the device. This button has been the bane of my experience with Pocket PC devices — any time you hit it, the voice recorder application starts up. Should the button get held down, which seems to happen quite often, it starts recording. Is that feature really popular enough that it demands a dedicated key? There’s one below it for Internet Explorer; I imagine users would like to have one for the messaging app. To be fair, all of these buttons are programmable, but that may be asking a bit much of many users.
The real problem buttons, though are the PPC-6700’s two power buttons. Yes, two — which is especially curious given that neither one of them actually turns the device off. The one on the top turns the screen and backlight off and on, while the end call/power button will turn the radios off and on if held down. Okay, that’s great, but how do I shut the damn thing off? As far as I can tell, the only way that’s possible is to take out the battery.
Let’s talk about the software. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Pocket PC user interface, and that hasn’t changed, but there are a significant number of improvements here both in the software itself, but also in how users interact with it. There’s one major change in the latest version that gets rid of another personal bugbear: significant data’s no longer stored in volatile memory. Older Pocket PCs stored everything in RAM, so when the battery died, all your data disappeared. It was a stupid arrangement, doubly so in a mobile phone. Fortunately, it’s no longer a worry.
I also like some of the lengths to which HTC’s gone to make it possible to control the device with one hand. I’m no big fan of stylus-driven UIs for mobile phones, but obviously with a PDA-type device, it’s a necessity. But, at their heart, these devices are still phones, and you should be able to control them as such. The PPC-6700 has two soft keys to access the on-screen menus along with the usual Windows and OK buttons, as well as a nice joystick that makes navigating everything with one hand manageable, if not perfect.
Also very welcome is the addition of landscape mode, which makes web surfing and messaging much, much better.
The included software is fine, nothing too outstanding or disappointing. The email client is fine, setup is easy and it works well. Internet Explorer is okay
I installed a few third-party applications with little trouble. Skype downloaded and installed fine; it has a few quirks but those are issues of its own rather than with the device. I couldn’t get Opera to download directly to the device, and had to transfer it over from my computer via Bluetooth. Once installed, it beats Pocket IE hands-down. I don’t know how many times it needs to be repeated, but Opera has figured out mobile browsing and should come as the default browser on high-end devices, if not all of them. Opera’s lack of support for WML and XHTML remains problematic, though. But for HTML, it can’t be beat.
All things considered, the PPC-6700 is pretty solid. Much of its charm comes from the zippy EV-DO connection, but along with the new version 5.0 of Windows Mobile, it’s got some significant UI enhancements that, for me, dull the pain of Pocket PC. It remains too bloated and overwhelming for general users, but for business users, PDA fans or people looking for a Blackberry alternative, it’s a good bet.
Britain’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has issued a Code of Conduct for Citizen Journalists (or what they call Witness Contributors), following an actually quite sensible sounding discussion at The Guardian.
The Code reeks of fear and attempted protectionist practices and you can read more about it on Neil McIntosh’s blog, Complete Tosh here. Neil is a “proper” journo, so his criticism needn’t be viewed as envy by writers who don’t get paid.
However, my problem with the Code is twofold.
Firstly, it attempts to restrict the role of Citizen Journalists to those people who witness breaking news stories in the flesh. So it ignores the efforts of millions of bloggers, as an example. Sounds a little like denial, no?
But more importantly, what are they doing creating a Code for Citizen Journalists in the first place and why should we adhere to it anyway? Isn’t it a bit like the ancient Senate of Rome seeking to impose a Code on the invading Barbarians?
Story via Alfie’s Blog. Image from Genre Online
Part One of this post concluded that the really important question when studying Location Based Marketing (LBM), in fact, the-answer-to-life-death-and-the-universe question of the subject, is: what kind of marketing messages should you say you’re going to send that will attract opt-in users, that recipients will welcome and that they’ll respond to? In other words, what kind of messages will work?
Knowing what the user wants is key to both opt-in in the first place and subsequently, optimising the channel’s effectiveness.
This might seem an obvious point to make and indeed, a comment was made to this effect on the original post. However, it’s a point that does need labouring, especially in the marketing community.
Why? Because the mindset of nearly all advertising, direct marketing and promotion has historically been about interrupting the recipient in whatever they’re doing at the time. This could be while they’re consuming a medium (TV, radio, newspapers) or doing something else (walking down the street, opening their post, shopping in a supermarket, surfing the net). Whatever the scenario, the marketer hasn’t really had to explicitly seek permission to communicate a marketing message before.
Of course, this isn’t 100% true. Direct Marketers will point out that they use opt in lists and have been for many years. This is actually rarely the case. Most use opt-out, which is an entirely different thing. True opt in marketing, where the future recipient of messages is knowingly signing up to a marketing channel is pretty rare. So for the vast majority of brands and agencies, this is a logical, important, but nevertheless, not so obvious starting point.
In this post, I’m going to kick off with some of the physical delivery characteristics of these messages, before a final Part 3, when I’ll look at what the messages themselves might actually say.
Firstly, they have to be free to receive. While some may believe that selling ads is possible (iTunes and ESPN announced yesterday that they will sell classic commercials for $2 a pop) I can say with some certainty that it’s going to be a pretty niche market. For the vast majority of us, we expect that our marketing messages are free and will take umbrage if we find that we’re being charged directly or indirectly for being enticed to buy someone’s product or service.
This is important in the context of a mobile phone, because even if the marketer doesn’t charge, the mobile operator may well do so. Any delivery of the marketing message over WAP will incur data charges, for instance and in the US, recipients will even be charged for receiving an sms.
There’s another dimension here though. Many digital marketing messages encourage interaction, mainly clicking through to a website. If there’s a cost to this action, in terms of more data charges, it’s going to suppress click-throughs to far below what we see on the traditional web. Can you imagine what it would do to AdSense response rates if Google started charging the consumer whenever they clicked an ad? And it would be even worse if you didn’t know how much they were going to be charged - operators being far from transparent or at least easily comprehensible, when it comes to one-off data charges.
This means that mobile ads will have to either develop an alternative call to action to the click-through, or find a technology-led solution to allow the user to click through for free.
Neither of these scenarios are impossible actually. Since we’re talking about LBM, we could be looking at the equivalent of a Physical Click-Through, otherwise known as a store visit. Or maybe where the message was delivered by a local network, a digital click-through could be handled free over that network too.
Any marketer who doesn’t take this potential cost barrier into account needs to rethink in my view. Although, I live in hope that all-you-can-eat data downloads might solve this problem for operator delivered messages, eventually.
A second characteristic of these types of messages, is that the message needs to differentiate itself from other forms of messaging, in an ideal world. Taking sms as a possible channel, the familiar beep of an incoming text message triggers a Pavlovian emotional reaction. Someone has sent YOU something and you can’t wait to open it. With younger people, the sms is much more likely to be personal (rather than business) and so possibly even more exciting.
So it can be anti-climactic to open it, to find that it’s “just” a marketing message. In any other context, you may have valued it (after all, you signed up to receive them), but the Beep raised your expectations too high. This is a point endorsed by The Mobile Sage of Brighton, Tom Hume in his comment on my first post.
If there were ways to push messages to individuals without masquerading as a friend or family member (which is what SMS marketing messages effectively do, after all), would it be more welcomed?
Yes, Tom, I think you’re right.
James at Moco News shared much the same thinking in his post about my original article and hypothesised that maybe the delivery channel could be a “scrolling ticker”. This would distinguish it from other forms of messages and could well be a solution. It also has the other important, third characteristic of LBM, namely:
It automatically disappears when no longer relevant or when the recipient fails to interact after a given period of time.
This is important for two reasons. Firstly, no one wants their phone’s valuable memory clogged up with mobile marketing detrius, especially if it’s no longer applicable or relevant. Secondly, to avoid the annoyance factor of recipients thinking “Yeah and?? I’ve already seen that and wasn’t interested.”
The fourth characteristic is timeliness. True LBM is highly time relevant - you are in the vicinity of the message sender for a matter of minutes, or even seconds. Therefore the message delivery backend, as well as the delivery itself, must effectively be instant.
If we’re using sms, this isn’t really an issue. But with richer media, like images, or even video, sending via an operator’s network can be slow at current download rates and by the time it arrives, it could have become obsolete.
As operator networks get faster and faster, rich media delivery, if appropriate in the first place, will become less of an issue. In the meantime, some form of local network, Bluetooth or wifi, might be the better option for high bandwidth media.
The next characteristic is don’t interrupt! Although interruptive techniques have been the very foundation of marketing throughout the ages, this is one environment where it’s a no, no.
If I’m making a call, I do NOT want to be interrupted by a marketing message.
If I’m writing an sms, I do not want to be interrupted by a marketing message, have to click on it to make it go away and then find my draft again.
Interruption on mobiles will be very annoying and will lead to people opting out of the programme very, very quickly.
The next characteristic is accuracy of location feeds. If a store visit, for example, is the objective of the campaign (and it doesn’t have to be), the further away the recipient of the message is, the less likely they are to visit.
There are many competing technologies as far as location identification is concerned and this isn’t the place to review them all. But I’d suggest that such a system needs to deliver accuracy of less than say, 100m, in all types of terrain. As an example, pure GPS relies on line of sight with a satellite, making it impractical to use in many urban environments.
Naturally, LBM may well encompass locally delivered, but non-location specific messages, in which case accuracy is inherent, if often not necessary.
My final thought on the characteristic of the ideal LBM message is probably too futuristic to be realistic right now. But it will be necessary if true LBM is to succeed in the longer term and in a mass market context.
Many such messages will require the user to visit a store and use their phone to prove that they are entitled to some benefit. This process must eventually be integrated in some way into the retailers’ EPOS systems if it’s to be accepted by the Ops people in the retailers.
Of course, the perfect system would be to allow the mobile user to receive the marketing message, go into the store, pay for the product or service and redeem an offer - all completely seamlessly with their mobile. But we’re a ways off that currently.
That’s my thoughts on the most important characteristics of LBM messages. What have I missed out? Please leave a comment and let me know or share your thoughts on this important subject.
Of course, you could argue that many of these characteristics are common sense and up to a point, they are. It’s like being invited into someone’s home - be respectful, sensitive to their feelings, ask before you use something and don’t deliberately break their washing line (long story!). But this is not how marketers have behaved in the past and most will require a new mindset when developing campaigns for the mobile channel.
Tomorrow, my final post in this series about LBM will be about the messages themselves. What should they be saying in terms of content that will make them attractive enough to opt into in the first place and to want to continue to receive them? Many traditional advertising messages will no longer be acceptable, so what should marketers think about saying?
If you have any thoughts on this angle too, please drop me an email or leave a comment.
The FCC has proposed fining AT&T and Alltel the staggering amount of $100,000 for “failing to properly certify that they have safeguarded their customers’ personal call information”. Such a huge fine sends a clear message to other operators — that the FCC really couldn’t care less about how they treat customer records.
I detailed last week some of the current goings-on vis a vis privacy matters with US carriers, and the joke is still going. Since then, the top four US mobile carriers have filed suit against sites selling their customers’ call records — a tacit admission that they let the people running these sites get the records. Again, these carriers are happy to sue after the fact since it makes them look tough. But how did the records get out in the first place?
That’s the issue here: lax policies and procedures that made it easy for the wrong people to get hold of customer information. The operators don’t seem to care, and the regulators don’t either. What will make them change their mind?
Anyone that’s read my blogging for any length of time has probably come across my posts about Cingular, the enormous wireless division of SBC, now renamed AT&T. Although they got kudos from me for the efforts during the hurricanes this past fall, on the whole I‚Äôve felt that this carrier in particular has been dysfunctional in the extreme and my posts have reflected a combination of disdain and frustration depending upon what it was I was trying to accomplish.
As a result of my past experiences, any time I have to call the carrier I do so fully expecting to come away from the experience in a worse mood. It has been the rule more than the exception at any rate. However, I am also a guy that likes to give credit where it’s due and to encourage further improvement by acknowledging when things are done well. For a nice change Cingular, or should I say a particluar Cingular employee named Storm made my evening better than I expected when he went the extra mile to help me sort of the WAP and MMS settings for a new Nokia N70 that I got recently.
Ordinarily this would be just a run or the mill tech question, but what made Storm’s efforts special is that this phone hasn’t even been released in the US yet and as such the settings weren’t just at his fingertips or on one of his preset screens. At first he didn’t seem to keen on dealing with me, but I think when he went to check the phone and realized that this would be a tough one for an unaided customer to sort out he decided to put forth some real effort and he managed to find the settings and send them off to me after about 10 minutes of extra work. For this I am grateful and hope his supervisors and co-workers note that it is this kind of work that makes the difference in the mind of the customer and goes a long way towards changing one’s impression of a business. Nice Job Storm. Thank You.
When ZagMe, my previous foray into Location Based Marketing (LBM), was shut by its investors, I wrote at the time that we were 5 years too early. This didn’t mean 5 years too early for user acceptance, incidentally, but too early for marketers and the available technology.
However, ZagMe closed 5 years ago now and I sense that the world and technology is catching up with the thinking, so I thought it would be interesting to re-examine the business case.
Whenever location based marketing is mentioned, there are usually a number of predictable reactions.
At one end, we have what I’ll call the traditional techie, or possibly the anti-marketer (not always one and the same person) who tend to run around shouting stuff about invasion of privacy and calling for damn-fool advertisers to leave us alone. “We don’t,” they say, “want marketing messages on our phones (or anywhere else, in our heart of hearts) under any circumstances. It’s Evil.
Well, unless it’s Pull Marketing, where we get to decide when we want to be marketed to - obviously maybe that’s OK.”
At the other end of the spectrum is the traditional marketer or ad agency. They know the traditional channels are dying. People PVR out ads, have spam filters and their minds are adept at ignoring marketing messages.
They need a new magic bullet and mobile marketing may be the answer.
What both parties seem to be missing is what the ordinary mobile phone user might want. So I thought I’d have a look at this and see what the role of marketing on a mobile phone might be.
Firstly, let’s bust the Pull myth. Most ordinary people don’t want the hassle of pulling down information. They want it presented to them as a seamless part of their device experience, to ignore or act on, as they see fit.
That’s not to say that there isn’t an important role for Pull - I think being able to access information to supplement other media, as an example, is a great idea. And some die-hards will always stick to Pull and that’s fine too.
But the ordinary person wants to access marketing messages without any hassle, provided that the messages will be of interest - more of that anon.
I’m also not going to belabour the the Opt In Rule here. Trying to run non-Opt-In campaigns is not only illegal in Europe, but will be anywhere where marketers try to run this type of campaign. It’s simply too annoying for recipients and too tempting for politicians to run vote-catching legislation to ban it.
Having said that, illegal or not, it’s fundamentally Stone Age marketing, akin to bludgeoning passers-by with a huge marketing club and shouting after those you miss “Oi, shithead come back here, so I can smack you round the head and tell you how much I much I disrespect you”. In other words, it’s not for reputable brands, as they’ll find out damn quickly if they try it.
So let’s assume that your user has signed up to receive LBM from you.
Yes, this is a very big assumption and leads to the first fundamental LBM question: Would anyone sign up and if so, why would they?
Well, I think we can tackle this pretty quickly. Yes, they would sign up or opt-in to receive LBM. And they’ll sign up because of the type of marketing messages you promise (and they believe) that you’ll send them.
At ZagMe, for instance, we had 85,000 people sign up to our opt-in mobile marketing channel. These people weren’t tricked into something, they were simply promised marketing messages from shops in the mall, as in “great deals on essential brands direct to your mobile ‚Äì free”.
So, in fact, the really important question when studying LBM, the-answer-to-life-death-and-the-universe question of the subject, is: what kind of marketing messages should you say you’re going to send that will attract opt-in in the first place, that recipients will welcome and that they’ll respond to? In other words, what kind of messages will work? Knowing what the user wants is key to both opt-in in the first place and subsequently, optimising the channel’s effectiveness.
I’ll examine this in Part Two of this exploration and I’ll publish it later this week. If you have any ideas or feedback, leave a comment and I’ll incorporate the best in the follow-up.
Have a great week.
WireMedia, a Boca Raton, Florida Company trading on the Pink Sheets has announced the deployment of bluetoothmedia.com. Their press release says:
The new site will allow advertisers, partners and end-users to see how Wiremedia’s new service offerings will work for them. Users will also see the direction Wiremedia is taking with the new site and the features that will be brought online for the service launch in the imminent future. We are excited about the new website and the opportunity it will afford the company to showcase an open demonstration of Wiremedia’s Bluetooth proximity advertising service.
About Wiremedia’s Bluetooth Proximity Advertising Delivery System:
Wiremedia’s Bluetooth Mediaserver delivers customized rich media content and applications directly to cell phones, within a range of 100+ meters of a specific location, at broadband speed. Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone users can receive coupons, video, audio, etc. ‚Äú80 percent of all new mobile phones expected to come equipped with Bluetooth in 2006,‚Äù says IDC. http://www.wiremedia.com
Not a word of “opt-in” or “permission based” Nope…just 80 percent of all new mobile phones. I wonder what percent of new mobile phone owners WANT to get messages from Wiremedia’s bluespamming devices?
This appears to me to be a classic case of a company that does not get it. Beyond this, their BlueSpamming Website has been announced, but when you visit it there is nothing tere, not even an “under construction page! Bluespamming was a novel idea in about 2002 today it is hard to take anyone offering up such a service seriously, especially when the company describes itself like this:
About Wiremedia
Wiremedia (Pink Sheets: WRMA) is an emerging company focused on creating scalable mobile technologies and wireless data software applications. The company intends to leverage its immense expertise in mobile content marketing and distribution to deliver value-added mobile applications, services and content to the global market place. http://www.wiremedia.com.
From that paragraph I can’t even tell what the company does, and frankly I don’t think they know either! Anyone have any idea?
Stuart at Blethers has done a great job editing the Carnival this week - head on over and check it out for the best of this week’s mobile writing.
It’s great to see more new writers joining the Carnival and yet maintaining the excellent quality we’ve come to enjoy.
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