Way back in the late 90’s, we had that weird idea that people could personalise the sound their phone made when it rang. And so, perhaps the least expected billion dollar market emerged since err…sms a few years earlier.

So don’t scoff at background tones which are the happening trend in India, according to Mobile Entertainment magazine. Background tones are music that plays in the background while you are talking on the phone.  Cellebrum, the tech providers, say that they have over 1 million subscribers in India, with 3 million downloads and the typical pattern is to change tones once or twice a month.

It’s not just about music though, with many downloads being religious chants or devotional messages.

And if you thought Crazy Frog was annoying, try having a conversation with someone who forces you to listen their brand of religious proselytizing. On the other hand, if we have any Jehovah’s Witnesses in the house, this sounds exactly like your kind of thing.

And even better news for MobHappy readers who can’t wait for this to come to Europe - you don’t have to, if you already have a Symbian phone. I see the nice fellas at All About Symbian will sell you a phone based app that does the same thing for $12.50. It’s a bargain if you ask me.

[tags] background tone, india, content, symbian, cellebrum [/tags]

Image from BBC.

This week’s Carnival is at SmartMobs and a very fine job Judy Breck has done as moderator.

Congrats to Rudy and Stephanie for winning host and post of the month in the awards sponsored by Khosla Ventures for June.

From now on we’ll still to the new Monday morning timetable as it seems more popular with readers and hosts have the weekend to polish things.

Geriatric rockers The Rolling Stones have hopped on board the mobile music train — sort of. Through a service called Listen Live Now!, fans will be able to listen live to their concert today in Paris via their mobile phones. And when I say via their mobile phones, I don’t mean some sort of streaming audiocast — they call in and get a feed from the mixing board piped across a standard phone connection to their handset. Sounds brilliant. But it gets better.

Users will be charged $1.99 for 7 minutes, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to simply buy the whole thing at once — so users who actually want to shell out the $40 or so to hear the whole thing will have to do it $1.99 and 7 minutes at a time. The Stones’ manager says the move will help deter bootlegging — seriously — and that “It’s passive income, and they’re helping fans enjoy the experience without affecting ticket sales.” Somehow I expect the “passive income” bit, rather than the “enjoy the experience” is what they’re focused on. But then again, when concert tickets are $150 or more, it’s not really about the music or the fans, is it?

Update: As Colby points out, the site says “On Friday July 28th at 3:00PM EDT (start time is approximate)”. What happens if they’re seven minutes late?

[tags]mobile, mobile music, rolling stones[/tags]

Forgive me a little self-indulgence, but it is about mobile, so you should find it interesting.

AdMob just passed a major milestone and served its 50 millionth ad yesterday - not bad considering it’s less than 7 months old. It’s proving to be a serious way of selling mobile related content, products and services, with a whole bunch of happy advertisers.

In the last 2 months our daily page inventory has grown by over 12 times its size, as more and more wap publishers find that AdMob can make them money.

If you want to give it a whirl, I’ll give you $10 to spend on a small campaign yourself. Just register on the site and drop me an email at Russell AT admob DOT com and I’ll credit your account. This will be enough to get you at least 40 free clicks (assuming 25 cents US per click) and see for yourself how it works. I think you’ll like it.

This might seem a little self-promotional and it is on one level. But it’s also showing that the mobile web is really taking off and has developed at least one viable business model. Watch this space, as they say.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle is a very astute piece of analysis and one which seems increasingly applicable to a huge variety of technology. It basically posits that new products and services typically go through early hype stage by vendors, while meeting a wall of indifference by users. Once the vendor has entered into the trough of disillusionment and very often gone on to hype newer things, some users will find cool and froody things to do with the product, tell their friends, who tell their friends and suddenly we have an “over night success”.

Wap is a great example, with 29% of adults now using it in developed markets like the UK and even 22% of adults in less advanced markets, like the US, according to M:Metrics. This is despite the fact that most operators long ago stopped seriously promoting it and is almost entirely down to users discovering Wap for themselves.

So it’s gratifying to read of the latest stats for mobile data usage from Informa Telecoms & Media, which shows that mobile data revenues surpassed $100 billion in 2005 worldwide. This is at a time when many operators are privately despairing that this market is ever going to take off.

But this is the tip of the veritable ice berg and mobile data will emerge to be one of the most significant markets to emerge -ever - both in terms of commercial importance, but also in the way it effects society on a profound level. Just as the motor car fundamentally changed the 20th century, the 21st will be molded by mobile data.

While the lesson of Gartner’s Hype Cycle might be that technology always takes longer to take off than we might think, it doesn’t preach that dumb acceptance is the only way forward. So if operators could do only one thing to accelerate this juganaut, what would it be? Fixed price data plans would start to shift this baby out of the trough of disillusionment like you wouldn’t believe.

We want to embrace this cool new stuff, this vision of the future, but we don’t want to be bled through the nose while we experiment.

So come on, operators, unleash this force and marvel at the result and the profits you’ll make as a result.

That’s Yet Another Mobile VoIP Kludge (TM). Rebtel is the latest one to pop up, promising cut-rate international calls. Like others before it, it’s not particularly straightforward.

It’s made up of two services. The first, REBout, has users establish individual local numbers for overseas friends. For instance, if I wanted to call Russell in Germany, I’d enter his info on the Rebtel site, and it would then give me a US number for him. When I want to call him, I just dial that, and the system calls him, and I’m charged typical VoIP rates (for instance 2 cents for a landline or 23 cents per minute for mobile for Germany). The other service, REBin, is charged at $1 per week. It generates two sets of local numbers — one for you, and one for your contact. You call the local number for your friend, who then gets connected, and you tell them to call you back on their local number for you. After they do so, you both can chat for as long as you like, at local rates.

As I said, not particularly straightforward. It also seems a little problematic to ask people in countries where it’s free to receive calls to shoulder some of the financial burden for cutting your long-distance bills, as you would with REBin. In any case, Rebtel provides a good illustration of the current “mobile VoIP” environment: there are plenty of solutions out there — if you want to cut what you’re paying for international calls and are willing to put up with a bit of a hassle, though admittedly there are other appear to be easier to use than this one. That’s hardly the mobile VoIP revolution that some would have you believe (and don’t get started on Wi-FI just yet).

It also illustrates a few other things: the real impact of mobile VoIP as a disruptive technology will likely be on pricing of mobile calls, rather than the success of any VoIP service running over a cellular data connection (at least until we’re in an all-IP environment where everything’s treated as data and goes over the same connection). For instance, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Hutchison’s Skype deal works not as a pure data service, but rather more as a connection between Hutchison’s voice network and Skype’s VoIP one, like Rebtel or JaJah or any of the other services. For now, this is an area that exists because mobile operators allow it to — they can simply cut costs, or more realistically, use VoIP in similar ways as some of these upstarts.

Cellular networks remain a pretty damn good way to allow for mobile voice coverage — at least in terms of getting calls between the network and users. VoIP’s real impact on mobile won’t really come in that connection, but rather in the middle of the network. It’s better suited there, anyway, where it’s largely invisible to the user — rather than forcing them to use kludgy VoIP workarounds.

[tags]mobile, voip, mobile voip, rebtel, skype, hutchison, jajah[/tags]

One of the hardest things for power users of technology (which includes all of you MobHappy readers) is to understand how most of the rest of the world uses technology. Sure, kids will pick up most things pretty quickly, like languages, sport, maths as well as tech, but most people simply get out of the habit of learning new stuff - certainly as effortlessly as they once did.

And some of them lack motivation to use technology. I know a banking consultant in her 30s, clearly very bright, who refuses to switch on her mobile at weekends. This applies even if she’s meeting someone, so if you arrange something, you need to be on time, or you miss her. It’s very retro, pre-mobile, but meeting someone like that can still work surprisingly well.

So when you design a cool new service or application, it’s important to figure out how others might use it. The kid might be able to send an MMS to their grandma, or indeed, even a parent. But will the older person work out how to view it?

So I found this idea from the Emotional Communication project, spotted on Regine’s WMMNA, rather fascinating in its simplicity and clear thinking. It allows you to send messages from your phone to someone else’s TV (admittedly via their mobile phone). So provided you buy granny a phone and set it up for her, she can switch channels and see all your messages and photos.

Naturally, there are still some practical issues with the concept, but it is an art/tech project and we can afford to be generous and focus on the thinking behind it.

As the pace of technology increases, there is a real danger that a significant proportion of the population will be come completely disconnected from essential services unless we make them embrace technology soon. For instance, accessing a bank account may well be impossible in 10 years or so, without having a working knowledge of computing. Ditto applying for a Passport, driving licence, paying utility bills or claiming a pension.

One day, even the geekiest among you will be unable to grasp a part of a new technology - face it, it’ll happen at some point. The challenge for the industry is to focus more on usability, education and motivating this growing part of the population to get involved and not just give up on it.

While lots of people sit around and wait for Google to really make its big move into mobile search, it’s fairly quietly rolling out some pretty nify mobile applications and services. Today, its got an enhanced version of its Google Maps for Mobile, adding traffic information for 30 cities and some other nice touches, while it’s also added the ability to further customize Google Personalized Homepage for mobile. Both were pretty cool applications to begin with, these enhancements make them just that much better.

What’s sort of interesting is that Google keeps chugging along with these things (though they’re not immune from the occasional mobile misstep), while so many people wait with baited breath for their big entrance into mobile search. But maybe that big entrance isn’t coming. I’ve never understood people that were so big on mobile search. Half the time, they were talking about people searching for ringtones or wallpapers, then the majority of the rest were people hung up on some sort of paid-search plan combining both pointlessness and uselessness. Very few people seem to really have an understanding of mobile search, and how it’s vastly different than web search.

A post over at the MEX blog lays it out pretty clearly: Mobile users don’t search, they locate. Marek Pawlowski makes the point that mobile users are “mission-driven”, meaning they’re after something in particular when they surf, rather than just generally browsing. So the perfect mobile search isn’t necessarily search, it’s something that delivers people the right information when they ask for it — which is what these Google applications are doing. So perhaps Google’s relative non-entry into “mobile search” isn’t because of indecision or incompetence, but rather because they realize their resources are better spent on building better, narrower mobile apps and services rather than a more built-out version of their XHTML search interface. Maybe it’s time to declare mobile search dead and move on with the realization that delivering wide-ranging and general links to information isn’t a great idea for mobile users; that delivering them specific information relevant to and determined by their wants and needs is. And that doesn’t necessarily demand a web-style search engine reformatted for a small screen.

[tags]mobile, google, mobile search[/tags]

One of my constant themes here at MobHappy is that any customer interaction is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to increase satisfaction and loyalty, increase advocacy, increase usage of basic services, encourage usage of more services and ultimately decrease churn. It also makes your marketing costs more efficient as it costs significantly less to maximise revenues from an existing customer than to go out and get a new one.

This should be pretty obvious and I’m clearly not the only one banging this particular drum.

So if you don’t work for an operator (or in any event are very familiar with how they run their businesses), you’ll find this article (registration needed) rather extraordinary. While it’s written by the Marketing Manager of LogicaCMG, who is trying to sell operators systems to help improve customer service, the bald facts can’t be argued with.

Consider:

* Most operator customer service people don’t even have access to basic account information like the the make and model of the phone, when the customer calls. Therefore, the first crucial minutes are spent trying to find that out - that is after you’ve spent time hanging on, inputting your mobile phone number and then having to tell them the phone number when you are put through. Determining the make is pretty easy, but the model number is something else - if you don’t know it, you often have to look in obscure places like under the battery.

If you can’t determine the model, incidentally and the query relates to Internet or MMS settings, as examples, the call is a waste of time and the poor customer service person has about as much chance of solving the problem as reading the answer in tea leaves.

* The CS person has no access to transaction records for the customer. This means that they can’t see what services the customer is using and apply that knowledge to improving usage of the phone or upsell further products and services. “Now Mr Rowehl, I’d like to tell you about this new thing we call ‘text messaging’” “Cool, but I’m finding the WPA support within the wifi stack dodgy. I don’t want to switch to WEP which sucks, so what can you recommend?” “Bleugghhh”.

Logica’s research also points to a worrying trend that the more users try more complex services such as MMS and Internet browsing, the more likely it is that customers will churn. This could be as they’re dissatisfied with the support, but there’s something disarmingly naive about the idea that they might think support will be better elsewhere. Far more likely that as “power” users in the loosest sense, they’re always upgrading and keeping an eye out for better deals.

Having just faced the challenge of moving to a different operator, operating system and far more complex model (Nokia E61), I have to say I’m really struggling with many of the more complex features. Sure I can do the easy stuff like voice, sms, mms, internet browsing, setting up email etc although many of the instructions are not nearly intuitive enough and I had to play with the settings, surprise, surprise. But when it comes like patching through to wifi networks and surfing or VoIP, I’m lost. And just how far do you think the average CS person in an operator is going to help me with that?

Thanks to Helen, who sent in details of Carphone Warehouse’s Mobile Life project, which is certainly worth a look. If you’re not from the UK, Carphone Warehouse is the UK’s largest mobile retailer, so the report isn’t likely to suggest that the state of the future of mobile is anything but rosy.

However, there are some interesting and very plausible results in the research, as well as some blindingly obvious stuff, if you’re a reader of MobHappy. It’s worth flicking through for yourself, but some interesting snippets caught my eye:

* 14% of people have two or more mobile phones. As someone who has four currently sitting on my desk, I shouldn’t find this very surprising, although I don’t generally make the assumption that everyone’s just like me. My new one is the Nokia E61 (pictured) if you’re interested and very nice it is too. No, not a freebie from Nokia - easier to get blood out a stone, I’ve heard.

I’d be interested why you think people might have more than one mobile. We have the Shag Phone, the Hostage Phone, test phones if you’re involved in mobile, roaming phones for regular travellers and who want to avoid operator pillaging roaming charges and I guess, fashion/function phones - if I’m out in that figure hugging dress (metaphorically, obviously), I want something very small and compact, phone-wise. This might contrast with my “real” full-function phone I use in the day.

* 18 - 24’s text, text, text (no surprises there then), but also dislike Internet shopping. Quite worrying, if you run an Internet store. Could it be that they just prefer chillin’ at the mall, over the more functional online experience?

* As a throw away remark, the report also says that some might argue that ”the art of conversation is dying among this tribe”. I’ve noticed this allegation cropping up more and more in the UK media, with various articles decrying the inarticulate nature of people entering the workforce. It’s partly a function of always being entertained (through MP3, portable and console gaming, TV, mobiles), but also an inability to bother with the nicities of social chitchat.

My own observation, based on a ridiculously small sample scientifically, is that there is something in it, for whatever reason. They seem to be happy to sit at social occasions absorbing what’s happening, but not really contributing. This isn’t the usual shyness or inarticulateness of youth - they simply don’t seem to feel a need to participate. Could it have something to do with reality TV?

Anyone else have similar experiences? I hope so, or I’ve just officially turned middle aged and extremely right wing. Hanging’s too good for ‘em, you know.

* A massive 83% of parents agreed that it was OK to track kids via their phones with their permission. Actually, this in unsurprising - I guess it’s OK to make them do 10 hours of math’s homework a day, with their permission. More interesting is, how do you go about getting that permission. I mean is a kid really going to win the argument if a parent is determined to track them?

More controversial is that 56% of parents think it’s OK to track kids without their permission. That’s like saying that 56% of parents in the UK aren’t responsible enough to have kids if they think that building trust is about spying on their charges.

* 42% of parents sometimes ask their kids for help using their mobile phones. The other 58% are probably lying or work in mobile, in my opinion!

Anyway, check it out for yourself if you have 20 minutes or so.