Michael Mace has done an excellent job of hosting the 37th installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists at his Mobile Opportunity blog. Be sure to check it out to see this week’s best writing about mobile from around the Web.

Yahoo’s been getting a lot of attention this week because they’re selling a Jessica Simpson single for download. It’s not just any single, though, there’s hundreds of customized versions of the track, and users can download the one that’s got their name in it. But that’s not what’s generating all the interest — the big news is that the tracks don’t have any DRM. Yahoo’s saying all the right things, that they want to sell more unrestricted tracks, but can’t because of the labels, and so on. I think their sentiment is pretty genuine, if for no other reason than they realize that unrestricted tracks are worth more to consumers, so they can theoretically charge a higher price (they do admit $1.99 for the Jessica Simpson songs are steep, but it’s because of the personalization, not the lack of DRM). It’s doubly great for them that skipping over the DRM also reduces their costs.

Where this gets a little interesting is that by selling these songs DRM-free, they’re selling not just the full-track, but they’re selling a ringtone, too. There are plenty of “personalized” tones available from ringtone sellers, and what could be better for some teenager infatuated with Ms. Simpson than a ringtone where she’s singing to them?

That’s the rub. Now, by selling the kid a $1.99 full track they can copy to their phone and use as a ringtone, Yahoo’s pre-empted the label, or a ringtone vendor, from selling them a $4 version to play on their phone. This illustrates not only why the ringtone market is about to implode because of phones that can play MP3s as ringers, but also illustrates why the labels are reluctant to abandon DRM: it undermines their strategy of making consumers pay multiple times for the same content.

It’s easy to see that this is a short-sighted strategy that isn’t sustainable. In the case of ringtones, it worked just fine back in the day of monophonic tones that couldn’t get on a phone any other way than by SMS. But if people can just put an MP3 on a memory card and set it as their ringer, they’ll be hard pressed to cough up another $4 or whatever for a legit version if the version they’ve legitimately purchased is copy-protected — particularly when it’s so easy to just go download an MP3. And it’s not a much further step to just forget the whole purchasing thing to begin with, and download an MP3 from a P2P service.

So what’s the right long-term strategy? Quit ripping off consumers by selling them restricted files that will only work on certain devices, or for certain applications. Change the strategy from one that’s based on selling people content based on compatibility and control to one that’s based on value. Sell a user an unrestricted track for $1.25, making it clear that it can be used anywhere that can play MP3s, or bundle in special ringtone versions. Don’t worry that unprotected files will end up on file-sharing sites: they’re already there.

If mobile operators really wanted to hasten the end of standalone MP3 players and take a leading role as music vendors, they’d beat this drum — of course they, too, are paralyzed by the fear that users will trade around content among their friends. Newsflash: they’re already doing it.

[tags]mobile, mobile music, drm, jessica simpson, yahoo, yahoo music[/tags]

Nothing whatsoever to do with mobile, but an amusing and pointed Greenpeace film to have a look at. Gas Guzzler

One of the features that ought to be a no-brainer for advertisers is to include an sms short code on all their advertisements. This means that people can see the ad and instantly fire off an sms with their ever-present mobile and get a response just as instantly. Examples might be to claim a coupon, find the nearest stockist, arrange a test-drive for a car and any number of other groovy marketing enhancements.

But at least 6 years after sms became mainstream, this feature is still far from common and what should surely be as automatic as putting a web address on an ad, still gets omitted.

One reason could be cost. While most people would think nothing of firing off an sms to get more info, the advertiser normally faces some cost from the service provider, along with a set up fee. And when the set up fee is amortised over the total response, the cost per response can be pretty hefty.

So it’s interesting that mobi.li have launched a totally free service for advertisers in the UK - the user pays the normal cost of the sms. So that means no set up or ongoing charges and really, removes any commercial rationale for not embracing sms interactivity. Their business model , if you’re curious, is to sign up customers and sell them other services in due course. A pretty common plan these days.

However, I suspect that one reason why agencies especially are reluctant to go down this route is that it introduces a frightening level of accountability. Currently, assessing advertising effectiveness is pretty woolly in most cases, involving measures like the number of people who could see an ad. If you start to prove how few people actually notice an advertisement and then engage with it via an interaction, it might begin to call into question the whole point of running a campaign in the first place.

Having personally experienced a meeting (a long time ago now) with a marketing director of a major brand where we both knew that his campaign had very few redemptions, there’s just no way of getting round the facts. Sure, you can fall back on mumbling about coverage, opportunities to see and other marketing-speak, but if no one felt inclined to respond to the offer and that’s 100% measurable, how can you persuade the guy to carry on using the channel?

However, in these days of increasing media accountability, with budgets migrating online and now to mobile, where payment by results is increasingly the norm, old media needs to fight back. If your poster, TV commercial or print ad isn’t engaging the consumer and isn’t generating a response, maybe it’s better to know that and identify what’s wrong with it, rather than pretending everything in the garden is rosy.

Pay per click (via a mobile) and pay per call is coming to old media as inevitably as England losing on penalties in Euro 2008. And that’s going to be another head-butt in the chest of an ad industry already dizzy with the pace of change and largely unable to understand that the world has drastically changed on them.

[tags] advertising, pay per click, pay per call, sms, interactivity, mob.li [/tags]

Messaging company Mobile365 says the number of mobile-originated MMS messages it processed in the US increased 40% from the first to the second quarter, a pretty significant jump. The raw numbers are higher than I’d expected as well, up to 52 million and change in the second quarter. Keep in mind this is just what Mobile365 processed, and doesn’t represent the entire US market (got a message in to the company’s PR folks for some clarification on that Update: Mobile365 processes half of the country’s inter-carrier MMS traffic — so this figure is much more representative than it is comprehensive).

It’s important to emphasize this is mobile-originated messages — ie person-to-person messages — not messages where MMS is a delivery platform for purchased mobile content. It’s hard to pin down exactly why things are growing so quickly: the company cites an increase in the number of MMS-capable handsets in circulation, but it’s not as if those numbers shot up 40% in the quarter. It would seem the only reasonable explanation is — gasp — people are actually starting to use MMS. M:Metrics’ figures from May show the percentage of American users that sent a photo message increase by 8 points from the previous month to nearly 12%, but still only represents 22.6 million users. This increase tracks pretty well with Mobile365’s average month-on-month increase in the number of messages, at 12%.

So it looks like more people are starting to use MMS, or are at least trying it. One factor that could be driving this is a change in pricing — most of the major US carriers now price all messages the same, if users buy them in bundles or buy an unlimited plan. I haven’t been able to figure out if there’s some activity creating a large mass of heavy users (like moblogging could do), and I’ve checked with my crack youth focus group to see if there’s something the kids are doing that I’m missing out on, but that’s drawn a blank as well. So what gives? Any ideas?

Update: Upon further reflection, 52 million really isn’t very much in a quarter, is it? That’s under 600,000 a day or so, which isn’t much at all. Still, something’s driving the growth, though at this point, I’m thinking it’s got more to do with people just bothering to try it out for the first time more than anything.

[tags]mobile, mms, picture messaging, cameraphones, mobile365[/tags]

I don’t think anyone could have predicted the massive scale of the ringtone business, even though it seems stalled now, but here’s another completely unlikely success story. The Rejection Hotline is a service for people being pestered for their phone numbers on the dating scene. You simply give out the hotline number and when they call….they’re let down gently.

So, a nice little idea methinks. But then check out the numbers involved. To date, it’s had over 77 million calls and is up to 2 million calls a month.

Moderati, a leading US ringtone provider, has launched a spin off product, the Rejection Ringtone. So just in case you get so flustered and give away your real number, so can still tell unwanted callers to take a hike.

A few months ago I wrote a piece about The Frustrations of Java, which you left a lot of comments about. My post was a rant about what a bitch Java Platform, Micro Edition (or J2ME as it used to be called) is to develop for, with a huge amount of work going into porting the application, once you’ve finished the initial build. In fact, I’d suggest that 20% of the work goes into the initial iteration of the code and 80% into the porting, which can be a shock for the uninitiated.

This is causing real pain in the market and where there’s pain, there’s opportunity. So it was interesting to hear from long-time MobHappy reader and fellow mobile veteran, Jon Beverley, who escaped to New Zealand a year or two back. His company sound like they’re on to something pretty big, at least to people who are involved in porting Java apps.

Innaworks have developed a product called mBooster and they’ve been successfully signing up a whole bunch of big name game developers as first clients, who seem to be getting great results. This has resulted in significant savings in time and therefore money. As well as helping many engineers all over the world sleep at night and their commercial colleagues hit those deadlines that they foolishly promised prospective partners.

How it works is obviously way over my head. But the principle is that it reduces the size of the midlet JAR files, while simultaneously increasing the performance. This allows the developer to maximise the handsets the application runs on, with the minimum effort. And in some cases, the additional space can be used to cram a few extra features in.

Innworks claim to already be talking to most leading games developers, so if you’re one and you’re not talking, get in touch and put their claims to the test. If you don’t, your competitors could be enjoying a significant reduction in fixed overhead that will be denied to you.

But I know there’s thousands of you out there who are non-gaming Java developers and you face the same pain and heartache. Be nice to yourself and your team and check out what these guys can do. You have nothing to lose but your pain.

I’d be interested to hear any feedback anyone has over the Innworks solution and I’m sure other readers would welcome your insight - so please leave a comment. And maybe send this post to anyone you know who looks haunted and goes around muttering about Java under their breath.

If you want us to write about your mobile tech product or service, just drop us a line using the link on the right. I can’t guarantee we’ll write about it, but we’ll certainly consider it. Stating the bleeding obvious, no Jonathan, we don’t charge for writing this kind of stuff and no you can’t pay us to do it. Now go away.

[tags] java, innworks, mbooster [/tags]

I was invited to join the panel to discuss the role of Mobile Advertising at the User Generated Content conference here in Munich last night and very interesting it was too. Thanks to Daniel Melter of M-Squad for the last minute invitation. I can’t say the idea of having a very poor German speaker on a discussion panel worked brilliantly, but I think I made some contribution (in English, I’m ashamed to say).

Having said that, I did understand most of what the other speakers were saying, so that, at least is progress on the language front. And I did manage to order beer very competently afterwards, but that was a skill I mastered some time ago.

On the panel were

Robert Wiedemann of Vodafone, taking about Orb’s Mein PC, that I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Robert Lang of Fon which hit the headlines, big time, a few months back when they raised a huge amount of money from a blue chip list of investors. Nothing to do with mobile (and not really very much to do with UGC either, to be honest), but interesting nonetheless. Fon encourage people to create their own wifi hotspots, which they sell access to, or give away free, in return for a free access at other nodes. To be honest, I’m a little sceptical about the model as to offer meaningful roaming access, the penetration has to be so intense that I fear critical mass simply won’t be achieved. On the other hand, if a node could be upgraded somehow to give coverage of say 1/2 mile or more to create a mesh, it would be a real winner and maybe that’s the master plan. Companies like Sequoia, Google and Index Ventures are smart cookies and Fon have got an amazing list of advisors, so definitely one to watch.

Mark Gazecki of Atlas Ventures, one of the foremost VCs in the European market gave an interesting talk about the development of media and where mobile fits in with the whole thing. Clearly someone who “gets” mobile which is an interesting contrast with some of the US VCs I’ve met. Of course, if you’re a US VC and are reading this, you’re not included in that huge generalisation. How can you be - you read MobHappy

Mark’s perceptive, if tongue-in-cheek, advice was that if you add “social” to the description of your business model, you’ll substantially increase your company’s valuation.

Vince Staybl of itsmy.com, which is a really cool glimpse at the future of mobile UCG and very much how I see the market developing. It offers a mobile home page, free content, blogging and community features. The famous Anina, the model/blogger/geek (pictured)was in the audience and asked why the site had such limited functionality on the web, which is a very good point as a quick visit will demonstrate. I didn’t really understand Vince’s answer to this, but I guess the functionality is intentional as it seems a very smart operation otherwise.

Maybe more on Anina at a latter point.

Bernhard Palme of Jumbuck, an Australian mobile entertainment company that specializes in dating and games. They work exclusively through operators and have 14.5 million users worldwide. Bernhard had some fascinating stats about USC/communities, which are hard to come by in this part of the market, so very valuable indeed.

Last year, Jumbuck alone accounted for 19% of wap traffic in the UK, which totalled 2 billion page impressions. 30% was accounted for by other mobile community sites, with 51% being “the rest”. Wow. I know that UCG and communities were big, but I thought it was still very much early adopter stuff and set to explode maybe two years down the road.

I think I’ll finish this post with a paraphrased point Mark made though. This market is set to be huge and it’s certainly not too late for start-ups thinking about jumping in. While the battle lines are being drawn up, it’s still very early days and the winners may not even have been thought up yet.

Better get your skates on though.

[tags] user generated content, vodafone, robert wiedemann, communities, atlas ventures, itsmy.com, fon, gazecki, gofresh, jumbuck, anina [/tags]

In the current social-networking boom, one glaring oversight has been the dearth of mobile integration — a few things notwithstanding, like Helio’s MySpace arrangement, or mobile-specific services like Rabble. There are some mobile services here and there, and some blogging sites offer users the ability to moblog, but for the most part, outside more specialist sites like moblogUK, it’s little more than an afterthought. Moblogging, particularly integrating it into social networking, remains a largely untapped market, leaving a pretty big opening for startups to move into. (There’s a lot to be said in general about mobile social networking, but that’s for another post.)

Enter Mojungle. What YouTube and its flock of imitators have done for embedding video on MySpace sites and other blogs, Mojungle hopes to do with mobile content. Sure, users could put video on their sites before, but YouTube made it easy — same concept here. Mobile users email in videos or pictures from their handset, then paste in a link to their Mojungle flash player on their site (as I’ve done here), and the content is displayed in a slideshow format. Users can also insert links to individual pictures and videos, should they wish.

What I like about this approach is that Mojungle’s focus is simple: make this product, which does one thing, do that thing as well as it can. They’re not trying to take over the social-networking space, they’re not offering an exclusionary, closed-down service that only works for certain people. If you’ve got a capable phone and a web page somewhere, on any service, you’re good to go. Actually, it appears users don’t even need a phone, as items can be submitted by email as well.

Simply put, Mojungle does as advertised, which, in this business, is fairly extraordinary (check out SMS Text News for more thoughts on this). It’s not clear what the business model is, but operators could do a whole lot worse than striking up a deal with the company to market Mojungle to their users as a way to encourage MMS use, and give them something to do with their cameraphone photos.

Update: The ever-reponsive folks from ShoZu have added support for Mojungle uploads to the application.

[tags]mobile, mms, cameraphones, mojungle, moblogs, moblogging[/tags]

Check out Mobile Jones for this week’s collection of best writing about mobile from around the web.

In case you missed it, the Carnival now has its own website and it’s sponsored by our friends at Khosla Ventures. This means you can win cash prizes for entering and hosting the Carnival every month.