Rod McLaren has Carnival 60 up at Mobbu, so be sure to check it out for week’s best writing about mobile.

Some interesting discussion has sprouted around my post on Bluespamming from Friday:

Ewan Macleod:

It’s an ugly, ugly message that most consumers don’t care for. It’s then a hugely underwhelming experience — to be sent a 100×100 shite image. Or some blocky video. You have to pair with the sodding device. It’s just……… it’s a by-hook-or-by-crook marketing method. How many sodding hoops do you want your (potential) customers to jump through so you can get them to view a video on their phones? Please. Stick it on Youtube or something, do the marketing that way. Bluecasting in a theatre? Bluecasting in a street? Oh dear.

Helen Keegan:

I also understand why Avenue Q would use something like bluecasting - there’s no messaging cost to the network operator. This makes it hugely attractive financially. And it is marginally less intrusive than a text message as your mobile number is kept private. And for any marketing campaign, 7% is a good response rate. And after all, we live in a commercial world and if the maths adds up, then the maths adds up.

But you know what, bluecasting will be an interim technology at best.

Tom Hume:

This stuff is balls, it’s the mobile equivalent of paying a man to stand in the street shouting at passers-by in a strong accent few of them can hope to understand, then putting out a press release claiming that 10% of them heard you. And a kick in the eye goes to the next person to justify it to me because it’s “better than direct mail”.

I’m sure there is potential in Bluetooth for interesting marketing applications, which make appropriate use of the technology and treat consumers in a respectful and ethical manner. But this nothing but spamming, even if you buy the IMHO shady legal-on-a-technicality argument.

A couple of interesting points there. As Ewan says, even if you don’t see this as spamming, the user experience isn’t great (and it’s even worse if you try and act responsibly, which hardly provides an incentive). Also, as Tom points out, the supposed legality of bluespamming seems like it comes from a technicality, not the actual spirit of the relevant law — even though Dutch regulators have ruled commercial Bluetooth messages aren’t covered by European anti-spam laws either.

Legality aside, is Bluespamming something companies should really want to be doing? Can they guarantee a user experience that’s not going to end up hurting their brand? And would they ever advertise their products through straight-up email spam?

If you’re not from around these parts, you might not know that my day job is working for AdMob, where I’m MD of Europe. I try to keep that from impinging on what I write on MobHappy, but sometimes I think there’s some stuff that you’ll find interesting and today is one such instance.

AdMob served its billionth ad over the weekend, which is a highly satisfying personal milestone. So Ra, Ra and all that.

More importantly though, it highlights some industry trends that are intriguing.

AdMob went live on January 18th 2006 and I heard about it a few weeks later. I blogged about it for the first time in March, comparing it to the new AdWords and I forecast that it had great potential. A few weeks after that, a VC suggested to Omar, the sole founder of AdMob, who had built the site in weekends and evenings while doing an MBA, that we should talk and I started helping out. This led to my being hired as first employee and building AdMob in Europe.

While it’s certainly true that AdMob hit the billion figure last weekend, it also hides the fact that actually, the first six months saw 30 million ads (not bad from a standing start), but our second six months saw a billion ads being sold. And if I was a betting man, I’d suggest that the next billion will take around 3 months.

This spectacular growth is actually indicative of quite a few trends that are happening in the market as a whole:

- Use of the mobile web is exploding generally, despite being held back (in my opinion) by the lack of flat rate data plans in Europe.

- The US is our largest market by page views, despite having a smaller proportion of mobile web users - it’s a function of the overall population size. Here’s the actual stats 

1. US                            20% (ninety million pageviews/month)
2. South Africa               15% (sixty-six million pageviews/month)
3. India                          13% (fifty-seven million pageviews/month)
4. UK                            12% (fifty three million pageviews/month)
5. Romania                      5% (twenty-two million pageviews/month)

It’s no accident that affordable flat rate data plans are prevalent in the US and S Africa.

- Like any web sites, a mobile web site is accessible from everywhere. Therefore, it’s worth noting that while pages are served all over the globe, most of the traffic actually comes from European web sites - I don’t think that we have any S African sites, for instance, despite being a huge market for mobile web consumption.

- We categorise the sites we work with into “channels”, so that advertisers can better understand where their ads will appear. In case it’s not clear, the sites where our advertising appears are independently owned, off-portal (for the moment) sites. We arrange to serve ads in return for a revenue share.

The channels split down in terms of traffic into

1. Communities                          45 %
2. Downloads                             44%
3. Portals                                    8%
4. Entertainment                          2%
5. News and Information                1%

This is somewhat counter-intuitive as I would have assumed that news, as an example, would be pretty big for mobile. But then, it could be a function of the types of sites in our network. The BBC, as an example, has a significant mobile web presence globally and we can’t work with them as their Charter precludes it.

- Communities is the largest channel though and that’s a function of another major trend - MugCon, or Mobile User Generated Content. It’s already huge and about to get stratospheric.

Good news for Nokia! In terms of what handsets most people using the mobile web have, Nokia wins hands down.

1. Nokia                        41%
2. Motorola                   14%
3. Sony-Ericsson           13%
4. Samsung                   12%
5. LG                               3%

This is completly out of kilter with market share and I don’t know exactly why this would be. I have a couple of theories though, as you might expect. Maybe, it’s a personal prejudice, but I find Nokia much better in terms of usability to use the mobile web and in particular, my E61 is a delight (Declaration of interest: unlike Carlo, I paid for mine!). So this phenomenon could be that users of the mobile web choose Nokia. Dunno, anyone else have ideas on this?

- Mobile marketing is a very hot space and it’s going to get even bigger now.

- If you are a brand and you’re considering building a mobile web site, get with the programme. Accessing the mobile web is no longer a niche for geeks. It’s mainstream and about to tip.

Here’s to 10 Billion!

Bluespamming continues to live on: using Bluetooth to distribute marketing content, but doing it responsibly, makes it ridiculously obtuse for interested users. So what’s a company to do? Ignore best practices and just bluespam, or ping every visible Bluetooth connection within site. Mobile Marketing Magazine says that a company was running a Bluespamming… er, Bluecasting campaign at a London theater, and spun the fact that 703 people out of 9,595 actually accepted the offer of a video download.

In the site’s next post, its editor, David Murphy, points out that really means 93 percent of the people they hit weren’t interested, meaning they more than likely saw it as spam. They’re probably overjoyed with their 7 percent response rate, since that’s pretty good for many old-school forms of marketing. But they need to keep in mind that 7 percent comes at the expense of irritating the other 93 percent. And, as Murphy points out, if 7 percent is as good as Bluespamming can deliver — when it’s supposed to be so well targeted and timely — marketers should probably look elsewhere.

Vodafone apparently plans to launch a user-generated video service at CeBIT in March, which will let users upload their own videos from their handsets, then pay them every time somebody else watches it. That sounds like a great idea… though 3 UK beat them to the punch more than a year ago with its quite popular SeeMeTV service, which sounds like the, uh, basis of inspiration (to be kind) for this service.

Vodafone copying the idea isn’t such a big deal, really. But what’s sort of interesting here is that operators have a real chance to do something substantial in this space. When it comes to user-generated video, YouTube is clearly the 800-pound gorilla. But it’s going to screw up mobile for itself. Instead of pursuing an operator-agnostic strategy and figuring out how to make money from an open service, YouTube has grabbed the short-term money by getting into an exclusive deal with Verizon to deliver a limited version of its site to the operator’s customers. It’s actively blocking sites that make its videos available to mobile users, presumably to protect not just its Verizon deal, but whichever other operators it inks country-exclusive deals with. What it’s really doing is limiting its audience, and its reach in mobile. By cutting off the vast majority of mobile users, it’s going to eventually make itself irrelevant to them.

Here’s where operators can come in. The SeeMeTV model has already proven popular with users, and it’s a great idea for operators, since they’re essentially getting free content. But what they need to realize is that these services, on their own, aren’t going to do much as competitive advantages — that is, the number of users that decide from which operator to buy service because of them, is going to be very, very low. While people might like SeeMeTV, it’s not likely to come at the top of their “reasons to switch to 3 list”, and likewise for this new Vodafone service.

Given that, why not band together and create a common, shared platform for a user-generated video service? It would have two key benefits over YouTube: first, the payout element, and second, it’s made to be browsed from a mobile device. There’s little value in restricting these video services by operator; it’s just a new twist on the walled garden. But banding together would not only save infrastructure resources, it would widen the pool of content creators and viewers by taking on an audience YouTube shuns. Quite often, operators’ attempts to replace popular internet sites with their own services are misguided (and awful). But if YouTube is going to ignore mobile users, there’s no reason for operators to not get in there and take the user-generated video space for themselves and their customers.

This isn’t specifically about mobile, but it does affect mobile businesses, as well as every other business - as well as every person on the planet, so please excuse the slight digression.
 

I wrote earlier in the week about attending the DLD conference in Munich, which is probably one of the leading new and old media events in Europe. The final speaker, was James Murdoch, the young boss of Sky TV and the fruit of Sir Rupert’s loins. He was speaking about an apparently unlikely subject, namely Climate Change. This was followed by a panel discussion of learned scientists and a big wig from BMW.
 

[As a slight aside, I wonder why they kept including these “old” companies in the panels, like Lufthansa, BMW and even HP, as they seldom had much of interest to say or contribute in the context of the discussion. I mean, neither would Ester Dyson be very interesting to hear about car manufacturing and so I doubt if she gets invited to many of their conferences either.]
 

Anyway, it struck me quite forcefully that in the last year, Global Warming has moved from a pretty fringe theory to an indisputable and mainstream belief, held by business leaders, politicians and large parts of the population.
 

I describe it as a belief, because like any such thing, you need to have faith to accept the evidence and it’s far from conclusive in my limited understanding of the situation. The earth goes through natural warming and cooling periods and it has always been thus. We’re actually still in an Ice Age in fact, as the definition of a non-Ice Age is when there’s no polar ice caps and thus the seas rise.
 

One of the scientists showed a map of Italy in the Pleistocene period to show what it looked like when there are no ice caps – it’s a series of Islands basically, a bit like the Greek Islands. This was meant to say “look – this is what’ll happen if we don’t change” but another way of looking at this is to say “look, this is going to happen again, just as it’s happened before – deal with it”.
 

Michael Crichton, he of Jurassic Park fame and pretty into New Age stuff himself, is one of the biggest sceptics about global warming being a man-made phenomenon and he’s studied this subject exhaustively and is a trained scientist to boot. in his book, State of Fear
, he calls Global Warming a pseudoscience and compares it to the Eugenics movement in the 1920’s and 30’s, which was a widely supported theory, and which was questioned by very few and opposed by even less and ultimately culminated in Adolph Hitler’s Final Solution. 

However, let’s not be picky about this. I can’t see any harm in believing in global warming, unlike say, if a significant number of people suddenly start to believe that it’s acceptable to blow yourself up in a train full of other people because they believe in a different version of an ancient best selling book or that their God has told them that they should invade another sovereign nation and it’s OK to justify it by lying to the world about the justification.
 

No, believing in global warming doesn’t seem to have a downside. It’ll save energy, be better for the planet we call home and hopefully allow us all to appreciate more the wonder of the world around us – all good things.
 

Anyway, my main point is that whther you approve of the evidence or not, a significant proportion of the population, including our leaders KNOW that global warming is true now and we need to be aware of this trend. Companies will increasingly be eager to emphasise their Greenness and force their carbon neutrality (if they can achieve this) down our throats. And many people are going to start taking into account green issues when making purchasing decisions.
 

Climate Change is going to be one of the most important single issues in politics and business in the next 50 years and you’d better take note and act, or you’ll suffer.
 

James Murdoch’s Sky actually has been doing a lot to boost their contribution to this issue. For example, they’ve given all their customers energy efficient light bulbs to sample, in an initiative they sponsored with Ikea. If only half are ever used, it’ll save their customers £120 million. They also give their staff £1300 cash back if they buy a hybrid car, interest free loans to buy bikes and have launched hundreds of small initiatives to become better corporate citizens. It’s the small things that add up to make the big difference.
 

David de Rothschild, another panellist, made the point that we spent $300 billion on preventing the Millennium Bug being an issue – was that another belief, rather than scientific fact? If the US spent this kind of money on this area, they’d cut carbon emissions by 25%, which is far, far greater than the amount that Bush baulked at in Kyoto. Although, again I’m strongly suspicious the science behind this claim. I mean, will $300 billion lead to 25% savings, or 25.1% or 10.3% or even 53.7% - I strongly suspect that the 25% is just a pure guess, but would be happy to be told otherwise.

Another parallel is that the cost of the Iraq war has already cost well over $300 billion according to this website, which means that if it’s true, the US could have cut carbon emissions by 25%, which even the most ardent hawk would probably have to admit would be slightly better for the planet than what has actually been achieved so far. It also shows that where the political will exists, the money can be found.

James also made the point that the media were suddenly behind this issue too, quoting one reactionary newspaper headline forecasting a “Mosquito Epidemic” as being imminent – I wonder if that’s one of his Dad’s headlines? This raises two points for me though.
 

Firstly, why do we have to be bullied and frightened into taking this subject seriously? What’s wrong with saying that we’re custodians of the Earth and we should act responsibly? But if that’s what it really takes for us to act, maybe the end does justify the means.
 

The other interesting thing is that if warming happens and we can’t do anything about it, a mosquito epidemic is certainly a possible side effect. This has fundamental consequences actually, as the mosquito is by far the most dangerous species for man in the history of the world. Of the 50 billion people who have ever lived, the mosquito is reckoned to have killed about half of them, by transmitting various infections from Aids to malaria and in primitive societies, just through simply blood infection. Oliver Cromwell is thought to be the last person killed in Britain in this way, so it is actually potentially a global issue.
 

Sky also launched a campaign inviting viewers to create their own video (see? – user generated content again) and I thought you’d find this one amusing, by way of light relief.
 

Finally, I know I’ve been a little sceptical about some of the thinking behind this subject, but that’s because I don’t like being manipulated and I think we should question what our leaders want us to believe. However, let me emphasise that I thoroughly support the central issue of taking better care of our environment and behaving more responsibly.
 

So, let’s look at the little things we can do – starting with things like turning off our computers and TVs at night. Every little helps.

Two questions for all our lovely, intelligent readers:

Can anybody recommend a decent blogging client, either for S60 3rd edition, or a Java app? Web-based service might possibly be okay, too.

Second, what (if anything) are you all using for mobile VoIP these days? Just curious to get a feel for this and potentially check out some new services.

Well, I couldn’t resist it and my final prediction is going to be about the iPhone - though it would be kinda cheating to just say that it’s just going to be launched.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few weeks and quite honestly, I don’t think this is going to be the success that Apple are clearly hoping for. So, despite Steve Job’s own prediction of 10 million sales by 2008, my forecast is less than 100,000 units will be sold in 2007.

Thinking about these numbers, it would be reasonable to suggest that they’d expect to sell more in 2008 than 2007 by what? 40:60? Then they are also only launching halfway through the year and mostly in the US. So if they were on track, very roughly, they’d expect to sell around 240,000 handsets (assuming the US market is about 120 million mobiles a year, they want 1% and they’re only selling for 6 months). So my 100,000 forecast would have to be disappointing for them.

My rationale is well documented elsewhere, but it includes no 3G, no enterprise email support (which will be an automatic dis-qualifier for most corporates) and it’s an expensive gadget. My feeling is that by June, the iPhone will also feel like old news to many people, so I wonder about the wisdom about pre-announcing it too.

My initial take was that despite all this I would buy one, but you know, I don’t think I would. Mainly as my killer app these days is email on the phone for when I travel. This isn’t unique to me and many people who might have considered spending this kind of money simply won’t. Many geeks won’t go there either as it’s currently a closed platform and they won’t be able to install many of the apps they use daily.

My initial reaction was that the legacy of the iPhone would be that (like the Sex Pistols) it would be hugely influential and create a lot of noise, but someone would make all the money and in hindsight, I think that’s a pretty good take now I’ve had a chance to mull.

So, 2007 - less than 100,000 iPhones.

What do you think?

Carnival of the Mobilists 59 is up at Xellular Identity, so go check it out.

Rudy de Waele has launched a wiki to track Mobile 2.0 companies at http://www.mobile2companies.com. I’ve helped him get started with some of the intro text, so be sure to head over there, have a look around and perhaps make some contributions — particularly if you’ve got a company working on a mobile 2.0 app or service.

In more Rudy news, he and Stuart Mudie are putting together another informal get-together the Sunday night before 3GSM begins in Barcelona. Last year’s was a great time, and it looks like things are coming together nicely for this year’s event. Check the wiki for more info.

One last thought: “I don’t know how much sense it makes to charge people twice to listen to something on two different devices,” says an analyst. Says Mike Rowehl: “Do my ears deceive me, or did that sound like an acknowledgment of the existence of the possibility that the problem might be that the perceived value of the product being delivered is below the price being asked?”

This afternoon saw the start of the DLD conference in ole Munich town, which I posted about a couple of weeks ago. It’s probably one of the biggest and most prestigious media/technology events in Europe, all the more remarkable as it only has 450 invitation-only delegates. This makes it surprisingly intimate and you really can be standing next to Anina, Craig of the List fame or founders of Skype and Flickr respectively, Niklas Zennström or Caterina Fake.

But it was Nicholas Negroponte who was the star of the first session for me, with more tales of his $100 laptop project, which is in full swing and has the potential to really change the world. Not many people historically can ever claim to have changed the world and if the man pulls this off, we’ll be privileged to have witnessed such an event.

The big idea, in case you missed it, is to give every child in the world a laptop computer, which is now actually in production - indeed, he had Number 5 out of the factory with him to show us. It’s mainly open source and anyway, completely DRM free, which is one reason why it can be provided so cheaply. A net connection is also built in and kids can be given access to the huge resource of the web for $1 a month per child.

In case you didn’t know, there are about 1.4 billion kids out there and 50% don’t even have access to electricity. So the laptops can be hand cranked and (unusual for even $5,000 machines) are designed to be legible in direct sunlight.

But, sceptics say, $100+ multiplied by a billion or so, if still a very big number and thus the dream would be impossible to execute. Not so. Negroponte has sorted funding out with the World Bank already. They’ll carry the loan over 5 years and governments can pay for the computers out of money already earmarked for eduction. I mean, what’s going to open up minds more - a working laptop with web access, or what, a couple of text books per year?

While this is all laudable, there’s a very big dream behind this. Education helps children think for themselves and the more they do this, the less likely they are to fall for the propaganda the poor and poorly educated are likely to be fed by their leaders and exploiters. The more they can question these “truths”, the more likely it is that irrational hatreds, religious wars, racial and class stereotypes will be maintained and who knows, maybe it’ll be the start of a massive and genuine grassroots worldwide peace movement.

Two interesting other thoughts for me were:

Children up the the age of six, learn by doing. Then they’re expected the learn by being told.

Secondly, the laptops are mesh networked, meaning that they can connect with each other and via each other, to all the others in the network. This means that, for instance, a private network of computers could reach across huge swathes of the world. Who knows what societal change such a thing might bring? It’s a little mind boggling actually.

A few other quotes that caught my attention.

The web represents a “culture of generosity” and that we’re seeing the “sunset of the web” in that the mobile will increasingly be used to consume, with the PC more about creating content - Caterina Fake. Nice to see she agrees with me

“Whisper marketing” coined by Thierry Antinori, Marketing Director of Lufthansa. Never heard it called that before, but it’s another phrase for world of mouth. He also said that they were shortly launching a way of diagnosing and treating illness onboard planes and that the mobile would soon become the proxy for the boarding pass. Both pretty obvious innovations actually, but nice to know they’re coming.

Linda Stone also gave a very interesting speech about Attention and in particular today’s “Continuous Partial Attention” phenomenon, where we try to focus on too many things, in case we miss something really important. This leads to a state of constant crisis and many people to mental unease and indeed, illness.

However, this phase is going to be over soon and we’ll enter the Unifocus period, where we’ll use technology tools (like presence) to help us decide what to focus on and how best to accomplish this.

Her view is that the history of software was initially about features and adding more and more. Then ease of use and usability took over. Tomorrow it’s going to be about products and services that improve quality of life, which has to be great news, if she’s right.