I just read about a new service on SlashDot, which sounds like it might be pretty useful, although I find the positioning strange - maybe a cultural thing.

The service is called SlyDial and you use it to connect you straight to someone’s voice mail, when you don’t want to speak to them in person. To use the service, you dial 267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425) and after the prompt, dial the person’s mobile number for whom you want to leave a message. This call then goes straight through to their voice mail, without ringing the phone itself - although one SlashDotee claims that it makes the phone ring once. I can’t try it out as it only works in the US, so any feedback would be cool.

The service is ad-funded, with callers having to listen to an ad before getting connected to the voicemail, with an option to upgrade to a paid-for version at 15 cents a call or $4.95 per month for unlimited use.

As far as the positioning is concerned, I find it a little strange that it’s about “sly”, which in British English implies that it’s sneaky or underhand in some way, unlike say, “cunning”, which has a similar meaning, albeit with slightly more admirable qualities. And many of the use-cases that they suggest do indeed sound “sly”, such as a student phoning home but not wanting to actually talk to their parents, or when someone has blown $5,000 gambling and wants to tell their wife to hold off making a mortgage payment!

To me, this is a little like a credit card company promoting itself by suggesting that it makes it easier for you to buy online porn or carry on drinking yourself stupid when you run out of cash. Yes, these are true and many people do use credit cards for these kinds of purposes. But why sully the image of the service for more mainstream users? Human nature will ensure that every nefarious use for a product and service will be discovered and spread virally anyway. I’m sure that bank note issuers didn’t think about how their product could be used to consume cocaine or hammer manufacturers anticipate that they were making murder weapons for some people.

There are other use-cases they go into and arguably far better and surely more realistic examples of how it might be used - such as not wanting to bother someone with a call, but wanting to make sure they get a message, such as confirming a meeting. Personally, I’d do it by email the day before, but there are certainly some people who prefer voicemails, especially in corporate America.

So, while I can see that for some people this kind of service might be interesting some of the time, I do wonder about the marketing and execution. Or maybe I’m being too straight and serious today. What do you think?

As with all these sorts of service though, the biggest challenge is in promoting itself. Getting the word out in the first place is about 5% of the battle. Getting people to use it again and again is the huge challenge, as they must remember that it exists at all when they have a potential need for it and then remember how to use it - or the phone number in this case. These aspects are really, really hard.

I wish them all the best, of course, despite my slight reservations.

I was speaking on a panel a few weeks back, which was an odd mix of folk really, so it was hard for the Chair Lady to involve everyone and maintain some kind of coherence to the discussion. But one of my fellow panelists was some kind of sales person for a tech infrastructure vendor. I won’t embarrass him (he did a great job of that himself) by naming him and his company, but he was the kind of person who couldn’t leave aside his sales pitch and either look at a bigger picture or actually answer the questions he was asked.

At one point he came up with a startlingly naive statement along the lines of:

- he certainly didn’t want advertising on his phone
- therefore no one else in the world would

I assume his little tirade would have been a different if his company had been in the ad business somehow. But even if they weren’t, it was an astonishing position to take in public against an industry that indirectly, pays his salary. I mean, how many servers and high end boxes would his company sell without online advertising, even if extending that principle into mobile advertising proved too intellectually complex for the poor chap?

The fact is that advertising is the primary commercial engine that drives the PC web and it will become as important on the mobile - indeed, it’s already going that way. If you try and imagine the web without advertising, you’re looking at a world where you pay for every time you search. There’s no free email. No Skype and IM. No media online. And no free services like Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and many of the other, everyday things we take for granted. The web would be completely different space today and would have been unlikely to develop much beyond where we were in 1996 - an amazingly primitive and not really very interesting place to be, although Wikipedia still may have happened, so not entirely useless.

I was thinking about this Dorkface when reading about 4th Screen Advertising’s new survey about how consumers view mobile advertising when embedded in video. [Bias alert - 4th Screen are in a similar business to AdMob]. The survey was conducted among 600 consumers on O2 Active and sought to understand how they reacted to 15 second pre-roll adverts run before free video content, with age and gender targetting.

Now let’s just remind ourselves that this type of advertising is very intrusive - essentially, you are forcing the consumer to watch something, after which they get their reward of the free content. So unlike say a banner ad, you can’t possibly argue that people can ignore it if they’re not interested - they have no choice but to watch it. Therefore, it wouldn’t be very surprising if lots of people didn’t like this format, while finding other less intrusive formats acceptable.

On the other hand, the social contract is very clear - in other words, it’s very obvious that the free content is provided explicitly in exchange for the consumer’s attention for a short period of time. This is a little different to most advertising where this contract isn’t spelt out in quite the same way - a banner ad might be shown, but it’s not stated that the content or service provider can only produce this by showing ads. It’s implied, for sure, and most people understand this if asked. But I wonder how many make the direct connection with more subtle ad formats?

Anyway, back to the survey. An overwhelming 88% of respondents said that they were happy with this form of advertising of watching in return for the freebie and 59% said that it made them more interested in the brand being advertised. I reckon that even better results could be achieved given more sophisticated relevance and targeting that will come in the future.

So let’s end this idea that people don’t want advertising on their mobiles (or anywhere else for that matter) as it’s completely missing the point. Consumers are happy (actively happy) to get advertising, provided that they get something in return and the clearer we can make it what that something is, the better.

Of course, that’s just the base line of acceptance. Naturally, it’s far more effective to produce ads that engage with the recipient, but that’s an argument for another day.

In the meantime, I think we can say that people do want advertising on their mobiles.

Take note Dorkface.

Bloomberg.com: Technology:

Motorola Inc., the largest U.S. mobile-phone maker, sued a former executive now working for Apple Inc., accusing him of disclosing its trade secrets to aid in the marketing of Apple’s iPhone.

Michael Fenger in March ended an almost six-year career at Motorola where he was a vice president for the company’s mobile- device business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is now Apple’s vice president for global iPhone sales, according to a complaint filed yesterday in state court in Chicago.

“He was privy to the pricing, margins, customer initiatives, allocation of resources, product development, multiyear product, business and talent planning and strategies being used by Motorola,” according to the complaint.

Seriously.

There you have it. This guy is, apparently, the reason Motorola is in the complete shit and the iPhone is doing well.

Of course, if this were the case, wouldn’t the iPhone have been called the IPHN?

…you go see a great movie (The Dark Knight, in this case), and the most exciting thing you see is a Nokia touchscreen handset. And then you laugh when you see a main character with a years-old 6630 and feel like you’re part of an inside joke, ’cause, damn, what self-respecting movie badass police lieutenant would carry THAT these days?

MocoNews has a post on a new report from In-Stat about Google and Apple’s efforts in mobile:

First, he said Google is primarily using Android to push its agenda of doing location-based search, and second, the two Bay Area companies are implementing change by marketing and merchandising better, not developing more advanced technology.

Let’s focus on the second part of that, about the marketing and merchandising. I’d agree overall with this sentiment, though the two companies are clearly doing some technological innovation. The iPhone’s multitouch interface would certainly qualify as “more advanced” (though you balance that with things like no video recording, etc); the Android platform looks like it could do some cool stuff (though the proof will be in the pudding, aka the actual devices).

Interesting sentiment…I interpret it to mean that despite having largely the same products and services (painting with a broad brush, I know, but at their heart, they’re all handsets and data services), Google and Apple do a much, much better job of selling them. So the problem isn’t necessarily what operators and device makers are trying to sell, but how they’re selling it, from top to bottom, from when the services are envisioned and designed, to how they’re delivered and/or sold.

For instance, compare Apple’s App Store to Nokia’s Download! service. On a technical level, they perform the same task: the browsing, sale and delivery of mobile applications. Both are competent in this regard. But compare the user experience: which service is easier and better to use? App Store. Which does a better job of selling and delivering third-party content? App Store. See All About Symbian for further explanation of Download!’s myriad shortcomings.

Apple’s service itself is far superior, and it does a much better job of delivering on its intended task, hence the 10 million app downloads it saw last weekend. In both regards, it’s far outpacing the old guard with its new way of thinking (and yes, it’s a sad indictment that “things should be easy and fun to use” qualifies as a new way of thinking). Meanwhile, on the operator side, you’ve got a bunch of them talking about this new BONDI standards initiative to — get this — minimize fragmentation in app development. Fragmentation’s been a long-running problem in the industry. But what about changing things around to actually help sell these apps people develop?

Technical competence really isn’t a problem for the mobile industry. There’s no shortage of powerful devices and services that can do a lot of cool things. But technical prowess simply isn’t enough for continued success, particularly when new competitors that do a much better job of marketing and merchandising are lurking.

Even though it’s 2008, syncing contacts and other info still sucks. Various pieces of the puzzle are there, but it seems like they rarely all come together. SyncML is great, if you can use somebody like Zyb, and your handset is supported. But there are still far too many handsets that don’t support SyncML, or don’t allow OTA syncing or have some other hang-up.

Hopefully this is starting to change. Vodafone bought Zyb about a week after I said, “If you work for an operator, get some deal going with Zyb or one of its competitors and provide and promote the service to your customers.” Hopefully this will lead to the big V prevailing on handset vendors to fully support SyncML throughout their range of devices.

One other boost to SyncML that could be coming: apparently Google will add SyncML support to Gmail contacts next month. That’s really good news, especially for Gmail users, and hopefully it will shine even more light on SyncML and help make it so that even more devices will support it for OTA syncing. Hopefully Google will soon be adding SyncML support to Google Calendar as well.

The iHype continues this morning, with the world’s press breathlessly repeating the Apple PR saying the company sold 1 million iPhones over the weekend. That’s a decent number, and eclipses by far the first-gen model, which El Jobso is keen to remind us took 74 days to hit that model. Of course, selling the new model in 21 countries versus a single-country launch will help. But back to the press reaction: A blog at Barron’s says that shares in Palm, Research in Motion, Nokia and Motorola are “Suffering an iPhone Headache”, as “Clearly, some or all of those companies are going to lose market share as Apple takes an increasingly large slice of the market.”

Just to let reality back in for a second:
- Total Q1 handset sales: 282 million (from Strategy Analytics)
- Nokia Q1 sales: 115.5 million (from Nokia PR), or roughly 1.28 million per day

Sure, Apple’s market share is growing, but “increasingly large” might be getting a little ahead of ourselves.

One thing that is worth noting, though, is that people downloaded more than 10 million apps from the new App Store over the weekend (though keep in mind this isn’t just iPhone 3G users, but first-gen and iPod touch users, too). It’s amazing what people will do when things are easy, isn’t it?

I am curious, though, to see how this works out for developers, and some sort of breakdown of free vs paid downloads. Apple says that a quarter of the App Store’s 800+ programs are free, while 90 percent cost less than $10. While the App Store simplifies discovery, download and installation, it’s not yet clear if this translates into an easier or better revenue stream for mobile developers.

Russell mentioned the book Mobile Internet for Dummies back in May, noting that its release showed just how this mobile thing was taking off. One of the book’s authors, Dan Appelquist, notes that the book is now available.

So, to echo Russell’s message from a few months ago, go buy a copy.

You can also check out the site the book’s authors created at mifd.mobi.

And the numbers 9838.

Thanks, of course to Jim.

I’ve mentioned before about how I think a key aspect of mobile operating systems of the near future will be the degree to and ease with which they can be customized with user interfaces. I think this is part of what’s behind the recent Symbian move, for instance. But what will also be key will be those OSes and UIs that give the best mobile internet experience. That doesn’t mean having the best browser, it’s a lot deeper than that. It’ll be which has the best widget platform, supports the best runtimes, and so on.

This will be way more important than native development — after all, if developer support or application availability was the most important factor, Palm wouldn’t be in the can, would it? As things have played out, Java has provided a good enough (note I didn’t say “good” or “great”) app environment for most users, and various smartphone OSes have filled in the gaps. Accessing internet services from mobile will increasingly move away from standalone apps and into various runtimes and widget platforms (see my earlier post on the Facebook mobile UI), particularly when these runtimes and platforms hit critical mass.

When will that be? As Dean Bubley points out, when Nokia’s Series 40 starts supporting them:

Given that it accounts for 30%+ of all worldwide phone shipments - and probably 40%+ or 50%+ in certain markets - any developments in the platform pretty much determine the viability of future next-gen business models.

It’s very easy to get hung up on Feature X or Application Y that is supported by S60 / Windows / Android / iPhone / whatever…. but if it ain’t in S40, it ain’t going to be that important in the really big, wide world.

He goes on to talk about the mobile internet features of the newest version of S40, the 6th edition, including support for Flash Lite 3 and a WebKit browser that can handle HTML and Ajax. Widgets are supported through the Widsets platform. (More info from a thorough post by Stefan Constantinescu here.)

There are a few kingmakers in the mobile world, and the people deciding what makes it in to Series 40 are definitely one of them, so it’s worth paying attention to what gets built into the platform, and which technologies it backs. But this also highlights the progression of mobile handset software in general, and how the mobile internet experience is of ever-increasing importance.