Services, services, services. Lots of handset vendors and operators have been talking about services, and how they’re key to the future. I’ve had a hard time buying into the talk too much, given the long and storied track record of big-name companies in the mobile industry rolling out dreadful applications and services. It’s hard to [...]
One of the myths about mobile is that people don’t like to download applications. So much so that many VCs have been turning away business plans for some time if they start with “We’re going to build a downloadable app…”
In fairness, these plans often then add “…and then all we need to do is [...]
The hard-copy publishing industry seems to be in terminal decline right now. Stories of doom continue to circulate - The Cranky Geeks Podcast was recently speculating that San Francisco might be the first major US city to go completely digital, as the demise of the San Francisco Chronicle seems imminent.
Actually, newspapers have been in decline [...]
I was lucky enough to be elected Global Chairman of the MMA a few months back, on top of my role as Chairman of EMEA. This is an unpaid and part time role, in case you wondered, and has to be squeezed into my day job, blogging, my involvement in Mobile Monday and any kind [...]
US fast-food player, Arby’s has just announced that it’s starting to experiment with mobile couponing with Cellfire.
This is evidence that mobile couponing is slowly starting to go mainstream, although these things always seem to take longer than you think. However, the couponing industry is massive and certainly mobile seems to be an obvious way for [...]
When our LBS marketing startup, ZagMe, went bust back in 2001, I spent quite a lot of time analysing why. The tendency in these circumstances is to move on to the next thing, without really learning the lessons. However, I know that one of the issues was that it was way ahead of its time [...]
One of my theories, going back some time now, is that audio and mobile would make much more natural partners than the rather contrived experience of mobile and video. Here’s something I wrote back in 2004 about it and I think it’s stood the test of time very well. Not only did I point out [...]
Back in 2006, I wrote a post called “The Death of Intel” as the chip maker announced the sell-off of its Marvell Technology Group (which made chips for mobiles) in order to focus on “chips for personal computers and servers amid stiffer competition”.
The reason for my dramatic headline was that if mobile is the future, [...]
The ever informative eMarketer has an interesting stat based on Informa’s recent report on mobile data. The worldwide market for mobile data in Q1 of 2008 was about $50 billion.
What’s so interesting about that?
Well, it just happens that the worldwide digital media market is worth $50 Billion too, but that’s per year, not per [...]
Most of the press coverage of Microsoft recently has obviously been focused on their on-off pursuit of the coy Yahoo!. Followed by lots of analyses of what Redmond needs to do now to catch up in Search and Advertising.
Mr Ballmer has also spoken a lot about how they understand that software is moving to [...]