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]

I can’t find the release anywhere online, so here’s the relevant bit:

Bango, the mobile content enabler, announced today that consumer spend on mobile content in the United States for the first quarter of this financial year (April-June 2006) was seven times higher than for the same quarter last year (April- June 2005). In other parts of the world, consumer spend also increased. In the UK, spending was over 50-percent higher and other regions (Europe, Far East and Australia) saw end user spend four times higher than the same quarter last year.

The increase comes from existing customers continuing to buy more mobile content combined with an influx of new users – estimated to be at 100,000 per week – as content providers attract new consumers to their mobile internet services. The rising popularity of pay per downloads with their one-off charges, compared to subscription services where users are tied to regular monthly payments has also contributed to the increase in consumer spending.

Mike Grenville of 160Characters pointed this out in a comment he made on Russell’s last post, but I thought it was worth a post. A new survey from the UK says that 44% of mobile users there who used a mobile data service for the first time during the World Cup won’t use it again. Why? “Pricing, ease of set up and use were identified as the key barriers to mobile data uptake.”

Surprise!

Seriously, how many times will those factors be pointed out on surveys like this until they’re fixed? It’s not rocket science — if something disappoints a user the first time they try it, they probably won’t try again. There, it’s out in the open. Operators, content providers, take it to heart. And to reiterate Mike’s point, don’t let a tunnel-vision focus on technology make you blind to customers — something operators in particular should heed.

User generated content is the new new thing at the moment – both online and in mobile – and unless you’ve been living under a stone, you can’t fail to have noticed the buzz.

I’ve been looking at Tocmag recently, which allows you to create your own Java magazine for friends, family and colleagues to download to their mobile and browse offline.

We’ve already seen big name publishers with Java versions in partnership with Refresh Mobile’s Mobizines. But this is the first time that I’ve seen this offered to the ordinary punter.

To show exactly how easy this is, I created a magazine you can download onto your mobile from here www.tocmag.com/russ. Simply go there on your mobile, download it and you’ll see what I came up with in a few minutes. I am, it must be said, a little bit of a technical and design klutz. But my effort illustrates how incredibly easy it must be to use and hints at the potential of what could be done with someone with a little more skill and time.

If you can’t be bothered to check out my effort, I put together a 2 page mag, consisting text and images – my mug shot (sorry about that) uploaded from my phone and a post from MobHappy which I wrote on Monday.

So how much does this little lot cost then? It’s actually free to both create one (or a dozen) and free to download, with the normal caveat that your operator will probably charge you for the data unless you’re on a plan.

I think that this idea has the potential to be very big indeed – at least as big as “professionally” produced content. Like the Blogosphere, many of the magazines will probably be read by only one or two people – indeed, you can opt to make it private. So sending your partner a little love note or a post-match report from your sports team might be good examples of how it’ll be used. You can even include video, though the download cost might then start getting a little pricey.

A couple of final thoughts.

This is a real alternative to MMS, with the added advantage that it’s free. I’m pretty sure that the cost of download will be considerably cheaper than the cost of sending an MMS. But since the recipient is actually paying, it is economically possible to put together and promote a little micropublishing operation.

Finally, I do wonder where all this Java stuff will end up as faster connection speeds make the idea of off-line browsing redundant and presentation on the mobile web more sophisticated. Having said that, there’s a lot of potential in the short to medium term and perhaps the long term can look after itself for the meantime.

If you have a mobile phone product or service that you’d like us to have a look at, drop us an email, using the links on the right.

The World Cup kicks off in Germany on June 9, and beyond its importance in its own right (as well as a lovely summertime distraction), it’s going to be a huge piling-on point for mobile content, as developers and content providers try to capitalize on the excitement. Much of it, judging by past experience, will be crap, but give the general state of current mobile phones and content, there should be some interesting stuff.

So let’s separate the wheat from the chaff — have you seen any World Cup-related mobile content or applications that look good? There’s the “official” application, which looks like it could be pretty cool. What else is out there? Or will the acme of technology and popularity continue to be SMS score alerts?

Please share what you’ve seen in the comments, with links, availability and pricing info if you’ve got it. Bonus points for screenshots of real mobile TV services showing the tournament or the buildup to it

[tags]mobile, mobile content, world cup[/tags]

I think that Google’s personalized home page for mobiles is pretty cool, and sort of expected calendar information to be integrated into it, but no. Visiting calendar.google.com from my mobile browser just takes me to the standard site, where the AJAXy goodness is a problem, and Opera Mini is no help, either. Gmail has a decent little basic HTML site that offers a simple set of functionality, Google Calendar needs something similar as well.

The other mobile issue is a lack of sync options — it’s great that Calendar uses XML and iCal for sharing information, but for mobile users, then what? One kludge looks to be to subscribe to Google calendars in iCal on a Mac, then use iSync to get the info on the phone… but that’s only good for Mac users with an iSync-supported device, and it still only allows for a one-way flow of information. (Incidentally, if anybody’s got any other kludge mobile solutions, feel free to leave them in the comments). I get that offering some kind of mobile sync might undermine the idea that Google Calendar is an online service, but to that end, they allow access to Gmail from outside clients, not just the Web interface.

Day planners and Filofaxes don’t come with strings attached that means you can only use them at certain times, from certain places. Without some sort of mobile arm that allows for anytime access, online calendars’ growth will remain stunted.

[tags]mobile, google, google calendar[/tags]

A new report from KPMG says that 40 percent of mobile users surveyed around the world don’t want to pay anything extra for mobile multimedia content. This is a serious disconnect with thinking from operators that believes services like mobile TV will provide a serious boost to their ARPUs. Obviously, the other side of that statistic is that 60 percent of users are willing to pay a premium — but when nearly half your target market isn’t interested, there’s a problem, and a new business model is needed.

KPMG says operators should use the services as a churn reduction tool, which is maybe about half right. But, again, operators need to help create an ecosystem in which advertising can support content, so that the end user doesn’t always have to pay. Operators won’t want to eat the costs of providing content to users — otherwise they’d have done so already. They’re not looking to offer mobile television because they think it will keep people from switching to one of their rivals, as those companies will also be offering essentially the same services. They want the revenue boost.

But that revenue boost doesn’t have to come solely from user subscriptions, and there are other ways to monetize content than usage fees. Content doesn’t have to be free, either, but users don’t always have to be the ones paying the bill.

If you’re a big brand looking to get in to mobile content, the time is now. The opportunity really hasn’t changed much over the last year or two (even with the advent of 3G), but perceptions have. Just look at CBS and News Corp., which today announced some mobile-content initiatives. CBS, on the one hand, is developing some multimedia alert services that could be somewhat interesting. On the other, News Corp. is selling some wallpapers and ringtones and games, and gets heralded as some sort of revolutionary.

Just for the NYT’s benefit, there have been plenty of people that have been doing this stuff for quite some time, and doing it better than News Corp. ever will. But I digress. My point being that, especially in the US, if you’ve been thinking about getting into mobile content, or even if you just are renewing a push, do it now and strike while the iron’s hot. You can count on a lazy press to provide you with plenty of hype, even if you’ve got little substance.

I’ve got two related points. First, if you are one of those people that’s been doing mobile content for longer/better than these big new entrants, doubly so if you’re not a big brand but can enable them, this is a good time for you, too — better than ever. The money’s flowing, but clearly, when ringtones and graphics is the best a company the size of News Corp. can come up with, the ideas aren’t. So get in there.

Second, News’ new mobile unit is called “Mobizzo”. It’s strangely reminiscent of Vizzavi, which some readers will remember was the name of the spectactularly failed venture between Vodafone and Vivendi to take the former’s mobile expertise and apply it to the latter’s portfolio of media holdings. After checking out the Mobizzo site, I’m not sure I see why it should be much more successful than Vizzavi, so perhaps the name isn’t a coincidence.

[tags] mobile content, news corp, murdoch, mobizzo, vizzavi, cbs, viacom[/tags]

My former colleague Justin Pearse broke the story at New Media Age last week, though that Vodafone is going to allow content providers to bundle traffic charges into the cost of their content, then take a cut of the revenues to cover the charges. This will let content providers charge an upfront, set price, or even allow for free browsing and downloads. The article’s gone behind the NMA paywall, but I’ll share some if it here (thanks Justin!):

Vodafone lets content providers charge consumers fixed price

by Justin Pearse, New Media Age

Vodafone is the first operator to launch a commercial offering for third parties to let them absorb the cost of data traffic, making browsing and download of content free for consumers, who will only pay the retail price for actual content.

This model has long been successfully used on the Vodafone Live! portal, a discrepancy which was seen by content providers like record labels as distorting the market.

“Rich media, such as audio and video, will be the next fillip for the mobile content market,” said Vodafone head of commercial partnerships Jeremy Flynn. “But a lot of current data tariffs are not 3G-centric. We’re introducing an 0800 data model that’ll be free to consumers and reverse-charged to content providers.”

Vodafone said it already had live services trialling. The service works by Vodafone zero-rating a URL so that consumers don’t pay to access content. If content providers have a fixed-size product, that’s always 1Mb, say, then Vodafone takes a cut of the revenue share. The alternative is for the operator to charge per megabyte.

Vodafone said it already had live services trialling. The service works by Vodafone zero-rating a URL so that consumers don’t pay to access content. If content providers have a fixed-size product, that’s always 1Mb, say, then Vodafone takes a cut of the revenue share. The alternative is for the operator to charge per megabyte.

This is a pretty significant move, and one that really should have happened sooner. The problem remains, though, that it only works on Vodafone for now — seeing this across all carriers would be more beneficial. But the idea that carriers will do this makes things much more straightforward for content providers, but particularly for marketers. It could also open up mobile web advertising, should it be possible to zero-rate ad servers so consumers aren’t charged to view ads.

Google have unveiled the Google Personalized Home for mobile devices — the mobile version of its personalized Google Home for PCs. Users log in to the Google XHTML site from their mobile phone, and they’re presented with a version of the personalized Google page formatted for the small screen. Gmail, weather, RSS — it’s all there.

Google’s plan is pretty clear (and so is Yahoo’s for that matter) — push mobile operators aside and become the face of the mobile Internet. It’s making deals with handset manufacturers to get its applications bundled onto devices, even get Google buttons on Motorola handsets. But those efforts can be undermined by the carriers themselves, should they choose to disable the features on the handset, or remove them entirely (as some have been known to do).

On first glance, I like that I’m given access to the same content as on my Google PC page (which, I must admit, I’ve only played around with and don’t use regularly). Carriers tend to make their portals separate from the rest of the Internet, eschewing interoperability with the services and sites people normally use for their own. If nothing else, it can create the impression that somehow the Web on your phone isn’t the same as the Web on your PC, and that you’ve got to access different services. This is, of course, in carriers’ best interest, but it’s something that the likes of Google and Yahoo are looking to blow up.

It’s not hard to think that one reason people have only embraced the mobile Internet to a certain degree is because they’ve been forced, to a large part, to adopt one set of sites and services when they’re on the computer, and yet another when they’re on the mobile phone. This isn’t to say that there aren’t things better suited to each medium, or that there are things people will want to access when they’re on their phone that they’d never want to access when they’re on a PC. But that should be the choice of the user, not of the carrier. If the carriers won’t offer open services that integrate with those that people are used to using on the wired Internet, Google will. And it will be the one to gain from it.

BTW, it appears that both the page describing Google Personalized Home and the XHTML personalized site itself may not be available outside the US — if you’re outside the US and have a second, it would be great if you’d drop us a line in the comments verifying or debunking this.

Update: In the comments, Bjørn points out that people outside the US can reach the personalized site on their phones at http://www.google.com/ig/mobile. Thanks Bjørn!