MobHappy

Blockbuster’s CEO says the company is in talks “with all the major mobile phone makers about partnerships aimed at making it easier for consumers to watch movies on the go.” I think Blockbuster is a fascinating company to look at. They really made a success of the movie-rental business and became synonymous with that industry, [...]

I wrote last week about the new Bango Button, which the company says is an easy way to send web content to mobile handsets, and which I said offered a “pretty terrible” user experience. Somebody from Bango got in touch, wanting to know why I felt that way, and in explaining my position, I inadvertently [...]

Lots of companies are drooling over the prospect of earning gobs of money from mobile video, using a variety of business models — many of them built on incrementally charging people for the content, whether by clip or by channel. This doesn’t seem likely to work, since it’s at odds with the typical TV model, [...]

… successful content providers don’t equal successful mobile operators. Think Disney understands this yet? Or is it going to take yet another MVNO failure for them to get it? —–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo

Mobile advertising is a fairly common subject here on MobHappy, thanks largely to my esteemed colleague Russell’s role at AdMob and his interest in the industry. The ad mechanism that it and many other players in the space, like Third Screen and Google, use is a familiar one: a mobile equivalent of a text link [...]

MyStrands, the music recommendation and personalization company I’ve covered before, has just announced that it’s raised a $25 million investment round — a pretty hefty sum, and one that should help it continue to build and grow. I find MyStrands to be one of the more interesting companies in the growing recommendation space because mobile [...]

One of the pieces of wisdom currently flowing around the industry is that it’s incredibly hard to get¬†users to download mobile applications. It’s a refrain¬†I hear from everyone¬†from seasoned investors to rueful executives of companies who have staked their all on a compelling mobile app – after all while most users don’t download apps, it’s [...]

More than a year ago, PayPal Mobile launched to great fanfare. As I noted at the time, it seemed a bit odd that they’d focus on person-to-person and physical goods payments and ignore mobile content completely. Now, some 15 months later, PayPal Mobile remains pretty invisible — as does any PayPal offering geared towards mobile [...]

Back in 1995/6, loads of brand managers suddenly realised that they needed to commission one of those web things. And many paid through the nose for the privilege, as the “right” price wasn’t really known. Fast forward 10 years and many brand managers are equally suddenly realising that they need one of those mobile web [...]

This was pretty inevitable, wasn’t it? MocoNews: User-Generated Meets Mobile Porn, Watch For “Citizen Pornography”: If you’ve got it, flaunt it, so they say. And now PixMeTV gives users a way to earn money for showing it all using their mobiles. The company has launched what it calls a “citizen pornography mobile phone movie platform,” [...]