mjelly mobile 2.0 blog

Back in late 2006 I was working in South Africa and was in the mall one day when I received a bluetooth marketing message over the phone.  This was completely amazing and something that I'd never seen before in the UK or anywhere else.  Anyway I blogged about it here and got in contact with the company behind it, WCIT.  

Anyway, the founder of the company behind that initiative has written a fantastic analysis of his experience starting, and ultimately closing that business.  

If you're interested in learning the lessons of an early player in mobile location based marketing this is an essential read.  It's also interesting to anyone interested in startups.  You can download the pdf for free below

Download Microsoft Word - Mobile Phones, Bluetooth and Location Based Marketing num

or you can grab the book for Kindle here 

http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Bluetooth-location-marketing-ebook/dp/B005VGRHR2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319735848&sr=8-1

 

One of the jobs I did back in the day was selling mobile phones for Orange.  The best thing about the job was some of the people that you worked with that knew absolutely everything about all the latest handsets.  In those days they had just launches colour phones (the Ericsson T68!) and bluetooth and GPRS was at the bleeding edge of technology so things were a lot less complicated than today. 

Whilst us mobile phone geeks as well as young kids know all about the latest handsets and features the average punter finds it difficult to get their heads around what 'Android' means or why you cant get Angry Birds on a Blackberry. When you think of all the different operating systems now, all with different ways to do even basic things like change the screensaver or ringtone, add a contact or connect to Wi-Fi it's pretty clear that many people are going to have real trouble navigating all this technology.  In my day the hardest thing you would have to do is show an old lady how to use text messaging - imaging having to explain how to download an app...

So the UK mobile operator O2's latest customer initiative looks interesting - they have a network of O2 Guru's in stores that are trained up to answer questions about how to use your phone.  They've now extended this onto an O2 Guru channel on youtube.  Quite a smart bit of 'education based marketing' which is what the sales masters are recommending these days as the best strategy for selling to people. 

O2 YouTube Channel

O2 then have links back to their online store - effectively extending the model that they are operating in stores onto the internet.  Not a bad bid of youtube marketing - a lot of attention is on facebook marketing these days but this shows there's a fair bit of room for innovating using other social platforms.  It's a good idea to use video as well - a lot of people dont like reading a lot of text and it's much easier to explain stuff. 

Back to the mobile gurus that I used to work with in the Orange shop back in the day.  If you look at the model used here there is no reason why someone couldnt create their own mobile phone review and tech channel on youtube and build a massive audience.  Howard Chui did it with http://www.howardforums.com years ago and new technology creates a new opportunity to become an authority.  With affiliate marketing sales of mobile contracts, handsets and so on you could make a good living out of this.  Very similar to what Gary Vaynerchuck advocates in his book Crush It! - if you have a passion about something the tools are now there to make a living from it. 

Anyway good to see an operator trying out different marketing channels and trying to solve a problem for consumers rather than blowing money on TV ads. 

 

The crew behind the 02 Litmus mobile application store are now working over at Telefonica Developer Communities and pumping out some good stuff over on the blog there.  Carnival of the Mobilists regular C Enrique Ortiz has written up a guide to the facebook APIs for mobile which is well worth a look.    

There's some other good writing there including a piece by Tom Hume from Future Platforms and they've also sponsored a very good bit of research by Vision Mobile on Developer Economics.

Mobile operators have typically struggled to build strong developer communities but Telefonica are going the right way about it by trying to add a bit of value with the free reports and so on.  So worth checking out what they are up to.       

Reblogging this from the mobyaffiliates blog - the summary - it is hard to make PPC mobile ad networks pay off on an arbitrage basis with mobile affiliate or lead generation programs.  

Using mobile PPC ad network arbitrage for affiliate marketing 

Ok so a lot of people are getting interested in mobile affiliate marketing and whether there is a PPC arbitrage model yet on mobile. Can you take traffic from a pay per click mobile advertising network such as admob or inmobi and drive it to a CPA-based mobile affiliate program and make a profit? In some cases this can work, but it needs very careful management, tracking and targeting. One of the issues with mobile advertising at the moment is that the quality of a lot of traffic on the blind mobile ad networks if of questionable quality, which makes conversions pretty poor in a lot of cases. Here's an example - the chart below shows the results from two different types of traffic - using organic traffic on a site controlled by us, and using traffic bought on admob. The creative, landing page and offer was exactly the same in both cases however the conversion rate was hugely different. 

Comparison of organic and admob traffic performance

 

As you can see from the data the organic traffic performed over 25 times better in terms of conversions. Despite having 3.5 times as many clicks the traffic from admob only delivered less than 25% of the revenue of the organic traffic. We have had a lot of success using admob for various things and it is a fantastic tool but you need to be very clever about how you test and target by geography, handset and platform to get the most out of it. So - what should affiliate marketers take from this? No you should not totally rule out using PPC on mobile, but it is very hard to make it work - just like on the PC web. Let us know any questions in the comments or on our forum and we'll try and answer them. 

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So

mobile internet is finally hitting the big time - with the "Youtube moment" at the end of the last year being the acquisition of admob, closely followed by Apple buying up Quattro Wireless at the start of this year. 

However, it's not just the ad

networks that are getting snapped up - already M&A is moving down up value chain into the agency space and down the value chain into the ad optimizers. 

Firstly, RingRing Media, a

mobile ad agency and media buyer in London got snapped up by Amobee Systems a few days ago.  The rumoured price was £12m - not bad for a company founded in 2008 and grown to £2m a month in gross revenue with only small investments.  Congratulations to Ben and Harry the co-founders at RingRing. 

Secondly, we learn that the ad optimizer/ ad

network aggregator AdMarvel has been bought by Opera.  Ad Marvel started life as a B2C play called Frengo and spun off a service that helps mobile sites and apps to manage their ad inventory through analytics, ad serving and real-time pricing data. 

With Mary Meeker predicting that

mobile is the big tech trend of the next decade we can expect more acquisitions like this over the next year, which means more investment at the other end of the pipeline.  VCs and other investors will be more willing to move into mobile now that they can see the big exits happening and real value being created. 

So what are the opportunities in the mobile ad space for startups and investors? Here's a few ideas:

That's it for now shout out in the comments if you have any views on what the opportunities are. 

The mjelly post arguing that admob got a bargain paying just $750m for admob is over at Mobile Stance this week as part of the Carnival of the Mobilists.  It's the 200th edition and there's some more analysis of the admob acqusition including a great post from Msearchgroove which goes into some detail. 

This weeks Carnival of the Mobilists is over at Msearchgroove.  We nearly won post of the week with our iphone Appstore Search And Discovery review but this week's winner is a post covering our favorite mobile internet service flirtomatic.  There's a load of other good posts on there this week including from Mobithinking and Holly from Mobienthusiast so go check check it. 

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Iphone appstore SEO given top billing on the carnival of the mobilists (mjelly.com)

The post on Appstore SEO has been getting a lot of attention and it was featured as the first post on last week's Carnival of the Mobilists over at Tams60 blog. 

There's some other good posts on mobile advertising and a cracker from mobithinking on "why mobile versions of sites still pay off". 

It seems that Peggy from Msearchgroove has taken over the Carnival organisation duties - massive thanks to Judy Breck from teh brilliatn Goldenswamp who has done an amazing job running the Carnival. 

The guys over at Welovemobile  have announced the launch of a new BBC mobile search service as the result of a project they've been working on. 

We all know that mobile search is totally broken - Google have essentially stopped even bothering to provide a mobile specific version or index, so it's an area which desperately needs more innovation.   At the same time, as the BBC note, mobile search is more important to them than ever, as mobile internet usage grows and there is more and more content available for mobile devices.  

"There are thousands of BBC web pages on the mobile site, a whole world of additional content that you more than likely don't know about. Offering search on mobile is a no-brainer - it gets you to the content you want with the least possible effort ...."

The new search service covers news, sport, radio & television web pages and iplayer radio and TV content.

Welovemobile helped the BBC to create a search interface design that incorporates 'best of breed' features from other types of search engine and discovery interfaces.   The aim of the design is to allow for advanced content search and discovery, with the emphasis on providing very relevant and personalised "content surfacing" around the BBC's mobile content and services assets.  The search solution contains some interesting new content filtering and presentaiton concepts and a slick UI.

The BBC say it was a tough job coming up with the end solution:

"our colleagues in Search have had many 'interesting' challenges developing BBC search for mobile. We know it's crucial to get the results right first time on mobile ...  we spent weeks fine tuning the search logic, weighting our search terms, and we now know more about the idiosyncrasies of search logic that we ever thought we would need to. Mobile search is still not perfect, but it's been a long time coming and we wanted to get it launched .... "

The end result looks pretty good, and it's great that The BBC has invested in developing a bespoke mobile search tool for its site, rather than relying on a third party white label solution or just bunging in a google or yahoo site search integration.  According to Simon Liss from welovemobile what they have done for the BBC is to 

"...think mobile from the ground up. We’ve applied what we know about mobile devices, mobile usage, user experience and design to create what we believe is a truly original and innovative search concept and interface.’

The BBC mobile search product launched in an early Beta version on 3rd September - you can check it out at http://bbc.co.uk/mobile

A belated link back to the Carnival of the Mobilists last week hosted by Rudy at mtrends.  There's a load of great stuff on there as usual including from some of the best mobile commentators out there including Carlo at Mobhappy, Marek Pawloski, Tomi Ahohen and Denis from Wap Review. The content spans Mobile Widgets, App Stores, Touch screens, Mobile Widgets and mobile learning and is well worth a read.  Here's the link

Rudy has also launched an interested new company directory and business social network called dot open which you can check out at http://www.dotopen.com/

Just back from the Mobile 2.0 Conference in Barcelona - wow - what a great event!  It was brilliant to be able to hang out with other mobile people from around the world and listen to a load of great talks, presentations and panels.  The event was brilliantly organized and I think everyone got a load out of it. 

Highlights for me were:

Some of the key themes included:

I'll be blogging some of my notes from the conference here and you can find stuff with the m20eu tag on slideshare and twitter. 

Thanks to Rudy, Miker and the team for organizing - I really appreciated it. 

The mobile search company Taptu has been on a bit of a roll recently - they closed a large round of funding, changed their branding, hit 1m searches per day and have been hard at work developing their iphone app and an index of touch sites.  Like admob Taptu is another company that is great for the mobile 2.0 ecosystem and we are really lucky to have them in the UK - they are often at conferences speaking about what they are doing and also publish some great white papers.  Steve Ives the CEO gave a presentation at the Mobile Web Summit and here's some of the key points and stats:

Future of mobile is touch

- 220m touch screens shipped this year - only a small proportion are iphones

- touch is a fluent, relaxed way of mobile browsing ideal for MASS MARKET

- 10% of the Quantcast top 1000 websites now have a touch-optimized mobile site (GREAT STAT!!)

- this moves to just 0.5% when you expand to top 10k sites so a long way to go...

Taptu is growing strongly

- 60% of Taptu's audience is based in the USA

- they had done 0.25m searches by Dec 07, 2.5m by June 08 and 25m by April 09

- new iphone app coming out which allows browsing and searching of mobile touch sites (it looked great)

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Do touch screen phones represent a step-change for mobile internet? (mjelly.com)

Tom Hume from the mobile development agency Future Platforms gave a nice presentation of day 2 of the Mobile Web Summit focused on the idea of play, engagment, happiness and mobile.  The killer stat from this presentation was:

- Mobile quiz app players usually played the games 3 times, this increased to 7.5 times on average if they entered a league table

- Not just explained by these users being just generally more engaged - they played 2 times on average before entering and 5.6 times after entering league

- shows power of social elements, gameplay etc in driving mobile

Tom has written a short summary of his talk here:

"My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element". That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of "social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity - and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude. Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake and loyalty."

Anyway the presentation is on slideshare and embedded below - it's well worth checking out:

Ilja Laurs the CEO of Getjar spoke at the Mobile Web Summit - Getjar is a mobile applications store that pre-dates the iphone app store by many years.  They are now funded by Accel and doing great things in the space.  Here's a few stats from the presenatation:

- getjar has done 450m downloads to date - currently running at 35m downloads per month

- 46k apps for all major platforms

- 200k developer accounts

- 35k active beta testers

- have grown strongly since launch of the iphone appstore - expanded app market beyond iphone

- aim to provide "everything for consumers'' - support all platforms, all types of apps, all types of device

- aim to provide ''everything for developers'' - tools, distribution, monetisation

- 1% of apps created by established companies - 99% are small 1-3 man shops

- Google maps has 300 different builds on the getjar site!

- Getjar now focusing on improving search and discovery by aligning results to segments e.g countries, devices, platforms - have the scale to do this

- also offering billing - in-app billing 7* more effective than SMS billing in tests

You can find getjar in the mjelly directory

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MM2.0 roundup:-iphone appstore statistics and success stories, Android Stats and Blackberry App World, mobile web data and more (mobilemessaging2.com)

Mippin are a mobile content aggregation and portal company based in London and one of the most advanced companies in the world in terms of using applications stores as distribution channels.  The clever thing mippin realised early on was that you don't need to invest huge amounts in creating full applications for each platform - by using a "wrapper" or "launcher" driving to a mobile website, you can have the best of both worlds - the distribution power of an appstorea and the screen real estate of an app on the device but with the lower development costs of a mobile site.  

Here's some notes on a great presentation on how they use application stores at the Mobile Web Summit from Robin Jewsbury Co-Founder and VP Development.  I actually got them the slot for this presentation as I knew they would have loads of useful points and I wasn't disappointed. 

- initially mippin was 100% focused on an application business (Refresh Mobile) but out of every 100 people that downloaded their app only 20 would open and use (they couldn't find apps on their phone!)

- not so long ago a lot of people therefore thought that mobile apps were dead RIP Mobile Applications and it was all about mobile web - until iphone appstore came along...

- iphone app store not perfect - QA process abysmal, not really a sustainable model? - mippin only getting 100 downloads per week on the app store - need to also look at Ovi etc

- however ... fragmentation of appstores and platforms is a problem

- Nokia - Java, Symbian, WRT, Flash, Blackberry - Java, iphone - C++, Windows Mobile - .net, Silverlight, Android - Java, Palm - Web OS etc etc

- but there is a way around this - use HTML, CSS and Javascript as a common platform and then create a "wrapper" for it -  Phone Gap framework can be used for iphone, android, blackberry mobile web apps, WRT for Nokia/ Symbian

- this has allowed mippin to quickly and cheaply launch a presence on a range of different appstores and be one of the first services on the likes of Ovi and Blackberry App World

- 400% growth in RIM traffic since launch on Blackberry appstore

- 21% increase in page views from Nokia handsets since launch on Ovi with a WRT app

You can find mippin in the mjelly directory

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Mobile Web 2.0 Summit - Day 1 Review - #mweb09 (mjelly.com) Mobile Web 2.0 Summit 3rd and 4th June - discount available (mjelly.com)