Mobile Marketing

Nokia bans the "phone"

I read in  Cellular news that Nokia bans the word phone. Nokia employees should talk about mobile multimedia computers instead of smartphones.

This move is in line with Nokia prediction a few weeks ago, that handsets will replace cameras, music players and video cameras, etc.

What do you think about this new word? Do you like it?

This is a good illustration of the convergence of devices and the new challenges of the mobile industry. There are more and more features in handsets, voice is becoming a commodity and operators are fighting on data services.

At the beginning of my career a few years ago, telcos were mobile telephony operators. This word is completely obsolete now, mobile operators are becoming multimedia content providers.

Mobile Monday Paris

A short feedback from the last mobile monday Paris. It was very interesting as the other times.

Stephane Delbecque presented Yahoo offer for the world cup. Yahoo has purchased the rights of the world cup from FIFA and they will propose plenty of services. The most attractive is probably the free SMS alert.
Yahoo will make sure that nobody else is using the world cup trademarks. About the FIFA trademark, I read a good article in the French magazine Capital and the ambush marketing - like pepsi are doing. I'll write a post about it later.

They were other presentations of mobitype (blogs), medialive (DRM) and the PACA mobile center.
I like the idea of the PACA mobile center. Today the development of mobile phones applications is very complex due to the numerous heterogeneous configurations. The PACA mobile center gives access to a pool of handsets and testing facilities for application developers. It is a smart and cost effective way of validating applications on multiple handsets - which is a nightmare today!

Finally, Catherine Ramier presented an artistic interactive exhibition. Very good! Amazing to see how her show caught the attention of the audience.

Next Mobile monday will be on July 3rd...

Next Mobile Monday Paris

The next Mobile Monday Paris is next Monday, 29th May at 6:30pm.

This is the meeting place for all innovative players of the mobile market. I recommend you to attend, it promises to be very interesting like the other times.

There will be presentations of Yahoo (very active strategy on mobile), medialive (DRM solution), mobitype (mobile blog) and mobile distillery (J2ME framework if I understand well what's on their web site).

Then, after the presentations, a great networking time with all actors of the mobile market.

http://www.mobilemondayfrance.org/

Have fun!

Pepsi starts the World Cup!

A very funny advertisement from Pepsi on Mydadada. This advertisement is already cited on many blogs and web sites, the buzz promises to be a big success!
And you can send a voice call to your friends with the "dadada song". A good means of distribution to your community and wide spreading the info.

It is interesting to note that Pepsi don't have the rights of the World Cup and can't use these words which are a trademark of FIFA. However, they show a football team in Germany and of course, everybody understands the reference.

Vision of a Swiss knife

In a Financial times article already cited on various web sites such as Moco.news or l'atelier [fr], Nokia predicts the end of cameras, music players and video cameras. All these features will be included in the mobile devices. The word mobile phone is of course obsolete.

This Nokia statement may look very strong and quite arrogant. At least, it opens an interesting discussion: will we have one device, the Swiss knife of the XXIst century that will do everything or several specialised devices?

Let's have a look at some of the applications.

Camera
Already Konica-Minolta announced they will stop producing cameras.
However, I believe that still digital cameras will be superior to mobile phones in terms of resolution or quality of lens.

Music players
Despite the tremendous Apple success of I-pod, I am sure that mobile phones will replace music players in the short term. The advantage of music player in terms of storage space or brand will not last long. Just take the success of the Sony Ericsson walkman!
However, it's probably not such a big threat for Apple in the long term. They will leverage on their brand and marketing strengths and make a lot of money with I-tunes.

PDA
PDA feature is now part of the smartphone. No doubt about it.

GPS
Clearly the GPS functionality will be soon included in handsets.
It makes a lot of sense to combine the location and the mobility.
See this impressive service under development by Google, Volkswagen and nVidia (see other screenshots).

Mobile ticketing in France

The Toulouse Football Club is now selling tickets over mobile phone.
How does it work?

1. 1. You purchase the ticket online through the Internet.
2. 2. You receive the electronic ticket via MMS. The ticket is displayed as a mobile tag on your phone's screen.
3. 3. At the entrance of the stadium, the guy checks the mobile tag on your handset''s screen with a scanner.

I heard that there are some issues with scanning the screen of the handset. But my brother used the service for the match Toulouse-Nantes and it worked perfectly on his Sony Ericsson W800i.

This is a great innovation. I am looking forward seeing similar applications based on contactless technology. Then it will be even more convenient.

Mobile TV in France

Four trials have been conducted in France to validate Mobile TV. The feedback of these pilots is given in the excellent JDNet article (fr).

Based on my last trip to Korea in January 2005, I am convinced that this is a new killer application. Mobile TV will be very successful if the price is affordable.
I will talk about the Korean experience in a future post...

Some lessons from the French trials:

• The main usage is at home after 7pm!  The mobile is an alternative TV screen at home. This is a big surprise. It was expected that the main usage would be in public transportation, that's not the case!
• Key programs are obviously sports, news, music, adult content.
• Usage is 20 minutes per day.
• Users are ready to pay between 7 and 10 euro/ month for the service.

In Europe there are some other trials ongoing and the service will be soon launched in Italy, hopefully before the World Cup.

                                    

In France there are still very important questions:

• Technology

It seems that the technology chosen in Europe will probably be DVB-H as it is pushed by big players (mainly Nokia).
DVB-H is an adaptation of DVB (in French TNT) for handsets.
Other technologies are DMB-S (satellite) and DMB-T (terrestrian). DMB is an adaptation of DAB. In France, Alcatel space is pushing for a combination of terrestrian and satellite technologies.
There is as well Flo, a proprietary standard done by Qualcomm which doesn't seem too much popular in Europe.

• Indoor coverage

The indoor coverage is a key requirement and still a challenge for all technologies.

• Lack of frequency

In France there is a lack of frequency so a big lobbying is ongoing to get free frequencies.

• Who owns the customer?

Is it the mobile operator (e.g. Orange or Bouygues) or the TV channel (e.g. Canal+ or TF1) or both?
The encryption of pay TV like Canal+ will be done through the SIM which means that an agreement between both partners is necessary...

 

In summary, this is a very hot issue in the whole mobile com industry. For sure when the service is launched, it will be really a big success!

From innovation in the posters to mobile marketing

There is plenty of innovation in the advertisement world. Not only a 73% increase of the French market of in 2005 but as well innovation of the classical on-street advertisement.

JCDecaux, one of the worldwide leaders in advertisement, is always trying new ideas to catch the attention of people. They installed a real dress inside the billboard.
See http://gregorypouy.blogs.com/marketing/2006/02/les_abribus_vol.html (fr)

When will the next step or full  mobile advertising become true? The mobile phone allows a good interaction with the user, it is a widespread device, easy to use.

There are already a few trials of live poster communicating with mobile phones. I visited the accinity booth at 3GSM Barcelona. This German company offers an interesting solution based on bluetooth or infrared communication. It is good to validate the concept but it is too complicated for the end user. He has to set up a wireless infrared or bluetooth link to the poster. Moreover, this is a breach in security and it could eventually open the door to viruses transmitted over this link.

Clearly, the future lies in pure contactless applications. No need to configure the handset, it is enough to simply  place the phone close to the poster (less than 10 cm) and that's it!
See the success of felica in Japan or the Navigo trial done by Bouygues, RATP in Paris.

In summary, the keys for the deployment of mobile marketing are:
- Easy to use –- no complex handset configuration
- Non intrusive - the action must be– triggered by the customer
- Cheap - the –use of RFID tags is preferrable to bluetooth modem
- Interactivity from the handset & the network - propose to download ringtones, wallpaper, to send SMS or to connect to special web site.

1 billion

1 billion songs have been legally downloaded from the iTunes Music Store and apple is organising a lottery to celebrate this success. 
The lucky music fan who downloaded the billionth song from the iTunes Music Store ­ won a new 20-inch iMac, 10 60GB iPods, and a $10,000 iTunes Music Card to jumpstart their digital music collection.

What a tremendous success! Who would have expected this 3 years ago? Who believed that people would pay to download songs that they can get for free on P2P networks?
Just another time apple was visionaire!

And the way apple communicates today and celebrates this billion is just another great lesson of marketing and communication. Much better than a press release!

I'm mentioning this news in my  blog because the mobile music is really one of the key applications. More and more apple is becoming an actor of the mobile world. They registered the brand "Mobile me!" last January. There is already an itunes client on some Motorola phones.

These major Internet players Apple, Yahoo, Google, MSN, e-bay, skype are now coming into the mobile com business very quickly. The traditional mobile operators need to be reactive and innovative if they want to survive. A very exciting and challenging future indeed!

Google exaggerates or big brother is watching you!

Crazy news... In the new version of the its google desktop 3.0, Google uploads your full hard disk on their server! You can imagine all privacy problems. Truly unbelievable!!!

A few years ago, while I found google watch, I thought that they were exaggerating and that they were paranoid. I realize now that they were right!!

In their trend to take over the control of your personal data, Google are going too far...

Extract from the general terms and conditions.
If you choose to enable Search Across Computers, Google will securely transmit copies of your indexed files to Google Desktop servers, in order to provide the feature. Google treats the contents of your indexed files as personal information, in accordance with the Google Privacy Policy.


source (fr) http://www.atelier.fr/article.php?artid=31586&catid=14
Another interested post on the topic: http://ymalakha.blogspot.com/2006/02/google-and-end-of-privacy.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-6041338.html
http://fr.techcrunch.com/2006/02/09/google-desktop-30-la-fin-de-la-protection-des-donnees/ (fr)