The MoPR Blog

Weekend Reading is posted every Friday and represents some of the cooler and interesting mobility, wireless and collaboration news Mobility PR has read throughout the week.

It’s been an iWeek. We’d be remiss in a weekly wrap-up if we didn’t mention the unveiling of the next version of the iPhone. There are plenty of opinions from the web so you don’t need another one. Along with the rest of the world, we listened live to Steve Jobs’ keynote and got virtual updates via Twitter [props for not crashing during the thousands of Tweets] and MacRumors.com.

Sure, there are some exciting new features, but alas, still no cut and paste functionality. Bummer.

Mobile phones becoming the “fourth channel.” Mobile phones are becoming a major purchasing channel for consumers and represent a huge opportunity for e-tailers to capture new revenue, according to research from Cisco Systems.

Cisco found 42% respondents already provide the ability to view products on mobile devices. But only 15% offer the ability to conduct transactions, while 10% use SMS text messaging to provide customers with information and six per cent have Web pages and a URL specifically designed for mobile use.

Amazon recently launched TextBuyIt in the U.S., which enables customers to use text messaging to find products and make purchases using their mobile phones. To find a product, U.S. customers send a text message to the retailer citing the name of the item or a UPC or ISBN code. Amazon then replies within seconds with details and prices of products matching the search query.

Smartphone users doing more browsing. Social networking and Internet commerce are increasingly luring smartphone users to spend an average of four hours and thirty-eight minutes per month browsing the mobile Web in the United States, according to a new report from M:Metrics.

According to March data from the measurement firm’s metered smartphone panel, active mobile Web users in the United States spent an average of one hour and thirty-nine minutes in the month browsing Craigslist on their smartphone, the longest duration of any site among the top twenty domains visited.

On the days users visited a site, they spent an average of 22 minutes on Craigslist, 29 minutes on eBay, 16 minutes on MySpace, 14 minutes on Facebook and 18 minutes on Go.com. According to the report, mobile browsing has increased 89 percent year over year while page views increased 127 percent.

Are you paying attention mobile advertisers?

Firefox Mobile: Not if, but when. Hat tip to Boy Genius Report who reported and linked to Aza Raskinm’s website. Raskinm is Mozilla’s head of user experience. Not only is the concept video/demo on his blog compelling, his thoughts on usability, experience and design are fascinating.

Cool site of the week. The world just shrank a little more. News junkies like us have been reading and enjoying MetaCarta. Combining breaking news from Reuters and AP and a Google map mashup, users can search for news by a visual map of the world. The split screen also lists news stories on one side then a map on the other. Users can then click on a story and read it while looking at a map –and can even zoom in right down to the street name - of where the news broke. Powerful stuff. It personalizes news and makes it more than something happening “somewhere else.”

We live in a “right here, right now” society. We want connectivity at our fingertips, access to the latest news feeds any time of the day, and up-to-the-minute email. But during our busy days we often miss our favorite television shows. We want our favorite shows and movies right here, right now. No commercials, either. Those waste our time.

Quite simply: We are demanding Video on Demand.

Video on Demand (VOD) allows us to select and watch content on demand, during whatever time fits our schedule. The majority of cable- and telco- and even satellite-based television providers offer both VOD streaming, such as Pay-Per-View (PPV) whereby a user buys or selects a movie or television program and it begins to play on the television set immediately, or downloading to a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) rented from the provider for viewing in the future.

This isn’t news of course – but as the saying goes, the numbers don’t lie.

ABI Research issued a recent study claiming that “the number of people who watch online video will top 1 billion in the next five years.” The study gives credit to the increase of broadband globally along with Internet video power houses like YouTube.

There are some great websites emerging on the market that have encouraged our ‘immediate’ lifestyle, too.

Take for example popular sites like Hulu and Joost. They are user friendly and provide the latest and greatest of prime time TV. Did you miss last week’s House because you were in the office until 8? Or, did you miss your beloved season finale of 30 Rock because traffic on the freeway was horrendous? Don’t worry about it! Just hop online when you get home and catch up!

Though the Internet is handy when you’re in front of your computer, you also want to sit back and relax on the sofa and actually enjoy that new flat screen you spent last month’s paycheck on. You had better have VOD at home.

What most don’t know is the behind the scenes work that goes into successfully deploying VOD to the “gimme gimme right now” crowd (That’s me!) at home. The struggle for carriers is to deliver the maximum amount of VOD without eating up bandwidth or impacting picture quality. Nothing is more infuriating, say, than when sound goes out during a pivotal scene.

And with the arms race growing between cable, telecom and satellite service providers to offer more of these personalized services while competing with the Internet, the demand (pun intended) is on for creative solutions aimed specifically for VOD.

Companies such as RGB Networks are continually developing these exact solutions. Take for example the Dynamic Bandwidth Manager (DBM) which combines unprecedented stream processing density (1,200 streams) with real-time operation and low-latency, enabling service providers to deliver 50% more programming on their existing network – without costly network re-architecture or upgrades, and without affecting picture quality or VOD’s ‘trick play’ functions (pause, fast forward, rewind). Yahtzee!

I’d just like to take this time to thank the good folks who continually invent and engineer products that, even though I never see, definitely make my home viewing experience more enjoyable. Because as much as I love to watch a quick episode of Friends on my laptop, nothing beats lounging in front of the big screen and relishing in the latest Pay-Per-View movie.

I’m the first to admit, I have a tendency to get caught up in the elimination/game show type reality TV programs like So You Think You Can Dance, Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen, and my all time favorite, American Idol. Maybe it’s the cheerleader in me that loves to pick a team (or individual) and loudly root for them to the end. Or maybe it’s the thought of discovering something new and extremely cool (or talented) from a group of “anybodies.” Likely, I think it’s a combination of these two things, and the more I think about it, these are two of the reasons I got into the PR business – from the thrill of learning about a tech company that could be the next big thing, to the satisfaction of taking a company into the public spotlight and helping them to promote themselves to the world.

So, when I heard about a new TV show in the works that combines the reality TV show elimination format with the age old struggle by technology start-ups to get noticed and receive funding, you can bet I was interested.

The new TV show, in development in New Zealand will be called “Start Up” and will aim to bring audiences an insiders’ view of 10 start up companies, while taking one online start up from the formation of the company through to launch in Silicon Valley. Start up companies selected for the show will be put through a series of challenges over the course of three months.

The competition is limited to New Zealand online start ups, and applications are currently being accepted through June 20 here. The minimum entry requirements will be that companies have a product in development or beta phase, however they are willing to consider making an exception for someone that has an exceptional idea supported by market validation.

The program is produced by New Zealand-based Start-UP media along with the support of Telecom, Hewlett Packard & Domainz.

Read Write Web’s Richard MacManus will serve as one of the show’s judges, along with Tim Norton from PlanHQ and Rod Drury from Xero.

The show is set to air on Television New Zealand (TVNZ) which is the main network in New Zealand. No word yet on whether or not the show will be available for US viewers to watch on TV, but Start Up media did confirm (through the comments section of Read Write Web) that the show will be available to view online.

The team producing the show also commented on its efforts to really help the companies it selects to participate in the show. They said, “We’ve done a lot of work on the format to ensure that the program will not end up ‘Noise’. NZ is an extremely early stage online market, through the series we hope to encourage growth and investment into the local sector. We’re not in it to flame a whole bunch of aspiring online entrepreneurs but rather assist them in getting a world-class product to market.”

Good luck Kiwi start ups!