The MoPR Blog

Dell releases low-cost laptops for “emerging economies.” Dell has unveiled a new line of computers designed to meet the needs of small businesses, governments and educational institutions operating on limited budgets in the world’s emerging economies. The new Vostro products include two pre-configured laptops and two desktops. Additional Vostro products designed for emerging economies will be introduced in coming months.

According to IDC, there are more than 72 million small businesses worldwide, with 23.4 million – nearly one-third of the global total – located in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan). Latin America and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) follow with 12.5 million and 11.9 million.

The new Vostro products were designed to address affordability, reliability and easy maintenance, says Dell.

Photoshop goes online, finally! Adobe Systems Incorporated last week announced the availability of an online version of Adobe Photoshop Express. The public beta will let users store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects. According to Adobe, Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook. Photoshop Express offers a variety of creative sharing options, including uploading and showing off photos and slideshows in your own online “Gallery” hosted by Adobe, or conveniently embedding or linking photos to social networking sites and personal blogs without having to leave the application.

Did you get Obama’s veep text? So did 2.9 million. Nielsen Mobile, a service of The Nielsen Company, estimates that 2.9 million US mobile subscribers received a text message from the Obama campaign over the course of Friday, Saturday and Sunday last week. How does Nielsen know this? Nielsen Mobile monitors shortcode marketing (the use of text-message shortcodes such as the 62262 “O-B-A-M-A”) through the world’s largest telecommunications bill-panel, an opt-in panel that reports on the billing activity for more than 40,000 subscriber lines in the US.

The VP message was sent in the late hours of Friday night and is, by many accounts, the single largest mobile marketing event in the US., to date. From a mobile perspective, it makes sense that the campaign chose to use text-messages. Today, 116 million US mobile subscribers (52 percent of subscribers) actively use text messaging, making it a new mass medium for marketing efforts.

Nic Covey, director of insights at Nielsen Mobile also believes that “the success of this text-campaign has Madison Avenue thinking even more about how they too can interact with a universe of 116 million text-message users in the US.”

We agree. From a marketing standpoint, good move. It got people talking throughout the week, not only about his announcement, but also his commitment to technology throughout the week – hitting a fever pitch Friday night.

On the other hand…

We knew who the veep was before we went to bed. We got the text message the next morning – because it was sent during the night. And where did we get the information? The old guard: TV news. Not the web, not Twitter, not a text message.

Information Week’s Mitch Wagner has a fantastic analysis on the old guard scooping the new media.

Was the announcement itself a success? Wagner doesn’t think so. It was successful though in getting people to opt-in [cough cough] with their email addresses. So far, we’ve received emails from Michelle Omaba, Barack’s campaign manager, and Joe Biden.

Then again, text messaging may be obsolete by 2017. In his thought-provoking post, Ed Hardy, editor at Brighthand.com says:

Five years from now, I predict that anyone in the U.S. getting a text will be surprised. U.S. carriers will turn the service off in less than 10 years.

The technology for full email access is available now, so SMS has really outlived its usefulness.

At least injuries from walking into light poles while texting will go down, right?

Verizon, meet Google. According to the Wall Street Journal (don’t look for a link, the WSJ still refuses to offer most their content online for non-subscribers) Verizon Communications is close to an agreement that would make Google the default search provider on Verizon devices. According to the article:

“Telecom companies are finally conceding that their homegrown search services have stalled.

Today, users have to go to different places to look up services such as ringtones, restaurants and Web pages. Verizon wants to create a new search platform that would be a one-stop shop.”

Revenue, says the piece, will be split and come from ads that appear in keyword searches.

Network World also has coverage of the pending deal.

Presidential race: The year of the text message? You’ve no doubt heard about Barack Obama’s plan to announce his VP running mate via text messaging (and if you are reading this after August 22, you know who he has picked). And for all the flack that John McCain has received on his tech skills, [e.g., “what’s an Internet?”] the GOP is also utilizing SMS to get its message out, mobilize supporters and reach newer voters. In Austin, Texas, the Statesman reports that local campaigns are ramping up their outreach with the help of text messaging.

Text messaging has been used in both parties, according to the article. One example given was engaging volunteers who they hope will then spread the message. A specific example was the use of text messaging to volunteers to call in to a radio show that featured an opposing view.

An interesting quote from the article:

“Fifteen years ago, it was the fax machine. Five years ago, the e-mail. Right now, the text message is it.”

Did you sign up to get election news via text? How has it worked for you? One person here in the office subscribed to the Obama Mobile text stream only to be completely left out on the big day. That’s right… even after subscribing, confirming her zip code and receiving the confirmation text from team Obama, she never received the expected text (or any other text message from the candidate’s party) around the announcement. Bummer. And, what was the purpose of sending the text at 2 am in the morning?

American teens not that into the Summer Olympics. For all the talk about the 2008 Summer Olympics being the first to really utilize online and mobile technologies, a new study from Harris Interactive Youth Center of Excellence, suggests that the 13-18 year old market expressed only moderate interest in the Olympics and weren’t exactly glued to their mobiles.

According to the report, just under half (46%) of 13-18-year-olds in the US expressed an interest in the Olympics, including just 27% who are extremely or very interested, according to a Harris Interactive Youth Center of Excellence study conducted before the Games began.

“Marketers and advertisers may think that teens are a natural constituency for the Games, since many of the Olympic competitors are the same age. Our findings, however, indicate that the Olympics have not yet captured the majority of hearts and minds of today’s teens in the US,” said Dana Markow, PhD, VP senior consultant, Harris Interactive Youth Center of Excellence.

A far smaller number of teens are interested in reading about (22%) or watching (14%) Olympic sporting events online. Similar to an overall interest in the Olympics, plans to follow the Games online increases significantly with age - consistent with the trend for youth to spend an increasing amount of time online as they get older.

Mobile data cards gaining with consumers. Wireless data cards—hardware that allows laptop and PC users to connect to the Internet over a wireless carrier’s cellular network—are fast becoming a popular means of home Internet access. According to a new report from Nielsen Mobile, there were more than 13 million wireless data card users in the US as of Q2 2008.

Recent adoption has been strong, with more than half (55 percent) of these devices acquired in the past 12 months. In fact, 43 percent of mobile data card users report they most often use their data card at home, while 15 percent say they typically use the card at work. Additionally, one in five (21 percent) data card subscribers take advantage of ubiquitous access by heading outdoors and 9 percent use their card while commuting [and hopefully not “driving”].

NBC unveils measurement of mobile usage at Olympics. According to an article in AdAge, NBC Universal has revealed usage figures for mobile devices and the Olympics. The biggest news from the report is that the Olympics as an event seem to be driving mobile video and mobile news adoption for the masses. According to a spokesperson for NBC, half of the mobile users who are watching video or getting news from their mobiles about the Olympics, are doing so for the first time.

According to the piece, NBC also unveiled a way to measure all viewers across the board [TV, online, web, cable] with something called TAMi, or total audience measurement index, described by AdAge as:

Data capture in rudimentary fashion; the numbers of people watching Olympics content on TV, online, via mobile and through video-on-demand.

The program is still in its early stages and stats won’t be used to sell ad time says NBC – at least not yet. It’s interesting to note that the larger players such as NBC are starting to acknowledge there’s a whole new audience – the mobile consumer - that wasn’t a target even a mere four years ago during the Athens Olympics, and that in response they are starting to develop custom content to meet the needs of mobile users.

MySpace: Not just crappy bands, creepy stalkers and strippers. According to Marketing Charts, MySpace numbers shot through the roof with a record 75.2 million unique US visitors in July 2008, the highest number since its launch in 2004 - and an increase of 2.5 million from the previous month.

MySpace attributes its continued growth to recent changes it has made to its site and its ability to “make money in high interactive spend areas.”

Other positive data included:

• Total minutes spent on MySpace increased to 17.3 billion (a 7% increase month-over-month) while average minutes per visitor decreased for the total Internet
• Visitors each spent nearly 4 hours on MySpace in the month
• Visitors spent nearly three times the amount of total minutes on MySpace than on any of its closest competitors’ sites.
• MySpace total minutes were up 20% compared with the same period last year.

“BRIC” countries bigger fans of mobile entertainment. Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) mobile markets are more into entertainment-theme sites than American and European markets where the draw is information and news, says The Nielsen Company. According to Nielsen,  entertainment, gaming, and music websites rank among the top five categories visited in all four BRIC countries, but do not have a place among the top US and Europe rankings.

Email, weather, news and search are the top categories for both American and European mobile Internet users. Nielsen’s research suggests that mobile Internet users across BRIC countries are more reliant on mobile phones to provide them with entertainment content, while users across the United States and Europe view their devices more as a resource for information.

Online video market: Still ready to explode, but when? The worldwide online video market is experiencing dramatic growth, says a new report from In-Stat.

Worldwide online video revenue is expected to eclipse US$4.5 billion by 2012, up from $1.2 billion in 2008, the market research firm says. Purchased/rented videos are expected to offer the most robust growth for online video in the near term, in large part due to an increase in subscription services such as Netflix, which charges a flat monthly fee to deliver an optimal combination of packaged goods and online content that can be viewed on home TV sets. [The report was released before this week’s Netflix snafu.] http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9676

By 2012, In-Stat forecasts that 90% of US households will have access to broadband, with 94% of these individuals watching online video. On the other hand, they say 54% of respondents of their survey still favor physical discs when purchasing movies or TV shows. The DVD isn’t dead yet, folks!