The MoPR Blog

Launched last year, New Jersey-based RENTOBILE brings the Netflix model to cell phones, joining a long list of companies that have already brought it to toys, books and snacks, among other goods.

The company recognizes that in the fast-paced world of telecommunication technologies, mobile devices come and go like last week’s gossip. Mobile devices are not merely for convenience anymore; they make up a large part of today’s fashion accessories. To provide fashion-lovers and trendsetters a way to satisfy their techie needs, RENTOBILE lets you get your hands on the latest cell phones without shoveling out loads of cash each time a new ‘must try’ phone is released.

You typically have to wait for your contract to expire or have to pay full price for a new phone to try out something new, but with RENTOBILE you can sample a huge variety of mobiles on your whim for a set monthly rental fee.

The first step is deciding whether you want to rent phones as a RENTOBILE member, or as a guest. Membership rates begin at $5 per month, and members get a break in rental fees, along with other privileges.

When you are ready to pick out your new phone you browse RENTOBILE ’s collection—including sections for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon as well as unlocked models—and choose which device you’d like to try out first. Your rented mobile device will be carefully packaged and delivered to you in like-new condition.

Rental rates start at about $15/month, plus a $9.95 round trip shipping charge (per device). You can rent for as little as a month or as long as you want. When you’re done and ready for a new phone you simply return the item for free and tell RENTOBILE what to send you next.

Members can request specific devices, even though all the hottest ‘must have’ phones from Apple, Blackberry, HTC, Palm, LG, Motorola, Nokia and more are already available.

The fickle yet fashion conscious gadget-aholics who would use this service are the same group of consumers that myriad mobile app developers want to reach. I wonder how long it will be until we see third party mobile apps, browsers, and other software pre-loaded on these devices for consumers to try out. No, the phones wouldn’t be “like new” if RENTOBILE pre-loaded the extra bells and whistles on them, but these gadget loving phone-fashionistas would probably really enjoy the extras!

Will Twitter get down to business? Twitter is free for now but will the recent hiring of a Director of Mobile Business Development mean they might start charging or setting up a premium service?

According to Twitter’s blog: “Twitter receives a crushing amount of partnership opportunities on a regular basis—it’s a good problem to have yet until now there has been nobody on staff dedicated solely to business development. Things are changing.”

And, according to Telephony, “Twitter has floated the idea of some pay-per-use, premium services. But it risks losing users to other still-free services such as FriendFeed – not to mention telco-provided SMS.”

It will be interesting to see where this is headed – Twitter needs to eventually start making some cash – just preferably not from us.

The ever changing media landscape. We flinch every time we get a newsfeed about some newspaper or magazine cutting staff, shutting down or scaling back frequency. Though we have no intention of turning Weekend Reading into an obit section for publications, we feel the need to let our readers know about the landscape and how this polar shift affects our industry tremendously.

Newspapers and their current business models are sinking – that’s a given. Some, like The New York Times, are experimenting with alternative ad models, such as putting ads on the cover page. It’s not really that dramatic and has been done, but not with a paper of the Times’ caliber. It gets worse – one pundit claims the Times could no longer exist as a newspaper as early as this spring.

Change is painful but it also brings opportunities. Blogs sprout up everyday. News is getting hyper-localized; information is open and free [which has its advantages and disadvantages] and newer business models are flourishing. News isn’t a commodity anymore with sites like Twitter and its users scooping mainstream media stories. Just this week news about Steve Jobs stepping down and the Hudson plane miracle were both reported on Twitter first – with a dramatic photo directly from the crash scene posted on a Twitter user’s account.

Robert Niles in the Online Journal Review lays out some hard rules on these changes and shifts in media and how the new landscape might look. Here’s one that caught our eye:

The old rule: You can’t cover something in which you are personally involved.
The new rule: Tell your readers how you are involved and how that’s shaped your reporting.

MoPR is a company that works hard to tell its clients’ stories to their audience and this kind of transparency and honesty resonates with us. That’s why we’re increasingly having more open, two-way conversations with reporters and bloggers – and laying all the information on the table so to speak. From there, we let the reporter tell their side.

As the media landscape shrinks – and at the same time expands – we will always be looking for ways to make sure our clients get heard. It’s like a Disneyland ride – we’re cautiously looking at the next turn but we’re also excited about where the industry is headed.

American Idol Text: Fail? Are you on AT&T? Did you get a text on your mobile phone earlier this week promoting the season premiere of American Idol? You weren’t alone.

According to various news sources, the carrier sent the text message to a large portion of its subscriber base – many of whom were not very happy with it.

From The New York Times: “AT&T is defending the text barrage, claiming the messages weren’t spam because they were free, and because customers could opt-out of future ads. The ads were sent to frequent texters and to customers who had voted in the past, AT&T says.”

Social network sites growing on adults. The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8 percent in 2005 to 35 percent now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35 percent number represents a larger number of users than the 65 percent of online teens who also use online social networks.

Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60 percent of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58 percent restrict access to certain content within their profile.

Welcome back. We hope you enjoyed the holidays. We certainly did. We’d like to thank you for reading our posts from 2008 and look forward to bringing you more industry tidbits throughout 2009. Be sure to subscribe to our feed if you don’t want to miss any posts. Here’s the URL for your feed reader: or scroll down to the very bottom of this page and click on Entries (RSS).

Marketing execs “sick” of Web 2.0? Perhaps they drank too much of it in 2008, but a new survey by Anderson Analytics conducted for the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), claims marketing executives are going back to basics this year, putting renewed focus on satisfying and retaining customers and investing in research and insights, but are “sick” of hearing about Web 2.0 and related buzzwords such as “blogs” and “social networking” compared with last year’s survey. However, marketers still admit they don’t know enough about it. This lack of understanding was evident in results from a November 2008 MENG social media study showing 67% of marketing executives consider themselves beginners when it comes to using social media for marketing purposes.

It’s really a shame to see this lack of understanding translate into a negative feeling towards an area of marketing which carries so much potential. Let’s hope these marketers get over their burned-out attitudes quickly enough to realize these Web 2.0 technologies are more than buzz words, and that when used effectively can make a real and tangible difference to a company’s marketing efforts – especially in the areas of satisfying and retaining customers.

Mobile Broadband to Exceed 140 Million U.S. Subscribers in 2013. So says a new report from Parks Associates.

“By 2013, there will be over 140 million U.S. consumers paying for mobile broadband, which will extend video, communication, networking, and support services to all sorts of devices,” said Kurt Scherf, vice president, principal analyst, Parks Associates.

Parks Associates also forecasts 4.5 billion mobile phone users worldwide by 2013, with many people using these devices as gateways for entertainment services, community information, and social networking. The increasing importance of the mobile phone will affect other product and service sectors. For example, over 100 million femtocells will be shipped worldwide in 2013, cumulatively serving over 300 million subscribers.

Broadband deserves some government help. The federal government should create a national broadband strategy, create incentives and support efforts to boost broadband demand in order to increase broadband access, according to a new report released by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Learning the right lessons and emulating the right policies will “enable the United States to improve our broadband performance faster than in the absence of proactive policies,” the report claims.

The report also argues that it is time to move the “broadband policy debate beyond the free market fundamentalism on the right and the digital populism on the left and begin to craft pragmatic, realistic public policies” that focus on the primary goal of getting as many American households using high-speed broadband networks to engage in online activities, including education, health care, work, and commerce.

Spammers and scammers discover Twitter. Hooray. If you’re on Twitter you’ve probably noticed an increase of followers that look like spam. It’s not your imagination that names like @dof74s or @prongirl are starting to appear in your stream.

And if you think spammers are bad, it gets worse. Scammers have also discovered Twitter as was the case when several high profile Twitter users were hacked recently via the Direct Message (DM) function by being lured into entering their log-in information into a spoofed screen.

Here are some guidelines we personally follow when using Twitter to help cut down on the spam.

No. 1: Be real. If you follow us and use the Twitter-supplied avatar we won’t follow you. By using a real image you’re proving you’re a real person or are at least making an effort.
No. 2: Be interesting. If you start following us and your previous Tweets are nothing but self-promoting (spam), we won’t follow you.
No. 3: List your location. It’s interesting to follow back users in our own backyard as well as those in other cities and countries. By leaving out your location you might as well add “Spam Robot Planet” as your location.
No. 4: Follow and be followed. Have approximately the same amount of followers as those you follow. If you’re following 2,000 people and only get followed by 10 that’s a pretty good sign you’re a spammer.

As far as getting hacked, never enter information into a spoofed screen – you can usually tell by looking at the URL or if you click on a link and you’re already logged in and are asked to log in, again. But, you knew that, right?