Weekend reading for June 13
Friday, June 13th, 2008
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.”
