The MoPR Blog

Text messaging hazardous to your health? It could be if you are texting and not paying attention. According to a report from Fox News, people walking while texting are ramming into walls and doorways, falling down stairs and bumping into lampposts, parked cars and garbage cans. Read the whole piece here.

Women get their game on. New research from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) reveals that forty percent of gamers are women. Additional findings in the ESA’s annual survey of consumer demographics and usage behaviors indicate that the average age of game players has risen to… 35! This research, says the ESA, shatters the stereotypical image of gaming having, say, a sole audience of slacker male teens.

Other findings of interest:

• Sixty-five percent of American households play computer and video games;
• Thirty-eight percent of American homes have a video game console;
• The average game player is 35 years old;
• One out of four gamers are over age 50;
• Women age 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent); and,
• Forty-one percent of Americans expect to purchase one or more games this year

Generation Why. A great piece appeared in last week’s edition of Seattle Post-Intelligencer that offered tips on how to communicate with co-workers, across the enterprise and generations. From the article:

In general, boomers (1946-64) still prefer the phones they grew up with, Gen X (1965-82) is big into e-mail, while the youngest members of today’s work force, the “net generation” or the Millennials (1982-now), strongly prefer real-time communication technologies such as IMing and texting.

Interesting. Here at MoPR HQ, we sit mere feet across from each other and do we talk to each other? Yes, of course we do. But, we IM up a storm too. It just seems….easier. On the other hand, if we really want to get in touch with a reporter or writer, we usually pick up the phone to call them. It all depends on the scenario.

Frankly, we think email could be completely extinct in the coming years – many of the generation of youngsters coming up in the ranks will demand Facebook-like apps to communicate with each other and their co-workers. What do you think?

Former Googlers launch their own search site. Called Cuil [Cuil is the Gaelic word for both knowledge and hazel and rhymes with "cool"] the new site generated a ton of buzz, but has gotten tepid responses from the media and users who have actually tried it. We tried it out and were a bit perplexed on the results, but can see the site gaining users. We did like the rollover definitions and imagery that accompanied each search. Our only question… When’s the mobile version?

Visit our virtual mobility museum. Do you dig mobile and wireless technology like we do? Do you enjoy history? If you do then you’ll get a kick out of our Museum of Mobility History (MuMoH) we launched a couple of weeks ago.

The museum is both a physical collection of mobility firsts — first-ever portable computer, first-ever PDA, first-ever handheld electronic game — as well as a virtual collection.

Check out our blog and feel free to join our wiki community.

Mobile users want smart and sexy. A recent survey by J.D. Power and Associates reveals that the average price paid for a handset has increased by $9 over the past six months. It also says the number of consumers who reported receiving their phones for free dropped to 33%, up from 36% a year ago. The increase, says J.D. Power, is attributed to more users buying more expensive smartphones.

In the same study, consumers were also asked for the reason behind their choice of handset model. Of the top three reasons given, ‘style’ was the criteria cited by 41% of respondents, coming ahead of ‘received for free’ (25%) and ‘ease of use’ (23%). This also happens to be one of Melissa’s personal mantras – “fashion before function”!

Google and Yahoo! still top mobile searchers. According to Nielsen Mobile Google and Yahoo! are the overall leaders in mobile searching. Google leads in mobile Internet search provider share followed by Yahoo!, together accounting for 79% of the mobile Internet search market.

At 9.0 searches per month, Google users search more frequently than users of any other mobile Internet search provider.  Yahoo! is the third most frequently-used provider, with Yahoo! users searching 6.7 times per month on average.

44% of Google users rated their satisfaction with mobile Internet search between 8 to 10 on a 10-point scale, compared to 40% of Yahoo! searchers.

White space equals more ad dollars? digital SIDEBAR is launching a mobile ad platform that delivers interactive ads through the white space in mobile phones. The service will be piloted before going public according to MarketingVOX.

“White space” represents the space not used to make a call: the screen that appears when a user is dialing, the hang-up screen, or the time between sending and receiving a text message.

Ads are targeted by age, gender, interests, use pattern, day and time and can include links to games or other media. Content may be forwarded to other customers, says MarketingVOX.

Cool site of the week. Meeting a buddy for a beer across town? Want to pick someplace in between? Fire up your browser or in our case, an iPhone, and check this out.  Mezzoman – Meet in the Middle is a simple but elegant solution for selecting a middle ground for meeting-up. Enter your address and your friend’s address – and even choose the type of place [Italian? Indian? A movie? A pub?] and you’ll get an address and location of someplace “in the middle.” They have a Facebook app as well.

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.

Look behind you TV execs – it’s online TV. According to a new report from Ipsos MediaCT, traditional TV is winning the battle for viewers – for now. Slowly and steadily, PCs are “capturing an increasing amount of screen time among those who download or stream video online” according to the report.

The quarterly tracking study investigating digital video usage and behaviors in the U.S. showed TV watchers are increasingly getting their action from somewhere else, like their PCs.
Are users flocking to other devices such as portable video devices or mobile phones? Not quite yet. Yet.

Mobile spying report: We’re homebodies. Chances are you read about this week’s brouhaha over the study by a group of researchers that tracked mobile phone usage geographically. The study found that nearly half of the people tracked kept calls to a circle of geography no more than six miles wide.
The study was based on cell phone records from a private company, whose name was not disclosed.

Old media still has a fighting chance. Conversation Agent, a favorite blog here at MoPR, linked to a timely presentation by Jeff Jarvis that lays it all out for media professionals. In a nutshell, Jarvis says today news is less about a one-way message to readers than it is about contributing to the conversation. But, it’s also about distributing news via new avenues, such as links and feeds, and finding and participating in existing communities.

Take some time to watch the slideshow – especially pages 28 through 33 – that illustrate nicely how media is morphing into a different beast. The presentation really energized our thinking on how to share our own client’s story and message.

Marketers will do more online ad spending. More than three-quarters of marketers surveyed in a study by Eloqua and reported by eMarketer.com say they will increase their social media spending during the next three years. Seventy-four percent plan to increase their direct e-mail spending while about two-thirds will spend more on mobile texting and SMS.

Nine out of 10 marketers said they would continue to increase their direct online ad budgets. Unfortunately for traditional print media, “55% of respondents said they will probably decrease print ad spending in the next three years.”

eMarketer also projected that advertisers will spend $3.8 billion in mobile messaging advertising in 2011, up from almost $1.5 billion in 2008.

Make a mobile donation. Now there’s an easier way for organizations to accept donations – text message giving. Supporters of an organization’s cause can send a text message from their mobile phone to a specific keyword/short code and their $5 or $10 donation can be applied to their cell phone bill.

Obama vs. McCain Political Website War. Vanity Fair looks at the importance of campaign website design and evaluates our current candidates’ offerings.

Our favorite part of the post was design expert Doug Jaeger’s assessment of Obama’s site and his praises of the candidates’ social networking campaign, including “Obama Everywhere” that illustrates all of the sites Obama links to such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blackplanet, FaithBase, Digg, Twitter and more.

Hat tip to Read/Write Web for flagging this comparison in Vanity Fair and for its own insightful review of the candidates sites and online images.