The MoPR Blog

It’s a short, weird week here at MoPR what with the July 4 long weekend and Canada Day on July 1, so we’re bringing you the usual Friday blog post on Thursday.

So not J/K: Mobile phone users want text messaging. A new report by ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc. and conducted by independent research firm Amplitude Research says a whopping 73 percent of new cell phones buyers are demanding text messaging as a main feature. Texting capability demands were followed by Internet (61%) and email capabilities (63%). Also scoring big was music (34%) and video capability (33%). Users are increasingly using phones to check email: 41% of the survey respondents who use a cell phone with emailing capabilities said they send or check for emails one to five times a day.

Mobile advertising slowly climbing. According to a new study by BIGresearch , advertising account planners aren’t exactly piling on mobile advertising to their ad plans although phone users [90%] are increasing in numbers- meaning there’s a growing audience ready and waiting. The proverbial silver lining? The important and elusive 18-24 year old segment is increasingly being influenced by non-traditional forms of advertising.

According to the analysis, cell phones are much more likely to trigger an online search for young consumers than all adults (21.8% v. 8.3%), as is text messaging (15.3% v. 4.8%).

The 18-24 year old set is also more likely to download to a cell phone than the general market (31.6% v. 15.9%).

Interestingly, more than half (50.5%) of 18-24 year olds communicate with others about a service, product or brand via cell phone (compared to 29.6% of all adults), second only to face-to-face communication (66.9%). They are also almost three times as likely to communicate through text messaging than all adults (30.7% v. 10.8%).

The Twouble with Twitter. Our love/hate relationship with Twitter is not news. It seems the service is down more than up, while posts seem to magically disappear in front of our eyes. But now comes a potential competitor from Canada: Identi.ca.

Identi.ca, launched by Control Yourself, Inc.,  lets users post short messages which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web.

According to the press release, “Identi.ca is similar to existing microblogging sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce. Unlike those services, Identi.ca’s underlying software is available under an Open Source license.”

But like Twitter, it seems to be very slow - and down - frequently. Might not be the great Twitter killer everyone has been chatting about, but at this point it does have potential to be more open than Twitter.

Client news: Cascada announces Cascada Mobile Breeze. Our Toronto-based client, Cascada Mobile, officially announced its Breeze development platform on Monday. Breeze lets users create and distribute mobile applications using basic HTML and JavaScript. It’s really that simple. CEO Alan Lysnee shows some example apps here.

Client news: Talkster adds Skype and Google Talk compatibility. Long time MoPR client, Talkster announced its integration with Skype last week and kicked off this week with the announcement that its’ Free World Dialing Service can now be used from Google Talk for free calling in countries not yet supported by Talkster’s ad-supported calling service.  With the Skype integration, Talkster callers with Skype subscription plans can use their Skype account (and free local calling minutes) to make free international and group calls to cell phones and landlines in 34 countries.

Google Talk for the iPhone. Google has announced a new US version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch. From Google’s press page:  “In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you’re on the move, too! Google Talk runs entirely in the browser so there’s no need to download or install anything.”

Mashable’s take? “It’s kinda useless.”

Take the Smartphone Challenge. The PhoneStore is hosting something they call The SmartPhone Challenge. Companies that take the challenge [though we’re unclear what the actual challenge is] can test five BlackBerry devices programmed with their phone number, email and contacts with full managed Microsoft Exchange hosting and BlackBerry Enterprise Server Hosting from Rackspace, for 10 days at no charge. According to the website users can select a date, provide the information then launch the 10-day challenge. Hats off to the PhoneStore for a great promo campaign [and a hat tip to Blackberry Cool].

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.”