Weekend reading for June 20
Friday, June 20th, 2008
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.
