The MoPR Blog

Text-based mobile ads get traction. Limbo and GfK Technology released their latest joint Mobile Advertising Report (MAR) that reveals that mobile advertising awareness grew 33 percent in nine months against a backdrop of six percent growth in cell phone usage. This suggests an increased allocation of advertising dollars to mobile formats through the first nine months of the year.

According to the report, nearly four out of 10 Americans with a cell phone (104 million) recall seeing advertising on the device between July and September 2008. This is the first time the number of Americans aware of mobile advertising has exceeded 100 million in a 3-month period. The most commonly viewed ads were in text messages – 60 million consumers recalled seeing text message-based ads – an increase of 42 percent in nine months. Some of the specifics include a couple of surprises:

• 57 percent male, 43 percent female
• 52 percent are between 35-64 years of age, 28 percent are aged 50 and above and just 43 percent are under 34

Companies: An online presence works. Though getting real-time, 24/7 online access to company news and reaching responsive and efficient PR representatives still rate high on journalists’ wish-lists, reporters are increasingly sourcing stories from new forms of media as well, according to research from Bulldog Reporter and TEKgroup International, Inc.

Nearly half of journalists report visiting a corporate website or online newsroom at least once a week, while nearly 87 percent visit at least once a month.

Journalists also claimed they read corporate blogs, with nearly 75 percent following at least one blog regularly, compared with about 70 percent a year ago. More than 75 percent of journalists say they use social media to research stories, compared with about 67 percent last year. Nearly 19 percent of journalists receive five or more RSS feeds of news services, blogs, podcasts or videocasts every week, compared with only 16 percent a year ago, with about 44 percent receiving at least one regular RSS feed.

Mobile web sites not quite there. Yet. Yankee Group today released a new report that shows mobile Web sites struggle to deliver an effective experience to the millions of consumers they serve. The mobile Web site market is growing at a rate of 10 percent per month and is expected to become users’ preferred method of accessing the Web in the next 10 years. Therefore, the mobile Web platform represents a major opportunity for companies to leverage, especially in tough economic times when other market opportunities may be stagnating.

Carl Howe, a director in Yankee Group’s Anywhere Consumer research group and the report’s author, says, “Satisfying mobile users isn’t rocket science, yet our report finds that the average mobile Web site has significant room for improvement. Although most of these Web sites are functional, few provide anything specifically designed for mobile users, instead relying on reformatted desktop content. The average score of 54 shows just what these sites are: average.”

Ouch.

Museum of Mobility History makes the news. If you’ve been reading our blog for some time you know we are passionate about mobile technology and the industry. We’re also interested in knowing where our industry has been and where it’s going. We were honored when the local Fox affiliate in Portland wanted to cover our museum on its Good Day Oregon. In each segment we got to nerd out on all things mobile. Here’s one of the segments where John Sidline talks mobile games

Interested in learning more about mobile history? Visit us.

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.

“Okay, you guys… [ cell phone rings; he pulls out a tiny cell phone ] Hold on. Hello? Yes. Really. Splendid. [ hangs up ] We’re going to the Dolce & Gabbana show. How fast can you have your bags packed for Milan?”

As the boss at Jeffrey’s, Will Ferrell (making his third MoPR blog appearance) demonstrated for America the marriage of fashion and mobility technology. In February 2001, with his super-mini cell phone, Ferrell helped us understand that the glitterati wanted technology compact and gilded; a sort of functional jewelry.

By Fall of that year, the boss at Jeffrey’s was placing a call on a phone not unlike the 1973 model held up in this picture of Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone. “Big is the new small,” Ferrell’s character informs us, after he hangs up from his call with Cami Diaz.

Mobile phones, (aka cell phones and portable phones), began to flourish in the 1980s. But research and development into mobile phones dates back to the 1920s.

Built long before the transistor, imagine the size of the wooden box filled with vacuum tubes used to house the first mobile “phone” (like the one shown in this 1924 picture). Likewise, imagine the size of the batteries used to power it. Walking around with such a phone was not only impractical, it was impossible. So the first mobile communications devices were built into vehicles, primarily for military and public safety use. They also worked on radio frequencies (VHF) and were never part of any phone system.

The technology concepts for true cellular networks were not conceived until the 1940s (see MoPR Mobility Minute: US Patent 2,292,387). With transistors replacing vacuum tubes and better networks becoming available, cellular car phones were introduced – once again battery size keeping true mobile communicators out of the pockets of the glitterati.

By the 1970s mobile phones were portable enough to be carried around like a briefcase. By the mid 1970s, at last a phone that can fit in the palm of one’s hand. Martin Cooper, a former general manager for Motorola, is widely considered to be inventor of the cell phone. Placing the first call over a portable phone — to his rival Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Laboratories, where he began his conversation by saying “Hello Joel, guess where I’m calling from?” — Cooper not only invented the mobile phone, but also the phrase most widely used by people with new mobile phones.

With the cost of cell phones and cell phone calls making adoption prohibitive for most people, many calls were made for only two reasons: first, the person being called had to guess where the caller was calling from; second, the caller had to inform the person being called that a second call would be placed once the caller got to a landline.

By the 1990s the cost of phones and calls were making mobile phones attractive to the general population. Today many cell phones, now able to fit easily into the palm of the hand, a small purse or even the pocket of tight-fitting jeans, come free with an annual service plan, and lower per minute rates and prepaid plans make it possible for a much wider swath of the world’s population to enjoy getting their friends to guess where they are calling from.

Now state legislatures are taking up anti-cell phone regulation to keep people from talking while driving and cell phone etiquette guides would become widely available, and widely ignored.

Text messaging allows people from all over the world to send short instant messages from phone to phone and helps people learn to type with their thumbs using only 10 keys. Amazing.

As adoption increases so do features. Sharp Electronics of Japan put a camera into phones in the early 2000s, and now camera phones are included on a very wide variety of cell phones, including those given for free with annual subscription plans. Suddenly people all over the earth were taking pictures of themselves with camera phones to send people visual clues to help guess where they were calling from.

Ringtones helped personalize phones by allowing a ring to sound like your favorite song or to have different rings for different people. For example, when my wife calls my phone plays “Don’t You Love Her Madly,” by the Doors. When I call, the “Darth Vader Theme” rings over hers.

By 2006, with low-cost phones and plans making it possible for Americas teenagers to have their own camera-equipped cell phones, text messaging became a disruptive nuisance in the classroom. Fortunately, the mosquito ringtone was invented, which produced an obnoxious sound like the buzz of mosquitos that adults cannot hear but are audible to obnoxious teenagers. Now these teenagers can text one another in class without disrupting the lecture with rings or buzzes from vibrating handsets.

Okay fine, you kids go and play with your phones and send text messages about how lame the grown-ups are. But in the end, we’ll have the last laugh. Grown-ups are taking over MySpace (subject of a future post).

By the way, our much-beloved Will Ferrell wasn’t the first comic genius to teach us about the marriage of fashion and mobility technology. 35 years before Jeffrey’s opened its SNL doors, Agent Maxwell Smart was placing calls from a shoe.

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