SMS graffiti in Rome

Paul Notzold of Txtualhealing.com is doing interesting things using SMS as graffiti. The idea is that you send in your text message to the central system and then the messages are projected on to buildings (interior or exterior) in specific shapes or formats. In the recent installation in Rome, Italy, as part of the Urban Portraits programme, the text messages appeared in speech bubbles.

Art meets mobile meets social media. Very interesting...

Realeyes 3D win again

Realeyes 3D are doing some very cool things with mobile phones. By simply moving your phone, you can move around pictures and websites. You can check out how it works over at youtube. In fact, it's such a cool application, that not only did it win the Momo Global Peer Award at 3GSM in Barcelona this year, but they've also just landed a Red Herring 100 Europe award. This annual award is given to the top 100 private technology companies based in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). Well done Realeyes 3D and let's hope with this success, the software will be installed on more cameraphones hitting the market.

The effects of online advertising... ads are putting people off visiting a website

Ok, so it's not mobile, but it is related since we are now beginning to join the world of ad-funded content in mobile with the success of Admob and the likes of Greystripe's in-mobile-game advertising. The article linked to here describes an experiment in online advertising to see how much it affected people's likelihood to return to a site.

...Our findings suggest that advertisements do have significant effects on retention of the site. Also, advertising content that is non-congruent with the site's content seems to lead to greater effort in reconciling the differing content, and ultimately greater memory of both the Web site and the advertisement.

Intrusiveness is also important for both Web site designers and advertisers. Pop-ups and pop-unders seem to be more intrusive than in-line ads, implying that users should not be interrupted from their online tasks to close the extraneous windows....

This probably isn't news for those of us who hate pop-ups and pop-unders but having 'scientific' evidence is a step forward to drumming it home that you need congruence between the publisher, the style of ad and the product or service being advertised.

Future Technologies Conference at Oxford University 13th April 2007

Looks like the week after Easter is a busy week in mobile. Not only do we have Swedish Beers on the 11th April (courtesy of our lovely friends at Tanla Mobile) but there's also an extremely reasonably priced one-day Future Technologies conference at the University of Oxford on Friday 13th April. It's well worth a look if you're interested in mobile technology and in particular mobile web and innovation. And it's a bargain £95 for the day *including* refreshments.

Extremely useful handset and mobile web stats from m:metrics

As ever, the lovely folk at m:metrics have been doing their stuff again and have provided us with some juicy stats on the top 10 handsets in the UK by sales and by installed base. The really interesting thing for me about this is that all of the top 10 handsets by sales and 7 of the top 10 handsets by installed base have a colour screen, a camera and wap access. The future is bright, the future is mobile!

Top 10 handsets by sales (3 month average ending Jan 07) in the UK

Make	Model Name	Subscribers
Sony Ericsson	W850i	145,032
Sony Ericsson	K800i	132,978
Samsung	D900	109,752
Nokia	6230i	102,822
Samsung	E900	91,388
Nokia	N73	88,721
Sony Ericsson	K750i	87,187
LG	KG800 Chocolate	76,710
Samsung	D500	74,252
Samsung	D600	73,326

Top 10 handsets by installed base (3 month average ending Jan 07) in the UK

Make	Model Name	Subscribers
Nokia	6230i	1,614,909
Samsung	D500	981,663
Motorola	RAZR V3 Black Edition	932,762
Sony Ericsson	K800i	879,901
Nokia	6230	860,477
Sony Ericsson	K750i	792,681
Nokia	6280	781,564
Samsung	D600	774,267
Nokia	3310	769,520
Nokia	1100	744,444

They have also just announced their MeterDirect service which is the first research service to directly and continuously measure consumer mobile media behavior, unlocking mobile as a viable medium for advertisers. The first report reveals the top 5 US and UK Mobile Web Domains in February 2007.

The US sites are heavily geared towards things you would do on the internet anyway (searching, instant messaging and entertainment) whilst in the UK we're browsing the network operator sites. I wonder how much of that is an o2 user looking up what's going on on orangeworld for example or if people are loyal to their own network operator? Good to see the BBC up there though - it really is a good example of a mobile web site for usability.

Top Mobile Web Domains: February 2007
United States		United Kingdom
Domain	Company	Domain	Company
google.com	Google Inc.	google.co.uk	Google Inc.
yahoo.com	Yahoo! Inc.	o2.co.uk	O2 (UK) Ltd
msn.com	Microsoft Corporation	orange.co.uk	Orange Personal Communications Services Limited
live.com	Microsoft Corporation	bbc.co.uk	British Broadcasting Corporation
go.com	The Walt Disney Company	three.co.uk	Hutchison 3G UK Limited

A few links for you

First off, the podcast/videocast of the last MoMo London event is now live courtesy of Clarity Partners. It was a demo night so there are lots of short demos and right at the very end, Roving Reporter Keegan interviews some of the audience to get their reaction. I think I'm right up there with Bridget Jones' roving reporter skills!

Today I was on a panel for the Guardian's Changing Media Summit which was really interesting. I was ably accompanied by Justin Davies from NinetyTen (makers of Buddyping), Tom Hume from Future Platforms and Andrew Scott from Playtxt. In the Jeremy Paxman role was Mike Butcher of Vecosys and he also blogs about the event here. I'm pleased to say that we didn't use powerpoint (good thing) but the session seemed to absolutely whizz by without covering topics in enough depth so I left feeling I could have said a lot more (well, we all did actually). Jemima Kiss has blogged about our session over at the Guardian and I believe the event was filmed so if those films ever make it into the wild, I'll let you know. There are good write-ups of all the sessions in the Greenslade section of the Guardian website. Go see what you missed.

I just stumbled across this directory of web 2.0 services including a section on mobile. Might be worth checking out and adding to it if you know of a service that should be up there. There are certainly some interesting links up there.

And well done to Alfie, JC and Ben at Moblog for their Channel 4 deal for 'The Big Art Mob'. It's a really interesting project whereby anyone can send in pictures from their mobile of 'art' in their area, whether that's graffiti or statue or whatever. And they're using location tagging to create a map of where the art can be seen. Looks pretty cool to me. Go check out the Vecosys sneak preview of it. This follows hot on the heels of Moblog's support for the recent Red Nose Day.

I know there's more to write about - I have a backlog as long as your arm, but being busy on client stuff, sorting out the next WiMD (28th March) and Swedish Beers events (11th April), still suffering from a post-3GSM lurgy and generally trying to live life has meant I haven't been as giving as usual on the blog front. I will try to do better in the coming weeks!

As if one event's not enough... Swedish Beers next event is Thursday 5th April

*please note date change to Wednesday 11th April*

We had such a blast in Barcelona (courtesy of MyStrands and Colibria) that we thought it was about time we got together againfor the fun that is Swedish Beers in London at our usual haunt, the Nordic Bar, London W1. A sponsor for the bar is yet to be confirmed (anyone want to volunteer?) but the usual rules apply.. i.e. no powerpoint, no speeches, just mingling and networking with friendly people like you who are also interested in things mobile. We attract all sorts from within and without the mobile industry, which makes it interesting. You can read about our past events over at the Swedish Beers blog.

So the date for the diary for Swedish Beers Mobile Networking is Thursday 5th April - that's the day most of us break up for Easter Wednesday 11th April (so it's *after* Easter) and the proceedings will kick off from 6pm.

Our event sponsor will be the wonderful Tanla Mobile so the first few beers will be on them.

skål

Steve, Seth and Helen

Interested in how to market to the over 50s

And in particular, what that means to online and mobile companies? Then you may well be interested to join our next Women in Mobile Data event. It's on next week on Wednesday 28th March and is being hosted by the wonderful Amdocs at their offices in Fetter Lane. We are very proud to welcome Dick Stroud from 20plus30 as our speaker - he's a published author and general guru when it comes to understanding the diverse demographic that is the over 50s and he's taken time out of his busy schedule to come and talk to us. The event is free, but please RSVP to Gillian Kennedy so that we can make sure there is enough space and are enough refreshments for everyone and also to comply with Amdocs security procedures.

The event is open to Women in Mobile Data members - it's free to join and you need to be a woman working in mobile data to qualify (maybe with an operator, aggregator, content developer, applications development, mobile marketing or mobile is part of your job in another sector like publishing, the arts, enterprise, whatever). If you're not a member already, then please email me with a little bit about yourself (name, company, contact details, why you'd like to join) and then I can add you to the list. Don't worry, we won't spam you - that's just not our style.

If you are a man and would like to come, that's fine but you need to make sure you're accompanied by a member.

There are a few more details over at upcoming.org and we hope to see you there.

Update 23 April 2007: The podcast of the event is available now. It's a free download but it's quite a chunky file. Well worth a listen. A round-up of the event is here.