Adidas and Samsung team up for miCoach

More than a website, MP3 player or phone, miCoach is a total coaching system that creates personalised training plans, keeps tabs on your stats, and coaches you along the way.

It's a suite of impressive sounding sports coaching services that help you:

• Find Your Level: miCoach guides you through your first run to determine your fitness level.
• Set Your Goal: miCoach gives you a range of goals that suit your fitness level, and a series of workouts to help you reach your goal.
• Get Your Plan: With the help of professional sports’ top trainers, miCoach creates a customized training plan just for you.
• Play Your Music: miCoach lets you download 4 gigs of music, and can even customize a playlist to match your stride rate.
• Start Your Run: miCoach gives you audio cues to keep you on pace and in your target heart rate zone for the duration of your run.
• Track Your Stats: miCoach tracks your pace, distance, calories, stride and heart rate to keep you and your goals on track.
• Reach Your Goal: miCoach has everything it takes to get you there. The training expertise, the personalized coaching and the music all work together.

It all sounds great. It's only available on the Samsung F110 handset which seems to have the standard things you'd expect from a phone these days - 2mb camera, mp3/4 player, 1Gb flash memory but with the added extra of the ability to keep track of your running data - heart rate, speed, distance and stride and to manage your personal miCoach programme.

The phone is currently on sale at Carphone Warehouse in the UK (and has been for about a month now it seems). In addition, Adidas is offering a £25 voucher for all new miCoach phone owners.

Is this just a marketing gimmick or a genuinely useful bit of kit? I'm a little skeptical because at the moment, it's all focussed on one single handset. If it was software that could be downloaded on to a range of handsets then I believe it would be a much longer term proposition for Adidas. I don't have any figures on how well feature-specific handsets do in the marketplace so it's hard to judge this one. If you're half-way through your contract, would you pay for a sim-free version of this handset? Or is this only something you might consider if your contract was up and this happened to be an option at the time?

Comments please, especially from any handset marketers out there or customers who have a view on this stuff. (I'm trying out disqus which I'm told is very good).

Quick Thursday linkage

A new blog worth having a look at is MSearchGroove from Peggy Anne Salz who I met recently at the Mobile Content Mixer at the Savoy Hotel (in the basement, where there was no mobile signal so you couldn't use your phones - not ideal for a MOD audience (mobile-obsessive-disorder).

Mobik looks to be doing interesting things in Australia and South East Asia around offering free SMS from your PC or a java application on your phone in return for receiving adverts. I still don't buy the fact that you have to bribe your audience into looking at adverts but if it means you build up a sizeable audience and that they are responsive *enough* then I guess the model can work and they claim to have 500,000 members already (I wonder how many are active though...?). If I were a brand, I don't think I'd like to force anyone to look at an advert though, but maybe that's just my personal preferences coming through.

I think the messaging part of this is interesting though as it uses the internet to distribute the SMS, but it looks like the other person receives the SMS as usual in their inbox. Of course, as time goes on, we'll be seeing more messaging applications and blends of email, SMS and instant messaging on our mobiles - Hotxt being a case in point.

Mobile ticketing being used at the 2000 Trees Festival courtesy of Tixmob. The logistics of this one are interesting. Typically, if I got to a festival, I buy my ticket and tickets for friends. Way before the event, I make sure they have their ticket so I don't have to be responsible for it. It's not very clear to me how you get the ticket from your phone to someone else's phone. And also what happens if you accidentally delete the ticket message or your phone gets nicked or the data is wiped for some other reason?

I like the idea in theory, but I'm wondering about the logistics of it all. O2 tried paperless ticketing for their VIP area at last year's Wireless Festival in Hyde Park. In the end, it was useless. The girls on the gate just let folks through by showing their ticket so there was no kind of monitoring. Of course the added benefit of getting your ticket on mobile should be that you get a link to the festival's wapsite where you can see all the latest line-up changes, weather reports and general news and gossip from your phone. But we're a year or two away from that happening. The BBC's wap effort for Glastonbury was more or less useless in the field as the information wasn't up to date :(

Samsung and Girls Aloud team up with a c0-marketing and promotions deal. I wonder what mobile content we'll see on the back of this? Maybe it's time I got a Samsung phone to check all this stuff out.. anyone at Samsung want to be kind enough to ping a phone over to me so I can review Samsung Fun Club stuff?!

And finally, Decktrade's "awesome" FAQs. I've never seen anything quite like it! Can anyone explain to me what a 'core of awesomeness' actually is please? If you're interested in mobile advertising as a publisher or advertiser, I recommend you head over and talk to the friendly folks at Admob instead, who are so [quietly] awesome, they don't need to put awesome in any of their marketing materials ;)

Samsung and Die Hard 4.0 team up for mobile action

I don't have a Samsung phone these days so I've no idea what the substance of the content is here as I have a Nokia (Dear Mr Samsung, please feel free to send me a lovely shiny new Samsung phone if you feel so inclined...), but the joint campaign for Samsung and Die Hard 4.0 looks pretty good and works in three parts...

1. Get free Die Hard 4.0 related content for your phone (text in DH to 62945 to get the link - but only if you have a Samsung phone - don't bother if you don't have a Samsung phone as they won't let you in to the wapsite).

2. Buy the official Die Hard mobile game

3. Enter the Die Hard Quiz for a chance to win blockbusting prizes

As it's all Samsung phone specific, I can't test it for you. And you'd have to be the die-hardest Die Hard fan to upgrade your phone to a Samsung on the back of this campaign. But for customer retention, I think it works. And there's nothing wrong with a bit of customer retention. There should be more of it!

If there are any readers out there who've tried out this campaign or have more information about it, then please do let us know if the content was any good and if it worked for you.