It was twenty years ago today

Well, almost. It’ll be twenty years ago on 3rd December since the first text message was sent over the Vodafone network and a new era of communication and data dawned or should that be ‘spawned’? It took some time for SMS to break through to the mainstream, but when it did, it seemed to happen pretty fast. Now it seems a bit old hat as I find myself reverting to email, twitter, facebook and IM to connect with friends, family and colleagues. As for calling, well, I barely need that function on my phone any more. We’ve all been part of this change and it has been hardly noticeable as we migrate from one service to another. And with these changes, you’d think that incumbents like Skype and BBM had the sector sewn up. But if Skype’s future isn’t as clear cut as we may have thought, that means there’s still wiggle room and there’s still scope for new services to emerge and I’m interested to see how and when these take off.

So the newest kid on the block is yuilop who happen to be based in Barcelona, one of my favourite cities in the world. My friend Phil has gone to work for them and I challenged him on why he’d chosen to go and work for a start-up in, what I thought, was a market hard to penetrate and with little (obvious) sources of revenue for all the above reasons. And why would you go for yuilop and not, say, Whatsapp (which seems to be almost ubiquitous now and a real threat to the once dominant BBM)?

Yuilop seems to have greater ambitions than Whatsapp or BBM and calls itself a ‘social communication app’. It allows free rich media messaging (so audio, pictures, video – what the operators may have described as MMS once upon a time), free yuilop to yuilop voice calls (all via mobile) and on top of that, you can message your friends who are not on yuilop via standard SMS or voice. This means you can get in touch with your friend who has an old Nokia handset without app capability and still message or talk to them. The latter has some significant cost to it, but they don’t charge customers for this at the moment, but instead require them to get Energy by getting your friends to sign up and by engaging in consumer offers. The free calls and messages angle is always popular in youth markets and they’re savvy when it comes to taking advantage of them.

The ad-funded telco offering is not new. We saw it with Blyk back in the day, and more recently with Ovivo Mobile. But it’s a tough one. Will the maths stack up or, like one commenter on Yuilop’s Google Play page, should you just let the customers buy credit if they want to? I’ve been wary of wholly ad-funded services for digital services. The danger is that you attract the freeloaders who suck you dry and find every loophole in the system. They’re also the customers who will never ever respond to an advert. Or even if they did, they don’t have the money to spend anyway. The customers you’re trying to attract can probably afford to pay. It’s a dilemma. That’s not to say new business models shouldn’t be tried. They absolutely should. And our digital lives are changing and moving so fast, exponentially even, that anything could happen and the innovators and the businesses nimble enough to try something new are the ones who will win out in the end.

So is there room for something like Yuilop? Yes, I think there probably is. They’ve had very fast growth in the last 6 months with over 30,000 Google Play ratings which is just a proportion of the overall number of downloads, it’s clear that this one is doing something right. If they can get the balance right between consumer insight and marketing offers, then they’re on to something. Add in a dollop of big data when they get to 250,000 customers to do interesting targeting beyond age, gender, location and device, and we might start to see some interesting results for advertisers and customers alike. Will they catch up with the likes of Viber, Whatsapp, Kakao, Line, Skype and more? Time will tell.

Phil from yuilop will be in the UK on 17th October and you can meet him to talk about the opportunities with yuilop in Spain and the UK at Swedish Beers.

Find Yuilop online at http://yuilop.com, on Facebook and Twitter. Download the app for free. Currently compatible with Android and iOS.

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Want to know more about what exponential actually means? Well, I could explain it, but I’ll leave it to friend and colleague, Russell Buckley, to do that in this short video.

Tuesday Tasters

In no particular order:

India's primary web connection is via mobile not PC

Vodafone is linking up with DatingDirect to offer mobile dating. I thought they must have already been doing mobile dating, but clearly not. And by the sounds of it DatingDirect is having troubles of its own if you read the comments on the link above so I wonder if Vodafone has chosen the right partner. Hmm. Elsewhere, Mobestar has teamed up with Bone Fish to offer mobile dating using its mDate service.

Mig33 is doing exceptionally well with 400 million customers in 200 countries for its mobile messaging service. "Simply download the application onto your mobile phone, and you’ll be connected to everyone around the world through the most popular online services. So you can IM, visit chat rooms, send email, share photos, SMS and, of course, make cheap calls—all from your mobile phone." More info at Mig33's website. Of course, they also have 10m dollars in the bank, so that's going to help get the service out there.

Meanwhile, MVNO Amp'd is shutting up shop leaving thousands of customers network-less. Customer services stopped yesterday and the service will shut down completely at the end of the month.

Incentivated is ramping up its recruitment.

Skandia Cowes Week is using SMS for research purposes. A series of short questions relating to that day's sailing will be sent via text message to each of the competitors. Questions will be asked on numerous topics, including the quality or difficulty of the course, the accuracy of the weather forecasts and the standard of stewarding.

And finally, young Britons prefer meeting face to face than using digital methods. Get away! You mean young people prefer going out socialising, going to gigs, dancing the night away, chillin' at a festival and hanging with their mates than spending time in front of a computer screen. Well I'm not sure I actually needed a research paper to tell me that. But there are some other findings that you might find interesting in there.

So much to write about, so little time

Ok, this post is going to be a little random as I'm very short on time but need to capture a few things on my blog before my firefox explodes with having too many tabs open simultaneously.

So it seems to be conference season.. World Telemedia last week in Amsterdam where I talked about mobile marketing in the PRS (premium rate services) world and then on Tuesday I was moderating a panel at Internet World around mobile marketing in the age of personalisation with very able speakers Stephen Pinches from the FT.com and Robert Thurner from Incentivated. I'm also due in the Heist Conference for Education Marketing today (I've got as far as my wonderful hotel room at least) and I'd really like to catch some of the sessions to help set the scene before I'm on this afternoon with Robert Thurner again and also Ramesh from Active Media. So I digress, lets get on with the links 'n stuff.

Voip and MSN/Yahoo/Skype messaging on your mobile from fring. Has anyone tried it? Looks like it's a pretty neat application that sits on your mobile phone allowing you Voip and integrates with your existing messaging apps. My poor old Nokia N70 is due for retirement so I'll hang fire in downloading this until I upgrade. But if anyone else has used it, please comment here.
Update: Alfie's done a rather good review of Fring over on his moblog. And both he and Whatleydude recommend it. So I guess I'll just have to get on and download it and use it myself then!

MP3tunes locker - this looks like a good idea - you can back-up all your mp3s from your 'puter for free and then you can access them anywhere over t'internet thus allowing for a back-up of your music but also the chance to access those choons wherever you are. It'll even stream over mobile (make sure you're on a flat rate data charge mind!). Another one I must try I reckon.

Limbo has raised USD8m for their reverse auction company. The founders are ex Enpocket (who were always good at raising cash it has to be said) and seem to be doing a good job of bringing the reverse auction concept to the US masses. As it happens, reverse auctions were in the news last week as well as Million-2-1 (who are one of the largest UK reverse auction houses) were up for a Eureka award last week at World Telemedia but lost out to ZoneMedia's made-for-mobile horror short series 'When Evil Calls' (it's not for the faint hearted!).

It seems teens are interested in receiving ads on their mobile phone so that should bode well for Blyk provided they can work out the economics to pay for it all as I discussed with one of the Blyk team in the back of a cab to Victoria after the W2F party (ably sponsored by our friends at Tanla Mobile).

Emma's Diary launches on mobile for expectant mums whilst GMTV and Opera's in a pickle again amid allegations that for some of their competitions potential winners were picked on the basis of their location and type of abode thus ruling out those living too far away or in tower blocks as these were too tricky for cameramen to reach. Opera brazened it out last week at World Telemedia and I've heard tell along the grapevine that they are in current negotiations with a very large UK broadcaster for a very large phone and text service despite the fact that it was said broadcaster who exposed them in the first place. The plot truly thickens and I'm sure we haven't heard the last of it and I'm quite sure we don't have the full story either. I guess it'll all come out in the wash..eventually.

Today's letter is J

Well, it feels like it. I was about to write up a piece on Jaxtr and how it compares with JaJah but The Voip Girl has beaten me to it with a rather good round up and she even throws in Jangl for good measure so I'll leave it to her rather than reinvent the wheel.

And if it wasn't so late and I wasn't so tired, I might find the energy to properly test SugarCandy or SgrCndy if ur in txt spk mde. Looks to be a group text messaging service but it uses email addresses rather than mobile numbers so I'm a bit confused. Perhaps the SugarCandy guys can explain how it works to us SMS shortcode addicts here in the UK?

Of course, we already have Hotxt here in the UK but that does necessitate downloading a java app to your phone, but once done, is pretty easy and cheap to use - and it looks a LOT easier to use than SugarCandy. How are you supposed to remember all those commands? And then there's also Phuser which I haven't yet had chance to try out which brings messaging and social networks together. George, I *will* give it a go, I promise!

Seems to me the digital world is a very exciting but complicated place. I can see how normobs (Ewan's term for normal mobile users) could get very confused and just not bother even trying to find out about this stuff and it's going to take some educating of the market to get this stuff to take off beyond the geeks and enthusiasts.