Manhattanhenge - today's the day for it

If you're one of my Stateside readers, you may not be aware that it's Manhattanhenge today!

So if you're in New York City, you can check out going.com to find places to go where you can experience the phenomenon. And maybe Spinal Tap will do a Manhattan version of their rock tribute to Stonehenge.

May your equinox be well today....

Via my pal Lisa via her friend Danielle Cyr.

dotmobi database to make mobile developers' lives easier

Andrea Trasatti dropped me a line the other day to let me know about his new appointment as Director, Device Iniatives for dotmobi. As part of this, he'll be overseeing the new device database that dotmobi is putting together. It's early days yet, but Andrea's in charge of designing, building and launching this new service.

"The database will provide structured data, accurate to a degree not found in existing public resources. Information will be obtained from – as well as shared with – the global development community and published online. This will simplify the development process and enable developers to create the very best experience for users, based on comprehensive and reliable intelligence."

Sounds like a great resource. Good luck with it Andrea!

Ringtones are the thing... or are they?

Well, it's pretty busy as usual at technokitten towers so just to keep my hand in with what's hot in mobile right now, here's some Friday linkage about ringtones 'n stuff.

Tele2 is running a user-generated ringtone competition in Sweden. Unfortunately, I don't speak Swedish so I can't tell you much about it! Perhaps a Swedish speaking reader could shed some light on this for me?

Cellfish.com introduced its Mobile Threat collection of hardcore punk, metal and indie rock ringtones, videos and image downloads for mobile this week. This means that the next time you ride public transport, you just might get an earful of GWAR, Shadows Fall, Everytime I Die, Chimaira and The Devil Wears Prada – consider this your early warning notice. Cellfish Media has partnered with the Sounds of the Underground summer music tour to bring the hard rocking genre of music fans a collection of mobile entertainment to suit their tastes... I think I'll stick to the theme tune from Fame as my ringtone for now ;)

But it seems that mobile games are the new black when it comes to revenue generation rather than ringtones. That comes as no big surprise to me as you can use mp3 files now for ringtones and it's not *that* difficult to make your own from your existing mp3 files.

So it's no surprise that free mobile content seems to be gaining popularity and some serious traction. Zedge.net now has over 5 million subscribers. I'm not sure how many of these are active, or what they're actually doing, nevertheless, it's impressive.

And since April 2006, I'm reliably informed that Cellufun, has delivered close to 4 million downloads to consumers in 160 countries. Cellufun offers free, ad-supported mobile products, predominantly free games ranging from Sudoku to casino to space battles and racing games. You can join the community by going to http://wap.cellufun.com from your web-enabled mobile phone.

And if you're a mobile addict, gaming or otherwise, you can now play with your phone safely in the bath as DoCoMo has just launched a waterproof mobile phone. Actually, joking apart, this would have been handy at Glastonbury this year, I know a few folks whose phones died after getting wet in the rain or being dropped in a puddle or the mud!

Tuesday tidbits on mobile marketing and advertising

Is Stelios planning to take Blyk on in the ad-funded MVNO game? Looks like it, with a model that sounds suspiciously similar to one of Spotcast's original models whereby a phonecall was interrupted with an audio advert - albeit targeted. Via SMStextnews.

Meanwhile, Virgin Mobile USA reported that it signed up roughly 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers for its Sugar Mama program, which "pays" them one minute of free call time for every 45 seconds they spend interacting with an ad on their phones or the company's Web site. Since the program was launched about a year ago, Virgin has given away 9 million minutes of mobile talk time. Read more about the programme here.

Mobile advertising works... if you bribe customers with free mobile content. And text based marketing seems to work best.

But others believe that the mobile marketing and advertising future is still too far away. I think the author has a misconception that it's operators who lead the mobile marketing and advertising world, when it fact it's mostly happening outside the network operators. Not least, because, anecdotally, I've been told that one large UK network operator isn't concerned about mobile advertising and it's barely on the radar... "if they make £100m this year on voice and £50m on data (I forget the actual figures) why would they worry about making £100k on mobile ads". And this seems to be borne out in a recent roundtable discussion (subscription required) on the topic with operators.

more Monday meanderings

but this time from Mike Grenville at 160 Characters... a few articles worth a read:

A new place to share ideas has been created, aimed specifically at NGOs, charity and NFP organisations to pool their ideas and resources about how to implement and use mobile technology effectively for social change. Shareideas.org is a wiki style community and blog with some very interesting stuff on there. It's refreshing to read about activity outside of the UK and USA, especially with a social or environmental bent.

How many sims do you have? And what's the impact on the *real* statistics about mobile usage? Informa's latest report might just have the answer. [I have 3 active sims - 2 contract, 1 pay as you go, and many pay as you go sims waiting to be activated when I need to test something].

Wap payments are more reliable than SMS payments according to those in the know at Bango.

A short history of telecommunications. Did you know it is 170 years since the first signal was sent by telegraph starting a period of rapid expansion of a communications network in the nineteenth century?

Monday meanderings continued

Dotmobi is giving city domain names away including Birmingham.mobi, London.mobi and Manchester.mobi. All you have to do is apply for the domain you want with a proposal of how you're going to offer a comprehensive city guide on the mobile phone.

Virgin bags online and mobile rights for The Football League to allow Coca-Cola Football League matches to be shown on its broadband and mobile channels. Highlights of Football League matches will be available to watch on-demand for up to one week after transmission.

Streamthru offers free flight information via your mobile phone. Really useful if you do much travelling. You get updates 4 hours before departure time, shortly before boarding and immediately if your flight is delayed by 15 minutes or more. I could have done with knowing about this when I was travelling earlier in the year.

And if you're travelling to exotic climes, the new malaria information service by text message might be for you.

But whilst you're travelling, don't buy cheap mobile phone batteries from China or Hong Kong for your Motorola or Nokia mobile phone... because it might explode. Nokia and Motorola, however, say they are very concerned about the substandard goods, particularly because their reputations are at stake in China, which has the world's largest number of mobile phone subscribers at over 400 million. Best to stick to the branded batteries for now.