Carnival of the Mobilists #155

Photo credit: Creative Commons from Carf via Flickr.

Happy New Year to everyone from technokitten in London Town. I hope all the hangovers are put to rest and you're all raring to go for a wonderful 2009. Yes, the holiday break is over and it's time to get the mobile ball rolling again with the first Carnival of the Mobilists roundup for 2009.

A look to the past and future

Inevitably with New Year there is always an element of looking back on the year just gone as well as a look to the future, and our mobile bloggers are no exception.

Looking back, we have Renegade Fanboy covering Nokia's most important news in 2008, James Pearce gives us a retrospective of the last two years at dotmobi and Digital Evangelist discusses his own mobile usage over the last year (he is arguably a Promobs) whereas Renaissance Chambara tells us what normobs really use (well, the normobs in his life anyway).

Looking forward we have some very interesting posts indeed: Chetan Sharma has completed his 2009 predictions with aplomb by compiling the thoughts of a wide variety of mobile industry folks (including me, in case you were wondering). Rudy De Waele has given us (well me at least) a lot of food for thought with his take on what 2009 will bring. I'm just hoping he knows as many start-ups as I think he does so that number 10 doesn't sound so terrifying. C Enrique Ortiz discusses the future for Mobile Applications in 2009 (including the ongoing debate between native and web apps) whilst Frederic Guarino tells us why 2009 is the year of the Mobile Web.

Mobile Marketing

Looking more at the mobile marketing side of things, Andrew Grill has done a comprehensive review of Social Media Marketing and shares some of his thoughts on its contents with its implication for mobile, and mjelly shares knowledge on mobile internet affiliate marketing schemes and newcomer Dave Levy of MLTDA talks to us about the growth of mobile email and its impact on campaigning (political, marketing or otherwise).

Mobile Development

In terms of mobile development, Tom Hume (rightly) questions mobile context and argues there is more than one mobile context and asks you which one/s you're going to choose. There are interesting things afoot with barcode ticketing for UK railway companies according to Masabi. Vision Mobile tells us about the Adobe Mobile Packager and what that means in terms of where the desktop and mobile environments are headed.

The Industry

Ajit Jaokar over at Open Gardens shares his theory about Net neutrality being like capitalism... covering global connectivity, the fact that human nature is to gravitate towards freedom and what impact that has on MNOs in the mobile broadband world and beyond whilst Steven Hoober of Little Springs questions where the device ends and the network operator starts and what that means for customer service.

Devices and software

Ever thought about how secure your iphone is? Well you can find out here from allaboutiphone.net, and more importantly, what you can do about it whilst Tams Blackberry Blog tells us why the Blackberry Storm is failing and being returned.

Twitter is obviously the new black, in case you were wondering, and Wap Review has done a fantastic review of the best twitter mobile web clients on the market today so there's no excuse now to keep up with your twitter feed. Meanwhile, Igor Faletski takes new mobile browsers through the acid 2 test with some very interesting (and visual) results.

And last but not least, Judy Breck of Golden Swamp (and worthy guardian of the Carnival of the Mobilists) ponders the mobile as a knowledge tool and the part that plays in the Outliers (aka Story of Success).

Post(s) of the week

This is a hard one with such good quality posts and writers this week (as ever). For predictions, then you really must read both Chetan Sharma's and Rudy De Waele's posts. And personally, I'd like to see more discussion around Tom Hume's post on there being more than one mobile context. Perhaps some of you may indulge me?

Carnival of the Mobilists

The last Carnival of the Mobilists of 2008, #154, can be round here and next week's carnival 156 will be hosted by Wap Review. And if you're wondering what on earth the Carnival of the Mobilists is all about, then have a read of this and join us on the ride that is 2009.

Technorati Tags: mobile,carnival,carnival of the mobilists,mobile marketing,mobile web,mobile internet,devices,mobile software,mobile browsers,predictions,statistics,mobile statistics

A few links on a Wednesday evening

I have so many Firefox and IE tabs open that I thought I should share some links with you all of what I've been looking at over the last few days.

Estonia becomes the first nation with mobile voting. Ok, it's a small country, but still, an interesting development.

Youth are not interested in mobile marketing. Graham Brown from Mobile Youth shares his thoughts on the matter.

There's a job going for an artistic hermit at The Manchester Museum. Actually, it sounds like a really interesting project. I'm wondering how I could blag my way into that one.. how does one qualify as an 'artist' these days?

Over the past year, 300 pupils in the UK have been involved in an experiment to use mobile phones in lessons to record movies, take photos or set homework reminders. Reporter Anna Lacey visits Park House school in Newbury to find out whether the project has been a success for the BBC. I'm very pleased to see mobile technology being used for educational purposes.

Mobile Awesomeness - a showcase of top mobile websites from around the globe.

Taptu whitepaper on making mobile search social (they've also just raised a nice bit of funding too as it happens).

Insights into iPhone usage from Nielsen. It's US centric but it's still an interesting read even if you're not in the US.

Cellphone shopping makes wallets redundant in Japan from coupons to using your phone to pay for stuff. It's only a matter of time before it happens here in the UK too as the O2/Telefonica NFC trials were very successful.

Mobile beats full-fat internet in ROI study from Quattro and comScore. The most interesting point for me is that the comScore/Quattro Survey found a significant percentage of the audience to be “mobile only” visitors to the measured brand destinations. This is consistent with other research I've been looking into in mobile usage in the UK. There appears to be a growing band of mobile-web-only customers.

Technorati Tags: mobile,education,m-commerce,metrics,mobile web,mobile search,research,mobile marketing,mobile internet,wap,iphone,mobile youth,mobile voting

Research findings re UK PC & mobile internet usage

And very interesting it is too. The white paper compares UK PC & mobile internet usage by age and gender. It takes a look at the impact of smartphone ownership on mobile internet usage as well as where the key growth areas are on mobile internet usage compared with PC internet (email, social networking, search).

From the figures there is certainly a male youth bias but it's not as strong as one might have thought, especially with smartphone ownership being significantly higher in men than women. Overall there's a skew towards men at 59% vs 41% women whereas PC internet usage is pretty much even. And 25% of the UK are using the mobile internet which is also very encouraging.

I've also been looking at some interesting research conducted by itsmy.com regarding their customer base and attitudes to mobile social networking and the mobile internet. It's also well worth a look (it's a free PDF download). There were a couple of particularly interesting things to note... there's a growing base of mobile only customers who also don't have an email address. And mobile internet usage is evenly split on itsmy.com between men and women... so I would suggest that if you give women what they want, they're as likely to use it as men.

Technorati Tags: mobile,mobile internet,pc internet,comscore,mmetrics,social networking,mobile social networking,mososo,research,gender,mobile data

Silly mobile tariffs

I spoke at the Future of Mobile conference recently and stated silly mobile tariffs were holding us back as an industry. And they are silly. They're complicated, there are too many of them, there's lots of very small print (which I can't read even *with* my glasses on), extra roaming charges on a per megabyte basis (who knows what a megabyte is anyway and how do you know the size of a page *before* you click on it?) and well, they're just so unnecessary.

And if you don't believe me, go take a look at MobileMeg who has attempted to collate all UK mobile data tariffs (albeit I suspect it's a little out of date as I know Tesco has recently introduced a new mobile data tariff - yet another one!). It's not pretty and it's not clever. Network operators - sort it out! Complexity is not a good thing.

Technorati Tags: mobile,mobile tariffs,tariff,tariffs,mobile data,data charges,network operator,UK,megabyte,roaming

Papa John's generates $1m in sales in the USA

 

I've just been reading about Papa John's foray into mobile commerce over at Mobile Marketer.

"Pizza chain Papa John’s International Inc. has generated more than $1 million in sales from mobile Web orders in less than six months after offering that option to consumers.

The milestone comes after Papa John’s earlier this year crossed more than $1 billion in overall online sales – up from $400 million in 2007 – and launched a Facebook page that quickly attracted 175,000-plus fans in less than a week. The mobile commerce push led to the introduction yesterday of an iphone site for Papa John’s."

So it looks like Papa John's is doing pretty well then. 1% of overall sales via mobile sounds about right to me. And no mean feat to accomplish that within 6 months of launch.

You can see the mobile site at http://www.mobile.papajohns.com. It's completely reliant on setting up an account with Papa John's which can all be done from your phone and once registered you can link through to your local Papa John's menu and delivery options. You can also use the related SMS service once you've created an account. It remembers your favourite pizzas so reordering is faster.

At the moment about 20% of all orders are via digital channels, including mobile but the powers that be suggest that digital channels may overtake voice pretty soon.

The also note that the digital orderers of pizza are typical Papa John's customers and are not specifically youth or after smaller orders (which makes sense to me as you do have to register and can't just order off the cuff - of course once registered, it's easier the next time). And I suspect the iphone application is even easier to use. And of course it makes perfect sense. You can order your pizza from the bus or train on your way home and you arrive home at the same time as your pizza. Brilliant! Certainly less annoying than shouting your order down the phone with the rest of the passengers listening in to what you're going to have for dinner.

Admittedly, I don't order pizzas very often, but I just might if it was that simple to do from my phone already without having to hunt for the leaflet that got stuck through the door and probably went straight into my recycling bin anyway.

I remember talking to Papa John's agency in the UK many moons ago about a very similar service but the idea was ditched in favour of printing more leaflets. But then that's another story...

Technorati Tags: papa johns,pizza,m-commerce,mobile commerce,mobile coupons,mobile ordering,mobile web

Follow me on twitter

Yes, I'm still blogging here from time to time, but frankly, I just don't have the time to write up all the stuff I want to write about. Don't panic, I'm not going to stop writing here but I am doing quite a lot of microblogging which you may be interested in. So rather than miss out, you can always follow me on twitter instead where I'm known as technokitten. I talk about lots of random stuff there, including a few juicy snippets and links on articles related to mobile so feel free to add me. You don't have to join in the conversation if you don't want to (although you'll get more out of it if you do), you can simply lurk if you prefer. And yes, I do keep my profile private so you'll have to ask permission, so please make sure I can tell that you're a real person (i.e. a photo of you, a short bio and a link to your blog or website is *really* helpful) and not some kind of spambot or serial killer.

Welcome to the twitterverse...