Despite the avalanche of mobile apps that let people access local information, the mobile browser is still the king when it comes to finding out what’s going on in your city or neighborhood.

From TC

***

This will only increase in the future, when HTML 5 (see Wikipedia Entry as well) will finally show up. Apps became popular with the iPhone, but even if Apple gets even a bigger market share than now, the competition will increase (Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre etc.) and we get back to square one, meaning a heavily fractured marketplace.
The only way out of this, in the middle to long term is to see the web- aka mobile browser as the OS. So hopefully the current trend of the mobile browser remaining in the pole position will continue. It's in the best interest for all of us.

UPDATE:
(contrarian view) Rohit Sharma's The Browser Is Dead — Long Live the Browser
but see also Vic Gundotra about HTML 5, iPhone and Android

ANOTHER UPDATE:
App stores are not the future, says Google

Gil Beyda, managing partner at Genacast Ventures tells the MMF audience why Venture Capitalists are shy when it comes to investing in mobile. He goes on with:

“One: This is a brand new medium and device and we must look at it that way,” he said. “Two: It is not just a micro browser so we can’t take old paradigms and the way we were connected before and port it to mobile.”

Mr. Beyda also relayed that location is monumental, more so than with any other media.
He sees location based abilities as a differentiator for mobile devices because it is always with the consumer and is always tracking. Because of this, marketers can truly see the patters of usage and travel, giving them the advantage they need to turn basic metrics into revenue.

From Why venture capitalists aren’t eyeing mobile: MMF speaker via Mobile Zeitgeist


QR Code for MMF New York



QR Code for Grand Hyatt NYC




※ DokoDare

Mobile Monday #7: Making money on mobile. Here is the speakers list


DokoDare QR Code for the place




See also:
My presentation at Mobile Monday #6
My presentation this week at E-Learning Forum (in german)

versus




Rudy writes:

The fourth annual Mobile Sunday - an unofficial, informal and generally cool and funky gathering of mobile bloggers and their chums - will be taking place in Barcelona on the eve of this year’s Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM) on Sunday, February 15, 2009, starting at 7pm CET.

Sadly I cannot make it to the Mobile Sunday to see all the good people around Rudy, but at least we can make it easier to bookmark the place. Scan the QR Code:



You naturally can also type the address in your mobile phone - but your mobile phone only for now : http://dokodare.kaywa.com/place/202031520

PS: If you like to bookmark the place, write a 140 letter message at the place location, check in etc., you better open up an ID. And if you have a question, do not hesitate to ask.

PS2: Two posts you don't want to miss:
Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction? (GOOG) by John Borthwick
and
Google Latitude by John Battelle

Update from plus8star: to clarify: dogs and demons are everywhere! Dogs are inoccuous but efficient, demons are impressive but useless.
Thanks, that helps a lot to understand the title.

Is 3G a Dog or a Demon - Hints from 7 years of 3G Hype in Asia by plus8star

Watch closely slides 56 and 57 ;)
Slide 70 is also interesting: digital books page views - internet versus mobile.

The Federal Trade Commission (USA) on May 6 and 7 held a Town Hall meeting, entitled Beyond Voice: Mapping the Mobile Marketplace,” to explore issues surrounding the evolving area of mobile commerce (m-commerce) and the implications for consumer protection policy.

Leibowitz from FTC stated that as mobile technology evolves so to must consumer protection. He recognized industry efforts to self-regulate. He warned that companies should not burry notice and choice in privacy polices and stated that companies should obtain opt-in consent for mobile marketing, particularly for location-based offerings.

Regarding QR Codes:

Hairong Li, Associate Professor of Advertising, Michigan State University, stated that personalized mobile phones have become central to increasingly mobile lifestyles. He defined mobile advertising as any communication for promotional purposes by use of mobile devices. He identified two kinds of marketing strategies: (1) the push strategy, and (2) the pull strategy.From the pull strategy, Prof. Li highlighted QR Code, which is commonly used in Japan to provide consumers with coupons and discounts. Based on his mobile advertising research, primarily in Asia, he concluded that:

• The mobile phone is a dream medium for advertisers, but it has not been realized;
• Consumer initiated processes should be the primary form of mobile advertising;
• Mobile phone users are especially sensitive to intrusive advertisements; and
• Added value is the real driver for user acceptance of mobile advertising.

Read the full summary of the Town Hall meeting from Venable LLP

Via Colin Crawford

※ DokoDare

Mobile Advertising, Supercharge Your Brand In The Exploding Wireless Market

There’s plenty of buzz surrounding mobile advertising. The next step is transforming that buzz into real business. Mobile Advertising helps do that by covering the conceptual, analytical, and practical applications of mobile advertising, giving marketers, service providers, and investors in-depth guidance on tapping the full potential of mobile advertising.

Despite the excitement about mobile advertising, there are significant obstacles to overcome before the medium can become truly meaningful. Here, you’ll find a detailed and honest analysis of the hurdles that remain, as well as perspectives on managing and solving them. The authors address direct response promotions and advertisements; search advertising and its pricing and auction derivatives; and brand-based campaigning. While there’s work to be done, the authors remain bullish on the opportunity.

Table of Contents (PDF)
Mobile Advertising: First Chapter (PDF)

Positive Reviews:
Tomi Ahonen
Ajit Jaokar


Via ForumOxford

Interesting bits from the Taptu Whitepaper: Making Search Social (PDF) which was sent to me by Stefan Keller. I haven't found yet a place where one can download it easily.

Making Search Social by Taptu

There are four key megatrends that are combining to create the New
Wireless Ecosystem:

• Ubiquitous mass storage + processing power on handsets
• From mobile narrowband to mobile broadband communication
• A revolution in mobile UI
• From walled garden operator portals to open gardens
  

[...] Some observations about Generation Y (born 1977-2000):
In contrast to ultra-individualist X-ers, Millennials are grouporiented
-- meaning that they are less interested in an "army of one"
and more interested in the "watch me become we" alternative.
Group-oriented concepts such as "leave no one behind" may
emerge from the movies (2002 movies Lilo and Stich and Black
Hawk Down both used this phrase) and go mainstream.
(Note from me: This permeates japanese mangas, films and culture. Has this to do with the anime and manga culture Generation Y grew up? Would be an interesting research object for itself.)

[...] The nature of search in this new world
of mobile Internet devices will shift. This is because the journey that
Generation Y is taking on the Internet is more concerned with social
expression than finding information.

[...] There are four key aspects of “mobile search made social” which we will
review in the next four sections of this White Paper:
1. Social-assisted relevancy scoring
2. Easy sharing of search results
3. Human editing of search results
4. Crawling and indexing social info

[...] Social-assisted relevancy scoring
Level 1: Relevancy in general – what the world thinks is important
Level 2: Relevancy in your friends group – what your friends think is
important
A mobile search engine that operates at Level 2 requires a search engine
that can access your social graph and boost the ranking of search results
that your friends have deemed to be important. It would preferentially
show results that were more fun and more relevant to you in your social
context. For Generation Y, this would be a significant benefit.

See also:
Mobile Context by CEOrtiz

Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile introduce flat-rate plans

Verizon Wireless was quickly followed by AT&T and T-Mobile - three of the four largest wireless phone companies - announcing the new flat-rate plans, which cost about $100 a month. All three companies had their new plans available by the end of last week. Sprint, the fourth of the large phone companies, said it is testing a flat-rate plan.

[...] Verizon said. The basic plan costs $99 per month and covers domestic voice calls and some Internet use. For an additional $20 a month, customers can add text messaging. And for a total of $139 per month, video and mobile e-mail are added. AT&T’s plans are similar to Verizon’s and includes Apple’s iPhone.

It's still high, but if I look at my spending, it would already be worth the buck. In comparison:

Orange Swiss ARPU continued to drop from EUR 189 in the fourth quarter of 2006 via EUR 186 in the third quarter of 2007 to EUR 184 in the fourth quarter. The non-voice part of the total revenues amounted to 19.2 percent at the end of 2007, compared with 18.5 percent at the end of 2006.

61 Euro/month = $90/month. So if you target the heavy mobile phone users, the Verizon's $99 per month are certainly defendable.

And how much did the first flat-rates cost for internet? It was similarly high in the beginning. So there is much room for improvement - prices can only go down;)


See also:
The Switzerland Telecommunications Report 2008 where Orange has an ARPU of Euro 55 and Swisscom of little more then Euro 40.

Google homes in on revenues from phones

Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

If the trend continues and other handset manufacturers follow Apple’s lead in making web access easy, the number of mobile searches will overtake fixed internet searches “within the next several years”, Mr Gundotra said.


[...] mobile users increasingly want[ed] to browse beyond an operator’s own site.

“The world is changing. Users want an internet without fences. They know how to type in Google.com if they want to get to it. Two years ago the operators were still playing the role of gate­keepers but that is no longer the role for them,” Mr Gundotra said.