24/5 The Mobile Marketplace and Consumer Protection PolicyThe 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 13/5 Mobile Advertising by Sharma, Herzog and MelfiMobile 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 20/3 Taptu about mobile megatrends and mobile social searchInteresting 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 23/2 US Flat rates for voice, data, texting and emailVerizon, 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. 21/2 iPhone suits Google wellGoogle 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. 09/2 The mobile phone: a wonderful example of a "leapfrog technology"Hugh Pickens (found via Slashdot) writes:
"CBC News has up an article by Peace Corps volunteer Heidi Vogt, a woman who served in the small village of Gono in Mali five years ago and remembers letters dictated and hand-carried by donkey cart or bicycle to the next town. Vogt recently returned to see the changes that cellphone communications have made in a village that still doesn't have electricity or decent drinking water. 'Gono's elders say the phones can keep them in touch with their village diaspora,' writes Vogt. 'Villagers depend on far-off relatives to send money in time of crisis — if someone is sick, if a house has caught fire, if there's been too little or too much rain and the harvest is poor. There's a new sense of connection to a larger world. In a village where most people can't read or write, they can now communicate directly with far-off relatives.'"
See also:
This week's economist about Technologies in emerging economies. In the intro The limits of leapfrogging the mobile phone turned out to be a wonderful example of a "leapfrog technology". 29/1 Mobile Services 2008, Technopark Zurich, May 15, 200815/1 Addendum: Media vs OperatorsAs an addendum to this post:
The Operators vs. the Media Brands by Chetan Sharma
[...] If we look at the strategic canvas of the mobile data industry, it’s clear that operators currently have a huge advantage over media brands. Mobile operators’ advantage in the current landscape comes from their superior reach, as well as the capability they have to segment and profile users. Their current influence over the ecosystem is a magnitude ahead of media brands. However, in other areas, such as user experience, content, and the ability to be quick to market — media brands have a stronger strategic footing, and they will use it to close the gap in the other areas.
[...] Operators and media companies sit at the exact opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of cultural and media savviness. Mobile operators are very engineering focused and extremely conservative in their approach to the critical operational aspects of running a cellular network. Media companies, on the other hand, come up with the most creative ways to express a brand message in a landscape that would burst the brains of the very brightest network operators with all of its consumer nuances and related myriad creative intricacies.
[...] To be successful over the long term, operators need to focus on the unique elements that only they can provide — such as location, presence, user profiles and platforms for applications; as well as device and network APIs — and build business models around abstracting this information so that the ecosystem can utilize them to enhance user experience and usage. Such an approach will enhance their competitiveness in the media ecosystem, keep the usage and ARPU levels up, and get more entrepreneurs and users involved in moving the industry to its next milestone.
As for the last paragraph, operators are no longer the only ones who can provide location, presence, user platforms for applications. However operators are certainly the ones who could provide device and network API's. But that would mean that most operators have to change their ways of doing by 180 degrees.
Another angle from John Hockenberry
Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged. 13/1 The old model will work for the next two, three years, but then it's overIt's an old article (18.12.2007) from the Financial Times Germany, but I think it is a relevant one (thanks Timo).
Basically it comes down to this: E-Plus CEO Thorsten Dirks initiates a strategy change. They no longer believe in the walled garden strategy doing everything by themselves, but they see that they have to cooperate with creative internet companies.
The portal strategy (T-Zones, Vodafone Live or iMode...) has failed. For clients these portals are not attractive enough: they are too expensive and not user friendly.
And there is no time to loose. The incumbents do not have more than two, three years, then their current business will be dead.
Quotes from FTD's E-Plus bricht mit altem Geschäftsmodell
Selbst mit eigenen Angeboten wie den multimedialen Kurznachrichten MMS, Handyportalen wie T-Zones, Vodafone live oder gar dem Schmalspur-Internet iMode erlitten die Netzbetreiber Schiffbruch: Sie sind für Nutzer zu umständlich, zu teuer, zu unattraktiv.
[...] Statt alles in Eigenregie anzubieten, will sich E-Plus lieber an externe Dienstleister halten - und an deren Umsätzen teilhaben. Wie stark, steht noch in den Sternen. "Noch sind wir in einer guten Position, mit den attraktivsten Internet-Unternehmen Partnerschaften einzugehen. Noch haben wir Technik, Wissen, Kunden und Kanäle zu bieten, die sich andere erst mühsam erarbeiten müssten", sagte Dirks.
Die Zeit drängt. Allenfalls zwei bis drei Jahre könnten die Netzbetreiber noch von ihrem heutigen Geschäft leben, analysierten die Düsseldorfer intern.
[...] "Im Mobilfunkwettbewerb geht es um Ideen, Geld und Tempo. E-Plus hat seine Schwächen offenbar treffend analysiert - und zieht die richtigen Schlüsse", sagte Arndt Rautenberg, Telekomexperte der Strategieberatung OC&C, zu den Plänen. Defizite sieht er hingegen bei Marktführern - weltweit: "Gerade die Ex-Monopolisten wollen noch zu häufig alles selbst machen. Das kann nicht funktionieren."
Die Mehrzahl der Netzbetreiber sei weiterhin davon überzeugt, neben dem Zugang zum Mobilfunk auch künftig noch die Inhalte und Dienste bestimmen zu können. Dafür fehle ihnen oft nicht nur die Kompetenz, sondern auch die entsprechende Kultur und das passende Personal. "Es ist schwer abzuschätzen, was der Markt morgen oder übermorgen verlangt. Breite Partnerschaften mit einer Vielzahl kreativer Unternehmen sind daher die bessere Strategie als der Versuch, alles in Eigenregie entwickeln zu wollen", sagte Rautenberg. 14/12 Mobile Revenue Share and Expenditure Share Business ModelRevenue Share Model over Content Business Value Chain
In the Mobile Content Business value chain there are several parties (ie. Telecom Operator, Platform Vendor, Content Aggregator, Content Owner or Creator, Content Sponsor etc) involved nowadays. Everyone is involved here for their own benefits. From my experience I have seen that the operator tries to lower their CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) as well as the OPEX (Operational Expenditure). Hence Revenue Share business model came in the scene to satisfy all the related parties. Here in this article I will not just try to describe on the Revenue Share Business Model but also will try explore some concept on the Expenditure share model.
Didn't read it yet, so I am not sure if I will agree;) | |
