The Future of Cell Phone Advertising?

A lot of people are wondering whether cell phone advertising is actually as big as everyone claims to be. If you are one of those people too, I’ve got something to tell you. It is going to be much bigger than most people can ever imagine. Let me tell you why I think so.

1. The sales of smart phones. Even at the time of a global recession, the sales figures of Apple iPhone and Blackberry have been very good. The number of people who use smart phones has more than doubled in the past few years.

2. Various studies show that smart phone users are most likely to recall ads and other stuff. They spend a lot of time surfing, playing games, watching TV, and shopping on their phones. In other words, they spend a lot of quality time with their phone – which is exactly what marketers want.

Take Pandora for example. It is an online service provider which allows users to design their own radio stations depending on their preferences in music. It is a free service which is backed by ads. Pandora has been in the business for nearly nine years now and it currently has a whopping six million users. Some of its notable clients include Best Buy, Nike, Dockers, Puma, Domino’s, and Target. They all buy ad spots on Pandora regularly.

These big brands have been using Pandora in their own ways. Dockers, for example, offered 20% flat discount to everyone who used the promotional code ‘Pandora’ on their website. Puma, which was one of the sponsors of the movie Fast & Furious 4, allowed Pandora users to buy shoes that were featured in the film. It goes on and on. One thing that the marketing houses of all these big brands have been saying is this – the response to cell phone advertising exceeded their expectations. The average response rate was somewhere around 5%, which is way more than the average response rate for online ads.

The icing on the cake is the statement of Rob Weisberg of Domino’s. He said that marketers these days have no choice but to take cell phone marketing seriously. They need to be where their customer works, lives, and plays.

All I’ve got to say is simple – wait and watch. Like I have always claimed, cell phone advertising will become bigger than any other form of conventional advertising methods.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

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T-Mobile G1 from Google - A detailed look

So, the much awaited Google phone has been finally released. Called the T-Mobile G1, the phone looks quite dashy. Being the first phone to use Google’s Android operating system, G1 has managed to generate quite a buzz in the market.

The handset, built by HTC, looks neat. The way I see it, its shape reminds me of the iPhone. G1 has a slide-out keyboard which is very convenient to work on. The phone has a trackball and a touch screen. The device is capable of running multiple tasks at a time with relative ease. You can access Gmail, Google search, and Google Maps easily. The device also has a 3 megapixel camera, which is surprisingly good, Wi-Fi, GPS, full HTML browser, and offers five hours of talk time.

Overall, T-Mobile G1 is a very nice phone. It will be officially released on October 22nd. Customers will be asked to sign a two year contract with T-Mobile. T-Mobile has priced it at $179 and offers two different plans for customers – unlimited data and limited messaging for $25 per month and unlimited data and unlimited messaging for $35 per month.

The most attractive factor, the USP, of the G1 is the open source Linux based OS, which allows developers around the world to create different types of mobile applications for the phone. Users can simply download the applications they want through the Android market. And unlike Apple, T-Mobile has no restrictions on applications. So, users will be able to download whatever application they want, any time.

In my opinion, T-Mobile G1 will appeal to technophiles and hardcore smart phone users more than anyone else. The phone is chic, loaded with features, and runs on an open source platform which leaves lots of room for innovation – quite a nice combination, don’t you agree?

Categories: Google, All things mobile phones.

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Mobile social networking rapidly gaining popularity

Social networking is the in-thing now and it’s evident from the number of people who access MySpace and Facebook dutifully every day. In fact, people are so much into these sites that they want to be connected all the time. However, you can’t carry a laptop all the time and you can’t go to a browsing center ten times a day to update your status in your Facebook profile and to catch up with your friends. So, what do you do? Simple – you access these sites in your mobile phone.

The practice of accessing social networking sites on mobile phones, called mobile social networking, is becoming more and more popular with mobile users these days. The biggest reason is the iPhone. It literally changed the way people perceived mobile phones and now iPhone users top the chart in mobile internet usage.

According to statistics, more than 85% of iPhone users access the internet from their phones. This is an incredible number, to say the least. Smart phone users come second in this list. People, especially young ones, who have internet facility in their phone, access social networking sites regularly.

A report from Nielson says that 1.7% of all mobile users in the U.K. visited social networking sites on their cell phones regularly. It’s 1.6% in the U.S., 0.8% in Spain, 0.6% in Italy, and 0.2% in Germany. Experts predict that these numbers will more than double in about two years and mobile social networking will become popular big time.

MySpace, followed by Facebook, is the most accessed social networking site on mobile phones. In December 2007 alone, the site had close to 3 million visits from mobile users. In the U.S. and all over Europe, there are tens of thousands of regular mobile users who log into MySpace regularly. We’ve already seen how popular MySpace can be, but still these numbers are incredible.

I think these numbers will have a significant impact on mobile service prices in the coming days. Thanks to this overwhelming popularity of mobile social networking and other similar things, operators might be tempted to cut down the rates for data plans. One example for this would be Vodafone UK. In its latest monthly plans, it has added unlimited internet access as a standard feature. We might as well see other companies follow suit.

Categories: Apple iPhone, All things mobile phones, Mobile Social Networking, Apple.

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Mobile News Network from the Associated Press

Joining the list of companies that have launched their own mobile portals, the Associated Press released a multimedia news portal for mobile users called Mobile News Network. This news portal will have everything from local news to national news and international news and you can access it any time you want to, right on your mobile phone.

Unlike the usual run-of-the-mill news sites, the Mobile News Network aims to offer a complete multimedia experience for mobile users as it lets you access photo galleries, videos, and a variety of other news content. You can get your daily dosage of entertainment, breaking news, weather forecasts, sports, and finance right from this portal. Also, you will be able to rate the news items and share them with your friends on the go, which I think is a very useful feature.

If you are an iPhone user, you’ll find this news portal even more interesting, as this web application is optimized for Apple iPhone. You can access it from www.iphone.com/webapps. Since it’s optimized to offer a rich experience for smart phone users, AP is sure that they will find this app very appealing. I think this news portal has the potential to serve as a single access point for all sorts of news, especially for smart phone users.

AP has also mentioned that it will release improved versions of this app in future which will have additional content from other broadcasters and special features to improve user experience.

Categories: All things mobile phones.

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