• Global Trends on Mobile Marketing: Most interesting slides as they had actual and factual information from a survey listing different trends and technologies which are used in marketing. Notice that LBS has a HUGE growth potential (“planning to use in next 12 months vs have used in past 12 months”) and that majority of marketeers still rely on messaging. LBS drum has been hammered for years now as The Next Big Thing. But to me it comes with no surprise that iPhone does not have MMS support – it is expensive, cumbersome and mobile/closed (vs web/open) technology apparently invented (read: sucked out from a pencil) only to bring you junkmail. Multimedia exchange between peers feels much more potent via social services running over the (mobile)internet using internet methods (http, e-mail, social sharing services) than via monstrums like MMS. From my ignorant point of view, MMS represents a greedy mockup by operators who hope that it will follow the success of SMS (which, unlike ugly-CORBA-successor-SOAP based MMS, is a neat and clever hack on top of existing GSM network). I hope MMS dies soon.
• Estonian Operators Mobile Advertising Reach Package: Rrrright. After reading “2/3 of mobile internet traffic comes from operator portals” I understood that I’ve never given much thought to the difference of Mobile Internet and Mobile Broadband. For me mobile broadband internet is just a Pipe going through the Air into some Processing Device. Sometimes the device is attached to a computer, sometimes the processing device itself has input-output and user interaction capabilities and sometimes the broadband comes in sub-GPRS speeds. And operators are fighting hard not to become mere Pipes, hoping they could maintain their walled gardens. I still don’t believe that 2/3 of handset browsing only goes to the operator portal, but then again, most people don’t use technology the way I do or they don’t use it at all. After getting a glimpse of what the global trends are (technology, attitude and the unique right place-time-location mantra) it came a little shocking that the only thing they provide is a way to buy wholesale ‘dumb pixel squares’ on mobile ‘web’ portals. No demographics, no advanced features. Nothing.

  A suggestion to operators who are evaluating their location based services (and advanced marketing) strategies for Mobile *Broadband*. Mix LBS with web technologies such as Gears Geolocation API to give location aware ads and web content to desktop browser. A good (also a bit scary) example was JoikuSpot, which turns your 3G Nokia phone into a WiFi hotspot. The landing page of the hotspot displayed a Google map with the location of your mobile…

• Mobile Marketing Case Studies: There have been moments when I’ve thought that operators exist only because of football, because different big football events are very often natural stress-tests for mobile messaging technologies – spikes in traffic are guaranteed during New Year and world cup. Life in mobile messaging revolves around football, so did the Snickers campaign launch just hours before an important match. Does some big operator (Vodafone? Telefonica?) already own some FCs? If not, they should!

I’m not really into advertising and I hate annoying popups and ‘look here what we have to offer!’ pictures. I’ll have to wait until *marketing* guys come up with something technically advanced like offering meaningful information when I check for better prices in a supermarket.

EMT, an Estonian mobile operator, provides a very interesting service named call filtering what essentially is a user-programmable call router for your GSM number. It allows you to have whitelists and blacklists of phone numbers you want to receive or drop or forward to another number – without a ‘beep’ on your phone.

Traditionally you could either switch off your phone (and lose all calls), forward calls to voicemail or another person (and lose all calls but still get SMS messages), keep your phone in silent mode if you do not want to be disturbed but would still want to see who calls you (and possibly answer some calls) or just press the red button to get rid of annoying callers.

Jaiku is all about enhancing your mobile experience. Rich presence and status information on your mobile device – what we are all used to from IM networks – is here to stay. But IM clients/networks have also something I would call ‘rich contact and privacy management’. Take a look at Skype privacy settings or think about the last time you blocked an annoying user on some IM network.

Now.. Just as Jaiku Mobile integrates with your address book and allows to share your status and location with folks in your address book – wouldn’t it be nice if selecting ‘block this person’ in your rich address book would actually propagate the blocking action down to the GSM network level and answer all calls from that person with ‘phone not switched on’ message? Or instead of checking your silent phone every time the screen lights up during a not-so-important-meeting to see if this is your sick mother/wife/child or Big Boss calling, you could just activate a ‘busy for others, available to important people only’ mode/whitelist ?

Clearly the ‘passive address list’ used as the address book in most phones is not enough and Jaiku is one application that could make a difference. The quest for a unified address book has not yet seen a full solution and the future looks bright!

That’s all folks!

Ja faili sisu oli selline:

Vot siuhke jabur lugu siis. Peamine – Kapten sai laeva juhtimisega ilusti hakkama.

Operaatoritel oleks ammu aeg selliseid teenuseid bulk-müütada. Näiteks 100 meeldetuletust kuus – 50 krooni.

Oleks esimene kord, kui lõppkasutaja saaks SMSi kohaletoimetamise aega mudida. Ehk oleks isegi võimalus saata 160+ tähelist SMSi interneti kaudu (Hei! Elisa.ee, aasta on 2006 ja 140 baidi piirang on 99% ajalugu!)