Marketing to the right audience on iPhone and iTouch

As the market for smartphones in general increases (they account for over 10% of mobile phone sales, up 12.7% in Q1 2009 compared to growth of 9.4% for standard phones, according to Gartner), and the segment captured by iPhone in particular increases (now accounting for close to 11% of overall smartphone sales as opposed to close to 6% a year earlier), it is useful to take a closer look at the new demographics of an iPhone user.

According to statistics for the US released by AdMob for the first 5 months of 2009, only 26% of iPhone owners are below the age of 24 (see chart pictured courtesy of AdMob).

That means that if you are targeting the youth segment (or 'Digital Natives') the iPhone may not be the best option for you. In contrast, iTouch users have a considerably younger age profile, with over 70% being under 24. While the device itself carries its limitations (you need a Wi-Fi network to do pretty much anything apart from listen to music), the spread of (free) Wi-Fi means that there are untapped opportunities to exploit the iTouch in order to address the youth segment.

I haven't seen a marketing insight report on the iPhone (in the sense of an in-depth qualitative study of a group of iPhone users conducted through one-on-one or group interviews over a extended period) but this could shed some light on whether the reality is that kids are getting their hands on their parents' iPhone and effectively sharing the within the same household.

The appeal of the iPhone and its exquisite aesthetics certainly represent a pull for kids and if cross-sharing is indeed taking place, this would mean that the 'real' proportion of the youth segment using the iPhone is much greater than the quantitively measured 26% being reported.

Layar Augmented Reality-Now Open for Developers

I first came across Layar at Mobile 2.0 Europe when I met Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald (aka DutchCowboy to Twitterers) and he demo'd the latest version of his augmented reality software on a G1 Android device.

I had previously taken a look at all the companies entered into the Mobile 2.0 start-up competition and, out of all of them, it was Layar that had really captured my imagination.

Why? Firstly, because it was something new (though not the first of its concept, it is certainly the best marketed augmented reality mobile software to date) that immediately brought to mind the famous Terminator movie, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, as The Terminator, scans the street and an overlay of information about the height and weight of people ahead of him is projected onto his vision.

Secondly, because I believe that the future of mobile is all about interacting intelligently with the surrounding environment (or location) and information overlays on street-view maps point in the right direction of this.

Today, Layar announced that it is opening up for business with developers, allowing access to its platform to a new wave of digital map layer pioneers. 50 developer keys are to be provided to interested companies from around the world.

You can see the full press release about this here: http://bit.ly/RgwTP

Mobile 2.0 Europe-Priya Prakash presents Nokia's vision on 'Beyond Free'

BARCELONA -Priya Prakash (formerly at Flirtomatic) presented Nokia's vision on what she see's as the customer's perception on what is (or should be) free on mobile. One of the insights included the fact that customers can perceive greater value from a mobile proposition purely by the fact they have to pay for it. More insights are in the presentation here.

Publish Post

Mobile 2.0 Europe-roundup

BARCELONA -Mobile 2.0 Europe has come and gone again this year, attracting once again some of the finest mobile minds and entrepreneurs to Barcelona.

The (now 2-day) European showcase of mobile startups and trends in mobile this year gave everyone some extra food for thought with Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability and Regine Debatty on Mobile Culture.

Tom gave a thought-provoking presentation on why most telcos are not doing enough about achieving sustainability (with some squirming in the front seat from Carlos Domingo of Telefonica but pleased faces from Vodafone, with Tom's thumbs-up of their corporate web policy on green issues).

Regine offered a visually pleasing interlude of examples of not-for-profit mobile art and culture, with examples of giant SMS mobile screen projections (SMS Guerilla Projector) on the backs of innocent pedestrians (check out www.we-make-money-not-art.com) .

The panel on 'Beyond Free' managed to top last year's after lunch panel (on the role of Mobile Operators in fostering innovation) in terms of provocative debate, fuelled by some diverging points of view between Inma Martinez (Moderator) and Ian Ginn (seasoned web/mobile entrepreneur).

The conclusion from the panel, if there was one, is that mobile startups are still seen as an (un)necessary evil by most VC's but are treated as misunderstood children because they don't fit in the VC's risk/return equations.

You can find all the links to the presentations on the official event site here. A big round of applause to Rudy,Carles and the rest of the Mobile 2.0 Committee for organising (and pulling off) yet another great mobile event in Barcelona.

I will post some of my videos of the presentations by Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless and Priya Prakash of Nokia, starting with this one below:

Call for Mobile Entrepreneurs:VentureBeat invites coolest iPhone and BlackBerry developers to submit entries

The good folks over at VentureBeat, one of the leading sites for news about Tech, Money and Innovation, are organising their annual MobileBeat event in San Francisco on the 16th July, with the theme of 'It's the Application, Stupid' (love the title).

They are now calling for submissions from mobile entrepreneurs worldwide to enter their TopStartup Award and get a chance to pitch their idea in front of over 400 leading industry experts, execs and VC's.

Last year over two hundred companies were considered for the awards, which went to firms such as AdMob and Loopt. This year the competition shifts to mobile applications and services, with 50 finalists to be determined and a final 14 to present live at MobileBeat on Thursday July 16^th.

Startups must complete and submit the following form by June 30, 2009 for consideration-so apply now if you are interested (you should be) by clicking here.

Some rules:

-Fifty finalists will be announced on July 2^nd on Venturebeat.com. Voting will then be open to the public to select the top seven companies per sector.

-Seven finalists from each category will present for five minutes each to the MobileBeat audience determined by judges as to avoid any vote manufacturing.

-Nominees must be younger than three years old. Special consideration will be given to companies that are launching for the first time.

Have a cool iPhone, Android or Blackberry app? Why not go for it-it could be your lucky break!

uLocate's WHERE launches on Palm Pre

As of today, WHERE announced that it is live on the Palm Pre and is already the 5^th most popular application in the App Catalogue.

According to Pam Deziel, vice president, Developer Marketing, Palm, Inc. "WHERE is a best-in-class application that brings together local and social information in a compelling UI, and we believe that it will prove to be very popular with Pre users.”

On the Pre, WHERE has been able to weave its local and personal content into webOS’s linked contacts, layered calendars, multitasking, notifications and of course its GPS capabilities to deliver a seamless real-world experience. For example, users can see the nearest gas stations to their location ranked by price, find local movies and insert show times into their calendar, or find the nearest Starbuck's with Wi-Fi access.

You can find a shortened version of the press release below:

"WHERE®, the premier location-based application from uLocate Communications, is available on the new Palm® Pre™ phone via the on-device beta App Catalog. Running on the new Palm webOS™ mobile platform, Pre brings together your important information from where it resides – on your phone, at your work or on the web – into one logical view.⁽¹⁾

WHERE is the ultimate local application for mobile devices. It quickly helps put the people, places and things consumers are looking for at their fingertips. Local content available through WHERE includes everything from the weather, news, and restaurant reviews, to the cheapest gas, movie show times, and the ability to connect with other users on the WHERE Wall™.

Palm Pre is designed to make users’ lives easier by bringing them the people, events and information that they need all in one place. WHERE builds on this unique personalization to provide an exceptionally strong local and social experience to consumers.

”We are thrilled to expand our availability to Palm users with this new and innovative application for the highly anticipated Pre phone”, said Walt Doyle , CEO of uLocate. “Palm has done a great job with webOS, and has allowed us to integrate the features that our consumers love about WHERE with the functions of the device such as calendar and contacts. This integration has helped us deliver a very rich user experience.”

Wireless Industry Partnership-WIP Connector

Involved in the mobile or wireless industry? Are you developing mobile applications and need to connect to like-minded people to stay abreast of developments or simply to share your experiences?

Then the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) is for you-membership is free and you get a monthly WIP Connector newsletter letting you know of upcoming events or developments from member companies.

The flagship event organised by WIP is the WIP Mobile Jam Session, now run both in the US and Europe, as a one-day event bringing developers the latest news and tools to allow them to get to market quicker and innovate more effectively. It has rapidly established itself as one of the leading developer events worldwide in terms of breadth of coverage and reputation.

You can find more details here.

Testing iPhone Apps on Real Devices

Mobiforge published today an interesting article by Wei-Meng Lee on the key steps required to test and deploy your iPhone app.

If you have successfully published on iPhone before, there will be nothing new for you, but if you haven't, the article gives you a simple guide for deploying your app.

The article kicks off by saying that "a repeated criticism from iPhone app developers comes from the difficulty they find in deploying their application to a real iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple, for better or worse, has designed a process involving many hoops that must be jumped through, and this has prompted developers to grumble, and others to explore alternative, non-official open tool chains, which do not require app signing. In this article, I will walk you through the steps you need to take in order to test your iPhone apps on a real device, be it iPhone, or iPod Touch, the official Apple way."

You can read the full article here.

Mobile 2.0 Europe-Future of Mobile Explored

BARCELONA- Mobile 2.0 lands in Barcelona once again next month courtesy of Rudy and Carles of Dotopen and is set to pack a real punch with the main conference on the 19th June being supplemented by a Developer Day the day before.

The main themes of what is now the 5th Mobile 2.0 event in the series (after the initial event in San Francisco) will be: Openness, Beyond Free, Play, Cloud, Context and Sense. Based on the various events I attended this year and the current phase of the global economic cycle, I anticipate that the whole area of new business models within the Beyond Free track of the event will stimulate the most debate.

The thinking up to last year was 'what is free on the web, cannot be charged for on mobile', but perhaps it is time to update this credo as the quality and performance of the mobile experience improves (and not just on smartphone devices).

The speaker line-up features the larger than life founder of Zyb, Tommy Ahlers and Marco Ahtisaari, CEO of Dopplr. Marco was in Barcelona last week to speak at the SIME Barcelona event, and announced there the future release of a Dopplr app on the iPhone and a re-orientation of their business to more of a 'Social Atlas' (read Social Network). It will be interesting to get his views on the future for mobile social networking..

You can find more info on the event here

Location in Mobile Social Networks

London-Location is at the very heart of the next generation of mobile services and the future mobile web. Last year, both Nokia and Google made big announcements highlighting location as one of their key strategic axes. Now Vodafone is keen to position itself in this space and its recent acquisition of Swedish navigation software provider Wayfinder is but the first step in that direction.

I presented the experience of GeoMe in launching a location-enabled mobile social network at the Informa Mobile Location Services 09 Conference in London on the 12th May, describing how to overcome some of the barriers to adoption, especially privacy, and new distribution channels that can be exploited for getting the product to market.

I was also priviliged to be in good company on a speaker panel on the next generation of location services together with o2, TIM, Qualcomm and content provider Spoonfed. The conclusion? To create demand, you need to offer a good product with a clear value proposition. Will 2010 be 'the' year of location based services? The answer: 'probably'.

You can see my presentation on Slidespace below:

Location Based Social Networking by Ric Ferraro

View more presentations from Ric Ferraro.

Dude, where's my Privacy-The Privacy Conundrum in Social Networks

I will be speaking next week at the Informa Mobile Location Services 09 Conference in London and one of the key subjects I was asked to present on was privacy.

One of the key issues has to do with semantics:what do we mean by privacy exactly? How private is private? My argument is that the privacy sphere, like it or not, is getting smaller and smaller for most people. Over time, the level of intrusion that each person is willing to accept in their 'private' sphere is also increasing.

I like to point to the example of Google Street View, as this is a full on example of a significant intrusion into everyone's private sphere which was accepted and ultimately embraced (I recommend you see also the example of the Japanese mashup of a Virtual Jog using Street View).

The other key issue is that legislation is dictating the approach that mobile social networks that use location should use. This is the key concept of 'opt-in', such that it is always down to consumer choice whether or not anyone has access to the location of a mobile subscriber.

This is fine as a preventive measure to assuage the public's fear of location based services in the interim period during which the key players (like Google) educate and inform about the benefits of location based services.

But ultimately, it is not the way in which 'push' services, somewhat of a marketing mecca in terms of delivering the right marketing message to the right customer in the right place, will be achieved.

EU Caps Roaming Data Charges

STRASBOURG-In a welcome move from the European Parliament, it was announced yesterday that a law was adopted that will cut by up to 60 percent the price of using a mobile phone to send text messages or download data while outside a home state in the European Union.

Downloading data while roaming will cost a maximum of EUR1.0 per megabyte at the wholesale level compared with about EUR1.68 today. The BBC states that this cap will fall to EUR0.50 by July 2011. The same report adds that the current price cap of EUR0.46 per minute for an outgoing voice call will also fall to EUR0.43 in July, whilst the cap on voice calls received abroad will fall from EUR0.22 today to EUR0.19 in July and EUR0.11 by July 2011.

The caps on data roaming had already been approved by EU telecoms ministers in November last year. The initial proposals to cap data roaming charges were made by EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding. The BBC notes that the idea is not to fix an EU-wide price, but to set a cap below which telecoms firms can compete by offering lower prices while still earning a "reasonable" return.

Data roaming charges have been often cited as a barrier to growth in mobile VAS, such as mobile social networks and location based services, due to the prohibitive cost of accessing these services when beyond national European frontiers.

The regulatory move announced, together with the ongoing trend of cheaper, flat rate mobile data tariffs, will give a further boost to young players in the mobile space to extend their reach beyond their front yard.

Nokia to Close Nokia Mosh-to be included in Nokia Ovi

In today's online Webinar for mobile application publishers, Bill Perry from Nokia confirmed that they would be discontinuing Nokia Mosh and that it, together with Nokia Widsets, would be consolidated into one offering on Nokia Ovi.

Mosh has had a chequered history, being a somewhat misunderstood child of Nokia and accused of harbouring a mixed bag of (low value) applications.

The (re) launch of Ovi is on a substantial scale and is scheduled for May 2009.

It will provide a market for developers to reach over 100m Nokia customers worldwide but it comes with some limitations-small mobile developers will find the listing costs prohibitive (at over $500 a pop, per application, per language supported), given that Nokia will make Java/Symbian certification and validation mandatory.

Pasi Manninen from Ovi commented that Flash and WRT do not require signing, though this will be of little relevance outside of Asia.

Kevin Kelly Highlights Persistence Paradox of Social Networks

Kevin Kelly, who I previously covered in a blog post on his 'The One' vision, recently highlighted on his own site the results of researcher Bernardo Huberman, now at HP Labs of what is defined as the 'Persistence Paradox'.

Apparently:

"People persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience. And yet, an analysis of the production histories and success dynamics of 10 million videos from YouTube revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold. This paradoxical result is further compounded by the fact that the average quality of submissions does increase with the number of uploads, with the likelihood of success less than that of playing a lottery."

The conclusion suggests that increasing uploads improves quality but not hits.

Unfortunately, the paper does not examine the issue of photo uploads, and any link between number of uploads and user motivation/success in achieving his goals.

Had it done so, it may have offered some useful insights for Facebook, now the world's second largest online repository of photos after ImageShack (with 20bn images). Techcrunch recently reported that it has earmarked $100m to buy servers-with $30m spent this year alone with storage provider NetApp.

All of this just as relevant for pure play mobile social networks though on a lower scale-while uploading of photos from mobile is fairly standard, upload speeds for photos (let alone videos) mean data volumes still remain relatively low.

Mobile Location Services 09, London 12-13 May

LONDON- Now in its 13th edition, Informa's Mobile Location Services 09 conference taking place in London at the Ambassador's Bloomsbury Hotel, is the key event of the year for all those involved with LBS-related services.

The event will look at the current and future state of the LBS market and operators will say their bit on how they are looking to drive up ARPU with new applications.

I will speaking about how to leverage social networking within LBS and strategies for achieving critical mass in community size.

Readers of my blog get a special 25% discount to attend the event so just mail info@mobverge.com or send me a tweet @ricferraro.

GeoMe announces integration with 11870.com API

BARCELONA-GeoMe announces yesterday that it had completed the integration of content from the 11870.com platform within its own Location Based Social Networking beta mobile application.

11870.com is one of Spain's leading online business directories with over 10,000 daily page views and includes reviewer's comments and photos for each listing.

The full text of the press release can be seen by clicking here:

And the winner is...Mendeley @ Plugg Start-up Rally 2009

BRUSSELS- Mendeley took Plugg by a storm and won the Start-Up Rally ahead of 20 other competing outfits from all over Europe with a unanimous vote of confidence from both the jury and the audience.

Rightly so, given that they presented a unique idea, pitched it very clearly and effectively and actually made the revenue model very tangible. The idea behind Mendeley? It is a last.fm for research papers incorporating a recommendation system and acting as a dis-intermediary within the (high priced) academic journal market. You can see the full pitch here.

The audience award went to Myngle, a web-based interactive vehicle for language training with an attractive market and a crisp pitch.

My personal favourite after Mendeley was SofaTutor, a start-up that recruits video-tutors for maths subjects from YouTube and addresses the "digital age" gap present in most schools. It has a clear business model, focused execution (it only does maths tuition) and taps into what is a lucrative public sector (education) that is well ripe for a shake up.

You can read up more details on the start-ups by clicking here

European Entrepreneurship & Social Media @Plugg

BRUSSELS-The first couple of themes from Plugg this morning focused around European Entrepreneurship (and differences with US entrepreneurship) and Social Media.

Inma Martinez , founder of Stradbroke Advisors (and speaker at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona last summer) marked out three categories of European Entrepreneurship: Clueless, Pirates and Super Bad.

The Clueless category includes entrepreneurs with great ideas but no idea as to how to market them (see Collaborative film making experiment Wreck A Movie and their great trailer www.ironsky.net), the Pirates include entrepreneurs not afraid to break the rules (PirateBay from Sweden was quoted) and the SuperBad includes those with cheeky ideas but not much more.

The key message? It is good to be cheeky and also European Entrepreneurs should focus on product and not on technical excellence.

Jo Caudron from ONE agency stated how the Web 2.0 era has now moved us from a model of media consumption of 'feeding fish to penguins' to a 'birds and the bees' model, where the bee is spreading the word and has the real power in the social environment.

He also emphasized how Web 2.0 companies can make money by understanding that they are dealing not merely with social media but all-encompassing social business, where the social element effectively permeates all parts of traditional business spheres.

Plugg Startup Rally 20 Finalists Announced-include Bubok and Burt

Brussels-The nominees for the Plugg Startup Rally being judged next week in Brussels have been recently announced. The initial 126 companies to apply have been whittled down to just 20 and come from all corners of Europe, from language learning websites, to book writers' online publishing sites (Bubok from Spain), to location based services and semantic advertising.

It is a truly diverse group of start-ups companies, mostly web based, showcasing the fact that innovation hasn't stalled in the current economic climate.

I encourage readers to take a look at the full list here .

The Start-up Rally will add to what is already a compelling agenda for the day, with a focus on entrpreneurship, raising capital (in tough times) and generating revenue

Plugg-Dopplr and Google to present on European innovation

Brussels-Plugg is a one-day conference on March 12th in Brussels with a clear focus on celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and raising global awareness for those European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field that stand out in the crop.

Plugg aims to provide a hands-on view on what's happening in Europe, what the continent's (dis)advantages are compared to other regions and what the future will hold for its digital industry.

This year, Robin Wauters has assembled a great line-up of speakers, including Mike Butcher from Techcrunch UK, Lisa Sounier from Dopplr and Anil Hansjee from Google.

There is also the Start-up Rally for web and mobile start-ups with European roots where innovative new players can showcase their wares.

The first 3 readers to register via my blog (blog code AW6TZ24U) get 10% off the ticket price-don't miss out!