As you know we attended the Escenic Partner and Customer Day a while back. We did our debut as film producers by filming our presentation of the Escenic Mobile Solution. So, the quality of the video clearly suggests that this is our first time operating a camera for this purpose :)
Anyway, we would like to share it with you! Here it is:
Escenic Mobile Solution by Mobiletech from MrMobiletech on Vimeo.
Almost every day we get questions about applications versus mobile internet sites. “What should we do?” iPhone applications are of course the type of application most of the people we are talking to mean. IPhone applications are currently very (very!) popular in all segments and gets lot of attention. Why isn’t Mobiletech surfing the iPhone wave? Well, we believe in the open internet as the platform for innovation and application development. In this blog post I will try to explain what that means and why we believe this is the way to go.
First, let’s talk some of the phenomenon of iPhone apps. I’ll not try to describe how, but Apple has done what so many have tried before; to create a closed ecosystem (similar to a good old walled garden), but more b2c, or even c2c, than the traditional walled garden. By this approach Apple, motivate the developers and early movers around the world to enter the eco system. Well, enough about that. Apples App store has proven to be a success.
Further, the iPhone is the most successful mobile communication device of our time. Nothing less than revolutionary. So of course we understand all our customers who really want to join the iPhone party by creating apps and getting millions of downloads and easy access for your customers.
Let’s stop, and think about this… There are few issues that are easy to forget.
The iPhone represents only about 25-30% of the global mobile internet users. (Admob). What about the rest of the users with other handsets? When you enter the mobile application track it is likely that there, at some time, will emerge requirements to support other platforms as well. For example Android, Palm/WebOS, Symbian, RIM Blackberry, Java midlets and so on. Not to forget all the different “Appstore clones” (Ovi Store, Android Market, Play Now, SkyMarket Blackberry app world etc.) you need to rely on for distribution. You probably see why this is bad for business… You’ll need a building full of cheap labor to make this happen! Another interesting issue we have experienced in this relation is that the demand (and budgets) for an iPhone application often comes from the marketing people in an organization. Nothing wrong with marketing people (!), but a marketing organization is not capable of handling software distribution and maintenance. In some cases the demand and requirements are not aligned or attached to any internet strategy at all. In the current troubled and challenging times, this might not be the best way to spend money. “But the marketing value”, you say? Good question. There is not too much statistics on this area. Let’s try to break it down anyway. Being in the appstore itself, gives close to zero marketing value. You still have to do an effort to tell your users to go digging in the Appstore to find your application. It’s really hard to enter the “top lists” in appstore. If you do, you can’t rely on being there for long. Apple control these lists and you have no option of buying your app a top rank or even advertise for your app i the appstore. So presence in the appstore is not enough. However, if you are lucky many users find your application and downloads and installs it. Then you have an icon on the users’ home screen. That’s great! Now we can start talking about marketing value. But do the users actually use your application after download? Pinch Media have done some research. The findings are interesting. For free applications, 80 percent of people who downloaded the application used it once and then never again. For paid applications less than 1/3 used the application again the day after download. Only 1% of users tend to like the application and use it regularly.
My point here is that the appstore is a compelling distribution model. It has proved great, but you are not in control over the process. Apple is. As a business model, the Appstore is not too different from the “CPA models” Scandinavian mobile service companies know. Apple takes a fairly big slice of the cake.
Mobiletech believe in the internet as distribution model. Internet is the best possible distribution channel around! And it keeps getting better! You are in control of the complete value chain as well as distribution and business model. Internet is well known among your customers and (if you choose your mobile site software wisely) you content can be consumed by your users regardless of what device they have. Mobile internet also has a much more stable user base. Over all, the mobile internet usage is growing at lightning speed of course, the point is that users who have found your site on mobile internet usually comes back regularly.
You want access to GPS, offline usage, home screen icon and all the other cool iPhone stuff, you say. No problem! You can have all this. And not only for the iPhone but for all devices! Still using the ultimate distribution channel of all; Internet. iPhone 3Gs will support access to native functions, such as the GPS, from any mobile internet site. As will many other devices; Blackberry, Windows devices, Symbian etc. The W3C standard for this is soon ready to go. The Mobiletech software will of course support this.
Home screen icon is also an out of the box feature for mobile internet services today. Not many know, but instead of using marketing money on guiding the user into the app store, use half the money to tell him how he can use his favorite internet tool, the browser to enjoy your services.
Offline usage is also currently possible. HTML5, which is used in newer mobile browsers such as iPhone, Androids etc., defines a way to use the mobile web site offline. Together with javascript this client side database feature enables feature rich and interactive applications in offline mode, completely transparent to the end user.
I know what you are thinking; “fair arguments, but still something missing”. Yes, there is. It’s the “x-factor”. If you are confident you have an application that will reach the top 25 list, and you have x-factor-budgets (over time), you should give iPhone apps a try. If you want a long term solution, reaching all your audience, use internet. Anyway, remember to do this work according to your internet strategy!
Well, how can we help you with the x-factor? There is a thing called widgets (You have probably heard this word 1000 times with 1000 different meanings). Widgets are a standard. Soon finished from the W3C, currently supported by Opera, Vodafone, Nokia and others. A widget is a self contained, offline web application running locally on your device. The standard is 100% device independent and uses internet as distribution model: Runs and looks like an application, and still uses internet standards and distribution! Quote me in a few years: “Widgets will be huge!”. You get the best from both worlds. You can distribute your widget through your favorite app store, the internet memory cards, email, sms etc. The matrix below summarizes the differences on some common key selling points.
iPhone Native app
site/application running in the browser
Widget standard
Offline access
Yes
Yes, HTML5
Yes
Access to gps
Yes
Yes + other means of location user
Yes
Distribution model
Appstore
Internet
Internet and various appstores
Business model
Apple decides (Appstore)
Internet model
Internet model
Available from home screen
Yes
Yes
Yes
Performance
Good
Good
Good
Compability
Only compatible with targeted versions of iPhone
Compatible with all devices with internet connection and a browser.
Compatible with all devices conforming to W3C standards
Is it worth 10 000 Euro for an iPhone application on a propriatory platform to reach 30% of your potential users while creating yourself a maintenance problem when you could have used the same amount of money to reach 100% of your audience, with the same features as an native application and use the Internet as distribution?
You have probably figured it out already: Mobiletech can’t wait to create mind-blowing widgets together with you! It’s a tad early to roll out widgets yet, but don’t worry, we will tell you when you can line up in front of our sales office. During 2009 we will see many new mobile devices capable of running widgets. Even Google has concluded that the internet is the ultimate platform and have announced that for example Google latitude will not be available as a native application but as a web based application running in the browser.
This discussion above might seem a tiny bit heavy to one side. True. Don’t misunderstand me. iPhone apps can be great! Especially for games and other heavy features. Mobiletech is happy to help you refine your iPhone application idea and put it into a bigger perspective. We have great partners for iPhone application development as well. Further, we provide tools for measuring usage of your application whether it is an iPhone app, widget, mobile internet site, Android app or whatever. We provide the analytics.
Full presentation from Pinch Media
iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media
View more Microsoft Word documents from pinchmedia.
Today we have release our first mobile statistics report starting with the month of April. Each month we hope to bring you a summary of the mobile trends in Scandinavian region. As you may know, Mobiletech is hosting a vast number of mobile portals and sites in the Scandinavian region. The statistics gathered are based operational data from these sites and additional services.
So the statistics does not reflect the complete market situation in Scandinavia, but only inside the “Mobiletech sphere”. We do however believe that the reports presented give good pointer to what direction the market is heading.
The contents of the report may change from issue to issue where we choose some topics to dive into or we find some fun facts that we would like to share with you. If you have any suggestions or wishes please tweet us at http://twitter.com/MrMobiletech/ (tag the tweet with #mobilepulse)
In this issue we are giving special attention to the Norwegian market. Special thanks to TNS-Gallup who have allowed us reuse their data which shows the Unique Users, Page Impressions and Session for the top 12 Norwegian mobile sites. It makes for some interesting reading.
Mobiletech Pulse April 2009
View more OpenOffice presentations from Mobiletech As.
Our own Michael B. Sandager and Hans L. Theisen, from media|works have had a look at the Scandinavian mobile internet landscape and produced this report showing trends and developments. The numbers and data base in this informal report are collected from Mobiletechs and media|works’ systems and experiences. It should be noted that the data is not representative for the Scandinavian mobile internet landscape as a whole.
The report is written in Danish. The highlights are
50% increase in page impressions last 6 months
100% increase in page impressions last 12 months
>100% increase in number of unique users last 12 months
Number of page impressions per session has increased by 20% last 6 months
Much has been written about the growth of the mobile internet and the effect of the iPhone on the mobile browsing habits of thousands of millions internet users. This blog hopes to slice through these statistics and provide some thoughts on ways in which content owners and publishers can make use of these trends.
Firstly, lets take a look at the numbers. – Some startling statistics from a number of sources have been appearing which highlight some very exciting trends:
ComScore reports that among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35 percent) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year.
U.S mobile data revenues grew 7.3% in the final quarter of 2008 compared to same quarter in 2007.
Growth of the mobile web in the UK was eight times faster than that of the PC-based internet in the third quarter of 2008, according to Nielsen Online.
Smartphone growth has been a stand out with 3.7% growth in smartphone in Q4 2008 compared with the same period last year. Source: Gartner.
In Europe, IDC’s European Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped 9.3 million units in 4Q08, 25.9% higher than the 7.4 million shipped in 4Q07. Source: IDC European Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, February 24, 200
In Europe also, Apple achieved a 10.7% market share in the smartphone segment, making it the third biggest segment player in Western Europe. Source: IDC European Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, February 24, 200
The statistics are swimming against the current economic trends. In fact some would argue the recession has helped sped up the migration to mobile data and voice use as people look to rationalise their communication spend by ditching their traditional fixed connection, including fixed broadband. The ‘cutting of the cord’ effect seems to be gaining some notoriety. A study from The Nielsen Company says that more than 20 million U.S. telephone households (17 percent) are wireless substituters—homes without landlines that rely solely on a mobile phone for their home telecommunications. http://www.nielsenmobile.com/html/press%20releases/WirelessSubstitution.html. Whatever the case, one clear trend is blinding its way forward, more and more people will be using the mobile web to get information more and more often.
While the trend toward mobile internet is fascinating, we still have problems with traditional internet sites being presented incorrectly for mobile. We are not alone in believing that a correctly formatted mobile site is going to deliver a better experience for mobile uses as well utilising the unique features of mobile like location and movement. In fact some of the big boys agree with the launch of rolling out “m.” mobile sites specifically formatted for mobile including m.twitter.com, m.facebook.com, m.myspace.com (the m. Is a different story addressed here http://www.mobiletech.no/index.php/blog/817-one-url-regardless-of-device - ) The mobile version of facebook has been a big success and many of the major newspapers in each region have opted for sites optimised for the mobile phone and the iphone in particular e.g http://mobil.dn.se. We at Mobiletech would go as far to say that sites and services built for mobile will start to become a major success in their own right, developing a loyal following amongst mobile only users.
With better service analytics, the case for mobile will be further strengthened by the application of a common currency across the mobile internet. The mobile internet has more information than the traditional such as location, movement and presence. This information can be utilised to achieve better inventory management and ad performance – ultimately leading to the mobile channel being one of the most valuable to content owners as a source of revenue. TNS gallup statistic here in Norway are powered by Mobiletech’s mobile metrics tool http://rapp.tns-gallup.no/Default.aspx?aid=9072853 Mobiletech would like to have the opportunity to demonstrate the immediate effects of a well designed and executed mobile site. Talk to us about how we can give you the tools to thrive in today’s fastest growing media channel.
The EpiServerdagen 2009 took place outside Stockholm on Tuesday March 10th 2009. More than 1000 visitors came to Kistamässan, and Mobiletech were present with 5 of our people. At our stand we presented our EPiServer plugin, in addition to other mobile services.
We also helped EPiServer with our mobile expertise, and did the following:
Mobile portal
See http://dxad.mobi/EPiServerdagen-2009/
Included the agenda and relevant information. The portal is dual language, both Swedish and English. All Swedish end-users will get Swedish text, while international users will get English text.
SMS services
The introduction speaker came to a point where she mentioned the word ‘mobile’, and at the same time we hit the button in our systems, resulting in several hundred sms-messages received by the audience simultaneously. This is always quite a powerful experience!
mVote
mVote is a powerful tool where the participants may vote by texting an sms to a short code, e.g. MVOTE 10 (1-4), where 10 is the id of the mVote, and 1-4 is the number of alternatives. An example of an sms can be: MVOTE 10 3 to 72311 (Sweden). The results will be displayed on an automatically updated graph, which can be viewed with a normal web browser. The keynote speaker Tim Forrester asked the following question (results in brackets):
Over the next 12 months, how will your company’s deployments or usage of Web content management change? Will the number of deployments or usage…?
1. Increase (77,3%)
2. Remain the same (15,3%)
3. Be scaled back (1,7%)
4. Don’t know (5,7%)
One interesting quote from one of the sessions:
‘Traffic from mobile handsets towards community sites like facebook/twitter/flickr increased by 152% the last 12 months.’
-and with EPiServer focusing on community solutions for normal websites, that area could be an interesting future for the mobile.
SMS is here to stay :) To get the user to send keywords to a short code is a very effective distribution model, easy to track and the perfect way to engage your customers.
However, if you look around you will find diverse ways of telling the poor user how and what to do. Especially when the keyword consist of two parts, i.e. one “main keyword”, then a variable part, for example the email address.
To illustrate, a trend I have seen in Norway is this notation:
"Send SMS <NEWS> to 9999"
What does this tell the user? Well, we experience that many users will do exactly that; typing and sending it which results in no keyword found, because the keyword is not <NEWS> but NEWS.
The notation <> is used for “variable input”, for example the end user’s email address. Example:
"Send NEWS <your e-mail> to 9999"
So, skip the <> around keywords, you are only confusing the user. You may emphasize the keyword using capital letters, colors, bold etc. Then, for variable input, you can use the<>.
The 2009 Mobile World Congress was a great experience for Mobiletech. Even if the credit crunch has hit hard globally, we experienced great interest among new and old customers.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who stepped by our booth! We look forward to a great year of mobile in 2009 and hope that we will do more business ASAP.
See you next year in Barcelona!
Regards the Barcelona team
Bjarne Solhaug, Jon Arne Sæterås and Nick Robertshawe
TeliaSonera has re launched SurfOpen. SurfOpen is a transcoding service making web sites made for desktop browsers readable on older mobile phones. Last time TeliaSonera launched SurfOpen, it caused a massive riot among the Swedish publishers and media interest groups, resulting in the “SurfClosed” initiative (www.surfclosed.se). The reason for this was that SurfOpen brutally transcoded all kinds of content, both desktop web sites and also already mobile optimized web sites. This was destroying both business models and editorial control and freedom was deprived from the content owner.
This time around, however, things are looking somewhat different. Novarra is wisely replaced by Byte Mobile and the rules emerged from the international mobile community are acknowledged more or less.
The transcodingproxy is now an integral part of the infrastructure and acts as a transparent proxy. This means that urls are not changed. Wap billing, and other CPA services seem to work as usual. The proxy is identified by the http-via header with the value “1.1 Bytemobile OSN WebProxy/4.1”
Mobiletech does not have the complete list of which devices that are configured to use SurfOpen but it is mostly older, less capable phones. As far as Mobiletech knows, at least these devices are affected: SE K800i, SE K810i, SE K530i, SE T650i, SE K850i. The screens hots below are from the wap-browser on a Nokia E65 (the safari web browser is not affected).
Mobiletech, TeliaSonera and Byte Mobile have been working closely with the technical functionality of the transcoding proxy. At this point, all requirements seem to be fulfilled by all parties.
How can we say that when the below screen shot shows a transcoded www.aftobladet.se?
Note the advertising banner and the navigation bar at the top of the page. The advertising banner is currently only used for promoting internal TeliaSonera services, but will probably be used for other external ads in the future. This should be hard for content owners to accept since it’s stealing attention from other ads on the page. The navigation bar provides functionality for moving back/forward, adding site to favourites,entering a url,searching,settings and go back home to surfport. So the whole page is wrapped in a TeliaSonera look and feel. By the looks, kind of walled-garden-ish. Many of Mobiletechs customers have expressed concern about this kind of advertising. TeliaSonera control the most valuable ad space on their site wich is destroying their business model.
Mobiletech distributed a paper describing the functionalities of the transcoding proxy in early December 2008. Not all our customers, including Aftonbladet, have implemented what is needed to make the mobile experience good, so we repeat it here:
Adding a line of markup
Add this line of markup in the tag on your pages:
This line tells the transcoder where to find the mobile optimized site.
Changing your HTTP response headers
Adding
Cache-Control: no-transform
Vary: User-Agent
to your response headers on your servers serving your www-site.
www.SvD.se have implemented the above, and the result is a perfect mobile portal. The user-agent is untouched and no advertising or nav-bar on top stealing attention and screen:
Sample HTTP header
Here is an example of how a http header through SurfOpen looks like (sorry for the php formatting):
Note the operamini-phone-ua. This is because the Byte Mobile proxy is actually the same software as Opera Mini use for transcoding.
Below are some screen shots from different sites.
Surfport startpage. Top banner promotes SurfOpen.
When you hit the www icon you can enter the url you want to go to. The result is the same as when you enter the url directly in your browser.
The transcroded web site of www.dn.se look like. Dn.se has not implemented according to recommandations. Advertising banner on top of the page. Currently promoting TeliaSonera services.
More from www.dn.se
Aftonbladets web site www.aftonbladet.se, through the transcoders eyes. Aftonbladet has not implemented the required actions to control the transcoding.
More from www.aftonbladet.se
More from www.aftonbladet.se. Not very good user experience ….
More from www.aftonbladet.se.
A sample from the Norwegian newspaper www.dn.no, which have a “mobile swithcer” in front to redirect mobile phones to the mobile portal. Works well!
www.svd.se have implemented the recommended actions to prevent transcoding, resulting in a untouched mobile portal when entering www.svd.se.
Enter url to go to. From SurfPort.
From the settings page, you can activate or deactivate the service.
Tried to deactivate, seems to work as expected.
Bookmarks page in SurfOpen
More from the bookmarks and history of SurfOpen
Settings for image quality
Settings for text size and whether to do stuff with secure connections
Transcoding in general is scary stuff. Especially when it comes to placing advertisements, thereby monetizing, on other peoples intelectual property. It deprives editorial freedom and control, ruins business models, breaching secure connections and poor user experience. However, for TeliaSonera this is a step in the right direction, which probably will result in more traffic on the mobile web for those content owners with a mobile strategy and a good mobile optimized portal. So, it is highly recommended to implement the changes as described above on your www. site to tell the transcoding proxy that there is a better way of showing the site to a mobile user. If you experience any trouble or have any questions, Mobiletech is happy to help!
Feel free to use the screen shots on this page, but please refer to Mobiletech.
The 2009 Mobile World Congress was a great experience for Mobiletech. Even if the credit crunch has hit hard globally, we experienced great interest among new and old customers.
TeliaSonera has re launched SurfOpen. SurfOpen is a transcoding service making web sites made for desktop browsers readable on older mobile phones. Last time TeliaSonera launched SurfOpen, it caused a massive riot among the Swedish publishers and media interest groups, resulting in the “SurfClosed” initiative (www.surfclosed.se). The reason for this was that SurfOpen brutally transcoded all kinds of content, both desktop web sites and also already mobile optimized web sites. This was destroying both business models and editorial control and freedom was deprived from the content owner.
