This week Sifo Research International and Mobiletech announced that we will offer official mobile metrics for the Swedish mobile internet market. Mobiletech is already providing this service for the Norwegian market toghether with TNS-Gallup.
Read the press release in English (translated by Google)
Official press release in Swedish:
SIFO Research International lanserar mobilmätningar
Mobiletech levererar även mjukvara för mobila tjänster till många svenska kunder, däribland Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet, SvD, E24, Gota Media, Sydsvenskan, Skånemedia, UNT, med flera. Såväl den tekniska som den metodmässiga lösningen för trafikmätning i mobilkanalen kommer att vara den samma som de officiella mätningar som sedan några månader tillbaka genomförs på den norska marknaden.
- Vi har länge sett behovet av trafikmätningar för den mobila marknaden som har vuxit de senaste åren. I år tror vi dessutom på en kraftig expansion för mobilmarknaden. En gemensam valuta ger positiva effekter för både annonsörer och mediebolag då man får jämförbarhet med övriga medier,
säger Stefan Svanfeldt affärsområdeschef på SIFO RI. Vår ambition är att inom kort även att lansera individ och målgruppsmätningar för mobilmarknaden, fortsätter Stefan Svanfeldt.
- Vi ser en stadig tillväxt i mobilkanalen, och behovet för mätningar är uppenbart både för annonsörer och sajtägare. Mobilkanalen är fortfarande relativt ny, men med snabbare uppkopplingar och bättre terminaler kommer vi se en fortsatt stark tillväxt med fler avancerade kommunikationslösningar framöver, säger Anders Holen, VD Mobiletech, Sverige.
För mer information vänligen kontakta:
Stefan SvanfeldtAffärområdeschef Internet, SIFO Research International
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
Norway’s third biggest online newspaper, Aftenposten, has recently gone live with an innovative mobile site using Mobiletech’s Frame rendering software. Not only have they developed a site which adapts to all devices (including the iPhone) they have also gone about it in a very modern way.
After years of experience in mobile, including working with ASP hosted approaches, Aftenposten has chosen Mobiletech’s Frame delivery to power their mobile channel. With Frame, Aftenposten’s own internal staff were able to write jsp-code using Mobiletech’s tag library to develop the mobile pages they wanted. Rather than code for each specific device, Aftenposten was also able to choose a single template and widget framework which in turn created mark-up specifically for each device – while utilising the best features of each. Now Aftenposten are totally self sufficient in the mobile channel, having the editorial freedom and control to deliver content to their readers when, how and where they want it.
Total time between software delivery to a live site was only 5 weeks. The site now contains all the sections you would expect from a newspaper plus a city guide and mobile TV channel – all of which work across compatible devices. We think the team at Aftenposten have done an amazing job. Check it out on your mobile and we think you will agree. mobil.aftenposten.no
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.
In the Norwegian online magazine Digi Opera says that they can reduce the cost of using mobile internet by 20%. Might be true but we here at Mobiletech feel the need to throw light on a few things regarding that.
The article concerns surfing using Opera Mini on web sites made for desktop browsers. In these cases Opera is doing a great job in terms of minimizing the data cost and making the content displayable on a small screen. Thats good!
On sites that already are optimized for mobile, however, by Mobiletechs own brilliant products for exaple, this is not the case. Mobile optimized sites, made to fit the mobile context and utilise the features in the end users browser are way lighter and does not produce much data traffic as they also are compressed. So in terms of datatraffic on mobile optimised sites, as most of the popular sites are, there is not much to gain by using Opera Mini. In adition you get a superb presentation, editorial -controll and -freedom by making a mobile optimised portal.
So Opera is doing a great job on the sites that do not have a mobile optimised presentation, but for the rest of the mobile portals out there the moral is “use your favourite browser, mobiletech will make sure it works, it looks good, it’s cheap and it’s fast”.
UPDATE: Christian replying to Opera (transleted to english by Google)
Yesterday the landrush period of .tel domain names opened. What it .tel? Well, it’s a tld such as .com, .net and .mobi. It is administered by Telnic. Do we need another tld, you say? There is a difference from what we are used to, so you decide. I’ll give a crash course here.
A .tel domain name can look like this: example.tel. So what. Well, what is different from other tld’s where the DNS contains the IP address to the server serving a web page (or other resource), the DNS of a .tel name contains contact information such as phone number, address, location, SIP-stuff etc. So this has nothing (or little) to do with internet and web. It’s kind of an online global contact directory for companies or individuals to register contact details that will be avalable to anyone. This information can be accessed through a web browser of course, try for example http://telnic.tel/, used by social networking sites such as facefook, twitter, skype etc. or by applications of course.
So, do you need a .tel domain name because you have a mobile internet site? No. We have other tricks for that.
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.
