Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Wallet of the future? Your mobile phone [CNN]
In Asia, your mobile lets you make payments, access the subway, control your TV, and even open your front door. While some wonder if the technology will translate to the U.S., others think that mobile payments will take off here within five years. The article also goes over the low to high tech ways to pay, including RFID, barcodes and SMS.

Facebook Grew Twice As Fast As Twitter In July [TechCrunch]
Between April and July, Facebook grew 30% in unique U.S. visitors, while Twitter only grew 25%, an increase that could be attributed to the launch of  their “Everyone Button".  This gave Facebook members who didn’t have public profiles (i.e. most people) the option to share items in their stream with everyone else on Facebook on an item-by-item basis. Not only did this drive more people to Facebook, but it also increased the time spent on the site.

Yellix Dials in to Mobile Social Networking [Kelsey Group Blogs]
There is a lot of potential to leverage the phone's address book as the ultimate social network. To this end, Yelix has released an app for Android phones that automatically shows Facebook picture and status when receiving a call from a friend.

User Interface IS the Holy Grail [Wireless Week]
The user interface on a mobile phone is of the utmost importance, and its future lies in cloud computing. The cloud will lead to increasingly sophisticated applications, which in turn will offer the end user a higher degree of personalization.

As Ad Spending Declines, Magazines Move to Mobile [GigaOM]
Nearby Now seeks to move magazine advertising to mobile phones. The digital shopping service app lets users find and reserve products they’re looking for in local brick-and-mortar stores, as well as directing users to web sites to purchase products online.

“Leaf” Phone Runs On Solar Power, Doubles As Wristwatch [PSFK]
The Leaf is a cellphone that runs on solar power and is made of flexible material that enables it to double as a wristwatch. Lower-end phones might end up being simple, small, and eco-friendly.

Made-For-Mobile Comics: The Future of Pulp? [CNN]
To follow its audience, the comic industry has been slowly but surely offering paid content on the mobile screen, a move the print industry seems to have come to terms with.

Nokia Rocks the World: The Phone King's Plan to Redefine Its Business [Fast Company]
Nokia is evolving from a hardware company into a content provider, with grand plans to become the biggest entertainment media network in the world. Can they do it? "Look at the real world: It's not about people in the high end," says one Gartner analyst. "The real world is people in the middle, and Nokia owns that world in terms of numbers. They may not own mindshare, but they certainly have a lot to work with."

Xbox Gaming Platform May Soon Span Web, Console, Mobile [Ars Technica]
A recent job posting from Microsoft suggests that they are looking to bring the Xbox Live, Windows Mobile, and other similar properties closer together. More specifically, there's talk of a "casual and social gaming platform" that would be available across platforms and devices.

Augmented Reality Game Plus Facebook Equals Gaming for the Future? [Technomix]
Zugara's “Cannonballz” game uses the motion capture technology from their Webcam Shopper to “appear” in the gameplay. In this case, they are dodging cannonballs while trying desperately to save their friends (which are imported via a Facebook Connect integration) and accumulate points. Once their game is over, people can share their scores and the game by uploading it to their Facebook stream.

In Terms of Mobile Data Traffic, a Month in 2014 Will be More Than Whole 2008 [IntoMobile]
ABI Research has found that mobile data usage is going to increase so much that by 2014 there will be more data transfers in a one month than in all of 2008.

Cell Phone Sales Declined 6% in Q2 2009, Smartphone Sales Grew 27%
[Unwired View]
Research from Gartner points to the decline of cell phone sales in general, while smarphone sales have gone up 27%. The demand for "more than just a phone" is high.

Use Your iPhone to Track Your Happiness [Fast Company]
A PhD student from Harvard has released an app (based on a previously-implemented SMS diary platform) that enables you keep tabs on your happiness. It pings you at  regular intervals throughout the day, asking for your input. The hope is to get a broader picture of trends in your mood and what factors are behind them.

Drive for The 'Augmented' Stadium [BBC News]
Folks at the University of Glasgow behind the "smart stadium" project are creating software that links fans' smartphones into a network so they can easily share messages, images and video. This would enable both spectators and at-home viewers to share their thoughts, impressions, and feelings while watching the game.

iWantMore [trendcentral]
A selection of iPhone gadgets that will boost your photo and video experiences:

>>Zgrip iPhone Pro: A simple, yet effective grip for the iPhone. It takes away all the shakiness when filming, offering more stable memories.

>>MiLi Pro: Due in September, this small device is a video projector for your favorite mobile phone.

>>The Quattro: Allows for lens attachments on the camera,  improving zoom and image quality. It also serves as a protective case.

UK Text Donations Will Be VAT Free [velti]
In an effort to promote and boost SMS donations, the Mobile Data Association has decided to strip all VAT from SMS donations in the UK.

Advertisers, Consumers Disagree on Ad Effectiveness [MarketingVOX]
Research from Harris shows some differences in how advertisers and consumers perceive different types of ads: 39% of advertisers use empathy while 75% consumers say this has little to no effect, 25% of ads use motivational speech while 2/5 of consumers say this doesn't work.

Monetize The Audience, Not The Content [A VC]
With the NY Times looking to monetize it's online articles, whatever decision could make or break the future of the newspaper. Online/mobile ads need to get money from people that want to pay, not from everyone who uses it.

Barcode Replacement Shown Off [BBC News]
MIT researchers have just finished developing a new barcode format, called Bokodes. The new format is 0.1 inches, can hold a thousand times the information of regular barcodes and can be read by any mobile phone camera.

Tweet Your Senator: Healthcare Reform Gets a Presidential Mashup [Mashable]
Although tweeting in the White House is officially banned, BarackObama.com has launched a new feature that lets users tweet their senators to support health care reform.

Iran: Regime Uses SMS Messages to Threaten People [textually.org]
The Ministry of Intelligence in Iran is sending out texts to warn citizens that they should stop to engage in "illegal gatherings" or risk arrest and interrogation.

Mobile Internet Use Shrinks Digital Divide [NYTimes]
Pew has found that amongst mobile internet users, the minority teenager has become the majority user. Over half of African-Americans and Hispanics use their mobile to access Internet, while only 28% of Caucasians do the same.

Students From Around The World Learn Through SMS [cellular-news]
The Global Teenager project, started to connect schools from around the world to share knowledge online, is now integrating SMS functionality to allow schools with no Internet to be part of the project. Zambia, Ghana, South-Africa, Zimbabwe, Canada, Romania and the Netherlands are already signed up for the SMS program.

Indian Farmers Use Mobile Phones to Control Irrigation [PC World]
Tata Teleservices is testing a technology that would allow Indian farmers to control irrigation times from their mobile phones. The service would further revolutionize the lives of farmers who already use cell phones for selling/buying crops.

Brand Awareness for Teens and Tweens [Adotas]
Pangea Media has found that 77% of teens rely on friends to find cool brands, 51% discover brands through TV, and 46% said neither Facebook or Myspace had cool info about new products.

Japan to Politicians: No Twitter For You [Inquisitr]
Japan has very restrictive election rules where media exposure is limited for all candidates. This year, Twitter falls under that media exposure limit and thus candidates are forbidden to tweet.

Google Maps for Mobile 3.2 Brings Layers of Information [mediabistro]
Google has rolled out an update for Gmaps on Windows and Symbian phones that offers Wikipedia info in addition to classic maps features. This new "layer" of info promises to expand to all devices and probably see other services partner with Google.

Amnesty Wants You to Join a Chat TODAY With Shell Over Human Rights Violation in Niger Delta [Boing Boing]
After Amnesty International released a report on Shell's activity in Niger, activists tweeted to Shell that they wanted a public discussion about that issue. The tweeting and retweeting pushed Shell to accept the open discussion.

Mobile Data to Grow 500% by 2011, Will Surpass Voice Traffic [IntoMobile]
A report from Nokia Siemens Networks shows that mobile data usage has been doubling every year and is expected to surpass voice usage by 2011.

Push for 'Instant-On' Web Search [BBC News]
A company called Splashtop is partnering with Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex to offer "instant" search for PC. The idea is simple: When you type your search query, the various results are displayed according to what you are typing live.

MySpace’s Second Act: ‘A Window For Youth Culture’ [Ypulse]
Building on their early days as a community populated largely by twentysomething musicians, artists and other creative tastemakers/self promoters in L.A., MySpace is reasserting itself as a teen-centric site. Can it be cool again?

Will Pre-Teens Really Adopt the New iPod Touch as a VoIP Phone? [ZDNet]
The new iPod Touch will have a built-in mic, so VOIP over Wi-fi will be possible. Calling without a contract is appealing to teens, but will it overshadow the lack of texting capabilities? Probably not.

Open Source and Social Media: Community, Collaboration, Freedom [ReadWriteWeb]
The development of social media, as a user-defined and generated trend, is somewhat parallel to the boom of the open-source technology. The idea behind both is more control for the people actually using them.

YouTube Experimenting With 3D Web Videos [TechCrunch]
A YouTube engineer has been playing around with the addition of 3D viewing capabilities to web videos. One video is currently available, it even has a drop down menu to define the type of 3D desired.

Why Japan’s Smartphones Haven’t Gone Global [NYTimes]
While we've exported lots of cool things from Japanese culture--from sushi to Hello Kitty--their cutting-edge mobile phones still don't translate. The problem comes from the devices actually being too advanced for foreign markets, many features are thus rendered useless or simply not adapted to what users expect in places like the US.

The App Market Will Be As Big As The Internet In 2020 [The Business Insider]
By 2020, there will be approximately 10 million mobile apps across all platforms and manufacturers. That number will make the app industry as big as the rest of Internet.

Social Networking: Everyone is Doing it, All the Time [Mashable]
Social networking is the number one online activity amongst all age groups in the U.K., a comScore study shows. The second activity is instant messaging.

The Most Engaged Brands On The Web [TechCrunch]
Starbucks, Dell and eBay topped a list of  the 100 brands that are most active on social networking sites.

Mobile Internet--the Final Frontier for Game Vendors [CNET News]
As online and mobile overtakes traditional console gaming, Nintendo and others may need to break down their walled gardens and figure out how to converge their games with mobile devices and cellphones. The time will come when people won't shell out for both a DSi, Wii or XBox and a mobile phone.

World Poor Spell $7.9 Billion in Mobile Cash [Bloomberg]
As we wrote about in SMS Money Transfers with Africa's M-Pesa, mobile is becoming the standard for money transactions in emerging nations.

Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet” [TechCrunch]
The scandal on the blogosphere this week was the hacking of Twitter staff email and subsequent (and somewhat questionable) posting of secret internal documents on TechCrunch. These include:

- Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch
- Twitter’s Financial Forecast Shows First Revenue In Q3, 1 billion users in 2013
- Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”

The Future of Search: Social Relevancy Rank [ReadWriteWeb]
As real-time search services like BingTweets, Collecta, and OneRiot continue to grow, a Social Relevancy Rank will emerge. Based on the same principle as Page Rank, this means that whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph.

Google: Browser is the Platform of the Future, Even on Mobiles [Mashable]
Google is investing a lot of resources into Chrome, which most likely will be released on mobile as well. The idea is that browsers will become the ultimate platform for devices, fitting into the emerging cloud computing model.

Google Looks to Campuses for 'Cloud' Converts [AdAge]
Meanwhile, Google is looking to breed a generation of workers comfortable with the concept of "cloud" computing, particularly their version of it in which Google provides free web-based services in exchange for advertising dollars. To do this, they are providing free hosting and services to colleges and universities, an attractive proposition given the economy, and Google is signing up new campuses at a rate of 70 to 75 a quarter.

Surprising Mobile Video Consumption Patterns in Japan [What Japan Thinks]
Some interesting findings on Japanese video mobile usage: 53.6% have watched a video on their mobile, and only 23.5% watched it on the move.

The GRID Introduces Location-Based Advertising [CScout]
The GRID, Vodacom’s location-based social network mobile phone Java app, has been around for a couple of years in South Africa, but now the network has grown in size, making it economically viable to test various ad-based revenue models.

Molson Coors Uses Adeye Mobile Marketing for Different World Drinks Brands [Adeye]
Molson Coors is rolling out a mobile marketing campaign to its specialty beers. Tickets to a boat launch event were sent out via SMS and recipients were directed to a site for more info on the beer and for a chance to win a meal for two. While at the event, Bluetooth was used to deliver an app that acted as a multimedia brochure.

Landshare Lets Communities Grow Their Veggies Together [TrendHunter]
A new initiative in England called Landshare is connecting local food growers to plot owners who want to share land. Through a dedicated site, users access a map of who is offering what around them.

Kenyan Mosque Jams Mobile Calls [BBC News]
In an effort to have prayers a little more focused on God (and less on text messages), a mosque in Kenya has installed a cell phone jammer. The move is actually leading other prayer centers to start considering cell phone disabling devices.

Ethnicity vs. Culture in Advertising [Advertising Age]
The evolution of race perception in the US has led new generations to enter into cultural mindsets that are somewhat unrelated to race. "Urban" for example, is moving away from a certain ethnicity, and now expresses a way of life.

The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report [Hard Knox Life]
New report from Razorfish reiterates what smart marketers know already: Brands need to interact in a credible way with consumers and engage in an ongoing, two-way dialogue.

Twitter Outsources Ad Model Development [BrandWeek]
Built on Twitter: Ad models? Indeed, as the company looks to make money, it's looking for some help. Twitter Sparq will embed advertising in Twitter streams (Think AdWords for Twitter). Meanwhile, Federated Media Publishing has rolled out its third sponsored Twitter aggregation site Cinematweets.

5 New Twitter Games to Make Tweeting Fun [Mashable]
Branded games are a good way to get face time with consumers, but there's the issue of discovery. To solve this, some brands are building games on Twitter, where there is already a large community. Now with push on the iPhone, Twitter is even more mobile friendly and that leaves a lot of opportunity for a location-based real-time mobile twitter game.

iPhone Incoming! [Shanghaiist]
Watch out HiPhone, the real version is coming to China. Unfortunately (like Google) Apple is taking some features out of the device (e.g. Wi-Fi) and will probably change whatever the government asks them to.

Kenya: Stock Exchange Makes Sales via SMS [AfricaNews]
The Nairobi Stock Exchange is launching buy and sell orders through SMS. A simple idea, the innovation allows the market to move even faster and enables stock holders to react to news in a quicker way than phone calls.

Siri: Virtual Personal Assistant Prepares For Debut [ReadWriteWeb]
This new app will take a "person-centric" approach to search by offering conversation-type interactions for finding location-relevant  information. For example, ask  "What is a good movie about to start near my current location?" and the product would deliver a textual and graphical answer

GM’s Chevrolet Breaks Bluetooth Marketing Campaign in Mall [Mobile Marketer]
Deployed in Bangalore, India, the Bluetooth campaign for the Chevrolet Spark generated 11,000 downloads over the weekend.  The success of the campaign is largely attributed to the novelty of that type of promotion and the fact that users spread the info via their peer groups.

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and that holds doubly true for developing nations, where innovation doesn’t always come from something new and cool. Sometimes it comes from familiar technologies applied in novel ways to fill the gaps left by inadequate infrastructure, poverty or geographic constraints.

Such is the case for the banking sector in regions of Africa and Asia, where millions of people have no access to banks – either because they don’t meet the institution’s requirements for opening an account due to a lack of formal employment, or because they live in an area inaccessible to banking infrastructure. Access to such services is a necessity for rural-area dwellers who depend on cash remittances from relatives employed in the nation’s urban centers or in foreign countries. In this case, necessity found its solution in SMS, the grandfather of killer mobile apps, as a way of broadening the reach of banking services in developing nations.

The M-PESA mobile banking initiative in Africa is a perfect example. Launched in March of 2007 by Safaricom (of the Vodafone group) in Kenya, M-PESA (‘pesa’ is Swahili for ‘money’) leverages Safaricom’s national network of airtime dealers as well as the affordability and ubiquity of SMS. It also provides a viable alternative to formal banks, which serve only 19 percent of Kenya’s ‘bankable’ population according to a 2008 survey.

Registered M-PESA customers can “deposit” hard currency with any M-PESA agent in exchange for e-money, which is uploaded into the customer’s M-PESA account. For 38 US cents, the customer can then transfer this money to another registered customer’s M-PESA account via SMS. Once the recipient receives the SMS confirmation, the hard currency can then be withdrawn from the nearest M-PESA agent, completing the money transfer process.

How does the M-PESA service benefit the average Kenyan? Olga Morawczynski, a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh who spoke at the GSM World Congress in Barcelona last February, shared the story of Martin, a shoe-maker in Kibera, an informal settlement just outside Nairobi. Martin makes about US$ 20 a day from his trade and sends a quarter of his earnings to his wife and mother, who live in Western Kenya, over 100 miles away. M-PESA saves Martin time, allowing him to work his trade instead of having to travel far outside his place of work to find a bank. The service also enables him to make frequent transfers – about 5 times a month – thereby allowing him to send a week’s earnings when his family needs the money most. Martin’s story as well as the results of Olga Morawczynski’s study can be found here.

Today, Safaricom’s M-PESA service has over six million registered users and 8,000 agents in Kenya. Since its inception, over US$ 1.7 billion in funds have been transferred, equivalent to about 5.5 percent of Kenya’s GDP, at an average transaction size of about US$ 30. M-PESA has attracted global attention and has won several awards, most recently for the 2008 Best Mobile Money Service award from the GSM Association. However, for the millions of “unbanked” individuals in Kenya depending on relatives’ remittances such as Martin’s family, M-PESA’s success means only one thing - food on the table now, instead of next week.

For more about M-PESA, download the case study here.

- David Zarraga