Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

1. Facebook, Pandora Lead Rise of Recommendation Engines http://j.mp/cqM0hL
2. Would a baby app scare guys into safe sex? http://j.mp/ciVVaS
3. Why overheard mobile phone conversations are so irritating http://j.mp/dgZ0TF
4. Facebook Releases Analytics Tools For Sharing and “Likes” http://j.mp/buFSlQ
5. Mobile Payments: A Guide to the Growing Market in Your Pocket http://j.mp/9E02Lo
6. Pepsi Adds Official Bits to Products with Stickybits http://j.mp/9T7r96
7. How the iPad Became Child's Play -- and Learning Tool http://j.mp/bAJ9Iw
8. Apple's iPhone 4 promo videos show Retina Display and video calling http://j.mp/bDgd0y
9. 6 Geeky Devices Connecting the Internet to Your Things http://j.mp/9Sa3a8
10. Best Buy’s Movie Mode Enables Second Screen Interaction http://j.mp/9269hL

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.

iTunes changed how music was discovered. Will services like Spotify and We7 revolutionize the collection and sharing of music? The future appears to be all about anywhere access through streaming, not hoarding.

Up-and-coming Swedish music startup Spotify is gaining traction in the mobile space as it strikes deals with mobile networks and releases applications across multiple platforms. The site relies on advertising and a paid premium service to provide users with unlimited free music. This simple cloud-based access to music from anywhere through our phones is changing the game—and our behavior.

Ownership of sound has come a long way, ever since it became possible to record it. With the MP3, Kazaa, and iTunes, people began hoarding music and asking their friends, "how many gigabytes of music do you have?" With Rhapsody and now Spotify—as well as We7 and Grooveshark—this entire competition to own the most or best disappears. You already "own" all the music. Downloading it almost seems like a waste of time. In Spotify, every song you ever wanted is available with a simple search and without a download.

Earlier this summer Pitchfork's Eric Harvey discussed the social history of the MP3 and the nature of collecting music. He supports his thoughts by talking to Evan Eisenberg about music as a thing.

"What exactly happened when music became a thing?" He starts answering it by introducing us to Clarence, an eccentric music lover who has packed every nook and cranny of his suburban home with records. Though he obsessively amasses records, Clarence does not view himself as a "collector." He explains: "My idea originally…was to share my collection with everybody. You see, collectors--take collectors of oil paintings--they don't do that; they only share with themselves. Share it with everybody!"

This privileging of sharing and universal access over ownership has been trending over the past few years. In 2008 MTV's MX2 study pointed to an insight around consumer music listening behavior: Owning is more and more about timely access and less about physical possession. There is a difference between being able to physically and forever own music like in 1997, and being able to hear it when you want to, now, and in the moment. This is why mobile streaming is the future of music consumption.

The Pirate Bay is on its way out, literally. Illegal downloading has been a disruptive force that points towards an unmet need and now innovative startups like Spotify, We7 and Grooveshark are here to solve it. For hardcore fans who want to own a “piece” of an artist, there will still be collector’s editions, t-shirts and other merchandise. However, anywhere access through on-demand mobile streaming is where music is heading for one key reason—it’s what consumers want. We expect to see much more adoption of these services in the next year as we enter a 4G world…

Our Friday round-up of random stuff on our minds....

Mike

99Designs.com

Can you put a price on creativity? Yes. Decide on how much you want to pay for the design of everything from logos to your Twitter background and let 44,000 creatives decide if they want to tackle it for your price. Only beef creative's have: mockups are public for competition to view.

Allison

Good Morning Interwebs

Shameless plug this week: Some friends and I have started a new live web show called "Good Morning Interwebs" that airs every Tuesday and Thursday from 8:15 - 8:45am EST.

Using the Livesteam platform, we broadcast from two different locations--my roommate Meghan Keane and I from our apartment in Brooklyn, and our friends Nate Westheimer and Michael Galpert from their place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Since the first stop of the day is online for many people, we decided to take the morning show concept to the web. Think Morning Joe but about web/new media than politics. We even have our own coffee sponsor, Roasting Plant (currently seeking a cereal sponsor, btw). Our doors are open for friends to stop by on their way to work and say hi (so far we've had Soraya Darabi from the New York Times, Sam Lessin from Drop.io, and Amanda Payton from Harvard). There's also a chat room where we can chit-chat about what's going on in the world of The Interwebs.

If you're up in the morning, turn it on and have breakfast with us!

Jeremy

Death By Discovery: The Interminable Churn of Music Start-ups (MocoNews)

It ain't easy being a music discovery startup these days. As popular music discovery sites like iLike are bought and others like Pandora are forced to limit service, it begs the question of how to remain viable in a world in which consumers continue to demand free. Though large scale music delivery and discovery services will always have their place, perhaps the answer lies in returning to the communities based around the 1:1 scale of artists and their fans. One need only look at the numerous “official” Demi Lovato accounts on Twitter or Radiohead’s recent distribution of a new song on their website as examples of the continued strength of this artist/fan connection.

Matthew

Twitter is preparing to launch a new feature for their popular 140 character tweets. Longitudinal and latitudinal geographic location display will be included as an optional activation in messages. Twitter users will be able to utilize this option to view tweets that all originate in the same city, neighborhood, building, etc. Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, has also explained how this new feature will allow people to follow a particular event (such as a concert or earthquake) in a new, actively engaged, and useful way.

Aside from the benefits it lends to Twitter users, the new location tracking feature will play a role in commercial business. Businesses on Twitter can use the location tracker as a method of reaching out to a specified, local target audience. As of right now, Twitter assures that the release of exact location of tweets is still a long ways away.

Amanda

Kuler
Adobe developed a website where you can pick a color and match others to go with it, giving you the perfect color scheme. It's the perfect tool for those who aren't so color savvy. Check it out at: kuler.adobe.com

Oprah Asks “Where the Skype Are You?” [GeekSugar]
Oprah is dedicating today’s episode of her show to the power of Skype. She’ll be showing off the service’s video conferencing and phone capabilities by chatting with Skype’s president Josh Silverman and Skyping into Antarctica, a submarine and even an airplane.

HP Introduces Friendlee – Location-Aware Social Networking for BlackBerry [IntoMobile]
We’ve talked about the address book as the “real social network”, and it seems that’s what HP is trying to take advantage of with Friendlee, a new LBS the company announced at WES 2009. “HP is trying to reimagine the address book so instead of chewing through a list of rarely-used contacts, you’ll be focusing on the few people you talk to on a daily basis,” IntoMobile reports. We wonder about plans to integrate with existing social networks, though, or if it's purely an enterprise play.

Share Where You Are When You Want [WSJ]
Glympse, a new location-based service for mobile, invites users to send friends just a glimpse of their whereabouts via either text or email. These “glimpses” let you control how long someone can track you on a map – from just a few minutes to hours or days.

Major Ad Campaign for Starbucks to Focus on Quality [NY Times]
Starbucks' new campaign challenges people to hunt for its new text-heavy posters on Tuesday and be the first to post a photo of one using Twitter. We think it's safe to say that entrants will be snapping pics with their phones and using Twitpic or a similar mobile upload tool. Given this, there seems to be a lack of a more defined, integrated mobile strategy, one that really takes advantage of this consumer behavior (i.e. using the phone as a connector between the poster and their social network.)

Software Rules, as Phones Become More Than ‘Smart’ [eWeek]
Hardware is fast becoming a commodity in the handset market, with software becoming the meaningful point of differentiation.

App Revenue Is Poised to Surpass Facebook Revenue [AdAge]
It seems that the "Facebook economy", fueled by enterprising app developers, will now be generating more revenue than the platform itself. This has to lead Facebook to wonder about its own monetization strategy. While "engagement" ads were a start, we're curious what's next....

Pandora Aims For Profitability As Mobile App Usage Soars [mocoNews]
These days, Pandora is adding 50,000-60,000 members a day and as much as 40 percent of those users are being driven by the online radio’s iPhone app. These users may finally lead to a profit for the company as Pandora plans to increase the number of audio commercials on its mobile platforms.

New Tool in the MD’s Bag: The Smartphone [Washington Post]
Doctors and med students are increasingly using smartphones to do everything from pulling up instructional diagrams and videos and writing electronic prescriptions to looking up drug interactions and viewing X-rays and MRI scans.

Almost 60 percent of U.S. subscribers now text [FierceMobileContent]
This is up from 54 percent in 2008, according to a new Toluna study. Broken down that is: 94 percent of teens, 87 percent of twentysomethings text, 64 percent their 40s, and 46 percent in their 50s. In terms of SMS volume, the 13-to-19 age group remains the most active, sending more than 500 texts per month on average.

Alcatel Gets Into Mobile Ads [WSJ]
Alcatel-Lucent is launching new technology that identifies cellphone users within a specified distance of an advertiser's nearest outlet and notifies them of the address and phone number. The ad can also include a link to a coupon or other promotion.

Smart Phones Selling Way Better Than Dumb Ones [Digital Daily]
While global mobile handset sales fell fast in the first quarter of 2009, smartphones made out just fine. In fact, their sales rose 12.7 percent to 36 million units.

Hispanics 211% More Likely to Download Digital Content [Marketing Charts]
A new study reveals that Hispanics in the U.S. are heavier users of cellphone features and are more likely to download digital content online.

What do you get when you mix a social network, Internet radio, a mixtape and a little ego? You get Blip.fm and the combination is delicious.com - or should be.

Blip.fm (not to be confused with our fav video site, Blip.tv) gives you two options - you can be on the stage or in the rave. In other words, you have the choice of listening to Blip's "DJs" or becoming one yourself and spinning your own tracks.

Like Last.fm, you can follow people, see what they're listening to and let others know what you're listening to. Like muxtape and mixwit, you can curate tracks and create a social mixtape. Blip.fm combines these ideas and also lets you skip around between songs and play them on-demand. The site design is simple, reminiscent of Twitter, which makes it so appealing. Think of Blip.fm as Twitter with music.

Sites like Blip.fm seem to be forming a vanguard that could almost be termed "new radio" or "nu-radio" if you're into that. Radio has always been about (1) variety (2) discovery and (3) selection. Social networks like Blip.fm, iLike, iMeem and "search and discover" setups like Musicovery are becoming the new tastemakers.

There will always be a place for radios, like the radio in your car or the kitchen, but these one-way conversations have been and will continue to give way to the transitive nature of social radio. (Whereas traditional radio still relies on an A-to-B model (DJ-to-listeners), Blip.fm's model is more A-to-B-to-C-to-A-etc. and everyone is a DJ and a listener.) Essentially, we don't have to just take what we can get anymore--AND we don't have to be interrupted by sponsor messages.

There are exceptions to the growing social radio wave - Pandora and Slacker, for example, still operate on the principles of their forefathers (A-to-B), but these are so optimized for personal taste that there is a great deal of feedback and instant gratification.

But back to Blip.fm - this site is just plain cool. It's not as advanced as some sites, like Imeem (the third laregest social network), but it's simple and that in itself is a saving grace and a big reason Blip might catch on in big way. It takes less than a moment to get started and within minutes you will be following and/or be getting followed by people from all over the world.

On behalf of DJSassyKat, to all his European fans, I would like to say, "What's up ladies? I'm a Leo and I love to cook - a little 80's new wave, with a side of disco. Sprinkle some acoustic to taste. Enjoy with a glass of shoegazing."

The iPhone is democratizing mobile, and now that the App Store has opened, even the non-tech savvy are tricking their phones out. Our coworker Zack--a 20-something who calls himself an "unlikely iPhone owner"--has been like a kid in a candy store for the past few weeks. In an effort to discern which of the many (many) apps available are resonating with youth and why, we asked for his personal top 5:

Shazam
Definitely the coolest app out there right now. It answers the oft-asked question: Who sings this? Simply hold your iPhone up to the music and after a few seconds, it detects the song playing and stores it for future reference. It also gives you the option to purchase the song on iTunes or watch the music video on YouTube.

Save Benjis
For most Gen-Yers like myself, living can sometimes be expensive, which is why I love this one so much. Search for any item by brand name, product number, or even bar code and you can instantly compare prices of over 100 major online retailers that carry the item. It even allows you to purchase the product straight from your iPhone.

Remote
A very simple app that turns your iPhone into a remote control for your iTunes library on your Mac or PC. It's extremely responsive and, right now, the one I use most often.

Pandora Radio
Like its online counterpart, the Pandora app lets you tag songs on a like/dislike basis then suggests new ones you might like. The only downside is that it quickly drains the little battery life the iPhone 3G has to begin with. But at the end of the day, it's a great way to discover new music.

Phone Saber
Even if you don't love Star Wars, you'll love this app that turns your device into your very own light saber (it makes 'zzswoosh' sounds as you swing it through the air.) Now the force can be with any iPhone owner that wants it.

- Zack Eidman