Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Mobile Phones Beat PCs for Young Women [Marketing Vox]
SRG released a survey about the mobile usage of girls between the age of 12-24. Some key stats include: 80% own a wireless device, 70% watch TV on it, and 74% have taken a picture with it in the last month.

Is a Mobile App Right for Every Brand? [Mobile Marketer]
Just because it is popular, doesn't mean it makes sense for every brand to have an app. This article makes the point that an app store is like any other product/image distribution channel--if your consumers are not using it, why would you? We totally agree.
Related: Branded iPhone Apps and the Misleading Allure of Buzz

Mobile Pollution Sensors Deployed [BBC]
Imperial College London is deploying 100 sensors that are plugged into your average cell phone that can transmit pollution information for 5 common pollutants. The initiative will take place next Tuesday in London, Leicester, Gateshead, and Cambridge.

"MMS Lite” Debuts As SMS/MMS Hybrid Solution [Mobile Marketing Watch]
Feeling constrained by 160 characters? A company called Grapevine is developing an "MMS lite" product that includes a heading of up to 500 characters of text plus two images with optional captions. In addition, recipients can send a 250-character reply at almost zero cost.

Moms' Social/Mobile Web Use Up by 400% [ReadWriteWeb]
91% of moms say they never leave home without a mobile device. Over 50% have replaced photo albums with online photo-sharing services. And, perhaps most surprisingly, moms are also the primary console gamers in the household after the birth of a first or second child.

Popeye's mobile campaign garners 54 percent opt-in [Mobile Marketer]
The fast food chain is claiming an SMS subscription conversion rate of 54% in Kansas for special events and product launches. The number is even more impressive when you factor in the two-step opt-in process of SMS replies.

MagicJack Will Top $100 Million In Sales This Year [Business Insider]
It's no ShamWow, but MagicJack must have a pretty effective infomercial. The product, which easily enables cheap internet calling over home phones, is selling in the range of 10,000 a day and will soon have a cell phone version.

Your Favorite iPhone Apps With AppsFire [TechCrunch]
Getting users to discover an app can often be harder than building one.  AppsFire makes it easy to recommend favorites to friends.

Windows Mobile App Store Will Launch With 600 Apps; Some Free Games Included [mocoNews]
Windows is the latest to enter the app store game. Theirs launches in the fall with a pretty low number of apps as compared to Android and Apple, but the company promises to rapidly roll out the 20,000 apps that have already been developed for the platform.

Sexting (v) - v: the act of text messaging someone in the hopes of having a sexual encounter with them later; initially casual, transitioning into highly suggestive and even sexually explicit.

There's been a LOT of media coverage surrounding this new "trend." Much of it was spurred by the case of a few cheerleaders who took naked photos of themselves with their cameraphones and sent them to their boyfriends. The girls were kicked out of school, prompting their parents to sue.

Sexting (short for "sex text messaging") even made USA Today with the headline "Flirting goes high-tech with racy photos shared on cellphones, Web." Quoted in the article was a new study from Cosmogirl and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy:

About a third of young adults 20-26 and 20% of teens say they've sent or posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves, mostly to be "fun or flirtatious," a survey finds.

A third of teen boys and 40% of young men say they've seen nude or semi-nude images sent to someone else; about a quarter of teen girls and young adult women have. And 39% of teens and 59% of those ages 20-26 say they've sent suggestive text messages.

Reading through all these articles, you'd think every kid was doing it. 20% is still significant, but is this an epidemic? The behavior is certainly alarming parents and newscasters, prompting them to fret about the dangers of texting. "What is going on? Is there no just shame anymore with a lot of our young girls?"

Well, first lets look at the why. These girls have grown up on-screen, be it in home movies or MySpace profiles. Their lives are lived in the story--the telling and the showing. They also think that their value lies in their bodies. This is part of pop culture. Heck, it's almost an honor for actresses to pose for Maxim, Playboy and the like. But also keep in mind that girls probably don't intend for these to go public (though they will, of course...) Girls are feeling pressure to compete with online porn, to make the real thing as enticing as the digital.

Some are calling for the ban of the cameraphone. According to Nielsen Mobile, about 80% of teens 13-17 and 93% of those 18-24 use cellphones and most of these have built-in cameras. So should parents pluck them form their kids hands? Is that the answer? Maybe we should ask John Lithgow in Footloose.

The truth is that porn spurs technology. Sex is an early adopter and a prime motivator. You can see this in the evolution of books, magazines, video, websites, 3D, virtual reality, sensory technology.... Not to say that we should encourage porn among teens, just that it's not freakish. It's pretty natural. And Puritan fear should not impede progress. How about education as a solution? What about media literacy programs in schools and at home? Sure, we can ring the alarm, but let the cellphone ring as well!