All posts tagged ‘Teens’

by CalebOctober 8, 2010

Tweetworthy: Nokia N8 Ad, Public Twitter Booth, Networked Laundry, and More

1. Teens figure there's no point in learning anything if you can just Google it http://bit.ly/8XLkb1

2. Nokia N8 TV ad - It's not technology, it's what you do with it http://bit.ly/cFraK4

3. Public Twitter Booth [PIC] http://bzfd.it/9528vY

4. Laundry Machines That Email You When They’re Done http://bit.ly/cNsJwU

5. Making Music With Touchscreens And Sound-Altering Modules http://bit.ly/aqj7HF

6. Young consumers keen on mobile commerce http://bit.ly/8Xwb9j

7. iPhone apps are the new ads http://bit.ly/9MR9mt

8. Integrated Facial Recognition Coming to Smartphones with Viewdle http://rww.to/ako4WB

9. It Takes Over One Hundred Cellphones To Propose Marriage Properly http://gizmo.do/byqAGr

10. Shopping via Text Mesage - targeting emerging economies where cell phones, not browsers, rule http://bit.ly/bH6XU1

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

by SarahJanuary 20, 2010

Teen Uses Facebook Group As Form of Digital Rebellion

tess

For many teens who have grown up using Facebook, it comes as no surprise that teenager Tess Chapin started the Facebook group, “1000 to get tess ungrounded.” She nearly reached her goal last Friday with 806 members; after this column was published in the New York Times, she surpassed it. Now she is close to 2,000.

On her Facebook group page, Tess explains that she made a late-night mistake, her parents flipped out and then grounded her for five weeks. “Please join so I can convice them to unground me. please please please.”

Consider this teenage rebellion in a digital world. Tess has many sympathetic supporters, posting on the group page that “parents can be stupid.” But there are also some people who disagree, posting that she’s not going to get ungrounded just by convincing 1,000 people to join her Facebook group.

Unfortunately for Tess, her parents do not plan on ungrounding her. Maybe next time.

[image via nytimes]

by AllisonJanuary 13, 2010

Looking at Youth to Understand Our Mobile Future

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Having started out as the blog for Fleishman-Hillard's Youth Marketing group, we have long been tracking the youth segment here. While young people have long been arbiters of cool, they now have a very unique perspective on the world. Over the past 10 years, a revolution in personal and mobile computing took place. Young people today  never knew a world without PCs and cell phones, and they will inevitably relate to the world differently than their older counterparts.

The mobile innovation we will see coming in the next 5-10 years will be mind-boggling, and it will be fueled by people who can't even drive yet. Many older people won't be able to understand it -- not the how so much as the why. As a recent article in the  New York Times, "The Children of Cyberspace" by Brad Stone, points out:

Children my daughter’s age are also more likely to have some relaxed notions about privacy. The idea of a phone or any other device that is persistently aware of its location and screams out its geographic coordinates, even if only to friends, might seem spooky to older age groups.

But the newest batch of Internet users and cellphone owners will find these geo-intelligent tools to be entirely second nature, and may even come to expect all software and hardware to operate in this way.

Indeed, the rising generation will have different expectations from technology and the world around them. So you may show a Twitter, a Foursquare, or a DailyBooth to a 40-year-old, even a 30-year-old, and they may scratch their head and insist that people won't use it, whereas a young person understands it inherently.

Wait, what do we even mean by "young person"? Indeed, anyone who studies youth knows that there is no such catch-all term. As technology develops at an exponential pace, what we mean by "youth" is fast changing. There are now vast experience gaps between youth of all ages, and "consumer segments" are proliferating. The article points to this rise "mini-generation gaps":

Researchers... theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

The truth is that human behavior is changing rapidly. The only way we can hope to stay relevant as agencies and brands is with open eyes and an open mind.

by MBSeptember 4, 2009

News to Us: T-Pain's AutoTune App, Economist SMS Subs, iStoryTime and More

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  • Film Set for Mobile Phone Premiere | AdWeek
    Sally Potter's film Rage will premiere on mobile phones when Babelgum offers one episode from the movie per day for seven days via its free mobile application for iPhone and iPod devices, beginning on Sept. 21.
  • Metromix.com matches iPhone users with nearby businesses | Mobile Marketer
    This new version of the What's Nearby iPhone app lets users locate nearby entertainment options via GPS, post reviews and photos to Metromix.com and share those submissions via Facebook Connect.
  • T-Pain's Autotune iPhone App | TUAW
    T-Pain has a new app that will automatically Auto-tune you into the style of some of the rapper's top songs, with more purchaseable within the app. There's even a "freestyle" mode, complete with a few unreleased background tracks to jam with. Best part is the promo video featuring other artists trying out the app. HOT.
  • For Teens, Has Texting Replaced Talking? | WSJ
    Nothing new here, but interesting to here this POV from a mom: "I don’t see texting harming teens’ ability to communicate. My son is as attuned to nonverbal cues as any older members of our family. If anything, I have found him more engaged and easier to communicate with from afar, because he is constantly available via text message and responds with a faithfulness and speed that any mother would find reassuring."
  • Economist Replaces Your Newsstand Guy With a Cellphone | Advertising Age
    Extending a program already underway in the UK, The Economist is letting New Yorkers use their cellphones to order overnight home delivery of the new issue at the regular newsstand price.
  • How two dads turned the iPhone into a platform for children's books | Los Angeles Times
    Their iStoryTime platform lets you creat children's books for the iPhone that can entertain kids during shopping trips, airplane hops or long car rides to grandmother's house for a holiday weekend.
by MBAugust 20, 2009

ReBlog of the Week: "Teen & Tween Mobile Truths From Pew" (YPulse)

pewmobilereport

This week's reblog is from our friend Anastasia Goodstein, founder of YPulse.com.

Reading Pew Internet's retrospective summary of its teen mobile research over the past five years, I had two thoughts:

1) I am betting their 2010 report shows way more mobile adoption from younger teens, less landline usage, esp. with younger teens of Xer parents who may have ditched the landline (though they admit they only surveyed households with landlines in the past), way higher texting rates and higher percentage of smartphone ownership that may cut across socioeconomic lines (we'll see/should be interesting).

2) There are some basic truths you can glean from reading this research about teens and their phones (outlined below)

Girls Are The Biggest Users Of Voice & Texting On Mobile. Just as they put the "social" in social networking – girls are hypercommunicators. From Pew:

Girls ages 12-17 are more likely than boys to use any kind of phone for voice calling. More than a third (36%) of girls say that they use a landline phone daily, compared with 27% of boys. Similarly, 55% of girls with cell phones talk daily on their cell phone, while 47% of cell phone-owning boys report the same. [they didn't measure how LONG these conversations were, which I bet would draw an even starker gender difference]

Girls are more likely than boys to send and receive text messages frequently, as are older teens ages 15-17. More than 2 in 5 girls (42%) send text messages to friends daily, while about a third (34%) of boys do the same.

Older Teens Use Their Mobile Phones More. Even if tween mobile phone adoption numbers increase, my hunch is that it's being driven by parents just as much as peer pressure out of safety concerns. These parents probably aren't quite ready to give their tweens unlimited plans and still have a heavy hand in controlling how these tweens use their phones. Tweens also aren't driving yet, so they may be doing less communicating around where to meet up, who is picking up whom, etc. From Pew:

The older the teen, the more likely she uses her phone frequently. Older teens use them to talk to friends on a daily basis; younger teens tend to use mobile phones to call pals a few times or less per week. More than seven in ten 17-year-olds with phones talk to friends on their cell phones daily, while just 28% of 12-year-olds with phones say the same. A large percentage of phone-owning younger teens ages 12-14 say that they talk to friends at least once a week – 18% of those ages 12-14 report weekly cell phone use, while 10% of those ages 15-17 do.

Tweens Heart Games. Just as the internet is more about playing games for tweens (vs. social networking), portable gaming devices also reflect this reality.

Mobile gaming devices are owned predominantly by younger teens (those ages 12-14). Two-thirds (67%) of 12-14 year olds own a portable gaming device, compared with 44% of teens ages 15 to 17. The most notable drop occurs at age 14, typically a time of transition between middle and high school for many teens.

- Anastasia Goodstein

The original post can be found here.

Follow the site at twitter.com/ypulse.

For more coverage of the latest trends and developments in mobile technology for youth, check out the Ypulse Mobile Channel.

by MBAugust 19, 2009

News to Us: BlockBuster on Motorola, Survey4Teens, Drunk Texting, District 9 QR Codes and More

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Motorola And Blockbuster Team Up For Mobile Movie Downloads [Silicon Alley Insider]
Blockbuster is partnering with Motorola to offer direct streaming of their content on mobile. The move comes after Blockbuster has announced a deal to offer streaming on Samsung TVs and DVD rental machines to compete with Redbox.

Ringing Cell Phone Turns On Oven, Spooking Owner [textually.org]
A man in Brooklyn has discovered that when his cell phone is called, his oven turns on. The glitch has yet to be fixed, as technicians are trying to understand how this new functionality works.

eSPIN and United Sample Partner to Launch Surveys4Teens [Yahoo! Finance]
Hearst's online teen network eSPIN and United Sample have teamed up to launch a new social networking portal survey4teens.com, a place for teens adn yougn adults to take surveys and share opinions.

Mobile App Ads Cause Concern for Advertisers [mad]
The Central Office for Information in the U.K. has called on mobile ads to link back to mobile friendly sites. It is estimated that only 5% of mobile ads actually link back to a mobile site, a poor user experience that hurts a brand's image according to advertisers.

Survey: Two-Thirds of Mobile Users Guilty of Drunk Texting [Mashable]
Research from Buzzd has found that 68% of mobile users drunk text. Other findings include 85% of respondents relying on word of mouth for places to go and things to do.

Dangerous QR Code Advertising for District 9 [PSFK]
Last year we noticed the QR codes on posters for Notorious in the NYC subway. Now for the promotion of District 9, criminal-like yellow tape strips with QR codes have been spotted in major cities. One in NYC is actually on subway stairs, though, perhaps not the best location to stop, take your cell out, and read the QR code.

Window Phone Concept Mixes Transparency with Weather Forecasting [Unwired View]
Seunghan Song has designed a Windows phone that changes according to the weather forecast--the screen becomes wet when it rains, white when it snows, and goes to writing mode when blown on it.

How Smartphones Are Making Wi-Fi Hot Again [GigaOm]
According to Om Malik, the presence of PC-quality browsers on smartphones and webkit-based browsers, as well as the growing popularity of social-networking services such as Twitter and Facebook as communication tools, have boosted the demand for wireless data. These tools demand data connectivity, and people want to check them while on the go. This spurt in usage has left the carriers that long saw themselves as Wi-Fi’s enemy coming around and embracing the insurgent technology.

Lombard Street To Become Giant Candyland Game Today [The Alley]
To mark the 60th anniversary of Candyland, a life size version of the board game will take place today in San Francisco.

Europe Examines Reports of Exploding iPhones [NYTimes]
Reports of a few exploding iPhone/iPods in France and Britain have led the European Commission to launch an investigation.

North Koreans Love Their Spotty Cellphone Service [engadget]
A year after North Korea launched its own 3G network, reports are estimating that almost 30% of Pyongyang residents have one. The devices are obviously under tight government control but even an isolationist dictatorship cannot prevent the rise of mobile.

by MelvinAugust 18, 2009

StarHub Launches New Social Networking Value-Added Service

starhub-logo

StarHub recently launched a new social networking value-added service that allows its mobile post-paid customers to enjoy unlimited local access to Windows Live Messenger and Facebook from mobile devices, at no data usage charges. According to the company's press release.

This announcement makes StarHub the first mobile service provider in Asia to offer free local data access to Windows Live Messenger and Facebook, which are fast gaining popularity with mobile customers in Singapore, particularly the youths who are avid users of social networking services to keep in touch with friends.

This is a smart move by Starhub. By making the data and service free of charge, Starhub is sending a message to teens that Starhub understands them. It’s not always about the best price, but also about tailoring freebies to targeted behavior. Plus we’re guessing Starhub also wants to start nurturing mobile web surfing familiarity in as many users as possible from an early age. Today it's mobile facebook applications, tomorrow it’s news, sports, RSS feeds, and anything else under the sun...

With Singtel moving into the mobile music market with AMPed, Starhub and M1 had to respond with some form of strategy to counter what has been a very successful teen marketing campaign. This latest move by Starhub is really clever as data consumption is a very low trade off compared to AMPed’s heavy licensing and royalties.

What will be key to the success of this campaign is to make it less handset-specific and more customer-enabled. Currently, the service is available to customers using selected handset models pre-installed with the Windows Live Messenger and/or Facebook clients, such as Samsung OMNIA II, HTC Diamond 2, Nokia E63 and the new LG GM730 multimedia touch-screen smartphone.

We know that Starhub will continue to roll out more models, but we would also like to see this service extended beyond embedded mobile handsets. If the service is free, we think customers will be more than happy to download an app or widget onto their mobile phones. After all, the point is to encourage socialization. The more customers are able to socialize with each other--regardless of what handset they own--the better.

- Melvin Kee, MobileBehavior Singapore

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