The plan is set.  You have your content, your marketing strategy, a marketing budget (sometimes) and with the help of either the Fresh Mobile Platform, an in-house effort, or one of our ‘competitors’ you launch.  Depending on your go-to-market mobile product, it may have been a lot to get you here, but you’ve only just begun.

Over roughly the past 3 years we can make 2 general categorizations of “mobile” clients.  Those who have adapted (and continue to adapt) to a relatively new medium, and those who approached mobile with the stubborn  attitude of “we built it, they will come.”  Business fundamentals apply and we are proud to stand behind and work with our clients.  However sadly those who choose tunnel vision fail on mobile quicker than they would on the web. Those who are progressive and adapt, are still forging ahead and seeing success on mobile.

Here a few observations which may prove helpful to your existing or upcoming mobile strategy:

1. Be Sticky: Chances are a new visitor to your mobile site cost you a lot to get them there, and while they’re there for that visit, you are hoping to monetize that visit as best as possible. If you’re not after a higher cost subscription where its a numbers game for visitors/signups, make sure there is a reason to come back.

Is your content current and refreshed often, and offers a truly mobile optimized experience?

Do you have an opt-in SMS, send to Friend or even Email list? (and a reason to join)

Does the mobile site offer something different and unique from your other marketing channels?

Can a user maintain an “Account” with their content, or favorites?

2. A.B.C. (”Always Be Closing”): We are still surprised how many mobile websites which represent brick-and-mortar or even web based products do not have “click-to-call” or a simple form on their mobile website.  In the current state, most mobile websites are but a few pages of copy.  Make sure an interested user has the ability to find out more without having to remember to go home and go to the website.

For some of our clients who offer services beyond a simple click to purchase, “click-to-call” has proven invaluable (make sure you obtain a unique number to track conversions, easy with a voip service like skype or ringcentral… some of our clients are seeing 30% call rates!)

3. A Narrow View: Unlike your website with a great amount of real estate, even on a smart device, you are hard pressed for real-estate, so design accordingly.  Get the user what they want, fast.  Seems obvious, but again some traditional web approaches are making appearances on the mobile web. If the user has to scroll down every page to get past your logo which takes up half the screen, followed by an advertisement which nets you very little revenue, minimize or lose it.  Additionally make sure to keep the user navigation in mind - on many devices without “pointers”, a user to has to “tab” through links, so if the 1st thing on your page is a breadcrumb and they are 5 links deep in the mobile site, the user will have to click down on their mobile device 5 times just to be able to scroll down. 

4. Evolve: However you choose to operate your mobile channel, you have to be able to know who the user is, and what they are doing to provide an experience and information they cant obtain anywhere else.  Make sure you have the ability to understand how people are getting to your mobile site, and what they are doing when they get there.  Also, make sure you understand the devices and carriers that are visiting your mobile site. There are plenty of analytics tools for mobile or your platform provider should have some integrated analytics.

If your mobile site is optimized for smaller screen “dumb” mobile devices, but 60% of your traffic is on some type smart phone - make sure your technology has the ability to adapt your mobile site to both standard and smart devices.  If you are seeing traffic come in from international destinations you cannot sell to - look to expand your billing options (even if carrier billing isnt an option, credit card billing is effective as well).

5. 80/20: It’s a cliche rule of thumb, but it works just as well here.  Until you try, you don’t know, and while you may be resting on your existing mobile solution, a new competitor is about to capture market share that could have easily been yours.  The way people use mobile is interesting.  Whether it be a mobile oriented product, like ringtones - which has its obvious place on the mobile web, or the less obvious service like a masonry, people are getting on their mobile devices and searching for everything and anything they would on their website.  Dedicate 20% of your time/budget to exploring which will help you decide which direction you will evolve.

In all - our longest, most successful clients have adapted each and everyone of these principles and in our opinion remain the core reasons why they are still around and forging ahead.  While the concepts may seem simple, hopefully a few of them sparked some ideas and can be applied.

Any questions feel free to let us know!

Simon & Schuster and Macmillan Publishing Solutions (MPS) announced a partnership that will allow MPS to distribute over 500 S&S books on its unique mobile website Global Reader (available at http://wap.global-reader.com on your mobile device).  Some of the great titles immediately available - The Secret, Star Trek, Nancy Drew, and Hemingway with many to come - (visit http://www.simonsays.com to learn more about their library)

The Global Reader has been an ongoing project with MPS and Fli Digital for over a year, and through constant innovation both the MPS and Fli teams have successfully extended the Fresh Mobile Platform to include this unique content.  In addition to the Simon & Shuster content, regular visitors will notice a revamp of the user interface, additional support on smart phones such as Blackberries and the iPhone, as well as more rich media content such as audio and video in a variety of flavors!

On the backend, Fli Digital worked closely with the MPS team to integrate industry standard formats into its Content Management System such as EPUB - giving MPS the ability to add easily mobile as a distribution channel for all of its current and new clients.

We encourage you to learn my by visiting http://wap.global-reader.com on your mobile device, or reading our case study on the initial project here.

Fli Digital is proud to have the Fresh Mobile Platform power the GoComics.com experience, now on deck with Verizon.  Working closely with uclick, llc., the company behind GoComics.com, the mobile site has successfully made available the likes of Garfield, Cathy, Ziggy, TMNT, Doonesbury, Fox Trot, Manga and much more in a mobile optimized comic reader experience directly to Verizon users.

“In order to facilitate the GoComics experience on the Verizon deck, we had to provide a custom tailored version of the mobile experience.  When we developed the WAP Site, the uclick, llc. team had the foresight to plan for multiple carrier support.  In implementing their custom solution on top of the Fresh Platform, we made sure we were able to define several environment characteristics.  This resulted in our ability to provide seemingly custom WAP experiences all powered by the same solution.  The current Verizon solution of the GoComics implementation is an ad-supported version of the site, with no storefront component.  The key driver of the mobile site is its WAP Comic Reader, a mobile comic reading experience.”

The Verizon version of the GoComics.com mobile site is automatically displayed for Verizon visitors using the carrier detection capability of the Fresh Mobile Platform.

All users can access the GoComics.com mobile site directly at: http://m.gocomics.com

Only Verizon users will see the Verizon version, everyone else will see the full version.  Non Verizon users can visit the mobile storefront and purchase wallpapers, animations, games and more, or even browse now at their website http://mobile.gocomics.com (also powered by Fresh!)

If we had to describe our role in the mobile industry, or even the mobile industry as a whole, in one word, it would be communication. Communication is the main artery that feeds businesses, governments, families, and friends. The mobile industry has always been about communication - starting from a “cellular car phone”, this mammoth box you’d take with you, or even have permanently installed in your car (actually seems ridiculous now), and now we’re looking at services and devices providing near real-time communication across many dimensions such as voice, SMS/text, video and location. If you step back, its actually amazing how easy it is to make contact.

Communicating Is A Personal Preference

People choose to communicate at the level they feel most comfortable with.  There are people that want to shout to the world their every move (e.g. Twitter),  people that take 3 days to respond to an email, and everywhere in between.  Mobile devices add a great layer of additional abilities, and more importantly added control.  A mobile device allows users to pick and choose where and when they provide information.  You can text your friends silently in a movie, post to your blog when you’re on a train, or ‘check in’ to a service like Google’s Dodgeball to see who’s around.

Mobile Communication as a Privacy Concern

As the industry evolves, there are many important ways to identify mobile users which become valuable information to marketers and providers alike.  Identifiable information such as unique device ID’s or mobile numbers paired with habits on the mobile web allows for highly targeted recommendations.  Additional information such as location based services can further target users and tailor unique marketing pitches based on information at hand.  Why wouldn’t you want to know whats around you if it poses an advantage (e.g. search ‘i need a bathroom’ on the mobile web and your closest options come up). From a personal perspective, as long as the choice of privacy remains, I would love to have this ability.

How the Fresh Mobile Team Communicates

While we are all in the same, relatively small office, we have established some great methods of communicating internally without the disruption of talking over each other. As designers and developers, we have a strong appreciation for that state where you are so involved in your work that time and space stand still (we call it “flow”), and everything you do is just spot-on! We respect each others flow, and base the methods of communication around that.

We start our day with a quick meeting covering what got done yesterday and what’s being worked on today. Usually our days consist of several tasks, so we developed an internal “Fritter” (Fresh + Twitter = Fritter) to passively let each other know what we’re doing. Fritter also updates itself with important events across all of our clients, such as a ticket submission or code deployment. Additionally, we have developed a robust Ticket system to complement our Fresh Platform, which gives our clients direct, organized communication to the Fresh team without causing interruption - and as a mobile company, natually we have developed an iPhone version of our Ticket system to make handling a breeze when we’re not at our desk.

Finally, for the full mobile tie in… we have a tremendous amount of monitoring feedback being relayed by the Fresh Platform to Email and SMS depending on severity - all which helps us monitor core system functionality and respond to major issues with urgency.

In the latest attempt to make the ‘traditional’ Internet, and Mobile Internet into “one place,” Sprint has rolled out OpenWeb, an Openwave product. OpenWeb is “a content adaptation platform that transparently intercepts requests for all standard web sites and converts the web pages into highly compressed, functional WAP2 pages.” In simpler terms, OpenWeb is a process that takes an existing Web site, and does its best to make it a decent experience on a mobile device.

The Good
With access to the Mobile Web by the average cellphone user still in the vast minority, it is a great step in getting users used to visiting the mobile web on their handset. While there may be some underlying reasons for Sprint rolling this out (competing with the iPhone web experience), I do feel like Sprint is looking further down the line on progressing the industry in the right direction. The more people they can get on the mobile web, the more of an opportunity there is for everyone.

The Bad (and the Uuuugly)
As you may expect, there is truly no “one algorithm to rule them all.” Since it is hard to find consistency across most web sites, as you can imagine, the task of re-purposing a web page into a screen less than 1/5th the size yields a pretty messy result. Additionally, the compression algorithms can wreak havoc on image quality. For the mobile developers out there, say goodbye to the User-Agent (active mobile developers may have seen this as OpenWeb was being tested regionally in February), it gets replaced by an OpenWeb User-Agent. If you use this at all you must double check your site isn’t being put through OpenWeb.

Fear not, Mobile specific sites
Fortunately, in true form, Sprint has provided an “ignore my site” capability for companies with mobile specific destinations. Under the new system, as a global “ignore”, anything starting with “m” or “wap”, including the word “mobile” in the URL, or ending in “.mobi” will NOT be transcoded or optimized (these are just a few, full list available in the Sprint developer forum). Additionally, Sprint has allowed submissions of URLs to not be put through the OpenWeb process.

While its sometimes daunting to see the Carriers flex their muscles, and show how one simple changes can force an entire industry to comply, I feel Sprint did a great job of keeping the community informed of the rollout, and offering sufficient means to work with the new system. As a whole, this can only be good for the industry, we just hope some standard gets set and each carrier doesn’t follow suit with their own idea of how to do this.

Several members of the Fresh Team had the exciting chance to attend the 2008 CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas. The show was amazingly huge, walking the show end to end was a task in itself, with exhibitors ranging from manufacturers, wireless hardware, software, entertainment, content, aggregators, and on and on. The Las Vegas convention center was a great venue to house such a large show in, allowing plenty of space for the event itself as well as ample meeting areas. In comparison to March 2007 event in Orlando, this show was noticeably larger, a great sign that despite a possible US recession, the mobile industry worldwide continues to see great growth and potential.

From the perspective of mobile content management, detection, delivery, and marketing management - we were surprised to see very little new innovation compared to what we saw six months ago. Most of our competitors were more or less pitching the exact same product or service. In comparison, over the same 6 month period we had a very productive cycle and have continued to innovate our mobile platform in the areas of device detection and content delivery, as well as extending the marketing and reporting availability for an operational client.

Content developers continue to push out extremely popular J2ME games, which have helped content sales continue upward, despite stale performance with ringtones. This was also recently covered by Mobile Entertainment magazine. Of interest to Fresh was the XM/Blackberry collaboration on launching an application (link) which allows users to listen to their favorite XM Stations on most newer Blackberry’s. The subscription based service (using Bango) is a great example of a company taking advantage of what they already have, to successfully enter the mobile space.

There seems to continue to be a challenge getting the carriers to become more prominent at these events. With respect to the mobile Internet, they are the gatekeepers, and the show was tens of thousands of people telling you how they were going to get past the gate. On the flip side, this feeling of being locked out is diminishing; either because we accepted the current state of off-deck mobile, or carriers and manufacturers are loosening their grip just enough to see the ramifications of fully opening up. Only time will tell.

Overall, from what we’ve seen at CTIA and knowing where we stand, we are very comfortable with the development schedule we have laid out in continuation of the ever improving Fresh Mobile Platform. Our clients have, and continue to provide us ‘from the trenches’ feedback, allowing us to rapidly deploy features and updates to fulfill the needs of our ever evolving clients in a rapidly changing industry. Be sure to stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date with new features, research, and results!

>> updated <<  

With the proliferation of teen focused mobile sites from the major social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and the focus on mobile search from Google and Yahoo!, mobile users are increasingly becoming more comfortable accessing and reliably using their mobile device for off-deck uses. As the available WAP resources on the mobile Internet continue to grow, along with the focus of the manufacturers to deliver devices with better browsing capabilities, this market has and will surely continue to see double digit growth.

For teenagers (13-18), this represents an opportunity for freedom from their PC or TV. While this concept may be obvious, the results remain undeniable.  Teenagers are in one form or another on their mobile device all day, whether it be SMS and picture mail, checking their mobile version of their MySpace page, or other, they have become very familiar with the usage and navigation of the mobile Internet, despite the challenges imposed by carriers and manufacturers.

The teenage mobile market is already reported to be “saturated” by a report from MultiMedia Intelligence entitled “The Maturing Wireless Teen Market: 12-17 US Teen Wireless Subscribers, Revenue, ARPU and Content”.  In this report, the research identifies teens as extremely active in the mobile space; using more features and services, as well as teaching their older counter parts (e.g. parents) how to use their mobile device for value-added services, a great benefit to the industry as a whole.  The report identifies more than half of teens are subscribers by the age of 13, and by 17 most are.  Finally, the report found that girls reach “cellular maturity” sooner than boys, and among handset usage in teens of all ages, the numbers tend to skew more toward girls.

For the “Urban-ite”, this may represent their ONLY online experience. The mobile industry has seen this phenomenon outside the US, where mobile devices access the Internet more than any other device due to reasons such as cost, space, and connectivity. That is not to say this demographic isn’t highly sought after, especially in the major US cities.

From the perspective of the Fresh Mobile Platform, this gives us a great opportunity to deploy successful mobile initiatives on behalf of our clients. In addition to the traditional mobile storefronts, delivering rich mobile experiences can surely place your mobile destination in a fast-growing environment, targeting users in a new way - without the limitation of sitting at a computer or in front of their TV.  To learn more about how we’ve worked with clients targeting this very demographic, please contact us.

With the core features of the Fresh Mobile Platform rock solid and fully operational, the Fresh Team is continually extending the Marketing and Conversion components of the Platform. One of the key marketing capabilities we can offer new and existing clients is SMS; a great way to provide interactivity, as well as drive traffic to your WAP Storefront from your Web site, Direct mail, or other marketing channels. A major advantage of using our integrated.

SMS will be its built in interaction with our existing marketing features. Platform clients will be able to track users from SMS all the way through a sale to monitor the effectiveness of their mobile marketing.

With development underway and our Agency campaign approved by the major US carriers, we look forward to adding SMS capabilities as soon as possible.

SMS will be available initially as an integrated product to new and existing customers using other components of the Fresh Platform, then shortly after offered as a standalone marketing product for firms looking for just an SMS solution. Join the mailing list to stay notified.

Since a picture says 1,000 words… Here’s a peak!

With over two years of vigorous development and three major overhauls, Fli Digital is proud to introduce to the world, the Fresh Mobile Platform.

Fresh Mobile Platform is the result of the full collaboration of Fli Digital’s design and development team intended to solve the multiple challenges put forth by the fast growing mobile initiative. Having seen the difficulties involved with mobile content, delivery, and the infinite possibilities drawn by the ever accelerating mobile industry, we set out to create something inherently different than the current industry offerings.

Instead of choosing to re-invent the wheel, we took a different path and focused on how we could make the mobile web more accessible and appealing to people wishing to broaden their market reach and step into the new market places offered by new technologies. Our research showed us that the products and services offered were either too premature, inflexible and limited to be ready for production usage, or incredibly expensive and overpriced which served only as a deterrent for companies looking to trial the market without a full throttled commitment. In the end, we concluded that you shouldn’t have to add a “Mobile Department” to your company, just to launch a mobile website - the Fresh Mobile Platform IS your new mobile department!

The Fresh Platform and it’s core technologies solve these problems along with some of the most blaring technological challenges on the mobile web including, Device Detection, Multimedia Delivery, Image Rendering, and Carrier compliance. By developing a proprietary platform utilizing all of the available standards and our own proprietary technologies, we’ve implemented them into our product for the full benefit of our clients.

The Fresh Mobile Platform is built to service clients of many industries and sizes. As an entry point, it serves as a great off-deck delivery platform - delivering digital content such as ringtones, videos, wallpapers or games & applications through a WAP Site. For more advanced clients, we have developed the Fresh Mobile Platform with several access points and APIs, allowing your in-house development and marketing teams to access your managed data, content and statistics. Even further, we have the ability to use the Fresh Mobile Platform as a rock solid foundation for any mobile based initiative with our ability to offer custom developed client branches.

Additionally, the Fresh Mobile Platform offers you the ability to interface with your existing web experience or power a new one (developed by the Fresh Team), fully tracked and managed marketing modules, SMS, additional web and mobile pages, blogs, or just about anything else you can think of, all geared toward mobile. The possibilities are honestly endless. We’ve designed the platform to be fully extendable and entirely modular so that anything could be achieved. Even the most particular and niche’ client can find their solution with Fresh, and if it’s not already built in, we can easily create a custom build to suit your custom needs.

This blog will serve to address product updates, case studies, industry and partner commentary and some feedback from the design and development team as we continue to develop Fresh Mobile Platform and evolve with the industry. Stay tuned as we have some very exciting announcements coming in the near future and can’t wait to share them. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS or mailing list!

We are pleased to announce many global updates to the Fresh Platform. Not all clients have access to all the described features, so if you don’t see it, you don’t have it. If you’re interested in learning more about a feature, do not hesitate to contact us!

Design Refresh

The first thing you’ll notice is a refresh to the look and feel of the administration area. The new fluid layout makes better use of the browser’s available real estate. Additionally the navigation has been further organized and presented so common tasks are easy to find and utilize.

Pages (MANAGE -> Pages)

Pages section has been updated and now incorporates the same active functionality as downloadable content, allowing for the timely release of static content.

Customers (MANAGE -> Customers)

A detailed Customers section has been added allowing you to visually see your one-off transactions, the total value of a customer (estimated in USD), their carrier, and their phone number if they arrived at the mobile site following a web trigger. Drilling into each customer will show a list of the content they have downloaded. For subscription based offering, there is a separate section indicating subscribers and their statistics as well, including active or inactive, and what content each subscriber has downloaded.

Campaigns (MANAGE -> Campaigns)

The “Campaigns” tab is the beginning of additional marketing resources targeted toward making marketing your content much easier to your end user. Initially we now give you the ability to create shortcuts to deeplinks within your WAP Site. Additionally, we track access to these shortcuts allowing you to track hits and conversions on a specific promotion.

Polls (MANAGE -> Polls)

The added polls section gives simple interactivity to your WAP Site and lets you collect information from your visitors. Now you can easily create simple polls and monitor votes.

Bundles (MANAGE -> Downloads -> Add Download)

An additional marketing and promotional tool is the ability to add bundles of content, multiple downloads all for 1 purchase. Bundles are created through the add process. Once created a bundle is made up of multiple catalog items available in a unique “Downloads” tab when in the edit mode of the bundle.

Export (MANAGE -> Download -> Content Overview)

The overview screen presents a new export function which will allow you to export any Search or Filtered Results into a CSV.

SYSTEM

Depending on your access level, you will find a useful System tab to manage users within your account and edit various setting specific to your solution.

Safari by Apple

We HIGHLY recommend you check out the experience of the management Platform in Safari either for Mac or the recently made available PC Beta version. This unintentional result produces an application like experience due to our very light wrapper and its very efficient image caching.

http://www.apple.com/safari/

Internet Explorer 6 No Longer Supported (Upgrade required)

Unfortunately we no longer can support IE6 for several reasons. IE6 makes it very difficult to reliably accomplish the usability and functionality standards and goals we have set. IE6 users will be forced to upgrade to IE7 or use a different browser.