Archive for the ‘Mobile Industry’ Category

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!

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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.