Another Funny Japanese Game Show

Orchestra playing with empty Beer Bottles

Check out this group of orchestra whose instruments are non other than empty beer bottles. This is a bold and creative ad for Australian beer Victoria Bitter (VB) showcases the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria playing VB’s commercial theme song with empty beer bottles.

Opera browser surges in Asia Pac

The mobile web is replacing the wired web in South East Asia. Opera latest State of the Mobile Web report reveals that in many Southeast Asian countries the mobile Web exists not because it complements wired access, but replaces it. Page views grew more than 1120 per cent in the Philippines this year, while there was 330 per cent user growth and 827 per cent page view growth in 2008 in Indonesia.

There is an incredible appetite in Southeast Asia for the mobile Web and many are relying on Opera to browse the mobile internet including myself. The user experience is the closest that you can get to the Safari browser on the iPhone. 

Make yourself heard with SMS

The Samsung Propel’s primary feature is its slide-out QWERTY keyboard, perfect for avid text messagers, as the commercial shows. Scenes from a day in Ozzy Osbourne’s life are filmed in which Osbourne needs to send a text message in order to be understood. With the tagline, “Make yourself heard,” the ad brings the SMS-centric message home. 

iPhone users do more than make calls

Ninety-eight percent of iPhone subscribers use at least one mobile data service according to market research firm The Nielsen Company's Q3 2008 U.S. iPhone Executive Overview.

 

70% of iPhone users listen to audio tracks on their device, with 39% downloading music directly to the handset, 66% of users download software and applications, and 35% screen video content, which Nielsen says makes them seven times as likely as the typical mobile subscriber. Of course, if 98% of iPhone users have embraced mobile data services, that means 2% of the iPhone subscriber population does nothing more than make voice calls on the device.

Nielsen reports 43% of iPhone users rack up a monthly bill in excess of $100, compared to 20% of the total mobile subscriber population, 13% of iPhone users look to their employers to pay their wireless bill, compared to 7% of all subscribers. 

Among consumers who purchased a new handset between January and September, 11% considered an iPhone, and 21% of them made the leap to the Apple device. As of the third quarter, 89% of consumers who acquired an iPhone within the previous six months were highly satisfied with their purchase, compared to an industry average of 71 percent of new handset owners.

In all there are now 3.6 million mobile subscribers ages 13 and up actively using the iPhone, Nielsen notes. Adults ages 35 to 54 make up the majority of iPhone users at 34%, while Hispanic subscribers represent a larger portion of the iPhone audience (21%) than of the total U.S. subscriber audience (13%). In addition, 44% of iPhone subscribers report a household income in excess of $100,000, compared to 22% of the overall subscriber population.

2-D barcode mobile boarding pass

American Airlines had just announced that travelers departing from selected airports may now receive boarding passes on their mobile phones or PDAs instead of the regular paper boarding pass at check-in. The Airline is rolling out the program in partnership with the United States Transportation Security Administration, and it will extend the initiative to more U.S. airports if the trial proves successful.

To use the mobile boarding pass option, customers must have an active email address where their boarding pass will be sent to their web-enabled mobile device. Boarding time will be alot faster and efficient in the future. 

iPhone Firmware 2.2 Jailbroken

Once again, the brand-new iPhone's firmware 2.2 has been jailbroken. QuickPwn had just released its latest version that should take care of everything.

via iPhone Dev

The INQ1 Facebook Phone

The new INQ1 Facebook phone,available from 3 in the UK, has been designed specifically around the functionality of Facebook, and gives users direct access to their social networking circle at the touch of a button. The phone has been optimized for use with the site so users can poke friends straight from the home screen.

While the iPhone and the new Google G1 phone target professional users with costly handsets and sophisticated technology, the Facebook phone, while retaining email and web functionality has a much cheaper price and talk plan, and will appeal to larger audience of younger users to whom the iPhone is prohibitively expensive. The phone also comes optimized for Skype, MSN Messenger and Last.fm.

12 year-old Boy Scouts offering free breast exams

Have a good laugh and thanks to the team at The Onion News. These boys are no perverts as they are part of a gag show. 

This is a real Internet Addict

Nokia's future mobile phone design

Start trek mobile phone design by heikki juvonen

Interactive Virtual Auditions - Zon Multimedia Mobile Campaign

This is a very innovative campaign from Zon Multimedia to promote a new cell phone network, where you take part in a virtual audition for an opera show and you use your cellphone to interact with a web page. The campaign begins by asking you to enter your name and phone number. Then a movie starts where the casting director explains you that you can be a star, you just have to answer your phone and sing.

A few seconds afterward, your phone actually starts to ring and when you answer, the director tells you that the casting has started and you must sing. You can then edit your voice with some cool effects in real time and send it to your friends.

Its a pretty cool interaction between a ‘normal’ website and the consumer and how mobile takes the engagement offline. 

15 million using Facebook Mobile

Mobile social networking is definitely going to be huge. Social networking giant Facebook announced its mobile userbase has expanded from 5 million to 15 million since the beginning of 2008. Writing on The Facebook Blog, Facebook mobile team engineer Wayne Chang adds that in the 24 hours after the site began allowing subscribers to comment on their friends' status updates to the Facebook mobile site, users posted close to a million status comments. Chang adds that Facebook is in the process of expanding its mobile staff, and promises new improvements are forthcoming.

I m definitely looking forward to the new improvements as i have been on Facebook Mobile from day one when it was launched. Its certainly one of the best way to update your status. If you are constantly on mobile and have a data plan in place, go check out Facebook Mobile.

via Facebook Blog

Geotagged Documentaries - A Virtual Trip to South Africa with ‘Mobikasi’

Mobikasi is a mobile documentary about youth culture in the township of Soweto, South Africa. All the clips are geo-tagged to a location so you can explore real places in Soweto via your phone.

Mobikasi can be accessed through a SA mobile social network called The Grid.

The content features interesting people, spaces, culture and social issues that the Sowetan youth encounter. For example, one of the groups interviewed are the Smarteez, a fashion crew that design their own clothes, dress up, and battle other fashion posses. In a recent competition, they were named the best dressed crew in Johannesburg.

Informa - Handset vendors must include software and services for future growth

According to Informa, global revenues from mobile phone sales are expected to increase 6.8% between 2007 and 2013, topping $200bn by the end of 2013. Emerging markets, including Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) and Africa, will make up the majority of the global handset market value, with 60 per cent share in 2013.

In developed markets, growth is forecast to slow significantly and will not exceed 2% and could even turn negative after 2009 if the downturn continues acoording to Informa.

With revenue growth from mobile phone sales expected to hit just 2% in Western Europe, 1% in North America, and less than 0.5% in Japan between 2010 and 2013, smartphones are predicted to represent the major growth area. Informa reckons revenues from smartphone sales will represent more than 55% of total handset market value in North America, Western Europe, and Japan, but this phenomenon will only slightly offset the sharp decline of non-smartphone market value.

Furthermore, the ongoing price war between the handset players will only intensify with new entrants such as Apple and Google increasing their pressure on competitors to reduce prices on smartphones. With commoditized chipsets, off the shelf platforms and the use of open source licensing models will mean handset players will find it hard to maintain margins in the future.

It is becoming clear that handset vendors can no longer rely on mobile phone sales to sustain growth. They will have to look at other opportunities, for example getting involved in content creation and service offering according Informa, a trend which is being tested by Nokia, Apple, and Sony Ericsson hoping to create ecosystems linking their devices to the services they offer. Nokia's Ovi is a clear example but whether such initiatives will be successful is still unknown. 

The value of the global smartphone market will set to grow from almost $39bn in 2007 to more than $95bn or 47 per cent of the total handset market value in 2013, and many vendors are increasing their involvement in open mobile terminal software including the Symbian Foundation, the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), and the Linux in Mobile foundation (LiMo). Virtually all handset players and leading operators are actively working within these organisations and preparing themselves to compete strongly in this market segment.

This development clearly indicates the industry is entering a new era where product differentiation will increasingly shift from hardware to software. While the recipe of success is still unknown and many of such initiatives are not proven, players who have prepared themselves for this radical change will find themselves in a better position than those who continue to differentiate their products on the basis of hardware. 

How All Commercials Should Be

With DVR, downloads and online v,ideos people aren’t watching commercials like they used to. But something tells us that if all commercials were more like this one, maybe people will spend a little more time watching them. haha...

Obama Mania - The Real American Dream

$585 Billion to stimulate the Chinese economy

China has announced a $585 billion economic stimulus plan to help it counteract the worldwide financial crisis. Innovating through crisis is critical, and precisely what China intends to do with this spending. The country is already feeling an impact on its export as the reality of the economic recession hits more countries, and they want to stop before it gets worse.

China’s plan is to invest the nearly $600 billion economic stimulus plan over the next two years on social welfare, such as low income housing and rural infrastructure to fend off financial crisis. Post-Sichuan earthquake reconstruction is a major part of that investment, as is public transit, health care, education and the environment.

Its going to be interesting to see how the stimulus package is going to keep China growing and maintain at least an 8 percent growth for the next 3 years. China is surely is a good position to weather the current global financial storm of the century.

Google launches video chat for Gmail

Google is finally rolling out video and voice capabilities for the chat function that is embedded in the Gmail interface. It's a bare-bones voice and video-conferencing service, but it's simple to install and use and is a very good addition to Gmail. Its no where near skype though and currently do not provide connection to the outside network. 

The voice and video quality on the service are decently good taking into consideration i m connected to the Hotel's ADSL network in Manila. Unlike many current video chat products, Gmail Video and Voice uses a proprietary plug-in, not Flash. The small (2MB) download supports Firefox, IE, and Chrome on the PC, and Firefox on the Mac. 

Gmail Video and Voice will be made available to all Gmail users starting Tuesday at noon PST. global rollout should be complete by the end of the day. It works, it's easy, and if you're a Gmail user, the service is just what you would had been waiting for.

See this all in action in the video below:

iPhone 3G - the top selling handset in the US market in the 3rd Quarter

Apple's iPhone was the top-selling handset in the United States in the third quarter, according to new data from NPD Group. The long reign of Motorola's Razr handset three straight years is over and has slipped to the No. 2 position.

RIM's BlackBerry Curve garnered the No. 3 spot, followed by LG’s Rumor and Env2.

Four of the five best-selling handsets in the third quarter were optimized for messaging and other advanced Internet features.

When it comes to the specific features that motivated U.S. consumers to purchase their handsets, 43 percent of handset buyers cited the need for a camera and 36 percent noted the ability to send and receive text messages. Mobile phones with a QWERTY keyboard experienced the greatest year-over-year rise in sales; 30 percent of handsets were sold with this feature in Q3 2008, versus just 11 percent the year prior. Also this quarter 83 percent of phones purchased were Bluetooth enabled (versus 72 percent last year), and 68 percent of phones purchased in Q3 were music enabled (versus 49 percent last year).

In the smartphone category, however, RIM continued to be the top U.S. market share holder with 40% in October. Carrier subsidies appeared to be helping as more than half of the BlackBerrys on the market were subsidized to $100 or less.

Apple's iPhone outsells BlackBerry

Apple's iPhone outsold rival RIM's BlackBerry in the latest quarter, according to a technology analysis firm, confirming to the recent boast by Steve Jobs. Jobs took a shot at RIM during a conference call announcing Apple beating RIM in their fiscal fourth-quarter results.

U.K.-based Canalys confirmed Jobs' claims on Thursday in a report on the global smartphone market. Apple shipped more than 6.8 million iPhones during the third quarter of 2008 to give it a market share of 17.3 per cent. RIM shipped just over six million BlackBerry phones in the quarter for a 15.2-per-cent share of a market that saw more than 39 million phones shipped overall.

Apple leapfrogged both RIM and Motorola from a year ago to take the number two spot, behind Nokia Corp. Nokia shipped more than 15.4 million smartphones in the quarter for a market share of 38.9 per cent, but saw its leadership position take a big dip from 51.4 per cent a year ago.

Apple's growth over the past year has been staggering. The company shipped only 1.1 million iPhones during the third quarter of 2007, giving it a growth rate of more than 500 per cent this year.

Touch screens are definitely proven to be the secret sauce for Apple considering the future mobile usage of applications such as playing music, maps and web browsing. 

Canalys also looked at the operating systems running on smartphones. About 46.6 per cent of smartphones shipped during the quarter ran Nokia's Symbian, followed by Apple's own operating system at 17.3 per cent. RIM came in third with 15.2 per cent, followed by Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile at 13.6 per cent and Linux open-source software at 5.1 per cent.

Samsung bumped Motorola out of No 1 in the US

Another smack in the face for Motorola as Samsung has ousted the American handset maker from its number one position in the US market. Research firm Strategy Analytics reports that the Korean electronics maker edged ahead in the third quarter taking 22.4 percent of the US handset market, compared with Motorola which had a 21.1 percent share. Samsung shipped 47 million handsets in the 3rd quarter. 

The US, the world's single largest handset market has been Motorola's traditional stronghold, where it accounts for half of the company's total sales of mobile devices, about $1.55 billion in Q3.

Korean rival LG has a 20.5 percent share, giving it the third biggest share of the market. I dont see how Motorola can stop LG overtaking them in the next quarter. RIM is in No. 4 with 10.2 percent and struggling Nokia has an 8.4 percent share of the market, putting it in 5th position. Apple is rising fast with 5.7 percent share of the market putting it in sixth position. 

Fake Naughty - Beate Uhse TV Ads for Parental Controls and Supervision

This cheeky commercial for Beate Uhse TV, the parental controls for erotic TV viewing in Germany, is a sure attention-grabber. No wonder it took a Gold award at the 2008 New York Festivals Advertising Awards and was a winner at The Cresta Awards 2008.

Shakira - The Best 4 Year Old Salsa Dancer

Mobile ad awareness soars in US

Mobile advertising awareness grew by a third in the US over the last nine months.

Research by mobile social network Limbo and research firm GfK concludes that the economic slowdown is promoting brands to divert budgets to cost-effective direct marketing channels and that mobile media is benefiting from this.

The key findings were:

· Nearly four out of ten Americans with a phone (104 million) recall seeing advertising on their device between July and September 2008.
· The most commonly viewed ads were in text messages -- 60 million consumers recalled seeing text message-based ads -- an increase of 42 per cent in nine months.
· 31 million people recalling seeing mobile web ads, 57 per cent of them male, and 43 per cent female

This is good news for the mobile marketing industry. This means that people are already realizing the value of SMS Ads and that they have control over the ads that they are receiving by opting in/ opt out. This study shows that mobile marketing is being used as an effective medium to reach the consumers directly. 

Photographing Ads With Mobile Phones

Sony Ericsson is claiming the first ever advertising campaign shot entirely via a mobile phone camera with the new ad campaign for the Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber-shot phone.

The unique technique emphasizes the selling point of the C905 handset, its powerful camera. The phone’s camera is put to the test by letting a professional fashion photographer use it under professional lighting, models, hair and make-up.

Handset's cameras are getting so good that soon we may not even need a separate camera anymore. In fact i had already dumped my camera long time ago since having my N95. This new handset from Sony Ericsson is definitely raising the bar once again. It wont be for long when other handset manufacturers will retaliate with a much better camera phone. 

New Ferrari Phones from Nokia

If you have £3000 to spare, perhaps you may want to get your hands on a Nokia Vertu Ferrari Ascent Ti.  The phone is made of titanium, forged at 850˚C, has a sapphire crystal mix covering the camera lens, flash and screen and has a battery cover in the shape of a Ferrari hood.

However, even though this phone is likely to cost more than £3,000, you still only get basic handset features under that expensive hood. It will come with 4GB of internal memory and is backed up by a measly 3MP camera, integrated flash, with 3G connectivity is included.

But why would you worry about all those boring specs when there's a leather cover with the Prancing Horse logo stitched right in, AND you get Ferrari-themed wallpapers and ringtones to boot. This is as close as you can get to owning a Ferrari. 

Handset growth rate falls in Q3, weakest quarter since 2002

303 million mobile devices shipped in Q3, according to Strategy Analytics. The figure is down a little on the previous quarter, and marks the industry’s weakest growth rate since 2002. Sales were up five per cent year on year.

In the past typical growth rates have been nearer 20 per cent. It’s alarming because Q3 is normally a strong quarter. Slowdown in the emerging markets was mostly to be blamed for the decline.

Apple and Samsung performed best, with annual growth rates of 516 per cent and 22 per cent respectively. Sales of Sony Ericsson, Motorola and LG handsets fell and Nokia remained top with a nearly 40 per cent share. 

Just check out how fast Apple is catching with just one iPhone and the iPhone craze only started last year.

3Q2008 (m) 3Q2007 (m) Mkt share (%)

Nokia 117.8 111.7 38.9
Samsung 51.8 42.6 17.1
Sony Ericsson 25.7 25.9 8.5
Motorola 25.4 37.2 8.4
LG 23.0 21.9 7.6
Apple 6.9 1.1 2.3
Others 52.1 46.9 17.2
Total 302.7 287.3 100

Motorola sank to No. 4

As expected Motorola had sank to fourth place among the top five global handset vendors for the quarter having shipped 25.4 million units, below Nokia Corp. (118 million units), Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (52 million units) and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications (25.7 million units). LG Electronics Co. held fifth place with 23 million units.

Motorola lost $397 million on $7.5 billion in revenue across all its businesses in the third quarter and it would delay its plan to spinoff its handset division until sometime after 2009. Sales in the company’s flagship device business reached $3.1 billion, down 31% from the year-ago quarter. The handset business lost a whopping $840 million, more than three times the loss in the year-ago quarter!

Motorola will be phasing out use of the Symbian operating system and focus on Linux-based Android and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile for its smartphone efforts. Motorola will also cut off business with semiconductor supplier Freescale and use Qualcomm Inc. for low-cost 3G phones and Texas Instruments Inc. for higher-end devices.

About 2,000 jobs from its mobile-devices business will be affected as sales will continue to shrink and Motorola is expected to sink to No. 5 in the coming quarter and really have to cut off its mobile division fast as its bleeding the company's overall performance and worst of all affecting the profitable enterprise, government and video divisions of the group. Nobody is sure when is the exact date but the longer they hang onto the mobile-device business, the bigger the liabilities it will become until such time that when Motorola is ready to spin it off, they will realize they wont have much to spin. The outlook for Motorola is nothing but bleak.

Spending my virtual weekend with my Dad & youngest Bro

You can feel young and crazy at any age. Just because you are 60 years old doesn't mean you are too old to be young and crazy. Of course i m not 60 years old to be advising you this. This advise is coming straight from my dad's t-shirt, a gift from my mom to him. 

My dad, Robert is a living proof of person who is forever young at heart. Not only that, he is crazy enough to learn how to blog at 60 at robertfoo.blogspot.com. Pretty good writings on his experience on business, selling, women and sex too. It has been an adventure riding out with my dad and you can read more about his adventures on his blog.

Check out my youngest brother's new look. Caldwin had finally shaved off his old messy heavy metal looking hair look, a look that has been a constant discomfort for all of us at home. I m sure he will start to get into real action with this new look and of course find a new girlfriend. Well done and all the best bro.

Wassup - Budweiser Endorses Obama

After 8 years, the Budweiser boys of “Wassup” fame are back, and they’ve reunited for an Obama campaign commercial. The video has the men in a much unhappier state than when they were last seen. There’s no beer, football game or pizza. Now they’re jobless, homeless, fighting in Iraq, experiencing the economic crisis, and unable to afford medical treatment. Really hilarious.

Dress Made of Water

This amazing 30 second ad features a woman clad in a water dress that moves fluidly as she walks. The Mattoni ad shows top model Hana Soukupová showing off clothes made from water with the help of clever trick photography.