Pin-Up Weather - Discover a new way to see the current weather

Type in your city and a a weather babe will give you the weather forecast where you live.Its so cool!

China Mobile - Some Interesting Stats

China Mobile subscribers sent 607.1 billion text messages in 2008, up more than 100 billion over the operator's 2007 SMS totals.

According to China Mobile, its subscriber count is now closing in on the 464 million mark and China boasts about 650 million mobile subscribers nationwide.

In addition, China Mobile customers purchased 76 million full-track music downloads in 2008, while another 41.5 million paid for mobile newspaper content, up a third over 2007 totals - the carrier now offers 110 different news periodicals.

Adoption of China Mobile's Fetion IM service doubled from year to year, with 147 million users in 2008.

At a recent business summit held during the China Development Forum 2009, Wang Jianzhou, chairman and CEO of China Mobile revealed that the company recorded revenue of RMB 16.3 billion (US$2.38 billion) in 2008 from its mobile music business (including mobile ringback tones and mobile downloadable music), exceeding the revenue of all record publishers as well as film box offices in China combined. Over 300 mln mobile subscribers currently utilize the company's mobile music functionality.

Source : Fierce Mobile Content

Tampax Stunt Puts Mother Nature On the Street

This ia a hilarious commercial for Tampax tampons. Enjoy.

Social Cartoon Teaches You Twitter

Don’t get Twitter? Think it’s ridiculous? This animated short video will teach you all about twittersphere in under 5 minutes.

Ogilvy UK Mobile Marketing Day

iPhone going China Unicom way?

A regional China Unicom Web site posted pictures and specs of the iPhone 3G as rumours build that the mobile carrier could offer the iPhone 3G in China. It’s hard to know exactly what the presence of iPhone pictures on China Unicom’s site means, as every translation of the Chinese seems to be different. But given the recent reports floating around of Apple negotiating with China Unicom, it would certainly seem possible that the carrier will soon carry the iPhone.

Comscore - US Mobile Internet use doubles year-to-year

Research firm comScore revealed that day-to-day Internet use on cellphones in the US has roughly doubled in the past year. Where about 10.8 million users are known to have visited the mobile web at least once a day in January 2008, about 22.4 million were doing the same at the start of 2009. Large jumps also occurred for once-a-week visitors, who surged from 10.3 million people to 19.2 million, while those who accessed the Internet at least once a month climbed from 36.9 million to 63.1 million.

Most of these were accessing news or other basic information, though comScore notes that there were major increases in the uses of more specific information. Social networking in particular exploded and saw use grow about 427 percent to where 9.3 million users regularly check sites like Facebook or Twitter. Other but less dramatic jumps have taken place for those checking financial information on their phones, checking movie showtimes, looking up businesses or checking entertainment news.

txt.local outlines six mobile marketing objects for success

Mobile marketing is an affordable investment for the shrewd business says txtlocal (www.txtlocal.co.uk).

Six steps to success include
Below are 6 key marketing objectives where Mobile Marketing can shine for any business.

1) Direct Response Advertising
For businesses feeling the pinch, return on investment is the key for ensuring profitability. It’s now more important than ever to ensure advertising produces results and costly advertising campaigns may be great for raising brand awareness but are not always the best option for businesses looking for quick sales and ROI. Targeted bulk text campaigns to a qualified database coupled with a strong call to action can prove powerful in reaching impulse buyers at just the right time to entice a purchase. The key to the direct response lies with the fact people carry their phones with them wherever they go and therefore there is no more powerful way to reach people than by their phone. With 75% of people reading their texts immediately the direct impact can be huge. Statistics provided by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) found that response rates for mobile are 4 times higher than other direct marketing mediums such as DM and Email and at only a few pence a text and no production costs a simple text message equates to a fraction of the cost.

2) Customer Retention Marketing
Anyone with a qualification in marketing will know that long term clients are the most profitable. It’s now more crucial than ever to ensure that businesses retain the customers they already have. Keeping customers will not only save businesses money but will make them money. According to a report by The Logic Group, loyal long standing customers account for over 50% of a company’s annual sales, they are also higher value customers happy to pay premium rates of around 30% to 50% more per transaction. For this reason a CRM program is crucial and regular communication via new media techniques such as email and mobile is a key player in helping maintain communication. However, of course no one wants to be bombarded with endless SMS marketing campaigns but a friendly personalised offer or promotion at just the right time will do no harm to your relationship and could provide just the push you need to increase sales.

3) Viral Marketing
Viral marketing includes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on marketing messages to others. With virtually the entire UK population owning at least one mobile phone, it’s little wonder that mobile communication along with the web is a key viral marketing channel.
With people looking for bargains, text is proving more powerful than ever. Texts are the ideal viral marketing tool capable of reaching much further than initial recipients alone. Good offers and promotions are often shared amongst friends eager to spread the word of a good bargain. If businesses send out tempting offers and promotions then it’s only human nature that people will
want to share them and it couldn’t be any easier or convenient to pass on a good tip to a friend than via a quick text. Also, people genuinely like receiving texts from friends, with a whopping 94% of texts being opened and read which offers great opportunities for marketers.

4) Integrated Marketing
Mobile works best when integrated with other larger campaigns and therefore it’s important for it to be integrated into all marketing communications material such as newsletters, websites, e-marketing, POS, Outdoor, TV and radio in the same way a telephone or email address would be included. This gives customers and prospects another medium to get in touch, which many may view as easier than phoning or emailing. A quick text and people can easily register their interest in a product or service. E.g “Text BROCHURE + your email to 60777” All inbound opt-in details are stored in your online account for further contact and an email with a PDF brochure attachment is automatically sent.
Examples of this include businesses such as holiday and car companies that advertise heavily on television, radio and print, a punchy short code, is easy to remember and quick to respond to.

5) Lead Generation
So the question is how can marketers obtain good quality leads at a fair price? The tightening economy is sure to put lead generation tactics in the spotlight as businesses search for ways to generate new leads. Tactics such as Mobile Marketing enable businesses to build their own opt-in database of contacts at no extra cost, simply by publishing it on all marketing communications material. This is a much more practical way of operating than buying in cold call data from a broker. Displaying a Short Code should start to be general practice for every keen ROI business who will use mobile to generate warm leads to prospect to.

6) Measuring and Tracking Results
During the tough economic climate it is more important than ever for businesses to implement marketing strategies that are trackable and measureable. There is no point investing in advertising if it’s not properly monitored. It’s important to track where sales are coming from then analyse the statistics and drop what’s not working in favour of what does work. It doesn’t cost anything to monitor where people heard of a business and SMS text promotions such as 2 for 1, free entry texts and buy one get one free are perfect for monitoring due to easy visual or coded redemption.

Digital Projections

Sixthsense, the latest project from MIT is a wearable projector that interacts with your surrounding environment by overlaying interactive content over everyday items that allow the user to find out more information. Another cool stuff from the MIT guys.

World’s Largest Cell Phone

New Samsung Phone Gives You Big Screen

The new Samsung’s i7410 is set to hit stores soon, offering users a built-in DLP Pico Projector that can project content with flexible sizes up to 50-inches. A built-in speaker and video jack allow even greater versatility, along with all the standard mobile phone features and a 5.0 mexapixel camera.

Expected to debut this summer. Soon we will only need to bring our mobile phone into a meeting room for presentation. 

China Mobile records strong profits and subscriber growth

China Mobile, the world's largest operator by subscribers reported a 30 percent increase in annual net profit in 2008, rising to CNY112.8 billion (US$16.5 billion) on revenues of CNY412.34 billion (16 percent higher than 2007). 

However, warning signs that 2009 is set to be a difficult year were highlighted by profit growth in the final three months of 2008 slowing to 11 percent, which was below forecasts and down from growth of 26 percent in the previous quarter. 

Other areas of note from the results include the following: total subscribers hit 457 million in 2008, up by 23.8 percent. ARPU slipped to CNY83 from CNY89 last year. Value-added services such as SMS, CRT, MMS and WAP enjoyed revenue growth of 23.8 percent and accounted for 27.5 percent of the company's total operating revenue.

800 million downloads at Apple's App Store

At its iPhone 3.0 software preview event in Cupertino, Calif. today, Apple gave out some pretty interesting statistics for the App Store. There are now over 25,000 apps in the App Store, and those apps have been downloaded over 800 million times.

It took Apple just eight months to reach this figure. And given previous statistics, that means the store is still growing as strong as ever. No wonder all its major competitors in the mobile space have now launched or announced plans to launch their own app stores.

But it will be hard to overtake Apple as some 50,000 companies have joined the paid iPhone developer program. And while over 17 million iPhones have been sold, even more impressive is that 30 million iPhone and iPod touches have been sold when you add the two together. That’s a huge base which is still expanding very fast.

Some other interesting stats:

• The software development kit (SDK) has been downloaded over 800,000 times.
  
• Of developers on the platform, 62 percent had never developed for Apple before.
  
• The App Store is now available in 77 countries.
  
• 96 percent of apps submitted are currently being approved, and of those, 98 percent are approved in seven days or less.

Google Adsense Now Lets You Pick the Ads You Want to See

Google is making AdSense more sophisticated, a goal advertisers have been seeking. You can now control the kind of AdSense ads you read based on preferences you choose.

In the past, the AdSense ads were based strictly on the context of the website you visited. By selecting your preference, you are helping Google AdSense target their advertising messages, thereby increasing clicks for advertisers making their advertising more effective.

What's the deal at Microsoft App Store

Microsoft has unveiled further plans for its new app store called Windows Marketplace for Mobile. 
Like the iPhone App Store and Android App Market, Microsoft will give developers a 70 percent cut of app sales and will let them set their own prices. Developers will also be charged $99 annually to submit applications to WMM. The first year's fee will cover submitting up to five applications to the app store, and every program after that will cost $99 per submission. Student developers can submit applications for free through the Microsoft DreamSpark program.

Apple also charges an annual fee of $99 to enter the iPhone Developer program, but charges $299 for companies with more than 500 employees.

What do you think? Will developers jump on it?

Gartner - iPhone sales grew 245% in 2008

Gartner researchers reports Apple’s iPhone was the fastest-growing smartphone of 2008, despite end-of-year sales that failed to maintain the blistering pace set in July with the launch of the iPhone 3G.

The Four Stages of our Life

This is what we would consume in different stages of our life. Haha...

Coca-Cola True-Life Ad Campaign

This Coca-Cola's tv ad is really heartwarming. It’s a true story of a 102-year-old man traveling to meet the youngest addition to his family.

Apple's NEW 4GB iPod shuffle

This is the new iPod shuffle released on Wednesday. Apple has doubled the capacity and reduced the size of the predecessor by half. 

The new device is smaller than a AA battery yet holds up to 1,000 songs and the gadget's battery life clocks in at 10 hours. Priced at $79, it comes in silver or black. The aluminum body of the third-generation Shuffle stands 1.8 inches tall and is 0.3 inch thick. The navigation and volume controls are in a small protrusion on the right earphone cord.

Apple "Netbook" in the making?

Is this the new Apple "Netbook?" It makes lot of sense for Apple to be working on a "iPod touch HD", a touchscreen, portable Internet device that's bigger than the iPhone. The netbook market, a small and relatively inexpensive PCs, is exploding and combine it with successful Apple's multi-touch gadget platform, this would be a perfect marriage.

While the rumor refers to Apple's gadget as a "netbook," I dont think Apple will be producing something me-too. Those maniature device has little aesthetic design and definitely doesnt fit well with the Apple's cool and sexy positioning. I think Apple will take advantage of its expertise in multi-touch screens and virtual keyboards to make a device that's about four times the size of an iPod touch, selling for around $600 to $700.

A Future Vision by Microsoft

Gartner: Mobile sales declined 5% in Q4 08

New data from Gartner has revealed that mobile phone sales dropped almost 5 percent in the last quarter of 2008 as vendors struggled against low consumer confidence. Total worldwide sales to end users totalled 314.7 million units in the quarter, a 4.6 percent decline from fourth-quarter 2007, with the top five handset vendors all registering a drop in sales. The decline came in a quarter that is traditionally the strongest for the mobile phone industry due to Christmas sales. However, despite the fourth-quarter decline, sales for the full year 2008 reached 1.22 billion units, a 6 percent increase over 2007. Its not going to look rosy this year with sales of mobile to continue to plummet.

Free E-Book - 101 Business Uses for SMS

You can get a free e-book in PDF format on several innovative ways to SMS for your business. Clickatell's 37 page guide reviews 101 different ways to use text messaging in your business (you have to give your details to access the pdf document) and it covers all these areas mentioned below : 

• Sales, Products and Marketing
  
• Customer Services and Relationship Management
  
• Business Process Management and Internal Administration
  
• Information Technology and System Administration
  
• Transport and Logistics
  
• Travel and Tourism
  
• Financial Services
  
• Social Networking

Go check out the site and get your free copy now.

Viagra Launches "Benjamin Button" Ad Campaign

People are watching more video than ever on every type of screen television, the Internet and mobile devices according to a report on the nation's viewing habits to be released by Nielsen Co.

Nielsen found that during the fourth quarter of 2008 the number of users and the time spent watching each of the three screen media rose from the previous quarter. 

The biggest jumps came in the number of viewers watching video on mobile devices and "time shifted" television, that is, programming viewed with a digital-video recorder. Each rose about 9% in the fourth quarter from the third quarter. Roughly 11 million people used mobile viewing and 74 million people watched DVR programming. Internet video users increased 2.3% to 123 million people.

Traditional television is still the most popular by far. Roughly 285 million of the nation's 306 million people watched TV in their home in the fourth quarter, up about three million people, or 1%, from the prior quarter.

Television also wins in terms of the time spent on each medium. People spent more time watching TV, an average of 151 hours a month or five hours a day, a record high, according to Nielsen. That is a 7% increase, or roughly 11 hours more.

Internet video viewers, on the other hand, spent just under three hours on that a month, or 22 more minutes than the prior quarter, a nearly 15% increase.

For the first time in the Nielsen study, people ages 18-24 spent nearly the same amount of time roughly five hours watching Internet video each month as they did watching DVR programs. Other age brackets watched half as much or less Internet video than they did DVR video.

Online video viewing is increasingly seen as more valuable than DVR viewing because, unlike DVR viewing, viewers can't fast-forward through the advertising.

Television viewing, however, remains the most valuable for advertisers because of its breadth of audience.

iPhone AppStore Secrets - Pinch Media

Pinch Media had came up with the AppStore Secrets. This is what they had learned from 30,000,000+ downloads AppStore structure. 

iPhone AppStore Secrets - Pinch Media

View more presentations from pinchmedia. (tags: pinch media)

What Would Google Do, the powerpoint by Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis has posted a handy powerpoint summary of his book. It's a great book that you should buy the full version.

WWGD? - The PowerPoint

View more presentations from jeffjarvis. (tags: buzzmachine business)

U.S. Mobile Ad Revenue to continue growing significantly

The U.S. mobile advertising sector is likely to continue to grow as adoption of mobile handsets, particularly smartphones, rises according to "Going Mobile: The Mobile Local Media Opportunity," a report released by The Kelsey Group's new mobile local media practice, which includes forecasts for local mobile advertising through 2013.

Advertising revenues for U.S. mobile are expected to grow from $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 81.2 percent. The ad spend for the mobile category is divided in three categories. In 2008 the split was $21 million on display advertising, $39 million on search, and $100 million on SMS. By 2013 a shift will occur with a bulk of the spending dedicated to search. The report projects $567 million will be spent on mobile display ads, $2.3 billion on search, and $270 million in SMS.

Tightening budgets have affected mobile expenditures. Many still in the experimental phase have been slashed and won't recover for the next year or two. We're not really going to see a tipping point in terms of mainstream advertiser adoption until 2010 or 2011. Mobile is still something seen by a lot of advertisers as experimental. In uncertain economic times experimental will go down.

As mobile penetration grows, and mobile Web usage continues to grow, advertisers are expected to follow users to the channel. Mobile does offer promise for local, particularly for local advertisers.

Two factors will encourage the adoption of mobile Web usage and ability for advertisers to reach consumers on a mobile device. The increase of app stores from Apple and other providers makes compelling content for a variety of handsets ubiquitous. Google, on the other hand, makes it easy for small businesses to advertise. Google has already started to lower the barrier with Google Mobile, the addition of Google AdWords to mobile. Advertisers only need to hit a few extra buttons to advertise on the iPhone and Google's Android devices and that will be the one thing to drive adoption once Google makes it easier for small businesses to buy mobile ad inventory.

The Free E-Guide to low-cost, high-impact mobile marketing on the Mobile Web

The mobile Web is taking off and the big brands aren’t the only ones benefiting. Small businesses from pizza parlors to real estate agencies are using it every day to attract new customers and serve them better.

This short, practical eBook is for small business owners who want to harness the power of the mobile Web. Sections include:

What is the mobile Web?
How people use it
How your business can use the mobile Web today
How to make your first mobile Web site
Ten tips for great mobile sites
Promoting your mobile Web site
Choosing the right domain name

Go on, download it.

Bavaria spoofs Heineken walk-in-fridge

Dutch beer brand Bavaria just launched a commercial that leaves no mistake. It's a direct, professional and fun spoof on the popular Walk In Fridge commercial from competitor Heineken, which was released late December 2008. I m sure Heineken is going to come back with a new ad to retaliate. 

In case of you have not seen the original Heineken's Walk in Fridge Ad, check out below.