China Mobile launches first Android's device

Electronics manufacturer Dell will make its official foray into the mobile handset space this month with the launch of its Android-based Mini 3i device, developed in conjunction with China Mobile.

The Mini 3i is the result of a year-long collaboration with China Mobile, the world’s biggest operator by subscribers, and will go on sale in China by the end of November.

The device runs China Mobile’s own OPhone open source platform, which is a branch of the Android operating system. The OPhone SDK 1.5 is compatible with Android SDK 1.5, so developers can use both OPhone APIs and Android APIs to develop OPhone applications.

Dell’s handset is a touchscreen device with a 3.5” nHD, 640×360, display, three megapixel camera, microSD card slot, GPS and Bluetooth. It has quadband GSM/EDGE connectivity and typical to devices launched in China, no wifi.

Early demonstrations of the OPhone platform, which first appeared on Lenovo hardware, seem to have been well received, largely due to a slick user interface overhaul.

While its a great strategy taken by China Mobile but i m not too sure how much traction China Mobile and Dell will make out from this partnership.

A Funny Short Story about the Creative Agency by Yahoo! Adbuzz

Included in this clever mockery is a vicious butt-kissing account executive who switches sides before you can blink, and a couple of pretentious clients. A must see point in the video shows the creatives scrambling to prepare for the client.

2010 - Top 20 Consumer Trends Forecast by TrendHunter

AdMob metrics - Android rising fast

Android is on the charge when it comes to mobile internet and application usage, judging by AdMob’s just-released October Mobile Metrics Report.

Google’s OS took an 11% share of worldwide smartphone ad requests on AdMob’s network in October – up from 3% in April. In the US, it’s risen from 7% of requests to 20% in the same time period.

What’s more, Motorola’s Droid looks set to continue that growth. Just two weeks after its launch on 6th November, AdMob says it accounted for 24% of all its Android ad requests.

Globally, iPhone also increased its share of ad requests on AdMob’s network in the last six months, moving from 43% in April to 50% in October. The big loser was Symbian, which went from 36% to 25% in the same time period.

However, Research In Motion may have cause for concern. Its global market share of AdMob requests declined from 9% to 7% between April and October – but in its biggest market, the US, that share went from 17% to 12%.

Windows Mobile is also on the slide, with its global share shrinking from 5% in April to just 3% in October. Meanwhile, Palm’s webOS – represented in October by the recently-launched Palm Pre smartphone – took a 2% share that month.

The full report can be downloaded from AdMob’s Mobile Metrics blog.

A Living Book using QR Code

In an attempt to draw offline interest to their online store, Editoras (equivalent of Amazon.com) incorporated a “guerrilla” marketing strategy that included the use of 4,000 QR code stickers that were placed at various locations around Sao Paulo. Mobile users who participated quickly discovered that each QR code redirected them to select Twitter messages- and here’s where it gets interesting.

Each Twitter message related to either “love” or “hate,” and refreshed every seven days throughout the campaign. The result of this strategy was that Editoras was able to produce a 200+ page so-called “living book” that was made up entirely of QR codes and messages from Twitter feeds. To bring it all together, each message also included a call-to-action that ultimately drove users to the Editoras website. Beyond driving an insane amount of traffic to their Online store, Editoras generated so much buzz with its unique guerrilla marketing campaign that copies of their “living book” sold out in less than a week.

The ROI experienced on behalf of Editoras was off the charts, and they fully deserve to reap the benefits of creating such a unique and innovative campaign. This just proves further that thinking outside the box, even using a marketing medium that’s still in its infancy, can pay off big time.

Toyoto Prius's iPhone Campaign

Toyota has released The Prius Experience App, a free iPhone app that uses the unique features of the iPhone to engage with individual consumers, and also connects the consumer to a large billboard display in New York’s Times Square.

The Prius Experience App gives the user a choice of 4 activities: Tour, Interact, Draw, and Play.

The Tour gives a really interesting way to view the interior of the car. By just tilting the iPhone, it changes the view. The app uses the accelerometer to adjust what section of the 3-D interior image you see. So as you tilt back, the view goes up, as you tilt to the right, the view pans right, etc.

It is sort of hard to explain, so here is a video.

The iPhone app also provides closely integrated links to the Prius mobile website at m.toyota.com/prius.

The site provides full information and prices about the Prius models, plus gives you 3D views of each model in selectable colors.

But the nicest feature - and one that takes advantage of today’s handset quality and network speeds - is a series of short videos that explain various special features of the Prius. These include the solar powered roof, hybrid power modes, parking assistance, etc.

Here is the video for the solar powered roof, showing how you can use energy from sunlight to keep your car cool while it is parked.

95% of digital budgets now include spend on mobile in the UK

New research conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), reveals that 95% of digital budgets now include spend on mobile. The research also finds that 73% of marketers believe mobile will be the medium to see most growth over the next five years.

The survey, conducted amongst a panel of over 100 senior-level UK agency representatives, investigated their knowledge and understanding of mobile advertising, as well as general attitudes towards the medium.

The results show that familiarity with many areas of mobile activity has grown significantly over the past 12 months, requiring respondents to ‘score’ their knowledge and understanding of the mobile medium.

Awareness and understanding of areas such as MMS, voice and video Shortcodes has grown, with just 20% of marketers having no experience in this area in 2009, compared to 66% in 2008. Knowledge of mobile search is on the rise, with the amount of marketers with no experience of the discipline declining from 57% to 29% over the last 12 months. Similarly, familiarity of ads in and around mobile gaming has increased from 62% having no experience in 2008 to only 35% in 2009.

The research also finds that, compared to 2008, the majority of employees responsible for planning a mobile campaign within the agencies surveyed are mobile specialists, with the number of dedicated mobile experts increasing year-on-year. In 2008, around 37% of those responsible for planning mobile campaigns within agencies were dedicated specialists, with this figure rising to 52% in 2009.

Agencies that took part in the survey were also asked what percentage of their digital spend is for mobile, and the results reveal that some 95% of respondents included mobile in their overall digital budget. Within this, 30% spent between 0 - 1%, 46% spent 1 - 5%, 13% spent 6 - 10% and 6% spent more than 11%.

Looking to the future, some 40% of agency respondents predicted they would be spending between 1 and 5% of their digital budgets on mobile in 2011. A further 29% believed they would be spending 6 – 10% and 13% stated they would be spending 11 - 20%. Only 1% of agencies stated that they will not be allocating any budget to mobile in the next two years.

73% of those surveyed agreed that mobile will be the fastest growing media for the next five years, with 73% also believing that most media agencies will have a mobile specialist by 2010. In terms of using the medium to communicate with specific audiences, some 55% of respondents agreed that in the future, mobile will be the primary medium for communicating with 12 – 24 age group.

With the industry putting education at the very top of its agenda and driving growth more than ever this year, mobile advertising is becoming more of a necessity to reach today’s consumer. It’s extremely encouraging to see that agencies in the UK are adapting to the changing landscape, allocating bigger budgets to mobile and hiring more specialists to plan mobile campaigns and this will surely be the trend in most emerging markets. Japan has certainly proven that there is money in mobile advertising surpassing $700 million in ad spend in 2008.

Free Mobile Marketing White Paper - The Time is Now for Mobile Marketing and Outreach

Mobile phones represent the most personal way to communicate with individuals. In a recently released report, Nielsen highlights how brands can reach practically every mobile consumer in the U.S. by adding a mobile address, a Common Short Code to their marketing mix.

Download a FREE copy of NIELSEN'S WHITE PAPER on adding mobile to your campaigns.

AdMob kickstarts interactive video advertising on iPhone

AdMob, the mobile advertising child of Google announced that it’s supporting a new kind of iPhone ad — interactive video.

This is the first interactive video ad unit for iPhones, AdMob says. Mainly, the new feature allows application developers to run a video ad while the application is loading, the way video sometimes plays when you load a website. Advertisers can also introduce interactions into the video, such as the ability to tap a button to see more video or jump to a website.

AdMob’s network reaches more than 20 million iPhones and iPod Touches, the company says. The interactive video ads will start to run this week.

Asian consumers prefer to access social media on mobile

Young Asians prefer to access social networking sites via the handset rather than the PC, says IDC. More than 50% of Chinese, Indian, Korean and Thai users go onto social media sites via the mobile phone at least once a week, it found in a survey.

In China and Thailand markets, 62% and 65% of users respectively use their handsets for alerts, messages, status updates or to upload photos. The survey covered 1400 SNS users aged 18-35 in Australia, India, China, Korea, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. By contrast, Australia and Singapore see the lowest percentage of mobile SNS access, with 19% and 25% respectively.

The reasons for the differing approaches vary across the region, said Debbie Swee, market analyst for IDC Asia-Pacific emerging technologies research.

In emerging markets, the dominance of cellphones over PCs is the major factor. In Korea, however, the market is technologically advanced and has already seen mass adoption of mobile internet. In Australia and Singapore, the dominance of the PC for broadband access meant “strong inertia” against adopting regular mobile access of SNSs.

The survey found that the biggest push towards mobile adoption was cheaper and affordable mobile data pricing. Most users who had never logged in to SNSs through a mobile phone cited hefty mobile internet, SMS or MMS tariffs as the main obstacle.

For mobile operators in China, India and Thailand, IDC believes a low flat-rate internet access fee would complement and increase mobile SNS adoption. In Australia, Korea and Singapore, where data tariffs were already relatively low, operators needed to correct users’ misconceptions about high pricing.

China's Huawei is No. 2

China’s Huawei has underlined its status as a top tier vendor by becoming the world’s second-largest mobile network manufacturer in the third-quarter, according to research group Dell’Oro. The Chinese vendor almost doubled its market share from a year ago to 20 percent, surpassing Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN). Ericsson’s market share of 32 percent remained flat year-on-year. Huawei has been on the rise for several quarters, with the firm enjoying a 17 percent market share in the second quarter.

Huawei and NSN are experiencing contrasting fortunes at present. Huawei is establishing itself as a major contender for next-generation LTE network deals, earlier this month scoring a hugely significant win at Telenor. Meanwhile, NSN has struggled with falling market share for several quarters as its owners Nokia and Siemens have looked for profits from the ailing business unit.

ZTE, another Chinese equipment vendor is also hot on the heel of NSN and if business dont improve for NSN, they will falter and fall further.

Verizon Wireless Misfit Ad Shows the iPhone as an Outcast

The Verizon Wireless misfit iPhone ad certainly knocks their competitor, AT&T.

The commercial takes place in the land of the misfits, where all the rejected toys of the North Pole hang out, and this year among them is an iPhone on the AT&T network. Why? Because Verizon offers five times more 3G coverage.

India on track to hit 500 million mobile subscribers mark by year end

Indian telecom regulator Trai revealed that the number of fixed and mobile subscribers had crossed the 500 million mark in September, a year ahead of schedule. Total phone subscribers reached 509 million, with wireless subscribers growing 3.28% to 471.7 million, Trai said.

With 15 million new mobile subs in September, Indian cellcos are on track to hit 500 million wireless subs around the end of November.

Tata Indicom maintained its market lead, with a 26.7% share. Three operators battled closely for second place – Bharti, with 16.7% market share, Reliance with 13.4% and Vodafone with 13.1%.

By contrast, the wireline customer base fell to 37.31 million from 33.33 million, with state-owned operators BSNL and MTNL feeling the brunt of the subscriber exodus.

Overall teledensity reached 43.5%. Broadband subscribers increased 3.3% to 7.2 million.

RIM and Apple in driving position to dominate the Smartphone segment

Analyst Canalys has released figures for global smartphone shipments in the third quarter of this year, and it's good news for RIM and Apple.

Nokia remains No 1 in terms of market share, shipping 16.4 million smartphones in Q3, 39.7% of the market. That's up from 38.9% in the same quarter last year. I wonder how much longer can Nokia maintain its leadership in this segment at the rapid pace RIM and Apple is eating into its market share not forgetting the release of more Android smartphones in the coming months.

However, Research In Motion is on the charge with BlackBerry, whose 8.5 million Q3 shipments bagged it a smartphone market share of 20.6% - up from 15.2% in Q3 2008. That means it's overtaken third-placed Apple, which shipped 7.4 million iPhones in Q3 for a 17.8% market share, up from 17.3% in the same quarter last year. Fourth-placed HTC shipped 2.2 million smartphones in Q3, giving it a market share of 5.3%.

Overall, smartphone shipments rose just 4% year-on-year to 41.4 million. While growth has undoubtedly slowed, it is still outperforming the overall mobile phone market by some margin, as well as driving data revenue for operators.

Microsoft is the big loser in that chart, with WinMo shipments down 33.1% year-on-year. The full stats can be seen here.

Google acquiring Admob for $750 million

Google is paying over $750 million for mobile advertising firm AdMob, one of the Web giant's largest acquisitions to date after Double Click and YouTube, reports CNet.

As AdMob itself has described, the volume and effectiveness of mobile advertising has been skyrocketing over the last several years as more advanced smartphones have caught on, making it easier to deliver more kinds of graphical and text-based advertising to phone-toting consumers.

AdMob said that the number of mobile ads it served had increased nearly 540% from September 2007, to 10.2 billion per month from 1.6 billion.

Congrats to the team at Admob.

Video: Motorola Droid Vs. iPhone 3GS

Technobuffalo puts the Motorola Droid & Android 2.0 head to head against the iPhone 3GS.In this video they cover stuff like the web browser, speed, GPS, scrolling speed, text entry etc. Guess who is the winner.... Its a pretty long video but i m sure you will find it quite useful if you are thinking of buying either one of the device.

Opera Mobile 10 beta released for S60 devices and its Free for now

Opera Mobile gives you a full web browser with support for proxy to speed things up using the Opera Turbo toggle. Opera Mobile 10 supports tabbed browsing, speed dial, password manager, and much more. Opera Mobile is optimized for both touchscreen and keypad-style devices and is available now for FREE.

Xperia X10 – The Android Device from Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson had just released the official specifications and photos of the final product and judging from those, it might be the Android device that’ll give the other device manufacturers a run for their money.

Specs :

- 4-inch capacitive touch display

- 480×854 pixels wide

- 8.1 megapixel camera with LED flash

- 1GHz Snapdragon CPU

- 8 GB microSD memory card included, with the possibility of extending that with larger memory cards

– WiFi, Bluetooth, Micro USB, A-GPS, HSPA

Check out the promo video below :

Verizon DROID Teaser TVC

Pizza Hut's iPhone Mobile Commerce App generated $1 Million in new Revenue

More and more mobile apps are being created for the purposes of branding, increasing new customers and gaining new revenue stream. The Pizza Hut app for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch has surpassed $1 million in new revenue having only been live for 3 months in the US!

The application uses iPhone and iPod touch features such as the multi-touch user interface and accelerometer with the goal of making the ordering process for each individual menu item a customized experience.

When ordering pizzas, users virtually build their own pizza by choosing a type of crust in the scroll wheel, pinching to select size and dragging-and-dropping toppings onto the pizza, all with visual confirmation.

Although Pizza Hut had a WAP enabled mobile site before launching the iPhone app, the level of growth on iPhone is explosive according to Bernard Acoca, senior director of digital marketing at Pizza Hut.

LTE 4G Network in Action

Imagine having our cars fully connected to the 4G network, it would be like almost having a giant smartphone built-in to our car's dashboard. Today the ng Connect Program has released a new concept car, the LTE Connected Car, which promises the technology to make our automotive dreams come true. Check out the video below.

Android accounts for 17% of US smartphone traffic in September

Mobile advertising firm AdMob has released its September Mobile Metrics report, which outlines trends based on ad requests from the company's network of apps and sites.

Globally, iPhone was the top handset in terms of requests, accounting for 16.9% of the traffic on AdMob's network. It's followed by iPod touch in second spot with 8.4%.

Focusing on smartphones specifically, the iPhone OS accounted for 43% of requests, followed by Symbian with 29%. Android is third with 10%.

However, in the US, Android is in second spot with 17% of ad requests in September - up from 13% in August thanks to growth fuelled by the HTC Dream and HTC Magic handsets.

Five of the top ten handsets in the US have touchscreens, six have Wi-Fi, and six come with embedded app stores, according to AdMob's data. The full report can be downloaded here.

Classical Music on Mobile Phones

Vodafone New Zealand has a successful viral video on their hands, after they spent who knows how many hours recreated Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’ using 1,000 mobile phones and 2,000 text messages.

The ‘1812 Overture’ is quite the project to take on, but Vodafone NZ more or less succeeds. The geniuses behind this used 53 different ringtones in order to match the complexity of the 1812 overture. Check out this cool and well executed video.

How big is Online Advertising in Asia?

The table above reveals the forecast expenditure on online advertising across each of the Southeast Asia markets. The study shows that the online advertising industry in the region is expected to grow more than 60% between 2008 and 2010, across all the included markets. Display advertising will continue to take the lion’s share of the online advertising pie although Search advertising is expected to close the gap in Singapore and Malaysia by 2010. Strong growth is also expected in Search Advertising, particularly between 2008 and 2009 and for the less mature online advertising markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam