Shane's Place

AdMob has released their June 2008 statistics that put the Apple iPhone as the world’s 4th largest Smartphone viewing mobile sites with their ads. AdMob serves Graphical Banner and Text Link ads on mobile web pages for more than 5,000 publishers.

These AdMob statistics are impressive considering the iPhone is the only mobile from Apple versus the multiple mobiles from each of the other manufacturers. it will be interesting to see how the new iPhone changes these statistics as this report’s data is prior to the release of the new 3G iPhone.

If you are designing mobile websites, this is more ammunition for tailoring to the ever growing iPhone base.

AdMob Mobile Metrics Report - http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics

Posted By Shane Williamson

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) have released a set of guidelines that "address the effective and responsible use of the mobile channel world wide." The MMA represents around 650 member companies worldwide in around forty countries and was established to grow mobile marketing and its associated technologies.

The updated Global Code of Conduct includes five categories:

• Notice – The fundamental principle of the MMA Privacy Code of Conduct, informing users of the marketers’ identity or products and services offered and the key terms and conditions that govern an interaction between the marketer and the user’s mobile device.
• Choice & Consent - Respecting the right of the user to control which mobile messages they receive by obtaining consent (opt-in) and implementing a simple termination (opt-out) process.
• Customisation & Constraint – Ensuring that collected user information is used to tailor communication to the interests of the recipient and is handled responsibly, sensitively and in compliance with applicable law. Mobile messages should be limited to those requested by the user and provide value such as product and service enhancements, contests, requested information, entertainment or discounts.
• Security – The implementation of reasonable technical, administrative and physical procedures to protect user information from unauthorized use, alteration, disclosure, distribution, or access.
• Enforcement & Accountability - The MMA expects its members to comply with the MMA Privacy Code of Conduct and has incorporated the Code into applicable MMA Guidelines, including the U.S. Consumer Best Practice (“CBP”) Guidelines. Until the Code can be enforced effectively by a third party enforcement organization, Mobile Marketers are expected to use evaluations of their practices to certify compliance with the Code.

The 4 page PDF can be downloaded from their site here

MMA's press release

Posted By Shane Williamson

Jetstar airlines has created a new mobile portal to their main website, but unfortunately you can’t buy tickets on their flights from it.

Whilst the Jetstar mobile site is limited, the user can check arrival & departure times of flights and there is contact information including a click-to-call customer support link. Also good to see that they have used browser sniffing capability so that you just point your mobile at their main site and you get redirected to the mobile version without having to fumble around trying to work out the mobile address.

http://mobile.jetstar.com

Posted By Shane Williamson

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1127.html

Posted by Shane Williamson

CafePress is staying true to it’s company’s business model by acquiring imagekind.com as the two companies are very synergistic. Creating a business that makes revenue from selling User Generated Content (UGC) is tricky at best, but CafePress and Imagekind have both nailed it.

CafePress is one of the greatest ways to make cash on the Internet by selling user generated content. I originally created my CafePress store as a demonstration that even a dog could have a website and make money. Whilst I did it as a jest, it wasn’t long before I got my first sale on the service and my dog was US$1 richer for it…. or more specifically her master was.

CafePress is a free online service that lets you tailor shirts, mugs and other merchandise with your brand, photography or even a campaign message that you want to advertise. As long as you own the intellectual property of the image or saying you can sell it on CafePress. The service then lets you add a prift margin to your stores branded merchandise. When you make a sale, Cafepress does the billing, manufacturing and shipping of your goods to your customer and you get the profit. There are no setup fees.

My dog’s site still gets the occasional sale and I don’t promote the site in any way (Except here of course), but this service is a powerful way to get your company merchandise printed without having to purchase bulk amounts and watch them waste away.

CafePress has a professional version of their service that allows more stores and greater flexibility in merchandise you can choose for a low service fee.

I’ve since used CafePress for marketing materials for a couple of the startups and business programs I have been involved in and even though the service is based in the US, the shipping fees are very reasonable and the products are a good quality.

So next time you hear someone criticise that you can’t make money from user generated content, just point them at CafePress and tell them to buy a Nikita mug! :-)

CafePress – www.cafepress.com

Nikita’s store – www.cafepress.com/nikita

Imagekind – www.imagekind.com

Posted By Shane Williamson

SearchMe.com has had a couple of updates since I last saw it in action. It now has a feature to search online videos and another that creates “stacks” for bookmarking your favourite search results.

SearchMe.com is one of the better visual search tools I’ve seen on the web and the media search options are one of the best user experiences for finding videos & pictures I’ve come across.

Posted By Shane Williamson

Will Park over at IntoMobile picked up a shiny new Apple iPhone 20 minutes after they were originally released to the world a year ago.

Park has a nice balanced user review of the iPhone 1 year on.

Posted By Shane Williamson

I attended the HTC Touch Diamond launch in Australia yesterday and was impressed that one device could pull so many Australian press and Bloggers. The much touted iPhone killer was impressively demonstrated during the presentation, but the timing of their release of the product so near to the Apple 3G iPhone was a pachyderm sized headache for the HTC launch crew during the day.

After the demonstration the Q&A session got into full swing except for the occasional stupid question like Peter Blasina of Channel 7 asking why it didn’t have GPS after they had just demonstrated it, most questions fell into a pattern of comparison between the HTC product and the upcoming 3G iPhone.

It was blatantly obvious that the HTC, Telstra & Microsoft reps had not been prepared properly for dealing with iPhone questions. For instance, one poignant question to the Telstra rep, Ross Fielding, queried how Telstra would position the HTC Touch Diamond alongside the Apple iPhone, his response was “We are not here to talk about the iPhone”. Fielding clearly failed to address the issue by choosing to dismiss a very important question. How do you expect users to understand the benefits of an iPhone comparable device without constructively positioning your product against the competition.

HTC’s failure with this device in the Australian market may come down to ignoring the bleeding obvious. The Apple iPhone has a massive marketing engine behind it especially with the three major Telcos all selling the device. As a competitor you must position yourself clearly to potential customers so they understand why they should choose your product over others.

Very sorry to hear that the HTC Touch Diamond will only be available via Telstra, which doesn’t leave consumers choice of carrier.

HTC Australia Touch Diamond site

Posted By Shane Williamson

The June edition of Total Telecom (http://www.totaltele.com/) is out and there is a great article on Mobile social networking.

The article has some great stats on mobile subscribers in European countries and their usage of social networks via mobiles. Whilst the focus is still on ease of use by some of the major players, it will be interesting to see if the 3G iPhone will impact the usage of these services with its great user experience.

Total Telecom is a great free e-magazine for all things global telecommunications. They do a great job of including news from all parts of the globe (including an article on Australia in this issue).

Head over to Total Telecom to subscribe - http://www.totaltele.com/Subscribe.aspx

Posted By Shane Williamson

Just ask the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, as they have announced that they will be using IBM’s Roadrunner super computer to model the extraordinary complexity of the US’s stockpiled nuclear weapons systems.

Yes that’s right, the world’s fastest super computer is being used to simulate nuclear weapon effectiveness so the US government doesn’t have to explode a real one. Imagine this amount of power in SecondLife!

When it’s not creating virtual mushroom clouds (80% of its processing time) the Petaflop beast will be able to used for other more productive work such as tackling global warming or the mathematical reasons as to why bees can fly.

So what does a Petaflop comparatively give you?

A “flop” is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second.  One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second or million billion operations per second. 

To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.

Lots of laptops. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today’s fastest laptop computers. You would need a stack of laptops 1.5 miles high to equal Roadrunner’s performance.

Today, just three of Roadrunner’s 3,456 Tri-blade units have the same power as the 1998 fastest computer. A complex physics calculation that will take Roadrunner one week to complete, would have taken the 1998 machine 20 years to finish.

Roadrunner geek facts:

• Roadrunner is the world’s first hybrid supercomputer
• 1 rack of the Roadrunner system = 1000 standard desktop PCs
• Roadrunner connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron™ chips and 12,960 PowerXCell 8i processors. The Opteron processors handle standard processing such as file system I/O. The PowerXCell 8i processors accelerate mathematical and CPU-intensive processing.
• Two PowerXCell 8i-based blade servers (IBM BladeCenter® QS22) and one AMD-based blade (IBM BladeCenter LS21) are integrated into a specialized "tri-blade" configuration.
• The machine is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blade units, each of which can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 gigaflops).
• Its 10,000 connections—both InfiniBand® and Gigabit Ethernet—require 57 miles of fiber optic cable.
• The system has 98 terabytes of memory
• Weighs 500,000 pounds
• Housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 6,000 square feet

So anyone want to guess how long till we see a Petaflop on a mobile?? ;-)

US Department of Energy’s press release

IBM’s press release

IBM’s Deep Computing site (in case you want to buy one…)

Posted by Shane Williamson

Fierce Mobile Content has some nice reviews of 5 up and coming mobile social networks.

Interesting to see the differences in the various networks, but the uptake of location based services is a growing trend amongst them.

 
http://www.meetnowlive.com/

https://www.sniffu.com/

 
http://www.trapster.com/

 
http://www.whrrl.com/

http://xumii.com

Posted By Shane Williamson

Looks like a Chinese mobile manufacturer called CKING has developed a commercial mobile with a projector built into it. Very interesting to see this becoming a reality as it was only a year ago we were hearing about the small projector devices being developed.

 Intomobile has further pictures and details on the device.

 

Posted By Shane Williamson

I’ve been waiting for the first commercial ZINK inkless printing product to appear and it looks like the Polaroid PoGo is the first. This system will give mobile users the ability to print their pictures as soon as they take them.

From their website…. “Polaroid PoGo™ – short for Polaroid-on-the-go – is a pocket-sized, inkless digital photo printer that produces full-color photos wirelessly from cell phones and via PictBridge from digital cameras.

The full-color digital photos are created without ink cartridges or ribbons using ZINK Photo Paper™, keeping the printer to about the size of a deck of cards. The paper is a durable material that contains colorless cyan, yellow and magenta dye crystals. Heat activation brings photos to life, colorizing ZINK™ dye crystals, so digital photos can be shared instantly.”

The Polaroid Pogo will be available on July 6th in the USA (Bestbuy www.bestbuy.com ) I’ll keep an eye out for when and if, it hits Australian shores.

The Polaroid PoGo website - http://www.thenewinstant.com/index.cfm

Posted By Shane Williamson

Just stumbled onto this great mobile user interface design resource Wiki at Little Springs design.

The site states “This wiki aims to be the *authoritative resource for all things related to the art and science of mobile user interface design.”

Linkage: http://patterns.littlespringsdesign.com/index.php/Main_Page

Posted By Shane Williamson

IntoMobile has a post about the CEO of Ericsson claiming that there will be 6.5 billion mobile subscriptions by 2013.

Even more impressive is the CEO's statement that 60% would be mobile broadband connections. Of course it's anyone's guess as to what percentage of these will be using what type of mobile technology 3G or 4G or ...., but the largest portion of these devices will be in both China & India. This will have a huge influence on the development of devices and focus on web services for these specific countries.

Posted By Shane Williamson

Confirmation came through today that Optus will be selling the iPhone in conjunction with Telstra & Vodafone.

Still no word on whether or not the device is the 3G version, or pricing and availability, but the great news is that customers will have a choice from three different carriers in Australia.

Posted By Shane Williamson

CNET.com.au has created a great mobile portal for their site. It is well designed mobile site with lots of information on all things gadgety, IT & home entertainment.

Having CNET's reviews in the palm of your hand means you can get direct access to info on the latest technology whilst you are out and about.

The check prices function is handy for that quick price check on your new technology purchase giving you enhanced haggling powers. You will save bucks here, especially with the reviews attached to the prices so you can verify if what you are purchasing stacks up especially with access to user reviews.

The main CNET.com.au website has setup up browser sniffing to redirect your mobile if you go directly to their site and the mobile variant uses the "m" standard for denoting a mobile site. This means you have the least text to enter via your mobile.

The m.cnet.com.au site is a great example of how to design a mobile site that compliments their main site extremely well.

Oh and click away on the ads as they go to mobile formatted sites too!