Bango Gives Its Pick Of 2008 Trends; Will The Bango Button + Mobile Search Ring In The Revenues For Content Publishers? » mobilegroove

In-Brief: A new tool makes publishing Web content on mobile a breeze. Mobile search (soon to come) will make finding it even easier. 

In my capacity as a columnist and regular contributor to eContent magazine, I recently reviewed Bango — a U.K. company that effectively enables content providers to market, deliver and sell their products and services directly to mobile phone users on all networks worldwide — and its recent release, Bango Button, that lets publishers deliver content from their Internet sites directly to customers’ mobile devices without having to adapt it to run on the plethora of handsets and devices. My thanks again to Andy Bovingdon, VP Product Marketing, who walked me through the publishing process in a series of webinars before trying it on MSG.

(I would kick off the New Year with a Bango Button on MSG, but the content isn’t that exciting on a mobile phone. That is until Paul Skeldon, our regular contributor, circles back with a demo of the podcast series jingle he jokes may become the official ringtone…)

The briefing with Andy reinforced my view that this simple button removes a lot of pain from the process; it has the potential to unleash a torrent of mobile content. More importantly, the Bango Button is the first real effort I’ve seen to unite the Internet and the mobile Web – two sides of the World Wide Web very much in danger of splitting apart. To be clear, Bango is not only motivated by a desire to decrease fragmentation. As a company that also provides a global exchange for content, Bango has a business interest in providing the tools that could jumpstart a new wave of mobile commerce.

The concept has a few minor bugs in the presentation, but overall the Bango Button tops my list of 2007 events that covers the bases to transform 2008. I’m particularly excited about the mobile search functionality that Bango is planning to add to the mix. In a nutshell, Bango is connecting with branded and white-label mobile search providers to make it easy for content providers to appear in the natural search results of the leading search submissions. I’ll circle back with more detail in an exclusive podcast with Andy next week.

In the meantime, here is Andy’s take on the 2008 trends that matter:

1) Increasing numbers of people accessing the internet on their mobile phone

There are many more mobile phones than there are PCs today. Over 50 percent of the world’s population now has a mobile phone, this amounts to 3 billion mobile phones. At last estimate, there were 1.1 billion PCs. As the majority of new phones come with Internet access as standard, we envisage that by Q3 2009 more people will access the Internet on their mobile than through a PC.

2) Mobile advertising surges ahead

Mobile advertising is a huge opportunity with the potential to generate in excess of $10 billion in annual revenues by 2010. There are a number of factors holding it back, mainly the lack of analytics so advertisers can verify the results of their campaigns. Once this is solved, and there’s an independent auditing process, then mainstream brands will dip more than a toe into mobile advertising.

3) Shift from messaging to internet for data usage on mobile phones

We are already seeing more Web browsing as operators introduced flat-rate charging in 2007, and moved from a portal model to a more open search based model by placing a search box prominently on the portal home page. Search will become more like the Internet experience, but the quality of mobile search index needs to improve dramatically to achieve mass market adoption. During 2008, more brands and content providers will use Internet instead of messaging for service delivery.

4) Mobile commerce of physical goods will come of age

Buying travel tickets and basic consumables via the mobile Web is popular in Japan and Korea, and soon this will move to Europe and the U.S. It’s possible in the Far East because the operator payout rates to content providers approach that of credit cards, so people are paying for physical goods on their phone bill. At the moment, payout rates in Europe and the U.S. are too low, but as they increase so will the purchase of physical goods.

5) The PC and mobile will become closely linked

The two separate worlds of the PC and mobile will come together. People will be able to connect their PC lives with their mobile lives much more easily. In practice, people on Myspace, Facebook or Twitter, for example, will be able to share content and information with mobile phone users. The two worlds will no longer be seen as disconnected because mobile will provide an always-connected, personal characteristic that makes it unique.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 11:35 am and is filed under Content Discovery, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.