Mobile Groove

MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING USERS WILL NUMBER MORE THAN 641.6 MILLION by 2013, according to the latest predictions from Informa. A new report from the company says that at the end of 2008, there were just 92.5 million users of mobile social networking services, but that will skyrocket to between 641.6 million and 873.1 million by the end of 2013. It adds that the most popular mobile social services

US MOBILE PENETRATION EDGES UP, says eMarketer, and will reach almost 97 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, they add a number of other stats pulled from other reports: in the first quarter of 2009, US mobile users sent an average of 486 texts per month and made 182 calls, with heavy use by 13- to 17-year-olds skewing the numbers up strongly.

The firm adds that the mobile Internet audience in the U.S. is now a third of the size of the wired Internet market, with the gap narrowing by the early part of the next decade. Source

The bottom line: No big surprises here, but some good insight into US mobile usage – in particular, the mobile internet audience is already a big target market for content providers and advertisers.
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DON’T FORGET BLACKBERRY WEB USERS, says mobile web firm Bango. The company says BlackBerrys now account for 14 percent of all mobile web traffic, pulling ahead of the iPhone. Given the length of time BlackBerry has been in the market, plus the fact that essentially every such device comes with an unlimited data plan, it’s perhaps a little more surprising that the iPhone was ever ahead of the entire BlackBerry range. Source

The bottom line: Once again, we’re reminded that the mobile web is a lot more than just the iPhone, and that users of other devices generate significant traffic for publishers and content providers. It’s also another reminder that fragmentation among devices and the multitude of mobile web browsers on the market isn’t going away anytime soon!

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TWO-THIRDS OF TWITTER USERS ARE UNDER 25, says eMarketer – or at least they were in May – while a tiny group of the service’s users account for most of its activity. Just 1.1 percent of Twitter users update more than 10 times per day, while 85 percent do so less than once per day; consequently, 5 percent of Twitter users account for 75 percent of its activity.

In brief: MSearchGroove proudly steps up to the plate and hosts the Carnival of the Mobilists for the first time.

The last weekend in August and I spent much of it at a two-day summer festival in Siegburg, Germany, where I’m based. I’ve been on a natural high with good friends, great food and a wonderful line-up of home-grown entertainment. But not all the excitement was at the local fairgrounds. The Mobilists have also come up with a mix of thought leadership and must-read posts that give us new perspectives on mobile and start our adrenalin flowing.

Andy Favell and the team at mobiThinking.com do us all a great service and compile a comprehensive list of mobile industry facts and figures. The first in this series focuses on the size of the mobile Web and the implications for marketers. What do the numbers tell us? Should investors/companies take advantage of the economic slowdown and move ahead while others are standing still? Read on, find out and tell us what you think.

Another round of important mobile stats comes from Jose Colucci at Mobile Strategy, who continues the countdown of the 12 Reasons Why Canadian Banks Should Really Offer Mobile Services.

T-MOBILE CZECH STUDY SAYS SMS/MMS AD RESPONSE RATE 27 TIMES HIGHER THAN INTERNET BANNER CAMPAIGNS. The project confirmed the high response rates of SMS and MMS ads, based on campaigns from 22 advertisers, including Coca-Cola, Nestle, L’Oreal, Ford, Komercni banka and Eurolines. The most successful campaign had a response rate of almost 12 percent, while even the results of the least successful campaign were three times higher than the average response rate for Czech internet campaigns. Source

The bottom line: These results highlight the potential of compelling, relevant and properly targeted messages. In particular, they illustrate how much more likely are consumers are to respond to SMS and MMS ads than simple Internet banners. Peggy adds: Mobile Advertising Research U.K. confirms this, but there’s also a lot of mileage left in banners. For more on what makes for a great mobile advertising experience and a balanced value chain check back tomorrow for my take on a new-launch Hardees campaign.

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TOP APPLICATIONS ON THE APPLE APP STORE HAVE MORE THAN 1 MILLION USERS, according to AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report for May 2009. The report found that the most popular free applications in AdMob’s iPhone network generated the majority of usage, with the top 5 percent of applications garnering more than 100,000 users in May, and some apps showing more than 1 million active users.

A further 14 percent of applications had between 10,000 and 100,000 active users, while 54 percent of applications had less than 1,000. AdMob reached 15.1 million unique users through iPhone and iPod touch devices across 2,309 applications in May, with the average user accessing four applications. 44 percent of iPhone ad requests came from devices running the new version 3.0 of the iPhone OS, compared to just 1 percent of iPod touch requests. Source

TAPTU MOBILE SEARCH GENERATING 1 MILLION MOBILE SEARCHES a day. The exclusively mobile search engine has revealed new statistics in preparation for the launch of its iPhone application. With 3.4 million unique users in April, generating a million searches a day, Taptu offers users results from sites that have been optimized for the mobile Web. The company’s blog reminds us that when Taptu started out, it counted some 10,000 searches on a mobile device. In a press statement, Steve Ives, Founder and CEO of Taptu, reads this development as a clear indication that “there is a distinct need for a mobile-only search engine with results best viewed on mobile devices.” Source

The bottom line: It’s encouraging to see traction for this particular approach to mobile search. Peggy adds: The question remains: Will mobile-only search, which essentially promotes a subset of wealth of content/apps/stuff out there, continue to flourish? Or will it be Web search scenarios, enabled by the usual list of suspects all over again. I have some positive views on the potential of social search in mobile, and share these via podcasts (such as this one) and my contributions to mobile search white papers.

And while we mull over the prospects for mobile search, I invite you to consider the graph below from StatCounter Global Stats (based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites) showing the companies that lead in online search . Charles Knight – my esteemed colleague and the “voice of alternative search” at MSG partner site AltSearchEngines - has launched a contest and asks: What is the one word that best describes Google’s lead? (Google is the read line at the top.) “Alarming” is my pick…

Since AltSearchEngines doesn’t focus on mobile search (which is why we have partnered), allow me to share the StatCounter Global Stat chart for mobile search, and likewise ask your views. Why does Google lead the pack? (Particularly when the mobile experience offered by Google is known to be unsatisfactory…) What do YOU think?

Continuing with Part 2 of my audio interview with Dan Harple, CEO of GeoSentric, the company behind GyPSii, a digital mobile lifestyle application. But look beneath the hood (and listen in to Part 1 of the series) and GyPSii isn’t just another company jockeying for position in the location-aware mobile social networking space. It’s got its eye on the prize: Using our location, our social graph (because we are members of the GyPSii community), and our judgment to index the world around us. Google may be about organizing the world’s information; GyPSii is about organizing the real world.

What to do with a people-powered, user-generated index of the world out there? Follow in Google’s footsteps and sell advertising on top of it.

As I wrote in my last post, GyPSii has cleverly harnessed PlaceMe, a primary function of GyPSii that allows you to create a point of interest (POI), add your content (image, video, audio, text), add your current or last geo-location, categorize/tag/describe the POI, and submit to the server in real time to a personal or publicly designated folder in your MyPlaces (your record of points of interest).

To get this to Google scale, GyPSii needs a lot of people out there indexing the world with their mobile phones. It’s an ambitious strategy, but not far-fetched. Dan’s forecast models tell him that a company with 7 million users, each doing 2 PlaceMes a month would produce an index in the first year that would be “significantly larger than the Google file system in its first year.” (Dan expects GyPSii to be on “between 80 and 100 million devices in the coming 12 months.”)

There are no stats on active users as a percentage of that total. But GyPSii members tend to be hyperactive when it comes to PlaceMe, creating and tagging “15-20 PlaceMes per month.” Every time GyPSii members do that, they are adding a new indexed item to what the company calls the Osmotic File System (OFS).

Where does mobile advertising come in? It’s already work in progress in China. In fact, GyPSii has a lot of progress to report in China – period. As Dan sees it: “To have an ad-based model, you have to have an audience.” To reach more members (and encourage them to index the world around them) GyPSii’s has this week launched the Java version of its application, with both Chinese and English language support.

The expectation, according to the press release, is that the new app will “appeal to the 70 percent of the 650 million phone owners in China who own Java-based phones.” By way of background, GyPSii is already locally available in China for the major operators China Mobile and China Unicom, for download on compatible Java phones. GyPSii is also available globally across a wide range of devices, including Samsung, Nokia, LG, Apple iPhone, and BlackBerry smartphones.

How does GyPSii plan to make the jump from critical mass to relevant advertising? What is the rev share model for partners (handset makers and carriers) who get on board? And what is the experience for members that use the ExploreMe function to search the world around them (and so trigger the delivery of an ad on their mobile device)? These are just a few of the questions I explored with Dan in this final segment of our podcast interview. (It’s a little longer than my usual interviews, but I felt detail was necessary to fully understand the interplay between search and advertising GyPSii-style.