Mobile Groove

SMARTPHONES ACCOUNTED FOR ALMOST THREE TIMES more usage than their relative market share, according to AdMob’s April 2009 Mobile Metrics Report.The report compared usage of mobile websites to usage of HTML sites on mobile devices and found the relative usage of both to be highest on Apple and Android devices. The iPhone’s OS had 8 percent of the smartphone market, yet generated 43 percent of mobile web requests and 65 percent of HTML usage. Ad requests from applications are said to have contributed to this heavy usage. Source

The bottom line: As illustrated numerous times within this section, the data dominance and superior browsing experience allowed by smartphones is undeniable. Making mobile Web user experience smooth, easy, and compelling – as these handsets often do – is shown to consistently drive mobile data traffic. That many consumers probably can’t tell and don’t care about the difference between mobile websites and HTML sites is also testament to technical developments.

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GARTNER SAYS THE NUMBER OF MOBILE PAYMENT users will increase by 70 percent this year. Its report claims that 73.4 million users of mpayment in 2009 would represent a leap of 70.4 percent from 2008. By 2012, it says mobile payment will reach more than 190 million, more than 3 percent of total mobile users worldwide, attaining a level at which it will be considered “mainstream.”

Gartner defines a mobile payment as paying for a product or service using mobile technology such as a short message service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), and Near Field Communication (NFC). It includes transactions that use cash, bank accounts or debit and credit cards, as well as non-carrier stored value accounts, such as travel cards, gift cards or PayPal. It does not include transactions that use mobile operators’ billing systems, such as purchase of mobile content or telebanking by mobile to the service center via an interactive voice response (IVR) system. Source

The bottom line: Although the definition of mobile payment is ambiguous here, these figures demonstrate that the mass market is slowly growing confident in using their mobile to pay for and transfer money. Much effort has been made to foster consumer confidence in the micropayment mobile payment space, and the adoption of mobile banking technologies still varies drastically from region to region. There are regulatory and security challenges to overcome, particularly with the emergence of NFC technologies, but these figures give strong reason for hope.

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SPEECH APPLICATIONS ARE TO TRIPLE by 2014 according to a new Datamonitor report. The report claims that as we get used to using mobile computing devices in ‘hands-busy’, ‘eyes-busy’ environments, speech recognition technologies are expected to gain considerable traction. The global market for advanced

The realization that mobile advertising is ripe for a re-think (and the stark possibility that traditional advertising inventory may be dead on the mobile platform, as Alan Moore, author luminary and founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, suggests) forces operators, brands, enablers and agencies to focus on what many are calling engagement marketing.

At the other end of the spectrum, this shift in mindset also turns up the pressure on mobile search providers to develop services that are (likewise) more useful, engaging and personal. Indeed, improving the mobile search user experience is at the center of a sustainable and successful mobile search and advertising strategy. Users are encouraged to explore the wealth of content and applications at their fingertips, and their urge to discover leads to more queries and more opportunities to deliver paid search advertising. It’s not quite the fixed Internet all over again, but there are similarities.

The outcome is a virtuous cycle where useful search results and targeted advertising convince users that mobile search is a useful way to find content and applications that matter to them. What’s more, the advance of app stores (similar to the excitement the industry experienced when content portals were the rage) underlines the critical importance of a better interplay between search and advertising moving forward.

I am therefore encouraged by improvements (from companies such as Yahoo), and excited by the increasing popularity of new mobile search paradigms, ranging from multimodal search (which has received a much-needed boost thanks to the iPhone); to approaches that integrate human input/judgment to deliver search results we’re much more likely to appreciate.