Mobile Groove

At m-pulse we wrap up a month dedicated to mobile voice technology and transformation with a look at Nuance, a company aggressively leveraging its long heritage in speech recognition to enable a range of new experiences and – ultimately – a new voice search experience (and ecosystem). Our guest is Kenn Harper, Nuance Mobile Director of Product Management.

In other segments we discuss some new numbers from Xyologic, a company tracking app downloads to provide us a more European perspective on the rise of Android and the increasing importance of local content and context. And this time my co-host Rob Woodbridge raises his goblet of rock to an innovation (and a mad genius) that redefines what we mean by ‘awesome.’ (Words alone don’t do it justice, so you’ll have to tune into m-pulse and check out the video teaser Rob has inserted into this week’s vodcast.)

Should we brace ourselves for a new battle as companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance) jockey for position to control the voice interface and our personal search/assistance experience? We continue our look at the opportunities and competition around mobile voice with Roberto Pieraccini, industry veteran and author of The Voice in the Machine.

In other segments we discuss the wider issue of personal privacy, following the news that social app Path has been uploading user data to its servers without our consent. Rob Woodbridge recounts a checklist of things to consider when building privacy into your minimum viable product. And we both find a perfect fit with a brilliant presentation— whose time has come (again) — from Jonathan MacDonald, a thought-leader and entrepreneur in digital media perhaps best known for his passionate views on the 3Ps (Permission: people will decide what brand messages they interact with; Privacy: people will decide where their data is collected and how it is used; and Preference: people will decide what content they find relevant). More about that further down in this post.

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.
***
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!

***
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.