WEEKLY WRAP: Location Points For Buddyping & Apple; India’s Mobile Advertising March; MOTO Personalisation; Nokia Serves Land Rover Mobile Ads » mobilegroove

MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING:
Mobile only social network, Buddyping is reportedly recruiting 3,000 new members a day. In contrast to other social networking offers, Buddyping puts location at the centre of its proposition, offering users the ability to publish their own location, find their ‘Buddies’ and geotag photos and upload them to flickr. Bundle with this free SMS messaging between users and you have a service sure to keep users coming back for more.

FREE MOBILE MAIL WITH ADS: India’s first mobile advertising provider, ZestADZ and U.S. based Berggi have struck up an interesting partnership recently to deliver free, ad-funded mobile email and IM to users in India under the brand ‘BerggiMail.’ The plan is for BerggiMail to pull all contextually relevant ads from ZestADZ and display them when users open and close the application. The partnership has also been wise when dealing with inclusivity – the application doesn’t discriminate against existing email or IM services (i.e. Yahoo or hotmail) and can work on all phones with a GPRS connection. Jot the dots (and add the growth trajectory of mobile in the Indian market) and the companies have the capabilities mix to make BerggiMail THE messaging vehicle for social networking sites and achieve exponential growth in the process.

LOCATION: Apple submitted a patent application yesterday aimed at GPS-enabling their mobile devices – iPhone, iPod and laptops. For the technically minded among you there is plenty to read here, but the upshot of the application is that Apple will be able to deliver (patent pending of course) location-aware content and services. Location will further enrich the iPhone experience as well as deliver new functionality to the iPod and laptop ranges. Read it as another sure sign that big players are jumping on the location bandwagon. Recall GPS-enabled iPhones, the gPhone with Google Maps, Nokia buying Navteq and the explosion of geotagging –location is poised to be the “next big thing.”

PERSONALISATION: Motorola have chosen personalisation as one of their key differentiators by introducing the application bundle ‘My Q Packs.’ Users of the newly-released MOTO Q 9h smartphone can download 5 applications of their choice from the ‘Q Pack’ roster which includes companies like Capcom, Mobifusion, Gameloft and Astraware. The one that caught my eye was the MyStrands Social Player that delivers mobile music alongside a mobile community recommendation search facility. Moto may have had a rocky time of late, but this shows they are aware of user-centricity which may be the springboard to get them back in the game.

MOBILE ADVERTISING: Some progress to report since Nokia snapped up Enpocket to make a play for mobile advertising. Land Rover and Nokia Ad Business have teamed up for a mobile campaign promoting Landrover’s LR3. The campaign uses location – it’s not quite GPS, but users can type in their postcode to get the 3 nearest dealers – and video – they have hit 70 percent conversion for the 3 videos of the LR3 in action. All of this is served through the Land Rover mobile website. The ads are targeted at certain age groups in a specific income bracket, but this may not quite be enough. At KOCCA’s Mobile Content Forum, Mike Kent, JumpTap GM EMEA, complained he had received the ad many times despite not being interested in it. Time has come to move from mobile advertising 101 to the more advanced course and cap the number of ads to individual users otherwise the brand – and the market – will suffer.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 11:44 am and is filed under Content Discovery, Location-Based Services, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Media, Personalization, Recommendation. 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.