Mobile Web News: Week of July 23, 2007

Americans Use Mobile Web Most for Weather, Europeans Sports
These results were announced by reputed mobile media intelligence firm MMetrics. 33,810 respondents in the US and 70,649 in Europe were used to project this information. News was the second most popular type of information for both groups; travel information was at the bottom.Watch Out, Lara Croft’s Going to Appear in Your Pocket…
Yup, the foxy explorer has squeezed herself into your mobile phone with the Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend game. According to MobileCrunch , the game will be available this summer. The game is created by Eidos, who also did the desktop version.

Yahoo Chooses Novarra for Adapting Mobile Web Sites to Cell Phones
Novarra reconfigures web sites to fit nicely onto mobile screens. When a user clicks on a search result in Yahoo’s oneSearch mobile search function, Yahoo first runs the target website through Novarra’s Vision Server Version 6.5 platform and then gets it delivered to the user.

Novarra says it has tested performance on hundreds of mobile phone models.

ScanR and Qipit Convert Scans to PDF
As mentioned earlier on our news blog, using the cell phone as a scanner is opening up an exciting new world for mobile phone usage. ScanR and Qipit are two web-based services active in this area.

Take a photo of a document with your mobile phone camera and send it to either of these services. It will send you back a PDF of the photo. The advantage is that the PDF will be nicely color-adjusted. In the case of handwritten notes, it will be crisp black (or blue) on clean white.

For instance, one could use these services for capturing a teacher’s notes on a whiteboard or for copying a classmate’s notes. What a time-saver!

Technorati Tags: mobile web, mobile phone, cell phone, lucky balaraman, the magnum group, mobile web design, novarra, lara croft, tomb raider, mmetrics, http://mobiwebber.com

Mobile Web News: Week of July 9, 2007

Cell Phones Hyperlink By Viewing Bar Codes
Hyperlinks are being encoded into a special barcode and put up on posters. You point your mobile phone’s camera towards the bar code and bang, your mobile web browser hyperlinks to that URL. Cool!This mechanism is already in play in Japan and Korea: here, take a look at this graphic from Scanbuy, the company that makes the software enabling cell phones to scan barcodes:

(The picture is no doubt doctored, but conveys the principle). By pointing his cell phone at the square barcode, the user’s mobile browser automatically jumps to the web site of the film ‘Hero’.

In Japan, carrier NTT DoCoMo even gives subscribers the means to print their own barcodes on advertising materials like flyers and business cards.

Fundamentally this is the rise of a machine-readable font for which billions of people have the reader! The barcode therefore does not have to be limited to retail establishments.

One application we at The Magnum Group have thought up is for telephone numbers to be barcoded wherever they are presently displayed. Your mobile phone could be enabled to dial the number just by looking at the barcode…

Ingenio Publishes Valuable Survey of Mobile Web Users
Ingenio, a pioneer in Pay-per-Call advertising (similar to pay-per-click, except that advertisers pay when a visitor calls them) has just announced results of a survey done by pollsters Harris Interactive of 4,123 mobile phone users.

Highlights among an array of interesting figures are:

• 85% of US adults own a cell phone
• Regarding which type of mobile advertising mobile phone users find acceptable, mobile web search ads come in first, followed by audio ads (which play instead of a ringing tone when you first call a number) and text messages from advertisers
• Younger mobile phone owners (ages 18 - 34) were more likely to use their phones for purposes other than just phone calls (like browsing the mobile web) than older users (ages 55 and above)
• Among those who called 411 from their cell phones,the most frequently sought after information was commercial (74 percent) and restaurant (72 percent) phones and addresses.

PayPal Mobile: Pay with Just A Phone Number, and More
PayPal, with which you pay using just the recipient’s email ID, now extends the same convenience to the mobile web. All you need to know is the recipient’s phone number and you can pay them.

You can pay merchants from your mobile phone. If you find something you want on the mobile web, and the site is PayPal-enabled, you click “Buy Now”, which takes you to the PayPal site, you enter your cell phone number and PIN there, click a link and bam, you’ve paid.

You can also send money to anyone who has a cell phone. Go to the PayPal mobile site, enter the recipient’s phone number and your PayPal PIN and click, you just made someone happy!

To make the mobile phone interface practical, PayPal requires you log into the merchant site to ascertain extra information like shipping details.

This product offering from PayPal marks an important step in the development of the mobile web. Imagine, if merchants publish newspaper ads with the Scanbuy barcode mentioned above, you could just point your phone at it and get taken to the PayPal payment routine for that product…

Google Tests Mobile Site Ads

Google is inviting mobile web site developers to place Google Adsense ads on their sites as part of a limited beta test. These ads work just like
Adsense for regular web sites.

Hope you aren’t surprised... and hope you didn’t think you could make it big running your own mobile web ad network!

I have a grouse... we develop mobile web sites, how come they haven’t been in touch with us?

Technorati Tags: scanbuy, barcode, mobile web, lucky balaraman, the magnum group, http://mobiwebber.com, ingenio, harris, adsense for mobile, mobile advertising, paypal mobile

Mobile Web News: Week of July 2, 2007

The IPhone Has Landed!The most important mobile event so far in 2007 has occurred: the Iphone was released to the market on June 29th.

Piper Jaffrey reported Sunday night that an estimated 500,000 Iphones were sold between 6 PM Friday evening and close of business on Sunday. At an average profit of 20-50%, Apple has cleared a cool $50 - $100 million profit in a single weekend!

95% of buyers bought the 8GB model for $600, according to a survey of 253 buyers by Piper Jaffrey, out of which about half were new customers for AT&T.

According to Bloomberg, Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research says Apple stores sold 128,000 phones on Friday while AT&T stores sold 72,000.

Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm says that at a nearby mall, the line in front of the Apple store was twice as long as the one in front of the AT&T store just across the street. Clearly the Iphone is more of an Apple offering than an AT&T offering.

Steve Jobs, a master of cult development, has given all Apple employees who have been with the Company more than a year a free Iphone. Taking the cue, I’m standing in my garden now, hoping that as an act of goodwill he will airdrop one on me…

Google Buys Grand Central

Yes, the search behemoth has now swallowed grand central … no, no, I’m not talking abut the railway station (although I wouldn’t be surprised if they bought that too in the near future), but a web service that manages all your personal telephone numbers. I just caught it in BusinessWeek.

What do I mean by manage? That’s best explained by example. If you have four personal numbers (office, home, mobile and skype), very often people will not know which one they can reach you on. Grand Central provides you a single 10-digit number, which you give to your friends and associates. When they dial that number, all your four numbers ring and you do not miss the call.

That was a simplified picture to explain the concept. You can have six numbers entered, enable or disable any of the numbers to ring at certain times, callers can leave voice messages, you can send voice messages via email and you can screen calls. And the best thing of all is.. it’s free! (at least for now).

That’s it for the week… keep watching this blog category on a daily basis to catch the mobile news as it happens!

Technorati Tags: iPhone, grand central, t-mobile, hotspot@home