Mobile Web News: Week of July 9, 2007

July 10, 2007 on 5:00 pm | In Mobile Web News |

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:

Cell Phones Read 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?