UK LBS through Geo-Fencing, Teenager SMS Volumes, Flash for Android 1m downloads and the True Size of Africa: my RSS Highlights!

Written on Monday, October 18, 2010

Quite a few interesting articles in my RSS reader this morning, so I thought I'd share them all....

In the first instance of a wireless operator using its closely guarded user location data for mobile advertising, UK-based O2 has entered a partnership with US-based Placecast for a trial said to reach 1M wireless customers.

Placecast has made a name for itself by building on the concept of geo-fencing — the act of drawing an invisible boundary around a given location and serving an opt-in SMS message when users enter said boundary.  O2 has licensed Placecast’s geo-fencing technology for a 1 million customer trial in the UK where the operator has already signed such advertisers as Startbucks and L’Oreal.

The partnership offers a different dynamic than what Placecast is used to here in the US.  Here, Placecast interacts with brands directly.  In its UK trial, the company is selling its services to O2 as a white label solution.  The most interesting aspect is the use of carrier-originated user location data on the part of O2. We’ve long said that carriers around the world are dumb not to utilize the treasure-trove of highly-accurate geodata they all possess.  Through its partnership with Placecast, O2 seems to be finally coming around.  Hopefully others will follow.

New data just released from Nielsen show the average teenager sends 3,339 text messages each and every month.  More impressive, the average teenage female sends over 4,000 messages on a monthly basis.

Nielsen analyzed the mobile data habits of more than 60,000 mobile subscribers and surveyed more than 3,000 teens during April, May and June of this year.  The data shows teens are sending 8% more texts than they were this time last year, representing roughly six text messages every waking hour for each and every teen.  Teenagers, ages 13-17, obviously represented the largest subset of SMS users, with the 18-24 demographic “only” sending 1,630 texts per month.

As SMS usage skyrockets, it’s quickly taking the place of voice calls within every demographic.  Twenty-two percent say SMS is easier than a phone call and another 20% say it’s faster.  Voice usage has decreased by 14% among teens and is decreasing in all age groups under 55. Eighteen- to 24-year-olds use the most minutes, but every age group between 18 and 55 talks on the phone more than the average teenager.

Earlier today, ZDNet noted that Flash for Android has made its way to 1 million handsets. Time for math!

It’s been a while since Google has disclosed how many Android handsets are floating around, instead opting to reveal how many units are being sold per day. As such, our numbers are a bit fuzzy, but should be indicative of how things are going in general.

If we use the numbers we know to be true (roughly 500k Android phones sold in 2008, 7.7 million in 2009, 100k per day from Jan to May 2010, and 200k per day from June on), we can estimate that at least 41.2 million Android handsets are floating around. More generous estimates put the platform at around 50 million units pushed.

Now, according to the numbers released yesterday, roughly 30% of the Android phones out there are running Android 2.2, which is a requirement for Flash compatibility (except for the Nexus One, which had an early build of Flash on 2.1). That brings the number of Android handsets out there that could possibly run Flash down to somewhere between 12.4 million and 15 million.

Now, Flash just cracked 1 million downloads. Depending on which estimate you use, that means that Flash has found its way to somewhere between 6% and 8% of the Android handsets that it could possibly run on.

Posted in location-based services, sms |