Written on Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Panathinaikos Basketball Club, arguably the biggest basketball club here in Greece, is no stranger to mobile marketing. They did a
Bluetooth marketing campaign a while back combined with a print call-to-action via SMS.
This time the Panathinaikos Amateur Sports Club is running a sort of a fund-raiser via SMS, in order for fans to help with the club's finances.
The Panathinaikos Amateur Sports Club is a sort of a union for all non-professional team and individual sports.
The original article is in greek, but here's the
link anyway. Also, the
link on the club's site.
According to the announcement from Panathinaikos Sports Club, each SMS costs 2€ + VAT and will help in bringing the club back on its track, surpassing the financial problems that make funding amateur sports a much more challenging task.
I'm strongly in favour of amateur sports, (sometimes money ruins the true sporting spirit) so I really hope this will help keep them going.
Posted in
sms,
sms marketing
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Written on Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Courtesy of an old dear friend (thanks!), who twittered this, here's what you've all been wondering...
Where can I get an iPad for cheap!?
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| But looking at it... I'm getting second thoughts.. |
The iPad is surely by now one of the most desired pieces of kit for gadget lovers, though I must say I'm not convinced... yet, anyway...
So here it is, all the necessary info for all your relatives or friends still undecided on their Xmas trip destination (whether to exotic or not so exotic countries) including such crucial factors as the iPad Market Price.
IF YOU fly from Hong Kong to Frankfurt or Paris and look suspiciously like a gadget lover, chances are that you will be searched by customs officers: an iPad with Wi-Fi and 16 gigabytes of memory costs $200 less in the former British colony than in Germany and France. Given the risk of having to pay extra duty (and the price of the flight), potential iPad buyers in both countries ought to consider a trip to nearby Luxembourg, where Apple's popular device is $35 cheaper. The sales tax is only one reason for such differences in price. Consumers in Hong Kong also get a better deal because iPads are assembled in mainland China. Buyers in Switzerland have to pay more because there is less competition between retailers. In China and Mexico, the device may be cheaper because people are poorer. Incidentally, if income is taken into account, consumers in Luxembourg get the best deal: they only have to spend about 0.8% of the city-state's GDP per person on an iPad.
I wonder whether the Luxembourg Ministry of Tourism secretly sponsored the Economist to run this article...
Posted in
iPad
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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....
First off, the deal between O2 and Placecast in providing
LBS and
mobile advertising services using the
geo-fencing technology from Placecast and O2's location data. From the
article:
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.
Finally, on an unrelated but still interesting note,
the True Size of Africa: some cool infographics regarding common misconceptions on the true sizes of different countries.
Posted in
location-based services,
sms
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Written on Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Going through my RSS Reader this morning, I came across this post from Murat, of
Mobile Inc. who posts about how Volkswagen used an iPhone app to generate over $4 million in car sales.
Now, I was particularly intrigued by this, because buying a car is not the type of thing you do through your phone (even if it IS an iPhone!!),
like you would when ordering pizza, for example. In most cases iPhone apps make companies money because iPhone users can directly order their products, through the iPhone, which makes it possible to link the purchase to a specific user and so track the profits.
So how exactly did the car manufacturer make money from their iPhone app? Murat
explains:
Volkswagen, with the help of AKQA, decided to create a car game, but rather than go through the risk and cost of building one from scratch they decided to reskin a already established racer on the market. So they took the popular racing game called Real Racing (retailing at $4.99) and created a sponsored version of the game, calling it “Real Racing GTI”, then gave it away for free.
As you can imagine the game features the Golf GTI as the selectable car and features VW branding throughtout.
The clever bit is that users were invited to use the iPhones GPS functionality to locate their nearest dealer. This data enabled AKQA to directly trace purchases of the GTI Mark VI directly back to the app.
And onto the numbers...
175 cars sold to registered players of the application, 50% of those sales to new customers.
The car retailed for $23,000, making at least $4 million in revenue.
Clickz.com makes a very valid point in that those are only the sales directly linked with the application. Once you look at the huge amount of ratings the app received (50,000) as well as it hitting number one in the download charts, the brand awareness must have also been sky high.
A great example of how mobile marketing, when done right, just has no match...
Posted in
iPhone,
mobile marketing
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Written on Thursday, October 07, 2010
I recently came across this article that gives a whole new meaning to the term "Bluetooth Proximity System". In fact, it's referring to nothing like what you're used to (and as such is rather off topic), but it is exactly what it says, which is why I found it interesting enough to share with you guys. I hope the more technical of you will appreciate it.
It's about how you can setup your Linux PC to be proximity-aware, meaning it will know when you're nearby, or when you've left. From the
article:
Have you ever wished your computer would keep track of your comings and goings and secure itself accordingly? Odds are good that if you have a newer laptop and cell phone you can do just that. Many laptops now come with Bluetooth chips and most phones now support Bluetooth as well. This can allow your computer and cell phone to "talk" and create a simple proximity badge for you to use. There are many other fun things you can do with a link between your laptop and your phone but for now we'll just cover how to setup the connection between the two and then have your laptop lock itself when you're away. We'll take a page from the
Gentoo Wiki and use a script from Steven to get everything tied together. The directions here are for SLED 10 but should work equally well on any recent SUSE distribution.
It's a rather technical article, aimed solely at rather advanced Linux users, but feel free to have a look if you find it interesting.
Posted in
bluetooth
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Written on Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Seeing the interest from a lot of you in the
various articles on SMS Marketing, and my
Bulk SMS and I
nteractive SMS Marketing Tips, I thought it’d be interesting to present one of the most upcoming services of Premium SMS, that of
Premium SMS Billing. I did a quick search online and am presenting to you the most interesting looking services on offer online, for those of you looking to add the monetization option to your websites.
Premium SMS, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is the service of sending an SMS message, with a premium cost (tariffs vary), to an “SMS Channel”, (i.e. a pre-defined keyword on a specific range of short codes), so that you can invite your customers / users / members, etc. to “Text KEYWORD to 12345 to (e.g.) win… ”
Although SMS Marketing has been around for so long, (in fact it was the first form of ‘mobile marketing’ to appear on the scene) it’s certainly not going anywhere. Any and all predictions about the downhill trend SMS was expected to take after MMS arrived, have been disproven, and, what’s more, SMS Marketing (Text Message Marketing for U.S. folks) is growing!
Premium SMS services (or interactive SMS as I like to call it) have brought new potential, because they change the character of SMS marketing from the bulk SMS campaigns people often relate to SPAM, to the exact opposite. It gives people the power to decide which campaign to participate in, by providing an entirely opt-in model of operation: If you’re not interested, you don’t send a message. No hassle, no problem.
But, if you’re ever interested in running any interactive SMS campaign – not just Premium SMS Billing - here’s a few things you must know to understand the options being offered to you.
First of all, about acquiring short codes. Most important fact: they are
country-specific. For example, 12345 in Greece is different to 12345 in India, 12345 in the U.K. and so on. This is because short codes are provided by each country’s mobile operators.
In addition, short codes are operator-specific. This means that you need to setup a contract with each network operator in order to receive SMS messages from their subscribers. (Well, not exactly. This used to be the case at the start of it all, but, fortunately, there’s now short code aggregators: Companies that go into contract with a lot of network operators so that you don’t have to).
Finally, do note, that each short code is bound to a specific tariff so that when consumers send an SMS to that number they will always be aware of the premium they are being charged.
Different countries might also have different length short codes (usually 4 to 6 digits) but that’s not so important. The gist of it is that if you want your SMS Marketing campaign to extend beyond your country’s border, you need to go to a short code aggregator. You can, of course, attempt to connect to each of the network operators directly, but, take my word for it, it will cost you both time and money.
Finally, it all depends on the type of campaign or service you’re interested in running, at which point you’ll need some
mobile marketing software / sms platform that processes your SMS messages, sends out the appropriate replies / notifications, etc. There are lots of different options out there as you can see..
Premium SMS Billing is a specific type of interactive SMS service that allows people (usually online users) to pay for content/services/etc. simply by texting to a short code, or replying to an incoming SMS message. Premium SMS Billing providers are both SMS & Short Code Aggregators as well as service providers. They offer a complete solution that’s easy to integrate into your website, so that you can quickly start making money.
A lot of online users are wary about giving out their credit card details, and so sometimes will look for alternate payment methods that your website might not offer. This means you lose customers. Paying with your mobile, via SMS, is a relatively new option that comes to fill this gap, and in my opinion, there certainly is a gap to fill.
Here’s the top Premium SMS Billing providers I came across. Disclaimer: The list is not 100% inclusive and it only contains the ones that came top at my searches and I had time to review:
http://www.boku.com/ -
Boku provides a pretty simple and easy user experience for mobile payments, with access to 63 countries. To find out more about how a publisher gets access you need to provide them with your info, which I didn’t have time to do.
http://www.zong.com/ -
Zong operates in 38 countries worldwide with 100% carrier coverage in most countries and concentrates in online mobile payments. Somewhat limited coverage, though it seems easy and fast enough to incorporate into your website.
http://fortumo.com/ -
Fortumo offers a mobile payments API for incorporating the service into your website, as well as in-app payments and access to 45 countries worldwide. Again, somewhat limited access but they do offer a range of SMS services, and an easy setup.
http://smscoin.net/ -
SmsCoin offers a huge range of scripts (a very impressive 150+) for incorporating into your website, app or service. They also boast a substantial 40.000 online projects, and support for hundreds of mobile operators across 82 countries around the world. SmsCoin also offers a number of different services around Premium SMS Billing, which allows a wider coverage of audiences and businesses.
If anyone wishes to add their comments from their experience with a Premium SMS Billing provider, feel free in the comments below.
Posted in
sms,
sms marketing
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