Born to be Wireless

Most eyes in the tech world are currently on the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld (detailed live updates here for you Apple fans). For those of us not in attendance, Twitter was presumed to be a good outlet to find out what’s going on and discuss each twist and turn with our community. Alas, Twitter has once again crashed under a presumed official surge in traffic from Macworld, and has been largely inaccessible.

Downtime has become par for the course for Twitter during big news events (especially those pertaining to the tech industry, which makes up a sizable portion of the Twitter userbase), with the company having nearly 6 days of downtime in 2007 according to a recent report from Pingdom.

Users have flocked back to Twitter after every outage so far, and there is no reason to think it will be any different this time. But versus other companies that have been hit by notable outages in the past year like Salesforce.com and Yahoo’s small business services on Black Friday, the technical barriers to entry for Twitter competitors are almost nil. Many companies have tried to imitate Twitter so far with little success, but with data portability on the horizon (aka - import your friends into the service of your choice), it wouldn’t take a whole lot to unseat them from their current dominance of the microblogging niche.

Labels: twitter

The global mobile marketing industry was worth $1.8 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow to $24 billion by 2013, according to ABI Research (release). The big difference over the past 12 months has been the integration of mobile marketing within cross-media brand campaigns. Still, the prediction calls for a greater than 50 percent compound annual growth rate, which is pretty high.

Meanwhile, a survey of 1,000 adults in the US by GFK/NOP Research found that "one in three mobile phone users have seen or heard mobile advertising in the fourth quarter of last year, with SMS being the dominant medium delivering the ads...One-third of people who received mobile advertising recalled a brand being promoted; 41 percent of women recalled the ads, while only 27 percent of men were able to recall them" reports Information Week. The survey found that 56 percent of people in the US use SMS (which seems low) and 27 percent use the mobile web (which seems high).

Labels: mobile marketing

Verizon has announced the top 10 selling mobile games for 2007 at the international CES 2008 in Las Vegas.

Leading the charts is without surprise all-time classic Tetris from EA Mobile. Smarter than a fifth grader, which was introduced later in the year, managed to get hold of the second position for Capcom Entertainment. The third place is a fresh mobile game; Guitar Hero III from Hands-On.

01 – Tetris | EA Mobile
02 – Smarter Than A 5th Grader | Capcom Entertainment
03 – Guitar Hero III | Hands-On Mobile America's Inc.
04 – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare | Glu Mobile Inc.
05 – Need for Speed Prostreet | EA Mobile
06 – Diner Dash 2 | Glu Mobile Inc.
07 – Assassin's Creed | Gameloft
08 – Madden NFL 08 | EA Mobile
09 – The Simpsons | EA Mobile
10 – God of War: Betrayal | Sony Pictures Mobile

Labels: mobile games

Yahoo Go, the mobile portal, is undergoing some major changes, resulting in what can only be called a relaunch to some degree. The service is currently down, as Yahoo works on getting the new mobile portal ready for the official launch tomorrow. Entitled Yahoo Go 3.0 Beta, the new features will include the obligatory new UI, which has been optimized for the mobile phone.

But the big announcement for Yahoo Go is the inclusion of Mobile Widget Platform, granting access to third-party widgets. These widgets will be accessible on both Yahoo Go and the regular Yahoo mobile page. So far, widget partners include eBay, MySpace and MTV. The mobile widget platform has also been opened up for developers who would like to create mobile widgets as well. The full-feature SDK for developers will be available in the next few weeks, and I’m rather anxious to see how developers will utilize the new mobile widget platform.

Yahoo does seem to be among the first of the major companies to come with third-party mobile widgets to this extent. Several mobile companies have adopted the heavy promotion of mobile widgets, including Nokia, for mobile portals because of their ability to package together a set of features in an easy access format.

Other new features include personal vitality and status updates, which gives you an at-a-glance view of what you missed: how many new emails do you have, how many Flickr photos have your friends added, what upcoming appointments are on your calendar, etc. The content for your mobile modules is also customizable, so you can choose what snippets (weather, news, etc.) you’d like on your home page.

The move to enhance the mobile start page, especially with the addition of mobile widgets, gives Yahoo a compelling usage of its mobile network, and a strike against other mobile startups hoping to gain traction from similar models for delivering content. Will the leveraging of your existing Yahoo content, such as email and friend updates, be a deciding factor for you, or do you avoid the mobile portal format all together?

Labels: widgets, Yahoo

Labels: marketing, sms