Is the mobile web dying… or merely resting?
So advertising researchers have finally cracked it, no not my eternal question ‘why was the Cadbury Gorilla such a big deal?’ but how to reach that elusive 18 – 34 audience… male audience to be more specific.
A report released by M:Metrics this week (just in time for the Mobile Marketing Forum in London) finds that ‘young males are a rich target for mobile advertisers, as among mobile phone users 36 percent of 18 to 34-year-old men accessed mobile media in February. Men in this age group are also highly receptive to SMS advertising, with 9 percent responding to an SMS advert they received, versus a 4 percent market average.’
The figures speak for themselves and show that young consumers are redirecting their attentions to their mobile phones. According to M:Metrics 18 to 34 year olds comprise 56% of mobile media users, compared to only 29% of TV viewers.
I’m not surprised, in the not too distant future it won’t be obese children that parents need to worry about, or how to get them away from the TV… but I have a vision of rehab camps where teenagers are separated from their mobile phones, hospitals full of thumb injuries from over-zealous texting, Jeremy Kyle counseling young couples who pay more attention to their mobiles than their partners – yes the UK is breeding a generation of nomophobes! But hey, it could be worse, right?
Among Europeans the UK has the second highest mobile messaging audience at 86.9% of the total UK mobile audience, only just falling behind the Italians with 87.4% (and way ahead of the US with 48.6% – with an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry reporting that excessive text messaging may be a sign or mental illness with a high rate of relapse and in some cases requiring hospitalization!).
The M:Metrics figures are amazing, and as an ex-advertising gal I found them quite an eye opener. But I also found it quietly reassuring for our proposal that the mobile trend is growing and in particular mobile messaging as opposed to mobile media is an incredibly effective way of reaching your audience.
Ironic too that these results come in a week that is reporting that the mobile web is dead following the decline of mowser.com (a start-up that ‘translates’ websites into mobile-friendly versions) due to lack of demand.
I’m not so sure, I wouldn’t say the mobile web bubble has burst, but is merely waiting for the next ‘blow’ and thanks to the birth of the iPhone and Android I think the next year will see some incredible developments in the world of mobile phone technology, I’ll just wait for the text message telling me that it’s started…
*** Claire
1 comment April 16, 2008
Telescope? Periscope? No: Textyscope!
We’ve always been aware that our labs idea has partly already been done before. Luckily, these previous incarnations are – without exception – very poorly executed, with question usability. And, as we’ve argued for years, the execution of an idea accounts for at least 50% of it’s success.
Even so, given that we’ll need to excite the BBC commissioners on that fateful last Friday of the labs, and having read the blog posts describing the evolution of others’ ideas during the labs, we’re keen to extend the scope of our basic premise.
We’re comfortable sticking with the ‘regional’ aspect of the idea (after all, we’ll be pitching to the ‘Nations and Regions’ commissioner), and with the ‘mobile’ means of delivery. But we still feel there are at least three different routes we could take to expand the reach of the project, and deliver greater benefit to the user.
1. Delivery Channels
You’d think that by choosing ‘mobile’ as a platform, there’s not much that we could do to expand the scope through delivery channels. As we’ve seen in the last 12-18 months, though, the mobile platform has quickly evolved into a rich environment, offering a huge number of possibilities.
SMS will still be our core focus, as we’re still keen to produce a service which offers valuable, timely information using a ‘push’ format. After all this time, SMS still feels like an under-utilised communications channel (by services, not consumers), and we believe that we can not only offer a highly-desirable SMS service, but that we can develop it as a ‘best practice’ example.
Voice is our second opportunity. Asterisk, a massively under-rated open PBX system, offers us a huge number of features to take advantage of. To start with, we’ll be looking at features like text-to-speech and speech-to-text, as a more ‘on-demand’ means of defining your route and receiving relevant information in return.
The mobile web is our third opportunity. With the latest Opera Mobile and iPhone Safari browsers now becoming commonplace, a far richer, more user-focussed experience can be delievered through mobile handsets.
And, fourth on our list, but possibly the most exciting, mobile operating systems Android and iPhone OS offer us a means for delivering tightly-integrated services, that can take advantage of geo-location, text, voice, the mobile web, and advanced means of user input (such as the iPhone multi-touch interface).
2. My Journeys
We could consider widening the breadth of our idea, so that it doesn’t just cover ‘changes to my journey’, but is a generic application for managing all aspects of the journeys you make; this could include the integration of some user-generated content, finding the cheapest en-route petrol prices, automatically arranging car-pooling, and much more.
3. Expect the Unexpected
Similarly, we could broaden the topic of the service in a different direction; rather than just ‘changes to my journey’, it could cover generic ‘changes to my routine(s)’, which could also include unexpected changes in weather, cancelled local events, and more.
Well, that’s it for now. Claire will be writing our next entry (we’re taking it in turns), so keep an eye out for her next post, where she’ll probably use an even more obscure word than ‘nomophobia’.
*** Dan
Add comment April 9, 2008
Nomophobia (no… not a fear of gnomes)
Less than a month to go to the Labs. Dan and I are going to spend a week in an intensive workshop in deepest darkest mid Wales where our idea will be poked, prodded and ripped to shreds before we have to present the tattered remains to the BBC. So you would imagine it’s the fear of failure that wakes me up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, the fear of not being good enough… but you would be wrong, my biggest fear is ‘will I be able to get a signal on my phone?’
I would appear to be one of the 53% of mobile phone users suffering from ‘nomophobia’, no that’s not a fear of gnomes, but a fear of being out of mobile phone contact.
But it’s comforting that I’m not alone and also promising for the service that we’re proposing. Text messages, love them or loath them, are a great way of quickly communicating information to an audience. As they are ‘pushed’ out, we only have to rely on people;
a) having their phone switched on
b) having a signal and
c) checking their phone
If the user is expecting to receive a text message at a certain time then (a) and (c) shouldn’t be a problem, in fact as I mentioned in a previous post, the ‘reachability’ addictiveness means that those who would opt in for this service would be checking their phone on a regular basis anyway and the prospect of having their phone switched off would probably give them nightmares!
(b) however poses a slight problem as the information that we are distributing is time sensitive – getting an alert about traffic jams an hour after you have reached your destination wouldn’t be very helpful, in fact it could be confusing and annoying which would not promote the service.
But is this something that we need to worry about? In an age where the terms ‘nomophobia’ and ‘mobile junkies’ are being coined and mobile coverage is increasing, surely reachability shouldn’t be an issue…?
*** Claire
1 comment April 2, 2008
A Problematic Journey
I mentioned in a previous post that journeys were particularly complex datasets; how so?
If we begin by looking at a (relatively) simple definition of the term: a journey is a directional route between two geographic locations, at a particular time, via a particular mode of transport.
This, in itself, is a bit of a mouthful, with a number of variables already rearing their ugly heads. However, if we now think about how we may want to compare a ‘journey’ to other sets of data – as a case in point, travel warnings – we can uncover even more complexity:
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There could be multiple sub-journeys (e.g. by different modes of transport: walk, then car, then train, then tube, then bus).
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Defining a route between two points does not necessarily provide all the necessary information, e.g. which bus or train is being used.
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There are no standard conventions for identifying ‘parts’ of a road (the primary type of ‘route’ for walking, car, bus and bike), with the exception of motorways.
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A journey might not just be concerned with getting from A to B in the shortest time/distance, but also with a number of intermediate locations (e.g. for a preferred route through a park, via a coffee shop, or to pick-up a friend).
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The ‘directional’ aspect of journeys is particularly important; roadworks on a southbound section of road may not be of any interest – for the sake of ‘comparing’ the data – if you are traveling northbound.
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With the specific case of travel warnings, an incident at a particular point can affect routes/journeys ‘further up/down the line’, and not just at the specific location.
So, in the case of an application that compares user-defined journey data with other data sets, we can summarise the above as two fundamentally difficult problems to overcome:
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A journey may be inherently complex (the route(s) and mode(s) within it), but much of this must be hidden from the user, so that they may quickly, easily and accurately define their routes – without frustration. The end-user benefit of the application must greatly outweigh the investment needed to use it.
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The data-sets may be difficult to compare accurately (e.g. roadworks at a specific location, without knowing whether it affects north or south-bound traffic, or how a delayed train may affect a journey which includes part of that train’s route within it).
What potential solutions might there be to these fundamental problems?
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In reality, most users may not care about every detail of their journey. Instead, they may focus on an individual part of their journey, probably that which occupies the majority of their time, e.g. a single train journey, or a commute along the motorway, without being concerned about how they get to/from the train/motorway.
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With regards to the lack-of a systematic identification system for parts of roads, data-sets may be compared purely on their geo-spatial attributes (long/lat), assuming they are available in both sets (although the geo-spatial width/area of the road/incident will need some thought, to see if there is ‘overlap’ in regions).
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Google Maps already has a sophisticated, intuitive system for defining ‘waypoints’ for a journey – we could use the API.
We’ll be thinking more about these (and other) problems/solutions over the coming pre-lab weeks. In my next post, I’ll talk a little about the scope of the project.
*** Dan
Add comment March 31, 2008
To text or not to text: when just enough becomes too much
I’m quite pleased that I have kicked (or at least cut down on) one of my more annoying and very unsociable habits. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that everyone is entitled to their vices but I was getting fed up of the looks that I was getting from my friends when we were on a night out, so I decided it was time to cut back…
I am of course referring to my addiction to text messaging!
Wikipedia tells me that a study at Queensland University in Australia found that text messaging is the most addictive digital service on mobile or internet (although I’m not sure if that is still the case, thanks to Facebook), and is equivalent in addictiveness to cigarette smoking.
However, there is a difference between receiving text messages from your mates, and receiving them from a company or service that you have subscribed to.
When I was buying a house I subscribed to text alerts from an estate agent, thinking that it would be helpful. But before long I was being bombarded with information on houses that just weren’t suitable, so after a while I started ignoring the texts.
I’m now quite wary of signing up to ‘SMS alerts’ through fear that my inbox will become full of mindless sales rubbish (rather than the mindless general rubbish that my friends send me!). So what would it take for me to sign up to a service again?
As our BBC project relies heavily on users subscribing to the alerts in the first place, and then actually paying attention to them – critical questions that we need to work out the answers to are ‘how do we persuade people that this is a service that they really need?’ and ‘how many text messages is too many’?
***Claire
Add comment March 27, 2008
Simplicity is a complex business
I’m back from my trip, which went more-or-less to plan (excluding the customer service, which the French must think is an oxymoron – but that’s a different story).
It did, however, give me time to start gently probing our idea for it’s most obvious weaknesses, with the intention that we can begin to solve them before the intense scrutiny of next month’s labs.
One of the critical datasets for our application is notoriously complicated: routes between geographical places. A key challenge for us, therefore, is to layer a smooth interface on top of these ugly datasets, so that end-users can quickly and simply define their precise routes, with as few barriers as possible.
Simplicity is not easy, however. It is becoming increasingly apparent that simplicity is a pivotal factor for mass-adoption of a product, but one that few organisations consistently get right. Apple and Nintendo are two obvious examples of companies that both understand this importance, and deliver appropriately: few would argue that the iPod or Nintendo DS are ‘technically superior’ to their competitors, yet their simple interfaces have seen them quickly dominate their respective markets.
I’ll cover more specific details of why defining our routes will be particularly complex in a follow-up post, so that I can keep this post as simple as possible!
*** Dan
Add comment March 25, 2008
Preparing for the labs: the Foresight Saga
There are just over 5 weeks to go before Claire and I attend the labs in mid-Wales, to have our idea analysed, ripped-apart, built back up, and ultimately assessed for commission by the BBC.
We’ve decided to get together once or twice before the labs, for some preparation: find the potential holes in the idea, plug them, and evolve the scope into something even more desirable and useful. I’ll be snowboarding next week, so these meetings will have to wait until early April, but my trip does present me with a possible opportunity.
Our labs project largely concerns preemptive notifications of changes to your plans, be they your daily commute or a holiday. My trip will involve car travel, flight, bus and train (and a reliance on weather), so in theory the probability that it won’t all go to-plan is quite high: some multiple of the number of sub-trips (and their individual reliability records). It will be interesting to see if any of the difficulties I face could have been pre-empted: if I could have avoided them given more timely knowledge.
Which brings me on to a personal dilemma.
Knowledge Is Power, as we’ve all been told, but the unknown is also kind-of fun… For example, I’ve always avoided online dating services – not because I don’t believe that they work for a lot of people – but because I’m a fan of serendipity. It’s not that I believe in fate – anyone who knows me will attest that I am the least spiritual, superstitious person they know – but I like the role that chance plays in life. After all, life is here very much ‘by chance’ anyway – when you analyse the odds – so why not roll with it?
Although ask me again next week – when I’m stuck in traffic trying to get to the airport in time for my flight – and I’ll curse serendipity and chance: give me foresight any day.
*** Dan
2 comments March 13, 2008
A bit of background…
In November 2007, an elite team of two from Box UK attended the BBC Innovation Labs Launch day in Cardiff.
The BBC Labs are a series of creative workshops aimed at independent media companies with a track record of producing innovative new media & vision products. Split into 4 regions, each workshop offers ten companies an opportunity to work with BBC commissioners and other mentors during an intensive 5-day period to develop an idea and prepare a final pitch.
On 31 January 2008 Box UK submitted a series of proposals which competed with over 250 applications submitted UK wide for one of the coveted 40 workshop places.
Finally on Tuesday 4 March, after much page refreshing on our part, the nail biting was over when the BBC announced that we were one of the winners of the Wales and West Midlands lab.
We are overjoyed at getting such a fantastic opportunity and thought we’d use this blog to track our progress through fine tuning the idea and taking part in the labs. So, the question now is how do we make our idea so utterly fantastic that the BBC can’t refuse…
*** Claire
Add comment March 12, 2008
