Author Archives: Nadir Garouche

When Will Mobile Advertising Really Take Off?

A study made by Gartner predicted that revenues made from mobile advertising will be worth $11 billion by 2011. But not everyone is that optimistic, even people from mobile advertising companies. Business Week reports what people from Nokia or Screentonic have said about such figures:

Kuhn, CEO of a mobile advertising company acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in May, views most analyst predictions as way too rosy.

Mike Baker, vice-president in change of Nokia’s (NOK) ad business, also sees a longer wait, suggesting it will take at least five years for the industry to surpass $10 billion in annual revenue. “The near-term visibility is cloudy,” he says.

I think 2007 was really the year when mobile advertising companies really started to push their services and big brands trying them. We just need to be patient to see where we’re headed, and maybe see the big tech brands such as Google or Microsoft adjusting their strategies.

Advertising With Mobile AdWords Just Got Easier

Many companies do not invest money in mobile marketing because they think it’s too complicated, or don’t have the resources to create a mobile site. AdWords for mobile just launched a new feature that should solve these problems.

When creating a Google Mobile AdWords, you’ll be asked if you want Google to create a mobile landing page for you, free of charge and hosted by Google. Here’s the announcement from the Inside AdWords blog:

According to Internet market research powerhouse eMarketer, the mobile search advertising market size is currently $13.5 million and growing – by a projected factor of 50 – within the next four years. With everyone buzzing about mobile these days, we wanted to tell you straight from the horse’s mouth about some sophisticated new tools and features that we’ve recently rolled out to help you run a more successful mobile ads campaign.

AdWords Business Pages for mobile ads
Mobile ads can refer users to a business phone number, a mobile website, or both. Usually you need to be a web developer or contact your webmaster in order to create a mobile web page from scratch. However, AdWords Business Pages for mobile ads provides a friendly wizard that creates a page for you in minutes – which is available immediately after you create it. Google hosts the page for free.

Details are explained here. What a great announcement from Google, this will definitely entice advertisers to run mobile marketing campaigns.

Free WiFi In Luxembourg With Location-Based Services

The City of Luxembourg, capital of Luxembourg, a small country bordered by France, Germany, and Belgium, has created a free Wifi infrastructure called Hotcity. The Wifi service has been live since July 2007 in a small area of the city, and from December 2007, more access points will be added to cover the train station area.

By 2008, free Wifi access will be available anywhere in the city, thanks to 400 access points.

The interesting part about this project is that Hotcity will provide location-based services, which will be launched during the Christmas period, to allow users to easily locate shops, restaurants, or bars.

This platform will also be open, an API is available to allow developpers to build applications that users can use when using Hotcity’s WiFi access, which is great.

Via Blognation Belgium.

Yahoo! Signs More Mobile Search Partnerships In Asia

Yesterday, Google released Android SDK. Today, Yahoo! announces that it has signed a deal with nine operators in Asia to provide oneSearch to their mobile internet portals and also mobile advertising solutions. The race to beat Google is on.
The new partnership agreements include the following carriers:

Aircel Limited (India), BPL Mobile (India), Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL; India), DiGi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd (DiGi; Malaysia), PT EXCELCOMINDO PRATAMA Tbk. (Excelcom; Indonesia), PT Hutchison CP Telecom (Hutch 3; Indonesia), PT Indosat, Tbk (Indosat; Indonesia), PCCW Mobile HK Limited (Hong Kong) and Starhub Ltd (Singapore).

Last month, I announced on this blog that I’ve heard that an Asian carrier had signed a deal with Yahoo! (DiGi and Malaysia), and I had some information on the nature of the deal, which will include Yahoo’s Mobile Media Directory, a mobile content search engine.

With these partnerships, Yahoo! will clearly keep a step ahead of the competition in this area of the world.

Source: Yahoo Press Room. via Techmeme.

Medio To Partner With mInfo To Gain Market Share In China

Medio, the leading white-label mobile search engine is about to announce a partnership with mInfo, a Chinese mobile search engine.

It is not stated whether Medio plans to create an on-portal or an off-portal search service.

Medio is very popular in Europe and in the US, as it offers it search engine to Verizon and T-Mobile’s portals. With this deal, Medio hopes to gain momentum in Asia.

Google Releases Android SDK: Ready to Rule the Juicy Mobile Market

So as promised, Google has released Android SDK, which will allow developers to create all kind of applications to run on the first solid open platform for mobile devices.

Google has revealed Android’s main features and seriously, this proves that this OS will revolutionize the way people use and interact with their mobile phones. Some of the most exciting features are:

  • Application framework: you don’t like the pre-installed calendar application on your “Google” phone? No worries, replace it with any other application.

  • Integrated browser: based on the open source WebKit engine, used by Safari. The integrated browser allows you to view full web pages and also has great zoom capabilities, like the new Opera Mini browser.
  • Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification: get ready to truly enjoy 3D games on your cell phones, and other kinds of rich animations. Check out this demo video on Youtube to see a demo of the Android version of Quake. Games will definitely look similar or better that what’s available on BREW phones.
  • Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi : with a phone powered by Android, you’ll have nothing to envy to the Iphone or other phones with built-in WiFi.
  • Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE
  • Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)

Seriously, this is the best thing that ever happened in the mobile industry. Once developers will start providing applications, we will realize that these things will make our mobile user experience more enjoyable and with no-limit.

Google hasn’t decided to build a GooglePhone, instead, it provided an open source mobile OS to develop thousands of phones, capable or running an unlimited number of applications.

This will allow Google to dramatically increase their mobile market share and obtain tons personal data that they will of course use for better ad targeting.

Follow the discussion at Techmeme.

Google’s Mobile Search Challenge In China

In China, a lot of people use the Internet for the first time from their mobile device rather than from a PC. According to an article from LeMonde, Google is struggling to figure out how to satisfy these kind of users. Lee Kai-Fu, President of Google China, said in an interview with Reuters (translated from french):

China has a huge potential in terms of mobile Internet, a lot of mobile phone users will become Internet users in the next few years with the development of 3G and other technologies.

These users have different habits than Americans’ ones. Most of Chinese people using the Internet from their mobile phone do not have a computer. This implies to entirely rethink products responding to their needs.

In China, 500 millions people own a mobile phone, and 120 millons have access to the Internet, which makes it the 2nd Inernet market behind the US.

If Google wants to turn these mobile phone users into long term users of their search engine, they need to make the right decisions to deliver a good user experience. That means adapting traditional Web pages so that they render properly on small screens, and also encourage people to visit mobile sites, especially when it comes to developping mobile commerce.