"Is it just me or is mobile marketing a bit shit?"

BBH's Peter Sells presentation was one of the finest we saw on last month's Battle of the Big Thinking. 

Imagining the "internet of things"

Timo Arnall from Oslo School of Architecture & Design did a visionary tour on the subject during last month's Web 2.0 expo in Berlin. Thought provoking and solidly reseached. If this was a book, it would be dog-eared by now. Click on the full screen-icon and "fit to height" to see the presentation properly.

Hat tip to Guido for twittering the URL of all Web2.0 Expo presentaions.

Starting the conversation from within

Tom Himpe's is thinking exactly the same thing we're saying to our clients when we talk about "Building brand beyond the promise" so we thought we'd share his brilliant presentation here.

We heard you Pietel...

When we launched our B-Side dashboard-blog 5 weeks ago, Pietel was the first guest to write a blogpost. Beside some praise for the new design he also had a suggestion :

"When I heard the Boondogglers talking about " a dashboard feeling" while presenting their newest blog I knew they are still on top of it. Right on guys! Still this B-side blog is lacking some key web features. Where is the twitter timeline guys?"

Well here it is Pietel, Boondoggle gets even more transparent with a Twitter-Box at the bottom of the sidebar. However I must admit that I will get a little bit more selective in what I'll be twittering about in the future...

Our personal YouTube record

This movie was recorded by our embedded journalist Vincent Depoortere with his mobile phone and uploaded on YouTube the same day. Today -6 days later- the view stats have hit the 120,000 mark along with a heated discussion on "wasting food" in 70 comments.

Klara ! On the iPhone ! Not !

This man is Wim Coessens, Digital Media Manager for VRT, the Flemish Radio And Television.  He has a lot to be proud of : he's the owner of a brand new iPhone, and VRT just launched klara.be, an all culture website that expands on their classical radio brand, Klara.

A mobile social network: Zyb

Their homepage: https://zyb.com/

They started out as a service which enabled you to backup your mobile phone to their servers (usefull in case of a lost phone fi).
Now they have built a social network with the contacts on your mobile phone as a starting point > seems like an interesting point of view to me. Furthermore, this service is free as you can see here: https://zyb.com/info/help?pagemode=pricing

6 amazing mobile stats

Found this on Communities Dominate Brands, but the data comes from a recent worldwide BBDO study.

1. 81% of youth aged 15 - 20 sleep with their mobile phone turned on.
2. Women in Japan have daytime and evening phones just like they have daytime and evening handbags.
3. 96% of people screen their incoming calls.
4. 76% of Australians and 76% of Spanish have already responded to mobile marketing campaigns, ie interacted with a brand via mobile.
5. In China if forced to choose between retrieving a forgotten wallet or retrieving a forgotten phone, 69% will go get the phone rather than the wallet.
6. And 63% of the phone owners will not lend the phone to anyone else.

Link: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/07/cool-stats-on-m.html

Six unique benefits of mobile

Communities Dominate Brands has a great post on the power of mobile. With all the hype on the iphone, it's time for some strategic thinking on the real innovative power of the mobile medium for brands.

What YOU should do - is build a strategy for mobile - what is the POWER of the phone. Don't see the limitations of a small(ish) screen or small keypad. Think of the POWER of the mobile. As a Mass Media, mobile has six unique benefits, that are not able to be copied anywhere else:

1. Mobile is the first personal mass media (even the internet is only semi-personal).
2. It is the first always carried media.
3. It is the first always on mass media.
4. Mobile is the first mass media with a built-in payment channel.
5. It is the first media device available at the point of inspiration.
6. Mobile is the first mass media with near-perfect audience information. Not perfect, but as AMF Ventures reported, on TV you capture 1% of the audience data. On the internet, you capture 10% of audience data. But on mobile you capture 90% of audience data !

These unique features challenge us to try out new things. Not just copying stuff we already did on the web. Alan Moore gives some thought provoking examples in his post. One of them is Kamera Jiten, a mobile service that translates on the fly Japanese text into English from pictures you take. Another one is the UK service Flirtomatic.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/06/so-now-iphone-t.html

Why you should read Tijs' masterpaper

Tijs Vrolix - I talked about Tijs before - is one of those very talented "born on the web"-generation guys who get their degree at the C-MD masterprogram at KHLim Institute for Higher Education. He just sent me a copy of his master paper on how the web2.0 frame of reference could be used to create killer apps on mobile platforms. He explored his subject like a true strategic planner: he first tried to understand the role of mobile within daily life. Based on sociological research he discovers that mobile phones are nothing more than a solution to a contradiction in daily life: co-ordination and mobility. A mobile phone makes it easy to be both mobile and still be able to co-ordinate your life: you can re-arrange appointments, notify your delays, etc...We're constantly coordinating our lives and the mobile phone is a very handy tool in order to achieve our goals. The challenge however lays in what Tijs calls "social co-ordination" or "micro-coordination", which is the ability to coordinate between a group of people at the same time. If you want to do this, you'll need a device and an application that is able to synchronise between multiple people at the same time, taking into account the social context that they are in. He didn't just write about an ideal application, he actually created it. www.seeyoo.be is a mobile micro-coordination platform.

To me, the brilliance lays in the way the app is build around fundamental consumer insights. People who are able to think strategic before they start to develop should be nurtured. Remember the name: We'll definitely hear much more from Tijs in the following years. Oh and if you're thinking about headhunting the man: you're too late. He has just signed a deal with a new employer. And no, it's not boondoggle... yet. :-)

If you understand Dutch: read his masterpaper. It's very eloquently written and it contains all you need to know about the future of the mobile web.

Download it here: http://cmdstud.khlim.be/~tvrolix/masterproef.pdf