I’m a little bit jealous of how nice and simple this app is.

Here’s the explanation:

It’s a Clock humanises the measurement of time to provide us with a scale more suited to the realities of life.

Basically if the time is 8.28 the display say’s “nearly eight thirty”. Lovely.

Download from app store or click here.

[Via @JeniRoger]

Initiatives such as Project Masiluleke shows that a simple SMS message to millions of people can raise awareness to levels that TV and radio cannot. Eventually this leads to prevention.

The clever guys Harvard Medical School hope to achieve the same thing with their new iPhone App,  Swine Flu Center. It features everything you need to educate yourself about swine flu including video guides, symptom checks, hotlines to call in case of an emergency (based on your location) and a ‘Health Map’ showing the state of the epidemic in your area. All this for $1.99.

Now I’m all for using the iPhone’s rich media capabilities to help people become more aware but shouldn’t this really be a government initiative and have the price point of $zero? By charging $1.99 I think it acts as a barrier to the type of people who really need this app. If they haven’t already made the effort to find out about swine flu, either by listening to the news or looking online for free, what makes Harvard think they are going to bother forking out $1.99? If this app is truly for the lazy, I doubt they will pay for it. However hypochondriacs can rejoice!

It’s clear to me that governments need a mobile strategy to deal with things like this. It’s not unreasonable to contact citizens via SMS when a country declares a national emergency like the USA did last week.

Although the iPhone is still only a small percentage of the handset market it should be a integral part of informing the public, with SMS and WAP being the primary forms of communication.

I’ve wrote about how bad the Nokia Ovi Store is compared to the Apple App Store but now with the power of video I can share that experience with you.

Check out the consumer vs Ovi Store:

Nokia recently revealed the absolute ass-whooping the Ovi Store is receiving in comparison to the iPhone App Store.

The announcement at Nokia World confirmed that since May 26th, users have downloaded 10 million pieces of content from the Ovi Store. Compare this to iPhone App Store which surpassed 100 million downloads in the first two months and 1.5 billion after a year. The Ovi Store supports 100 Nokia devices and the iPhone App Store supports, wait for it…2.

Now remember ‘pieces of content’ doesn’t just mean apps but also lame things like ringtones, wallpapers, etc count too. I wonder how much of that 10 million is actual apps?

The Ovi Store had huge technical problems on the first day, Nokia underestimated the demand and consequently suffered outages meaning that for many people, it was over before it started.

The technical issues weren’t the only problems with the Ovi Store user experience. The Ovi Store requires the CRAZY backwards step of having to find, download and install the Ovi Store client before you can use it.

If I wasn’t a mobile phone enthusiast I would have given up on the Ovi Store the very first day it was launched. Apart from the Nokia server problems it took around 3 tries and 40 minutes to set up on my phone. The end result was a clunky and slow store with some poor quality applications that neither provided a good service or enhanced the handset.

The process that I had to go through makes me wonder how many regular mobile users actually bothered to try the Ovi Store or did the majority of the 10 million downloads just come from tech heads, phone geeks and fanboys? Consumers and brands don’t really seem to know or care about the Ovi Store.

Nokia still don’t understand how important experience is these days. No longer can they get away with endless menus, crap graphics, unintuitive interfaces and poor end products. Consumers eyes have been opened by the iPhone and Android, they expect working services and high standards as well as amazing apps.

Considering the poor download figures for Ovi Store the decision not to develop a Facebook app sooner has clearly cost Nokia. Facebook has 300 million users yet still no Nokia application. Madness.

I really don’t see a bright future for Nokia unless they do something drastic. They really should get rid of Symbian and try Android. The more they build on top of Symbian the worse it gets, the N-Series phones can barely handle flicking through the menus after 6 months of use.

‘Innovate or die’ seems to fit Nokias situation perfectly.Market share is constantly being lost to Apple, Rim and Samsung, how long before Nokia are at 20% share of the market (down from 50%)? 2 maybe 3 years?

Decisions like releasing the 5800 Xpress Music phone with a stylus was just embarrassing. Yeah take that Apple! We’ll show you and your glossy touchscreen – look at our tiny little plastic pen thing, wait… oh we’ve lost it on the bus. Nevermind.

Mastercard have released an iPhone app called ‘Priceless Picks‘ in conjunction with their agencies McCann Erickson and MRM which integrates with the ‘Priceless’ TV ads.

It’s actually quite a nice dynamic, social app which uses your location to show the nearest ‘priceless’ deals that other consumers have pointed out.

Deals are indicated by bubbles on a map, you simply tap on it to get more information. If you happen to find a priceless deal or place you want to share you can tag it to your current location and add further details.

I like how much effort has gone into this app to tie it in with the ‘Priceless’ proposition. The user generated aspect is cool too, although I wonder if the app will have enough ‘picks’ to still be useful if the amount of users is low.

It would be great if users got a discount at these places for using Mastercard or something so there is a reason to keep using the app.

The app is free to download.

]]> http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2009/09/mastercard-priceless-picks-iphone-application-shows-creative-thought/feed/ 0 http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2009/08/teens-playing-music-out-of-their-phones-is-a-mobile-marketing-opportunity/ http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2009/08/teens-playing-music-out-of-their-phones-is-a-mobile-marketing-opportunity/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:46:58 +0000 Murat http://mobileinc.co.uk/?p=1157

Over the last 4 to 5 years a monster has been slowly created as mobile phone companies make their phones better and more feature rich. Mp3 and loudspeaker capabilities have now become standard in even the most budget models meaning that every kid and teenager is armed with a mini annoying ghetto blaster.

If you live in London you have no doubt seen teenagers on the bus, train, wall outside the off license playing crappy sounding tunes from their phones. Ever wondered why they do this when the phone probably came with headphones/handsfree?

They want you and everyone else to hear how cool the songs are that they are listening to, a mix between showing off and defining themselves by the music playing. It doesn’t even matter to them that the tiny phone speaker doesn’t have any bass. I’ve even seen a few boys on bikes riding around with their phone sellotaped to the handlebars playing songs and girls group together to combine phones to create one giant treble speaker playing ‘Bonkers’ by Dizzee Rascal.

This trend has mobile viral campaign written all over it. I can see school playgrounds and public transport everywhere overtaken by sounds of a genius campaign.

I don’t quite have the idea yet but seeing the the audio technology used in iPhone apps such as Sonic Lighter and Me2 is giving me a bit of inspiration.

The technology allows phones to relay information to each other via sound meaning you don’t need to fiddle around with Bluetooth for transferring small bits of data.

Check out the video below:

Don’t get me wrong, it’s defo a bloody annoying trend but something creative and good could come out of this. Or maybe a really uncool brand could jump on it and make the whole thing go away.

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The next step is full integration with the core functionality of your phone, by this I mean phone calls, contacts, text messaging and even the calendar, camera and music player.

For example, you probably have a large amount of your phone contacts on Facebook, many phones have the capability of adding a photo for your contact that appears when they call but how many people have a picture of all their friends on their phone? If your phone could sync with Facebook you could instantly grab everyone’s photo when they call.

Another example is your friends birthdays listed on Facebook, these could be synced with the calendar on your phone and so on..

Yellix is an app that sits in the background on your phone then whenever you get a phone call it grabs the callers Facebook picture and status update and displays it on the screen. Yellix’s tag line is ‘Know what your friends are up to’, but if they are calling you aren’t you going to know what they are up to without the app? It’s not a ‘must have’ application but it’s still a nice touch.

The BIG problem is that Yellix doesn’t know that ‘John’ in your phonebook is the same ‘John Smith’ on Facebook, how could it? This means you have to manually enter the numbers for all your Facebook contacts online using the Yellix app page,  I couldn’t be bothered to do more than two.

Another problem is that when someone calls it takes about 5-6 seconds for the application to grab the callers Facebook status and picture. I always answer the phone before the status appears on the screen. This is down to the fact that the phone needs to connect to the web and do a look up all in the time it takes for you to answer.

Until mobile phones have a ‘always on’ connection to the internet then apps like this probably won’t be able to provide the best experience.

Download Yellix now for Android, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian or Windows Mobile.

Another company in this space is Dialplus which pulls in information about businesses you are calling, for example if you call a restaurant the app will pull in its address, reviews, opening hours, directions and even menus. These are called Smartresults and will feature information in-call and post-call on the phone display. When friends call it also displays information from all of their social networks.

Dialplus also features advertising based on what information is being displayed on the screen.

The service is currently only available on T-Mobile in the USA.

One company really leading the way with social networking integration with mobiles is INQ and their ‘Social Mobile’ phones. They take it a step further by actually linking Facebook, MSN Messenger and Skype to pratically every part of the phone including contacts, phone calls, chat and messages. An example of this is rather than having to open an application or your mobile browser to check your Facebook messages, they get delivered into a inbox just like your SMS. Last.fm is even built into the media player.

I think this is pretty much what every mobile handset will start to look like in the next 2 years. Full integration with every part of your onine life, your music, friends, photos, status updates and location all synced with your phone.

Apps are great but what we really need is what INQ is moving towards, a seemless, always connected way of getting constantly updated information on the web to our phones. Facebook and Twitter changes every second. I want my phone to get alerts and instantly see updates, messages etc, not open the browser or app, wait for a connection zzzz.

INQ is available on 3 who have always had a pioneering attitude to the mobile web (such as free calls forever on Skype) when most other operators seem to be like rabbits in headlights when it comes to the innovating in this space.

INQ is about to release a full qwerty keyboard style mobile with Twitter capabilities and more. This is really exciting as the phones are priced towards the youth demographic and are affordable so it could put pressure on other manufacturers to produce similar products quickly.