Mobile banking has come a long way over the last few years with the majority of major UK banks offering SMS alerts and a select few offering full control of your account via mobile applications.
The SMS alerts are really useful, I can now see instantly when I’m overdrawn or received payments into my account as well as my weekly mini statement. However the one thing I need the most is to be able to check my balance without having to make expensive calls from my mobile to the banks call center.
By 2010, upwards of 70 percent of US bank center call volume will come from mobile phones. Half of those calls will be related to very basic balance inquiry information. The benefit to the bank by providing SMS balance enquiries is simple, it saves them money and allows them to provide a more efficient service. Read More
Over the last few days I have been trying out Spotify as I was really interested in seeing how it uses audio ads to fund the service.
If you haven’t heard of Spotify it’s a free music streaming program (imagine iTunes with all the content in the Store being free) with over 3 million tracks and 1 million users since launching in February. You can’t download songs but you can listen to as many as you want.
So what’s the catch? Audio ads play at the rate of 4 to 5 per hour plus a few banner ads on the program itself and if that bothers you there is a paid-for premium service at £9.99 per month.
After listening for a few hours and trying all the features of the service I was amazed that you get so much for such little ad exposure. I would go as far to say that even 7 to 9 audio ads per hour would be fine. The ads themselves are pretty polished and low on annoyingness, it’s cool that the banners in the program change to match the audio ad when playing.
Audio ads are usually some of the most disliked by consumers in my experience through focus groups. Pandora famously conducted a trial in 2007 serving an McDonald’s ad to just over 100,000 users, with 100 writing in to complain and far more complaining around the web. Pandora decided to halt all advertising until announcing in January this year that they will start serving ads again. I’m guessing the great execution of audio ads on Spotify made them have a rethink.
So why did it work for Spotify and not Pandora originally? Read More
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, it’s only a matter of time before we see Facebook utilising user location via its mobile site. I think it fits in perfectly for status updates done on the move on WAP or SMS, even for mobile uploads.
Friends could glance at their newsfeed on the go and see where friends are, potentially this will be far more useful than Google Latitude as not all my friends have a Gmail account or compatible Latitude phone whereas all of them have a Facebook account.
Obviously there would be user control such as a tick box to toggle displaying your location or choosing to only display it to certain groups you have defined (work, family etc).
The problem they would have is that user location is only available to the operator when accessing websites on your mobile. They would have to do a deal with every mobile network which doesn’t sound too far fetched considering Facebook is Vodafones most browsed mobile site and deals have been done with O2 and Vodafone previously, Twitter too.
In Q4 2008 Facebook mobile hit over 15 million users and is growing at a crazy rate (up from 5 million at the beginning of 2008). Nearly 20% of its user base are now on mobile.
I think this would be a cool feature to Facebook/Twitter and would enhance the experience. What do you think?
