Mobile Inc » Google

The First Ad-Funded Mobile Phone Is On Its Way. What’s Your Price?

Murat — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:17:23 +0000

” “It’s true that every man has his price….”
- Peter (Vince Vaugn), Dodgeball

If I was to ask you if I could place a permanent advertising banner on the home screen of your mobile phone which showed various adverts and offers throughout the day in return for paying £2 off your tariff each month what would you say? Not enough? What if I chucked in a extra £10 and also asked the change the colours of your phone menu to match that of my brand? Still no? What if I was to give you a free iPhone 4 and reduce your line rental to £5 a month for all of the above plus changing your alarm clock sound to my brand jingle?

There is no doubt that some people will see advertising embedded into their mobile as a huge violation, but the key point here is that it will always be ‘some’ people, not everyone. For every person who cries out in disgust there is someone who would lap up a discount on their tariff or mobile handset in exchange for ads. Everyone has their price.

As mobile technology gets better and cheaper at a rapid pace, the profits will come from software and services, not hardware. The device becomes a shell.

Android phones have now reached the price point where margins are so low that it’s not hard to see operators giving them away for free and mashing ads into them [Update: T-Mobile now selling a £20 Android phone on Pay As You Go]

Whilst the idea might sound horrendous it would be naive to think that it can’t be done well. A combination of the right data, interface, functionality and reward could find that sweet spot which provides a good user experience and adds value for advertisers. It’s in everyone’s best interest that the ads aren’t lame (like the examples I used above) because then both advertisers and consumers lose out.

Still it’s worth noting that research I’ve conducted in the past even the most intrusive ads will be accepted if the reward is big enough. A 20% off voucher for Pizza Express appearing on a homescreen banner might not be enough to entice a user in taking up a ad-funded handset but £5 off their line rental each month just might.

It’s going to take a while to get to the perfect blend of advertising on a ad-funded mobile, it was once my job to find the right balance, testing various concepts with consumers. It was a fascinating look at the psychology of mobile and advertising. What I can tell you is traditional ad-units won’t work, it will take a whole new approach.

I always think you need to slightly over-deliver in what you give back to the user in a ad-funded model. A perfect example of this is Spotify. They give you way too much shit in return for listening to a few ads, making it really hard to feel hard done by, that’s how ad-funded mobiles should be. And if you don’t like it you can pay for the ad-free version.

Today Amazon announced that they would sell a new ad-supported Kindle for $25 less than the original. The ads only appear on the home screen and screensaver, it’s a great deal in my opinion. This is a sign of things to come.

Expect various people in the mobile industry to start screaming generic comments like ‘It’s the most personal device there is!’ and ‘putting a advert on your phone homescreen is like putting one on your childs face!’ etc etc.

What’s your price?

Chrome For A Cause – Save The World By Opening Tabs In Your Browser

Murat — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:31:59 +0000

If you don’t already use the Google Chrome browser, here’s another reason to add to the list.

Chrome for a Cause is a browser extension (bit like a plug-in) for Google’s Chrome browser. It counts how many tabs you open throughout your browsing sessions, you then build up a tab currency which you can exchange for real contributions to causes.

Users can pick one of 5 different causes to donate their tabs to, vaccinations, books, clean water, shelter and trees. The break down looks like this:

10 tabs = 1 tree planted
10 tabs = 1 book published and donated
25 tabs = 1 vaccination treatment provided
100 tabs = 1 square foot of shelter built
200 tabs = 1 person’s clean water for a year

Google will donate up to $1 million for this campaign which ends today.

Got to say that I love this campaign, the way it keeps you updated throughout your browsing with bits of information will no doubt raise awareness. I find myself constantly checking how much contributions I’ve built up.

It’s a shame I only found out about Chrome for a Cause last night but already I’ve contributed 3 vaccinations.

If you haven’t got the extension yet, it’s better late than never – click here to get it.

Google Dominating Mobile Search With 98.29% Market Share, Time To Think About Mobile SEO

Murat — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:31:50 +0000

I’ve been spending quite a fair bit of time on mobile seo over the past year, many brands and businesses don’t seem to realise the importance of this area of search and the implications of serving mobile users a bad experience.

There’s no doubt in my mind that mobile seo will become more important than online. If mobile web browsing is due to overtake desktop by 2015, where do you think people will be starting their browsing from?

It seems a little known fact is that Google has a different search ranking algorithm for mobile devices, they judge websites based upon how they render on the specific model accessing the site.

For example, if your website looks like crap on a Blackberry Bold 9700, filled with errors and incompatible mark-up, eventually you will slip down the page ranking for that specific model. So when other Blackberry Bold 9700 users search Google, you won’t be anywhere to be seen. Meaning neglecting that one phone model could affect the millions of identical handsets around the world searching the mobile web. Interesting hey? Really makes you rethink seo.

The potential impact this will have to a business can be measured in several ways, no more than a competitor getting mobile SEO right and overtaking their rival for higher placement. All the hard work done on online seo could potentially go to waste.

I think this really ties in well with todays news that Google is dominating the mobile search space, according to Pingdom Google is now at 98.29% market share. Globally.

This has actually increased believe it or not, last year Google had 95.58% of the market.

Let’s be honest, this is unlikely to decrease much in the next 2/3 years, especially as Android phones flood the market, using Google as the default browser.

So there should be serious some attention paid to how Google works on mobiles, defo time for everyone to swat up!

Google Engineers Bring Quake 2 To Browser Using HTML 5

Murat — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:23:16 +0000

As the Flash vs HTML 5 debate roooooars on, the brains at Google have used their famous 20% ‘innovation time‘ to show how far we’ll be able to push web browsers once HTML 5 becomes the norm.

They’ve only gone and ported over Quake 2 into the browser! No CDs, installations or anything. Even Google were surprised to see the game running at over 30 frames per second. Read more about it on the Google Blog.

It’ll be interesting to see what this means for life after apps on mobile as the browser becomes more and more capable.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with HTML 5, it is the latest version of the markup language which makes up most of the web. The capabilities of HTML 5 were expected to challenge Adobe Flash’s dominance of online video but this shows it could spread into gaming too.

[Via Venture Beat]

How To Spread Fear About Google In Less Than 3 Minutes

Murat — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:12:07 +0000

Run for the hills! Google is trying to own your entire existence, they want to give you free sat nav, free books, faster internet and kill your family!

Nicely visualised but come on, Google isn’t making anyone use their services…or aaare they?

I wonder if Microsoft commissioned this.

Who Owns The Real Life Billboards On Google Street View?

Murat — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:41:11 +0000

According to reports, Google is developing the technology to enable them to start selling advertising space on real life billboards and posters in Street View. Google registered a new patent which describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with their own ads.

As cool as this is, it raises a number of potential questions which I’m sure will have to be dealt with some point in the near future, especially if this technology can be used for turn-by-turn navigation and Augmented Reality applications. Who actually owns the real life space once it’s online/mobile?

I would say Google own it but no doubt the likes of JCDecaux and advertisers will pipe up and suddenly want their cut. Google will probably play nice and give these sorts of companies revenue share but who knows? Would love to see the outcome of a court case on this one.

This is a really interesting subject and something I think we’ll be hearing much more about in the years to come. What’s your view?

Google | 'Near Me Now' Gives You A Glimpse Of Life After Apps

Murat — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:11:03 +0000

There is much talk at the moment about ‘how‘, ‘when‘ and ‘if‘ the mobile browser will become the replacement for applications.

The theory makes sense, once handsets are powerful enough we’ll no longer need hundreds of apps all wasting space on our phone, we”ll just launch are browser and get what we need through that.

If you take the desktop internet experience today as an example – Google Docs, Google Maps, YouTube, Hulu and even Photoshop all can be accessed in the browser. Obviously some have limitations compared to applications that exist on your hard drive but they are improving literally everyday.

It stands to reason that one day this will migrate onto mobile. Currently handsets and operators aren’t quite there yet, faster, more reliable networks and hardware will be required to do the heavy lifting as some of these services need high speed connections and better processors to work efficiently.

Google have just lunched a new addition to their search homepage called ‘Near Me Now’. The button, which only appears on US iPhone and Android handsets that visit Google.com, allows the user to search their immediate vicinity.

The site uses the phones GPS to find user location and provides categorised results such as coffee shops, bars, ATMs and banks.

If you take a look at the video below you’ll see it in action. It’s basically taken one of the best, most useful parts of Google Maps Mobile application and thrown it into the browser.

It’s nowhere near as visual or rich as the Google Maps Mobile app but the functionality is there. This is the start, a mobile website is hooking into the GPS function on the phone..what’s next?

…You can probably expect things like camera functionality to be streamed directly into a mobile web page (like the webcam chat on Gmail, left) one day soon.

Google Have Just Told Vodafone To Jog On | Will Retail Nexus One Themselves Via Google.com

Murat — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:39:33 +0000

No sooner than ranting about manufacturers beginning to have the upper hand, Google today confirmed that they intend to turn operators into their bitches.

As you all probably know by now, Google are releasing their own phone called the Nexus One. The phone is nice, good features but definitely no iPhone killer. However as suggested by Mobile Industry Review it represents something much more than that.

About 6 years ago the first Nokia handsets shipped with Wi-Fi capabilities, there was a huge buzz about being able to make free calls over the Internet using your mobile, however operators put a stop to that by strong-arming the manufacturer by literally saying “Disable it or we won’t bulk buy your phones”.

Sure enough the Wi-Fi stayed but the phones never got VOIP calls until YEARS later. And when it did arrive they tried to charge for it. Operators want other stuff too like putting their own maps application on phones, app stores, and a whole bunch of extra crap they were never meant to do. If you’re trying to build something into the core user interface it’s probably better to let the people who made the rest of the phone do it.

This is typical of how things work in the mobile industry, manufacturers bend over backwards for operators because without them it’s extremely difficult to get your latest and greatest mobile into consumers hands.

But what if you’re the most visited company on the web?

Google have told Vodafone they won’t be able to retail the phone themselves. If a customer walks into the Vodafone store or goes online wanting a Nexus One, they will be pointed to the Google.com/phone website.

As Ewan at MIR says:

(yes, it’s powerful, yes it’s got some cool apps) but the real meat was in their strategy of breaking the operator stranglehold on the mobile industry.

Apple has already shown the kind of flex that giant, sought after brands can have on operators.

Of course you’ll still need an operator to get the phone working but that isn’t the point. This is the very, very beginning of a massive shift. This is the first time it’s been done this way and won’t be the last.