MCWS - Future of mobile & online content
Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 at 9:14am in Media, Technology | 2 Comments
Simon Andrews - Chief Strategy Officer - Worldwide, Mindshare Interaction
“Everyone’s concerned about the size of their mobile bill,” says Andrews. This is going to prohibit the take up of the mobile web. However, “the mobile content market is four times bigger than the user paid internet content market.” Andrews believes that giving stuff for free changes everything and ‘free’ is going to drive mobile content in the future.
You’ll take a traditional model to attract eyeballs and give content away for free with advertising.
“Money follows the audience.”
In the short term, mobile content has been under-hyped. In the long term, it’s been over-hyped.
Andrews states his reasons to believe that mobile content will take off:
Increase of good content: MySpace Mobile, Facebook Mobile - “we’re finding ways of marrying the regular internet with the mobile web.”
Price - Charging people vast amounts of money for data doesn’t work and the mobile companies are realising that fact.
Standard of phones - On average, consumers change their mobile phones every 18 months because the technology’s advancing quick.
Infrastructure - 3g networks.
Google - Making the web easily accessible on a mobile.
Xda Orbit 2 review
Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 11:33am in Blogging | Leave a Comment
Bit old as it’s already been published on SMS Text News.
I’ve been playing around with the Xda Orbit 2 given to me by VCCP on behalf of their client, O2, for just over a week now and I’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty impressive phone. In all honesty, I’ve never been particularly fond of phones that come with a stylus. To me, they appear as an additional thing I just don’t need. Besides, I’m a master of predictive text (using either hand I might add) so the idea of using a little rod to poke in my letters is a complete turn off and, knowing me, I’d probably lose it within a matter of days.
So, as you might imagine, my first thoughts were I wasn’t really going to favour the phone from a usability point of view. However, after playing around with it on the first and second day I found the stylus is not really needed as you can change the option to TouchFLO and a much bigger touch keyboard is provided in QWERTY style. As fat as my fingers are (and they are pretty fat) I was able use them pretty easily to write text messages or input web addresses in the mobile browser.
The touch screen seems very similar to the iPhone and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Apple product was an inspiration for the Orbit 2. It’s definitely a selling point of the phone.
Next up is the mobile browsing. Being a frequent user of the mobile web, the mobile browsing experience plays a significant part in my mobile phone purchasing decisions. The Orbit 2 runs on Windows Mobile 6 Professional so uses Internet Explorer. Admittedly, I’m not a user of Internet Explorer on a PC but I have used it on an Orange SPV I used to own a few years ago. It was pretty useful then and still is today in my opinion. All my favourite mobile sites (Gmail, Bloglines, Twitter, BBC, Sky News etc) work fine on it. Although it did take some time to get used to the way it’s operated but I think this has more to do with me being more familiar with the browser on my Nokia n73.
The Orbit 2 also comes with ‘News Hub’ installed. Basically, News Hub allows you to subscribe and read RSS feeds on the move. You can also listen to and download podcasts, watch video blogs and schedule downloads. You can also import an OPML file too. Pretty cool.
I tested the internet browsing using wifi and was very impressed also. Believe it or not, this is the first phone with wifi capabilities I’ve actually used (how very old fashioned of me) so maybe it was the novelty of it that impressed me so much. Either way, it was quick and responsive and the next phone I have will definitely be wifi enabled.
Syncing the phone to a computer is a doddle and transferring music over was easy too. The phone comes with a 1GB memory card but the memory can be expanded up to 32GB apparently. Windows Media Player performs well as does the built in radio. A good radio is always a plus point to me. You just never know when you’ll want to hear a bit of Chris Moyles.
The phone’s 3 mega-pixel camera is adequate, although it doesn’t have a flash. What’s more impressive is the camera album which (again like the iPhone) can be used to sweep the photo thumbnails side to side. In all honesty, I think the camera could have been a bit more powerful given that Nokia’s producing 5 mega-pixels these days. Maybe I’m just being picky, I don’t know?
Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to play around with the sat nav yet. Will probably do so in due course and report on it later, but so far so good. Like all new phones it takes some getting used to but I’m liking the Orbit 2. In the beginning I wasn’t so sure.
Definitely a grower.
O2 Xda Orbit 2
Posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 5:04pm in Off topic, Technology | 4 Comments
Like quite a few others, yesterday I received my O2 Xda Orbit 2 mobile phone by the cool cats at marketing agency, VCCP. Steve Cater, who’s involved in the outreach, emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking if I’d like to try out the phone with no obligations to write about it. Of course they’d like me to (that’s the point of blogger outreach after all) and of course I will oblige after I’ve tried and tested it.
I was involved in the very good O2 Cocoon outreach last year and Amelia from VCCP very kindly shared with me the details of the initiative which I used when I presented at BizDays in Bucharest in November.
I haven’t had a chance to play around with the Orbit 2 yet but some of its key features are: 3 megapixel camera, touch screen, sat nav, Windows Mobile 6 Professional, mp3 player and FM radio. According to Neville Hobson, there’s a four day trial with CoPilot Live sat nav so I’m planning on giving it a whirl also.
Ewan from SMS Text News mentioned on Twitter that I can write a review for his blog so I’ll probably do that if he’s still up for it. Might be a bit like a 12 year old writing a piece for the Economist, however, given my lack of mobile knowledge. Compared to Ewan at least.
The Xda blog can be found here. No content on it yet though.
Media Content World Summit: London
Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008 at 8:10pm in Business, Media, Technology | 3 Comments
MEDIA CONTENT WORLD SUMMIT
LONDON 29 FEBRUARY 2008
8AM - 5.30PM
COURTHOUSE HOTEL KEMPINSKI (MAP)
Anyone going? I am. I’ll be live tweeting it too. Follow me on Twitter.
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Summit Chair - Sebastian Moertiz, President, MPEG Industry Forum
Morning Keynote – Simon Andrews, Chief Strategy Officer - Worldwide, Mindshare Interaction
Chris Townsley, Director of Strategic Accounts, Limelight Networks
MORNING PANEL:
Chair & Moderator: David MacQueen, Senior Analyst, Head of Mobile Media, Screendigest
Participants:
• Simon Protheroe, New Media and IT Director, Eidos Interactive
• Giorgio Riva, Managing Director, RCS Digital
• Patrick Jubb, Head of Global Communications, Vodafone
• Dan Whiley, Senior VP Digital Media, MTV Networks International
• Simon Gunning, Senior Vice President Digital, EMI MUSIC
Lourens de Beer, Managing Director UK, Minick
AFTERNOON KEYNOTE: MEDIA CONTENT SECURITY
AFTERNOON PANEL:
Chair & Moderator: Simon Drinkwater, Vice President Sales EMEA, Entriq
Participants:
• Myles Macbean, Vice President, Disney Online, Walt Disney Internet Group Europe
• Patrick Walker, Head of Content Partnerships EMEA, Google (YouTube)
• Paul Kanareck, Head of FM Ventures, Freemantle Media
• James Fabricant, Director of Video and Head of Entertainment, MySpace Europe
• Barbara Stelzner, VP, Director News and Programming, CNBC Europe
Arno Koch, Senior Solutions Development Manager, Nokia Siemens Networks – Closing Presentation
SMNR features comparison
Posted Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at 5:58pm in Media, PR General | 11 Comments
Orchestrator of the social media news release template, Todd Defren, has published a very handy chart comparing North American (Marketwire is Canadian) wire services’ SMNR propositions. Available as a downloadable PDF, Todd’s colleague at SHIFT compared the various elements (see below) of each individual company’s SMNR offering.
Since Todd’s chart is US-centric and webitpr’s offering isn’t included I took it upon myself (and I hope Todd doesn’t mind that I basterdized SHIFT’s neatly designed chart) to add webitpr’s SMNR offering in the mix.
[Click image to enlarge]
As you can tell from my poor design skills, the last three elements I added myself. These are:
Domain mapping: allowing the SMNR template to be tied onto a client’s website url. Example: ITV (http//:socialnews.itv.com)
Comment moderation: giving details/biography of the person who’s been allocated to respond to comments. Example: webitpr SMNR. Thanks Constantin Basturea.
Relevant coverage: Proactively providing related news stories, blog posts and background information for journalists, bloggers and even the general public can only be of benefit to the end user. Example: Converseon/Plant-It 2020
One thing that’s baffling is why most of these large wire services charge additional money to add a YouTube video or an image? They aren’t exactly paying for the hosting of the YouTube video. YouTube is! And how much bandwidth does an image use and cost these days?
Commercial organisations have to make money, of course, but in this case it’s disappointing that it’s going to cause barriers for the PR industry in adopting this new model of press release.
P.S. I think Shannon Whitley’s prxbuilder would hold its own in the list also.