Charge to Recharge
I am sitting in the airport terminal, waiting to board the plane and I’m almost out of batteries on my iPod. I hook up my notebook computer to the wall plug nearby, then USB to the iPod nano. Well, might as well charge up my computer for that long continental flight, since there’s no armrest plug on the plane. A woman sitting across from me in the terminal was also in the same situation as me; she asked if she could use my notebook to charge her iPod mini too. She had checked in her laptop and I had a spare USB port free. Bugs me that I wasn’t able to copy some of her songs onto my iPod, but she did thank me with a drink, once we got onto the plane. Rather sad that my bag has a mobile phone charger, notebook AC adapter, and iPod AC charger, as well as all the other cables and connectors. I feel like a mobile utility company with all the plastic-shethed copper wire, I’m carrying around with me all the time!
America’s Idol: TXT Voting
Back in October 2005, I wrote about how Mobile Voter was encouraging people to vote using SMS. But let’s take a slight detour about voting for public officials and state initiatives and look at the entertainment industry. Most notably, games shows or reality TV. Probably the most successful instance of electronic voting is FOX’s American Idol. Here are some bewildering statistics.
In an article from Wireless Week where the stats came from, it was also noted that the dominant age group was Under 30s. That draws some interesting parallels. If I’m a politician, it has always been a struggle to get the younger voters to turn out on Election Day. MTV with “Rock The Vote,” musicians, and actors are all trying to use TV and Radio to encourage this age group to vote. Well, I might not be the first one to suggest this, but maybe you heard it here first: “Why not use mobile as a validated medium to advertise to the Under 30 age groups to register to vote?” Other countries such as England, Italy, and Thailand encourage it’s population to do so, why not the USA?
Another instance of TXT Voting is another attempt at Interactive Television. NBC’s Deal or No Deal is transplanted show from the ones in Europe. During the commercial breaks, you see 5 models from the show, holding briefcases from “1″ to “5.” You TXT your vote for which model holds the winning case of $10,000 or $20,000 USD. Towards the end of the show, a graph shows the amount of votes (in percentages) for who voted for which case. Finally, the winning case is revealed and a random contestant from those who picked the winning case wins. At the cost of $0.99 USD per entry, it’s an easy sell, but not that cheap (It’s free to enter online, though)!While this might not be what Television Executives invisioned when Interactive Television was conceived, this is what it has become. Other shows have text messages scrolling across the screen while a show is broadcast, and subscribers pay a premium to express their opinions.The conclusion? It proves once again that the power medium of television can have a tremendous power of our social behavior and technology used in unexpected ways, can make more people scratch and shake their head.
Sprint Ambassador Program
Just got a new phone and phone service to demo for the next 6 months. In an attempt to convert me away from my current provider (Not Sprint) I got a Samsung MM-A920 phone as the Sprint Power Vision service. So I have been downloading music, games, and wallpapers and I must say, it’s nice when you don’t have to pay to download. Particular when some of the games are $5.99 or $2.49/month. The device isn’t bad either. The tiny dual speakers (on the outside of the hinge for the flip phone) sound pretty good for even playing MP3s. Most of the games that I have downloaded have been pretty entertaining too. The camera is quite good and takes pretty good pictures. Two other nice things about the device are: 1. Transflash. I can take files and move them over to my PC. 2. USB cable included. Now I don’t have to hunt online or search Radio Shack to see how much I’ll have to pay. While the phone is feature-packed, what about the service that it’s tied to? So far, I have been pretty impressed with the connection speed of data services using EVDO. The Sprint Music Store has over 400,000 titles, which is great in terms on selection, but extremely difficult to navigate and find what I am looking for. My previous post about Mobile Search 2006 — I really wish Sprint and other Mobile Operators would implement something like Caboodle Networks’ software to make unlock the potential in all those titles for all of its subscribers. Instant messenger connectivity to Yahoo, MSN and AOL seem to work fine, and the interface is quite good (albiet, I still have to get used to using the handset awkward T9 and text input). The WAP deck is pretty typical of most Operators, promoting the most popular content first, then everything else. With the small screen real estate, I still think it would be best if the search bar would be up at the top. Scrolling all the way down to perform a search, it continually tedious.One pretty cool tool that they have implemented is the “On Demand” application. By giving them my Zip Code, I have access to the Top 10 things that might be of most relevance to me: News, Sports, Weather, Money, Movies, Directory, Maps, TV Guide, Dictionary, and Extras. For example, using the Movies, it instantly takes me to the latest movies that are showing and links me to Reviews, Movie Times at nearby theaters. This is potentially an alternative to searching and surfing links, but it’s still has limits. But if we are applying the 80-20 rule then this is a vast improvement. One of the drawbacks for some of these services, is that fact that some are on a limited trial basis and a monthly subscription is required. Overall though, the interface and use cases for building mobile applications is getting better, and I hope that we can continue to see improvements.
Mobile Search 2006
Are we ready for Mobile Search? Can we make search engines like Google and Yahoo fit to the small screen (mobile phones)? It’s curious to note that as more companies migrate, setup outposts on WAP decks, the more confusion and chaos they are creating for the subscriber. I wrote about Google’s WAP search functionality and how it can be difficult to find digital content. However, if I wanted to use it as a Yellow Pages directory, merged with maps, then it does the trick quite nicely. But if I want to find the latest game from Glu or Usher’s latest digitized ringer, you’re in luck due to stacking of the WAP deck.
But what if you are trying to find something more obscure, say, “Caribbean Queen” by Billy Ocean, would I be able to find it easily? Or would it take me my entire morning commute sifting through the WAP deck and a couple of unsuccessful attempts texting in the search box. Frankly, unless it’s Hot, Popular, or Featured, chances are you won’t have the patience, nor the ability to easily locate the content you’re looking for. We are so accustom to point a web browser to a search engine, filter a couple hundred links on a large screen, and be on our way. But this experience has yet to translate onto the mobile side. So does this mean we have to create federated searches for all things mobile? At this point it seems like the big guys of Search are focused on what services they have and pretty much ignoring mobile digital content. One of the reason why is the level of integration between the Internet Portals and Mobile Operators is rather thin. Their incentive is next to nil, and they are definitely cut out of the revenue sharing between Operator and Publisher. But then why is the subscriber the one who ultimately loses, due to a poor experience on mobile?
I believe it’s another case of not understanding the customer. While it’s cool to show off to friends that the power of Google can be reached on my phone, I think many others have come to the realization that there is no way I could possibly sift through thousands if not millions of results given the state of bandwidth, screen size, and worst of all, the transcoding of HTML into WML or xHTML.
So what are we left with? Well, one idea is to have a company provide a search engine that you can bolt onto an Operator’s WAP deck and help subscribers find content. Everyone by now is familiar with the search bar on the web, so why not build that on the phone? Companies like Caboodle Networks who have launched their site semantical.org are attempting to provide a white label search for both mobile and wired Internet portals.
You can build a mapping of your content catalog (games, ringers, wallpapers, video, etc) and begin to build relationships between them; similar genres, artists, and more. Once you have that, you can start to build intelligent and meaningful relationships amongst all the content.This would inevitably allow more relevant content to be suggested to the subscriber and ultimately increase ARPU through making it easier to find content they want to consume. If Mobile Search is going to be Hot in 2006, it can’t simply be about retrofitting the technology from the Web. We need to address this specific device/screen and optimize for it by providing the subscriber the best experience and not just another channel of revenue by repurposing content from the Web, ad hoc.* Disclosure: This is a partial plug for Caboodle Networks.