Archive for July, 2008
By 2011, says e-Marketer, online and mobile will shoulder 56% of music spending worldwide - over three times the share reported for 2007. So, while the CD takes a scratching at the digital love-in, subscription services such as Vodafone Live and the 3 New Music Club indicate that the mobile industry is really making room for music. Quite clearly, the sales proposition of downloads on-the-move is just too nutritious to resist.
Of course, if mobile is buddying-up with online, it may also have to consider replicating the veritable throng of extra-curricular music content that the net now boasts. Indeed, you don’t have to look too far these days to find flickr-happy audiophiles opening up our musical horizons with more videos, audio, blogs and forum threads than you can shake a USB stick at.
Enter Vodafone + Madonna. This deliciously commercial mash-up offers genuine exclusives (pre-release tracks and live gig streams) to the network’s members and is certainly worth a holler as an incentive for music-lovers to gravitate to their mobile. However, it’s hard to accept it as a suitable case-study for music ‘beyond the call of duty’. It’s a candid example of music-lovers getting extra from an artist, yet, like the Radiohead free download, it is a unique situation anchored by the established success of an artist, and cannot be said to signify the arrival of a long-term channel supporting great content for all bands and artists.
This kind of ‘channel’ is a big ask – a bit like requesting that thriving online music communities like Pitchfork and Last.fm simply shift their things over to Casa Mobile – but the technical limits of mobile won’t be an excuse for a limited vision in the long term. The online domain is creating different sorts of value for assets like music, and these will influence the mobile community as it unfurls. Pandora Media, for example, have just announced that their online service (an intuitive online playlist currently available only in the US) is going to be offered for free in mobile form on the iPhone 3G. There may be plans to expand to other handsets, but as yet this is the only announced mobile partnership. The power of this as a marriage of music and mobile is that it creates a discovery channel for the ‘on-the-move’ music-lover. It’s a radio station for the common sound addict - intuitively connecting you with new tracks based on your tastes, and feeding into consumer paths in turn. Sadly, users in the UK will have to migrate if they want to feel the benefits of Pandora mobile.
Blyk’s ever-evolving music content – a key attraction for members - is focused on connecting people and music intuitively. We strive to use our unique targeting capability as a way of linking 16-24s with artists on an interactive basis, and we look to the character of the music itself to help define the creativity of our communications. Music-lovers are ever-poised to inherit an extensive wealth of content from their favourite bands, and with Blyk’s multi-media platform we can begin to provide this content; previews, promotions, exclusives, competitions, dialogue, discovery – all possible in rich mobile media.
Of course, the full story of music and mobile will be amalgamated from all sorts of efforts and innovations, but here at Blyk we hope to play a compelling part. So watch this space - and we may yet see the hills alive with the sounds of mobile, and a true music experience for fans as plugged-in to their mobiles as they are to their iPods.
Jamie Russell works as a member of the Blyk UK Creative Team, specializing in mobile creative for the Blyk Music channel.
July 22nd, 2008
From a great report on Ypulse mashup, a conference in San Francisco on youth and mobile
The device is inconsequential compared to the content
July 22nd, 2008
Never let anyone tell you you’re too young to do anything. This fabulous 18 year old tinkerer from Mombasa invented a system that enables mobile phone owners to remotely lock and track their car when it’s being hijacked.
“The system, that Mbetsa created by combining technology from projects that he has completed in the past. The real-time system uses a combination of voice, DTMF and SMS text messages over cell-based phone service to carry codes and messages that allow control of some of a vehicles’ electrical systems including the ignition to manage vehicle activation and disabling remotely in real time.
Another feature of the system is the capacity to poll the vehicle owner by mobile phone for permission to start when the ignition is turned in real time as well as eavesdrop on conversation in the vehicle.”
What I really like here is that he has no formal training and that has probably been an advantage to him and his idea. Creativity comes in various shapes and sizes and his ability to learn from hands on experience probably wouldn’t have brought him to the same result if he’d gone to engineering school, a form of innovation businesses and academia will have to deal with and recognise.
Check out the video taken from the TV report. If anything, I hope he gets the financial backing he needs to push this product onto the market.
July 19th, 2008
In case you didn’t know, telecom operators and software startups developing mobile services are still in full-combat battle. If this is something that means nothing to you because you live the happy life of not caring about who develops videogames or the next Jamba ringtone, then give this post a miss, really. But if you are part of this quest or feel curious about why not, at this stage of the game, you cannot pretty much watch TV on your mobile or fry Sunday eggs on it or print money from it - some even dared to say back in 1999 “surf the Internet”!, then stay on because this post brings news to all of us Earthlings….
Mobile 2.0 barcelona promised to be just another cute, small-sized but good, conference. And in Barcelona, with its weather and nightlife and culture, hard to miss. So we all schlepped down there and had great debates about how entrepreneurs could obtain funding for their startups, until the panel with the operators began. I don’t know why it started on a bad note - the moderator presenting them like Christian meat to the circus lions, at which point the audience half-jokingly began to wolf-whistle and to make strange beasty sounds as if some carnage was going to occur. And I still wonder wny-oh-why one of the operator representatives had the bad idea to challenge the audience, a young, mostly geeky, software developing audience with zero clue as to how to calculate financials in their heads. The guessing question was a Monty Python Holy Grail gimmick: how much would it cost to revamp all the mobile networks to allow for high traffic, massive data upload things like youTube on your mobile, to happen today. If this was the scene from Monty Python, every single member of the audience would have been sling-catapulted over the blue skies for failing to guess the answer. Because the answer was so out-of-this-world, that I will also not mention it, but think billions - Euro, Dollars, at this point it does not matter, and several. We all sat there in half-shock, half - “Santa Claus are your parents?”, that it felt as if someone had dropped cold water on our heads. Even the other operator members of the panel froze up there in disbelief.
I am one that avoids conflicts at all costs in normal life, but I don’t know why academic debate puts like a Joan of Arc shield on me, and driven by the “no BS” mantra, I don’t let a head on its pin if it deserves to roll down the hill. I reckon I must have fought with the Templars in a former life. So I challenged the question, and I gave examples to back up my argument, and I pretty much started the firecracker, because this time the audiences expressed themselves as if a female version of Russell Crowe in Gladiator had jumped on the arena and this circus afternoon was going to have real bloodbath after all. And for this sin I will pay forever but this is what emerged from it:
1. Tango Couple One: Operators & Logistics. We don’t have more cool mobile services not because the networks will go down like an old donkey, but because launching a new service on a huge network, with all its hundreds of thousands of customers is logistically D-day. Think call centres, billing systems in place, the software and the servers where it lives ready to get bombarded with requests, et cetera. Things don’t happen overnight.
2. Tango Couple Two: Operators & Startups. Operators are indeed working with software developers in bringing you great mobile services, music for example and photosharing and all SMS based ones that today work like a charm - but it has taken almost 10 years to become a mainstream service - and you know when this has happened when your mother sends you pictures from her mobile…. So an industry does not get built overnight.
3. Tango Couple Three: Operators & Handset manufacturers. What do we really want our mobiles to do? email? photo & video upload?
Until the arrival of the iPhone, mobile services were pretty much a geeky thing. Now that every Mary-Jane and Joe-Dude has spent awesome money on their pretty iPhones, and developing software for it seems like a walk in the park because the APIs are sweet-as-pie, are we to witness the rise of the big kahuna wave of mobile video traffic? This industry is full of “buts” and “maybes”, and paradigms are being broken, but not all operators are derranged and avoid new services, and not all mobile services are operator-ready. And us mere mortals, what real daily use will we make of the services we don’t even know we want?
July 8th, 2008
