Ford drives interest in new Ford iKool model through mobile advertising with Nokia.

Mobile advertising has proved to be the perfect way to target the music-loving audience that Ford in India was going after with its new model, the iKool. The campaign delivered for the client with average click-through rates of almost 9 percent reports Nokia Ad Services

Ford iKool case study can be viewed here.

Shaun Zelber

Is mobile advertising going to save AOL from its long slide down ? A recent article written by Colin Gibbs and published by RCR Wireless News gives an interesting snapshot of AOL’s recent activities in mobile advertising. It shows that while AOL has been losing ground to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in the online advertising market, they are actually doing well in the mobile advertising market.

AOL has had some difficulty in combining the business operations of all the advertising companies it has acquired in recent years – Third Screen Media, Lightningcast, AdTech, Tacoda, Quigo, Perifilliate, and Advertising.com. However, Gibbs points to the two recent deals that AOL’s Platform A has concluded as evidence of AOL’s growing prowess in the mobile market.

* An agreement with Verizon Wireless to be their exclusive display advertising and sales partner for mobile web inventory.
* A similar agreement with Virgin Mobile, which is especially important as the MVNO targets the teen and young adult market that is particularly receptive to mobile advertising. On top of this, Virgin Mobile has already seen big success with the Sugar Mama program that rewards users who opt in to receive mobile ads.

Also they have recently made an announcement that the Platform A is opening in Europe where mobile advertising is already hot.

For a more in depth article please go here.

Yahoo has updated the mobile web version of its widgets platform. When the Beta launched in January, access was limited to iPhone plus a handful of recent Windows Mobile and S60 phones. Even Opera Mini was blocked. I recently tried beta.m.yahoo.com again using Mini and got in. The page I saw in Mini was different too. It sports a new lighter weight layout (image top left). Compare that with the original N95 version (below right). The functionality of the two is equivalent but the original is flashier, for example it has a CSS rollover effect that turns the background of the link under the cursor green. The lite version’s page weight is 25% less than the original, 46 KB vs 61 KB for my heavily customized home page and uses simpler CSS for quicker rendering on phones with slow processors.

It looks like a lot of phones are getting the new version including most Nokia S40’s and older S60 and Windows Mobile phones like the N70 and Audiovox SMT5600 respectively. I also saw it with the Samsung X820 and Sony Ericsson K750i user agents. But all the Motorola user agents and anything with an OpenWave browser still gets turned away with a “We’re sorry. The new home page does not yet support your whatever. I’m sure the new platform works on a lot more phones than the ones I mentioned , give it a try and leave a comment telling us whether you get it or not.

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I really like the look and features of both widgetized versions of the Yahoo portal. They are completely customizable by the user. You can pick and choose from dozens of widgets and snippets. There’s a choice of Yahoo standards like news, sports and stock quotes plus 3rd party content from Sports Ilustrated and PopUrls among others. The difference between a widget and and a snippet is that the former appears as a separate page accessed from a link on the home page while the later adds inline content, like links to off-portal content, to the Y! front page. In the screen shots, Mail is a link to a widget and WapReview and Mowser are snippets. Yahoo Widgets and Snippets are an open platform. Anyone can build one and submit it to Yahoo’s catalog. The snippets are particularly easy to build, I put the WapReview one together in an afternoon and it only took a couple of days to be approved.

Full version of Y! WidgetsSpeaking of the Mail Widget, it’s potentially the best part of this new mobile platform. I’ve been quite critical of Yahoo’s mobile web mail for performance issues and missing features. To it’s credit, Yahoo seems to have given it’s mobile web servers a capacity boost and mobile Y!Mail has been reasonably fast and stable for me lately. But it still has the limitation that links are removed from emails! When someone submits a link to a new mobile site using the Contact form on this site it goes to my Yahoo Mail, but I can’t follow the link when I read that email on the phone. The new Mail Widget doesn’t have that problem, all links are clickable. Almost all the features of the PC version of Yahoo Mail are available too including folders, move to folder and send from alternate addresses including SpamGuard disposable ones. About the only things you can’t do in the widget are check your other POP3 mail accounts and set up new disposable addresses. The mail widget has the potential to be the best mobile webmail yet from any provider including gMail.

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The only problem is that the web widget platform is just too unstable for me to use on a regular basis. Literally half the time I try to read or send an email I get the message:

“We Have run into a problem processing your last request! Please try again later.”

Retrying immediately usually works but it’s quite frustrating particularly when hitting Send after composing a message. The message is gone and hitting the back button does not retrieve it!

Instead I’ve been using the Yahoo Go 3.0 Java application for mail lately. I’ve found that installing it in main memory on the N95 makes it much more responsive than when it’s installed on the memory card. This is true for some other Java apps including Opera Mini and mGmaps. Installed in main memory, Yahoo Go is actually quite usable for email. It doesn’t have the stability problems of the web widgets and you can follow links, although they first come up in some sort of funky transcoder. Fortunately there’s an “Open in Browser” menu item that launches the link target in Webkit.

Both Go! and the Web Widgets are Betas so they so they should get better. I’m really looking forward to Yahoo delivering a fully functional mobile widget platform that works in all browsers and includes a fast and powerful webmail component.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Strange question ? Well not really in fact.

3 billion humans, more or less, have mobiles. Each mobile is an integrated communication device, via voice but more and more via SMS ; but also a payment mechanism via premium SMS and Operator billing. Growth has not yet reached saturation, in fact some countries have a penetration rate of over 100% ! This means that there are another couple billion people yet to come online.

What has been seen from the mobile industry is that many people who cannot access the web via a PC connection because the cost or the lack of cyber cafes often use their phones as internet browsing devices.The number of users from independent sources is around 1 billion users that access the web via a mobile device. In fact many use the mobile internet or WAP without even knowing it when the download, often through a SMS WAP link. Last year 9.3 billion dollars of music and 5 billion dollars of mobile video gaming were spent using the mobile device (source Netsize).

Our mobile properties like iGloo.mobi and viGloo.mobi have seen great growth from more than 120 countries around the world including visitors from Kiribati in the Pacific, Africa and the Caribbean! We are not alone, many of our colleagues in the mobile internet industry have seen the same kind of growth.

So what does all of this mean for the Movie Industries… from Hollywood to Bollywood without forgetting the rising star of Nollywood ?

It means that if you want to get people to see your movies, if you want to make extra revenue from ancillary sources you need the mobile internet! In fact you can’t ignore it for your own survival.

How ? What can be harnessed ?

Well some things are already being done like SMS campaigns and Premium SMS numbers to win things. But frankly that is starting to get stale and people want and really demand more…

Like mini sites that are as engaging as the web sites with plenty of goodies.
Like mobile video game franchises that are on the mobile as soon as the movie is out.
Like interactive quests and quizzes that make use of the killing time aspect of the mobile internet.. always on, always connected…
Like short films and franchises that are made specifically for mobile video viewing.
Like recaps of a shows and movies in a mobile video format.

And the list goes on.. I am sure many of you in the mobile industry could add to that list.

So this is a warning call.. to the movie industry don’t miss the mobile internet bus!

Shaun Zelber – MobilOpen.org