by Mark Jaffe   www.mobilemandala.com

There was a lot of passionate response to the post a few weeks ago “Will Mobile Phones Replace In-Store Retail Salespeople”. Even more reason that these three announcements this week caught my eye:

■  The Aberdeen Group published a report that stated in 2008, the total of digital signage market revenue stood at $766 million and is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2014, growing at a healthy CAGR of 20%.
■  The London Daily Mirror reported according to unnamed sources that Nokia is planning to begin rolling out embedded NFC (near field communications) kits into its entire line of Symbian phones beginning Q3, 2010. The Finnish giant already has NFC in selected handsets, such as the 6216 Classic.
■  Malaysian manufacturer Fonelabs will produce two million low cost (under $100) NFC enabled phones in 2010
What do these three items have to do with retail? First, just as a refresher, Near Field Communication (NFC) is “a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance.” In other words, if you have an NFC enabled phone and opt-in, your mobile phone will be able to communicate with another proximate electronic device automatically.

Google has just launched real-time search integrated into search results pages.  Google (Google) real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web — for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query. It works on mobile too (at least iPhone) and Android (Android) for now). Here’s a video demo from Google:

Courtesy of Brian J. Friedman

BeMob’s and Tekora, ground breaking start ups in the mobile internet sector have decided to sell their social networking activities so as to concentrate on their main activities. They decided to regroup their social networks as a bundle but can be sold seperately if need be

Overview of the the social networks for sale :
The leading social network in France and growing world wide :

• 2 Mobile micro blogging services including : text, photos, videos, podcast…
• Dating service, largest mobile site directory in the world and customizable personal start page
• Optimized as a webapp on all types of mobile devices
• 10 millions de pages views per month (50% in France)
• 5 K euros of ad revenue monthly (non optimized)
• White label platform optimized for brands who wish to create a mobile social networking tool
• Growth obtained purely via viral means

Included in sale :

• Source code properly documented
• Tech hand over
• Chandover of contracts and ad revenue

Documentation:
If you are interested please feel free to download the PDF document which goes more in depth.
Presentation : bundle_igloo-MobitypeSales-proposal.pdf
Portfolio : 20091130_bundle_portfolio

Contact : bundle@texom.com

http://www.admob.com/google

Yes finally it has happened… we have speculated for years exactly when would Google munch AdMob. I guess that they held out till the right time… the $750 million time.

I am personally very excited to see this finally happening. Having worked with AdMob for several years it is great to see a good idea and great execution paying off in the mobile arena. AdMob have really set up a great business and are pleasant to work with. So for me it is a great news to see them joining with Google who has really made forays into the mobile sphere with Android over the past year or two.

Some wise tips on “Designing Mobile Widgets” by Rajesh Lal, Senior Engineer, Nokia shared at 2009 Maemo Summit.

Growing pervasiveness of mobile widgets has created every mobile app designers a challenging role to play within a limited space. Only 1 percent of Mobile Widgets are successful.

What makes some widgets thrive and used by millions, and others with equal functionality bite the dust ?

Rajesh demystified the ‘invisible’ layer below the surface with 10 pragmatic tips, which covered some of the most useful and often ignored standard design principals and the tip & trick to apply them in mobile context.