Canada is pushing the edge of the landline and the cell phone together. Now Rogers, Telus and Canada Bell customers can send text messages to landlines for about $0.15. The text message is converted to speech and an automatic voice reads the message to the user over the landline. The lines and services are definitely blurring.
Mobile search company, ChaCha, has been on a tear this last year. I saw a presentation given by one of their execs back in June at NewTech. Since then, they have really been growing. They report 1.7 million users asking a total of 50 million questions since the product debuted in January.
The question that the exec really could not answer at the time is how were they going to make money. They have now released the answer, rich media SMS. Right now, the service is really used by the under 25 age group. It will be worth watching over the next few months how these type of ads fair during the economic slowdown.
For years, developers have felt that the carriers have been guarding their networks from them. Coming from the open Internet, this initial distrust of developers was frustrating. There is nothing like having a great idea for a cool application and not being able to make your vision come true because the gatekeeper won’t let you through.
Apple was the only company in the world that could break the stalemate. Now AT&T is seeing its data revenues soaring 50% because their customers are able to use some of the cool applications that developers have dreamed of for years.
Better late than never. Pandora’s box is now open, but there should be profit enough for everyone.
Two interesting reports came out today. At first glance, they would seem to have nothing to do with each other. But as you begin to think about, you can see that they are very closely tied.
The first report lists the top 10 handsets in the U.S. Not too surprisingly, the top spot goes to that business person’s favorite, the Blackberry curve with 26% of the market. The closest competitor is the consumer friendly Apple iPhone at 9%. Not bad for iPhone since it has only been selling for over a year while the Blackberry is often purchased by a person’s employer.
The second report states that a measly 12% of Americans have used high-end mobile apps like email and video. These reports sound like they are coming from different countries. What people who work in the mobile space to create the next great mobile service forget is that most Americans don’t even try these services.
There is still much more education of the mobile consumer to come. In the next stage of mobility, the iPhone will be more important than the Blackberry. Both are great devices and are bringing the consumer what they want. But the iPhone with its limited feature set on its clean, intuitive user interface is the most likely device to teach consumers what they can do with the phones.
It is always great to get numbers from the big players on how their Internet video deployments are going. And one of the biggest was undoubtably NBC’s Internet Olympic portal.
After paying $900 million for the exclusive rights, they claim to have sold $1 billion in advertising. Not bad considering no one was even sure that people would watch the Olympics on the Internet.
But watch they did. Over 6.5 million unique visitors to be exact. Which translates into 36 million page views, 826K mobile video views and 300k text or multimedia alerts over 17 days.
That translates into $153 per person and $27 per page view, assuming all the advertising was just on the Internet pages. Silly assumption, of course. But if this test of the viability of the Internet could be profitable, just wait until the next one.
