Worlds apart

Imagine only being able to see in two dimensions, to move in two dimensions, to measure your world in two dimensions?

Imagine I told you there was a third? That not only was it possible to move left and right, but also up and down.

Imagine you are a hunter in two-dimension world, that what you do depends on movement. You had no idea that up and down stuff existed, let alone was possible for you. And then I tell you there are loads of hunters just like you out there right now moving up and down as well as left and right.

And they are doing better than you.

They don't just fish where the fish are in two dimensions, but in three.

The scale of their world is infinitely more vast. The opportunities infinitely richer.

All you have to do to join in is look up. Or wait to get swallowed whole by something you couldn't even conceive of.

Blyk on target as Google adsense goes mobile

Despite consistent mutterings within the mobile industry that Blyk cannot possibly work... here it is hitting its 100K customer target in the UK six months ahead of schedule.
Congrats to all those involved including Jonathan and Alan.

Also today I see google has added Mobile Ads to its adsense suite. So now you can design a mobile-friendly ad to link to your mobile internet site. Potentially very powerful and something I'm sure admob will be watching carefully.
The google tools even include giving the advertiser the tools to create their own mobile internet page for the mobile ad to link to (the horrible flaw in the car-crash they had before was that the ad might point to a standard fixed line web site. All the clicks but none of the business).

All very long tail enabling.

However, that page (an Adwords Business Page) is only an 'information' page. In other words you can't enable easy payment or ordering of an item advertised. Which seems a bit daft. How long before they integrate google checkout?

Make this mobile. But will we still talk?

I've just added a new widget at the top left of the blog. 'Make It Mobile'. Click it and you'll have the content from this blog on your phone to take with you where-ever you go. And it'll get updated the moment I update.

The irony of sending it to your communication device is that by doing so you risk disrupting the conversation.

The 'make it mobile' badge is one of the new bits from Mippin. I've been following Mippin's progress - a system which turns rss feeds from fixed line content into mobile sites, since it launched (Mippin plays video from your feed/ Mippin: Satisfying the long tail, extending the reach of the stumpy dog). CEO Scott Beaumont joins the conversation here from time to time.

They are among the best of a crowd of challengers in this space (widsets, squace and a new one on me, kimia)

Today they've updated and the changes make it oh-so-easy to monetize your content.
And as we know from the explosion of the long tail which adsense inspired on the internet, offering an incentive to publish is a key driver for the many millions who will populate the mobile internet.

In this post when I suggested the long tail would impact mobile internet first and fast (and Itsmy.com and Pepperonity are showing the way) I asked for the following to enable that long tail:

1. Really easy creation of mobile pages (on fixed line and on mobile)
2. Really easy ability to change the design to our tastes (and I'm thinking icons/desktop style as well as background colours and layout)
3. Ability to add and create rss feeds
4. Ability to add code snippets (ie YouTube video, google adsense)
5. Really easy share/ creator propogation (ie socially networked)
6. Enabled for social trade.
7. It has to be free to the site owner.
8. Option to offer as an application-based widget.

So how does the latest version of Mippin score?
1. If your fixed line site has a half decent rss feed it couldn't be simpler to mobilize. But you can't make a mippin site or upload content to it from your mobile.
2. The icon and desktop stuff is still illusive - but that's a nightmare to make right for every operator and every mobile, so Mippin, you are forgiven.
3. The rss feeds bit is what drives mippin. They rely on you having a fixed line site already which has them.
4. The youtube video example has now been implemented on Mippin. Add a youtube code to your blog post and it will play on the mobilized verson too. Critically they've made it easy as pie to add admob code, more easily even than admob. Type in your admob id number and mippin does the rest. Need an admob account? The links are there to guide you very swiftly.
5. Easy share stuff - well that awaits critical mass but Mippin is certainly enabled for this.
6. Enabled for social trade. Sadly not (in a mynumo kind of way) but what the hey.
7. Free to the site owner. Yes yes.
8. Widgetised. No. You can't create a widget to share on anyone's phone's 'desktop' or homepage. But there is a widget (now added to this blog) for your fixed line page which makes it a one-click operation for a user to get your content optimised for their phone, on their phone.

So, a round of applause chaps. I'm trying the admob ads on the mobile version, though I don't expect too many to be queueing up to place ads on my content, but I do seek to understand how easy it is to achieve.

One thought/question: Itsmy.com doesn't share revenues with the people who create its content. Their users are inspired enough by two things which make this possible:

1. The owner of the UGC (publisher) gets to control whether or not they have ads of any kind on their content. If they do choose to have ads then they can also select what kind (as referred to in my posts about Mobile Internet in Berlin earlier this week) and in this respect the user begins to think of the ads as content - not as an unwelcome interruption.
I'm hoping that they get to select at a quite granular level ie which brands, even which exact ads. I need to revist Itsmy.com to confirm. Perhaps a more regular user can tell me?

The right brands on your content allows you to show the world what kind of person you are.
It's a nice reversal of the usual routine in which brand owners decide who or what to associate their brand with through where they choose to advertise. In this model the user gets to select which brands WE wish to be associated with.

Is this another example of the intention economy? Trust me? trust my brands!
Since most users in the Itsmy environment are likley to trust their peers more than a brand in the first place, this could prove very powerful.

2. Only content created on a mobile is allowed on itsmy. That means a) it's all guaranteed to be the users own (written, shot, or filmed on their phone) and b) it all comes from the point-of-inspiration device that is your mobile. The result is users share the content they create very rapidly - and upload lots of it, creating loads of advertising opportunities as they go. Being able to publish at the point they are inspired becomes a driver in and of itself, as CEO Antonio Vince Staybl discussed in Berlin.

Mippin speaks to a need. The need to extend reach into the mobile space for anyone who is creating their content on fixed line.

Itsmy speaks to the need of those who are inspired to create, publish and share as they live their life, where ever they are and what ever they are doing (data charges allowing!).

In theory of course, if you use something like shozu to add content to your blog... and your blog feeds into your mippsite, then you can share at point of inspiration, too. Bit of a stretch though?

Wonder if you can turn an itsmy site into a Mippin one? Would that make for an unholy mess or a double whammy?

I suspect the former for a relatively simple reason. Mippin is a broadcast model. Itsmy is a networked one.

No matter how much of my rss feed is published, the one thing you can't do via mippin is add a comment to the original blog post, or even on the version of it that appears on mippin.
You can vote on my Mippsite in its entirety, you can send a link to a particular post by email. You can twitter it. You can share it on facebook. And these are all very socially enabling, all about sharing after all.
But in each case in order to join the conversation I must send the user away AND hope they are also a member of the community in which we could actually have the conversation. And in this respect the model misses out on the creation-at-the-point-of-inspiration power of the mobile AND the exponential growth potential of connecting up the nodes.

This has to inhibit its fit with the networked world.

This is not necessarily a criticism. And if it is, it is certainly one which can also be levelled at Mippins RSS-fed rivals. Mippin is, after all, an attempt to mobilize the broadcast, publish-from-the-centre, world. The fact that it turns the humble blogger into a broadcaster too is perhaps just a casualty of this.

So, for the record, if you do read one of my blogposts on mippin, please try to keep your inspiration burning long enough to get to a fixed line or full internet version of the blog and join in the conversation then. Send yourself a text reminder or email alert (hey Scott - add that as a button!)

Dodging cannon balls

I don't know why, given how often it happens, but I still find myself getting wound up by the way old-style business is regarding the emergence of the networked world - and even how mass media reports on it. Together they seem to repeatedly miss the point. Heads in the sand?

I recall the Times report on Radiohead's 'pay-what-you-like' download. How they sniggered when people paid a low average price. Why did they reject the significance of 1.2m downloading it in a month?

Another example today report from ft.com about a debate at Davos.

The guts: "In debates at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, enthusiastic technologists and advertising agencies pronounced that 2008 would be the year in which (social networks, video games and mobile phones) marketing techniques would become mainstream.

But sceptical media owners disputed their growth predictions, questioning consumers' appetite for advertising campaigns in such new areas.

"The [supposed] solution to everything at the moment in the digital space is adsupported," Sir Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony, told the Financial Times. "While advertisers are happy to talk that up, there is a limit to the amount of money available."

"The business model is not there today [for mobile advertising]," said Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal.

Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, was similarly sceptical about advertising-funded video games, saying: "It's early days. I wouldn't go in that direction myself."

The issues here are manifold.

1. "consumers' appetite for advertising campaigns" - Two problems. Keep thinking about consumers and advertising and you are only going to see a downward spiral.
Of course there is less appetite for advertising campaigns. That's obvious. Consumers are gagging on interruptive ads of all varieties - whether on old media or in new. They might, however, want to take part in the community-dominated creation of value. They feel under assault from 'campaigns'. They also want to be treated as something more than consumers - converged individuals who are part of the creative process.

2. Scepticism over a business model for mobile advertising? Tell that to Admob who are busily serving 1bn ads a month. And perhaps its worth considering NEW business models which aren't about same-old interruptive ads. Consider Blyk, for example. Your business model 'may not be there' today, old chap, but those adapting to the 7th mass media are making hay.

3. Early days for ad-supported games? Tell that to MyNuMo - who are busily creating (and making money from) exactly these for the Iphone (and others) in the States. If more people spend more time playing games than watching TV and all you want is eyeballs (let's not make this too complicated for the disconnected...) then... well, there's the water. Drink if you want to.

Thankfully there was a voice of reason - and one you'd expect even the most stuck-in-the-mud to have a twinge of respect for: Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google.

"(mobile represents) the recreation of the internet, it's the recreation of the PC story, it is before us - and it is very likely it will happen in the next year," Eric Schmidt, chief executive, said of the location-based advertising made possible by the mobile internet."

It is Eric - it's the internet revolution all over again, only this time its personal - it's that PLUS.
And if you aren't already familiar with Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore's work on Mobile as the 7th Mass Media - now would be a good time to catch up.

It seems bizarre that some of those who are witnessing the failure of interruptive advertising appear to draw the conclusion that there is no (or slow growing) revenue to be made with the networked world (either via social networks, mobile...what ever). Perhaps it's because they keep looking at the world from the centre-out, rather than the edge in.

Shift your perspective and you might see a crowd willing to join with you, rather than cannon fodder waiting to be assaulted by your next campaign.

No wonder we do all we can to dodge your cannon balls...

Mippin: Satisfying the long tail - extending the reach of the stumpy dog

Some time ago I asked for the moon on a stick.

Today I saw something which might not offer the entire lunar body, but I think it gets us into orbit. Mippin is in beta right now. Next week it'll be shown in public and go into public beta.

I was lucky enough to get a pre-preview preview, if you like - and VP, product management, Prashant Agarwal is happy for me to share. So go check it out for yourself.

It's the latest thing from Refresh Mobile - the former T-mobile management buy-out team which previously gave us Mobizines.

And it ticks a lot of the boxes from my moon-on-a-stick list.

As I said once before ...the fixed line net was initially grown by content providers of the mass industrial age, the mobile web will explode as a direct result of User Generated Content.
And because of the social nature of 2.0 I expect the growth to be exponential - and to dominate the way the mobile web develops in a faster and more pervasive way than we saw with the original fixed-line internet.
The long tail will wag the mobile internet dog more vigorously than it has the fixed line internet."

And I identified these drivers for the long tail to go truly exponential.

1. Really easy creation of mobile pages (on fixed line and on mobile)
2. Really easy ability to change the design to our tastes (and I'm thinking icons/desktop style as well as background colours and layout)
3. Ability to add and create rss feeds
4. Ability to add code snippets (ie YouTube video, google adsense)
5. Really easy share/ creator propogation (ie socially networked)
6. Enabled for social trade.
7. It has to be free to the site owner.
8. Option to offer as an application-based widget.

Mippin gets a long way along the route. It's really easy to create mobile pages (from rss feeds from your current content - your blog for example, or your website, if you are a publisher). So it also ticks number 3 on the list. FasterFuture is, of course, already available on it!

There are both sharing and rating functions (5) and community scoring edits the 'hits' you find on your portal home page.

Critically it integrates with ad services such as admob (or at least it will very soon) which allows the UGC creator to benefit from their efforts. The ability to monetise long-tail content was a huge driver for the explosion of the fixed web (eg google adsense, the most powerful widget yet!)

Mippin is free (that's no7) and there are plenty of widget plans (they've even got a bit of an in with facebook... watch that space).

This is Widsets on steroids. Where Widsets doesn't allow you to make cash from your rss feed in, the admob integration (Screen Tonic for bigger publishers if you prefer) means you benefit from your labouts.

And powerfully, while you have to download a client to your phone to make Widsets work, there's no need for this with Mippin.

How do they make their cash? Ads on the aggregated elements (users create their own portal of content they want to have fed to them, they get to rate it and share it too (though the share via sms function is too clunky at the moment - but it is early days).

There are no ads on the publisher's content - other than the ones the publisher selects AND which that publisher is earning cash from. This trumps the peperonity model, for example.
They take no revenue share from your arrangement with Admob, google adsense or whoever, either. They expect to make money from their introduction of your content to the likes of Admob. Which seems fine and reasonable to me.

In a nutshell, what Mippin does is allow individuals to create their own mobile portals of content they care about and rate and share that content.

Their marketing plan involves mobile ad campaigns of their own. It remains to be seen how effectively they can position themselves as your first-choice mobile portal.

The publisher (be it users creating their own mobile sites from their blog feeds etc, or publishers of bigger websites seeking to move into the mobile space) are simply extending their reach.

We shouldn't confuse Mippin with something which allows the creation of mobile-focused services fitting the 6Ms of mobile to perfection - as described by Tomi Ahonen (and those who attended Mobinar will be clear on these).

It also doesn't carry links from the original content, nor videos (though it does manage images from the rss feeds.)

What it does do is radically simplify the process of extending reach into mobile - and monetising it.

To publishers, I do not recommend Mippin as your long term mobile strategy - but it does seem an ideal quick fix to get you on the road and to use as part of your strategy. Create new mobile services alongside this - but perhaps use this to extend your reach and make a little revenue - free.

To those who are about to create the long tail - this is going to help a whole lot of shaking happen faster.

Mobile internet: A new media - no wonder Google gets it wrong

I was lucky enough to stumble on Informa's mobile web2.0 conference at Lord's in London yesterday. I'm indebted to Ajit Jaoker (for the invite) and the good people at Informa for letting me gate-crash.

I caught the last few presentations and final panel of the day (the event continues today). As a result I'll recommend you check out mystrands.com which was presented by Atakan Cetinsoy as an exceptionally well thought-out mobile community play. And I was delighted to catch up with Ajit and Tomi Ahonen, talk with Ken Blakeslee and at least say hi to Jouko Ahvenainen.

But the bit that stayed with me was Russell Buckley's (admob and Mobhappy) scathing analysis of the launch of Google Adsense for mobile.

He pointed out adsense will start appearing on mobilised sites whether the site the ad links to has been designed for mobile or not.

In other words click the adsense link and you could get a very poor experience. That's bad enough for the user. Imagine being the poor sap who is paying per click?

It's astounding really that even Google can't get this right. But as is often pointed out, there's hardly a brand from the old media forms that has successfully transferred to the internet.
So why should we expect the 'experts' on the internet to be able to move smoothly to being the experts on mobile?

How many are really making the effort to understand the vital differences between Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore's 6th and 7th mass medias (internet being the sixth, mobile the seventh)?

As Russell points out people might get excited by 450,000 people accessing MySpace from their mobiles but the leaders in the mobile social space are NEW and MADE FOR MOBILE - such as peperonity. They have way more page impressions than the old guard (amusing to think of MySpace as the old guard...).

Russell should know - Admob is currently serving mobile ads at the rate of 1.7bn a month and gathering more data about what the mobile internet accessing public are doing than almost anyone else along the way.

In the evening I was Admob's guest (and many thanks to Ivanka for that) at the Mobile Entertainment Awards - where Admob deservedly picked up the award for Best Marketing and Advertising Provider. Interesting - at this Nokia-sponsored event - to see Admob getting the nod over Enpocket (Nokia's latest squeeze).

A Google rep (picking up some search-related award, obviously) said there was much more from them to come in the mobile space. On the evidence of the adsense effort so far, there had better be.

The ad battle moves to mobile - but maybe they are drawing the wrong lines?

One of the most critical business battles of the early 21st century is raging - for dominance of the mobile advertising market.

Google has lit the blue-touch paper on adwords for mobile and just days later Nokia announces it is buying Enpocket

Nokia says: "Enpocket is a global leader in mobile advertising; providing technology and services that allow brands to plan, create, execute, measure and optimize mobile advertising campaigns around the world.

"By acquiring Enpocket, Nokia will accelerate the scaling of its mobile advertising business, leveraging Enpocket's platform and strong partnerships with advertisers, publishers and operators. In addition to key assets, through this transaction Nokia is gaining a team with strong expertise in global mobile advertising across disciplines."

Big guns - and all blazing.

Looks like the big fish are starting to snap up the clever ones.

Wonder what it all means for Admob?

I also wonder how strategic these decisions are - and how tactical.

For me, the forms of mobile advertising we've seen so far are of the kind Tomi Ahonen would characterise as 6th mass media plays on the 7th mass media. That is the kind of ad styles/inventories are pretty much like internet ones, squeezed on to mobile internet - with less cookie-driven relevance. (see Mobile as the 7th Mass Media, top of page). Which take advantage of what makes mobile different?

No one has gone (alan moore's) engagement marketing route, though I suspect Blyk will get closest of all when it launches before the end of this month.

Expect a lot of eyes pointing in Blyk's direction. And a lot of people wishing they were under 24...

Here it comes: Google Adsense for mobile!

Regular participants in this conversation will know I've long been an advocate of the idea that the long tail will shake the mobile internet dog (much earlier, and therefore acquiring significantly more influence, than it did on the fixed line web).
Google Adsense was the critical driver in the explosion of content on the fixed line web (it's one thing to create content left right and centre - quite another to get paid for it).
So the wait for google adsense or its equivalent to deploy on mobile has been pregnant with anticipation.
Well, now it's here.
A very reputable source told me on Friday (July 13, 2007) that in fact it had been available for a couple of weeks. And a quick scan around the blogosphere this morning reveals it is just starting testing with invited mobile content publishers (try here).
In my view, this is a very significant moment (please share what you think by adding a comment).
In combination with the arrival of the I-Phone and Youtube going properly mobile (in June) I think we'll end up looking back at the middle of 2007 as the tipping point of the mobile web.
Admob has already shown how taking the marketplace approach and making their code easy for publishers to deploy - gives long tail content creators a way of earning revenue for their efforts. As a result they are busily co-creating the new value emerging from the mobile internet (4billion ads served so far and currently adding around 1billion more a month).
And their biggest revenue earners are the likes of peperonity, itsmy... in other words User Generated Content in the classic long tail model.
But Admob can't serve in-context related ads. Yet (I'm told a version 2.0 is on its way...)
It's very hard to do for all sorts of very interesting technical reasons. So that makes their ads, despite their text-link design, more interruption than engagement. (though, to be fair to Admob, you can select which sites you want to serve on - and with increasing specialisation (into niches) that may well give a decent approximation of engagement).
However, if google adsense has cracked in-context, related (as it does on the fixed web) then there will be a better match between the 'advert' and the content. It closes the gap between the two. It makes it more engaging.
Both Admob and Google Adsense learned an early lesson many website operators would do well to consider - banners don't work. Text links do. They become part of the (albeit stilted) conversation. Translation: Interruption doesn't get response, Engagement does.

So now we have the staggering marketing power of Apple and the I-Phone, PLUS the global call to action (get a fixed rate data plan - get a 3G phone) of youtube to speed up the charge to mobile (pervasive if you prefer) computing.

AND on top of that there's now an easy-for-everyone AND engaging revenue model, too (Adsense).

Just watch mobile internet go now!

Make sure you are looking in the right direction (towards UGC) or you won't see it coming until it's way too late...

• Life after the I-phone
• Mobile as the 7th Mass Media
• Long Tail will shake mobile internet dog
• YouTube goes mobile - there goes your video revenue stream...
  

Forum Oxford: Future Technologies Conference

I attended the best conference I've ever been to, on Friday 13th - ForumOxford: Future Technologies Conference. It gathered some of the biggest brains in mobile tech, convergence, mobile internet (etc) from across the planet - at Oxford University.

Conferences can often be wasteful affairs if your thinking is anywhere close to the curve. You pay a fortune and sit listening to speakers telling you (being broadcast at) what you already knew - a year ago.

But this was something different. Not only was it fabulous value for money it was also in the 2.0 mode - sharing, interacting, challenging and igniting ideas.

It has to be the most profitable day I've spent in the last 365.

Some personal highlights: (podcasts etc are going to follow, so there may be more detail to come...)
1. Google presenting on their absolute commitment to the mobile internet - and its perfect fit with their mission statement (organising the world's information and making it accessible to all). Their promotion of the value of the long tail on mobile, too.
2. The clarification of the value of widgets/applications which mean you only update what you need when accessing the mobile internet (ie google maps for mobile). (google/symbian/Jeff Sonstein etc)
3. Google is making London its global hub for 'huge' mobile investment.
4. The emerging theme that even the mobile operators (at high levels) now 'get' the value of group forming network theory (Reed's law)- and why that means the walls not only have to come down but that they should to increase value for all parties. (3, Vodafone)
5. A stat quietly slipped in by (I think Russell Buckley at Admob) that 34% of UK mobile users now use the mobile web.
6. Prof William Webb's 'Wireless' predictions for the next 10-20 years. Brave man.
7. Vladimir Dimitroff reminding us of yet another convergence going on: in the realm of UGC the consumer and the employee are converging (expect to see this in co-creation of all kinds).
7. Personally getting name-checked three times from the stage - in a room of people of this calibre, that was a real jaw-dropper - many thanks to Tomi and Ajit.
8. Meeting some brilliant people both on the night before and at the conference itself - Hello Martin Davis, Jeremy Kloubec, Cameron Doherty, Tomi Ahonen, Ajit Joaker, Jim O'Reilly, Krzysztof Proczka, Eduardo Cruz, Jeff Sonstein, and everyone else I was lucky enough to spend time with.

and so much more... If you're at all interested in mobile/internet/world2.0 you should be at the next one: Try here for more.

It's also worth noting what a fantastic job Tomi and Ajit (the co-founders) have done at creating a truly vibrant, activated community which organises itself around a shared common interest. There's many a media company which could learn a lesson or two. Brilliant work, gentlemen.