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Mobile Mondays

MoMo – Mobile Mondays

I turned up to my first Mobile Monday event tonite in Sydney. Mobile Mondays are chapters or societies in different cities dedicated to learning more about mobiles, mobile marketing and for networking opportunites for those in the mobile industry.

The event began by talking about general industry trends relating to mobile and internet. The most interesting fact was that China has now overtaken the US as the greatest number of internet users. Which is suprising given that the U.S has 70% penetration of its population using internet, while China only has a fraction at 19%. Kinda scary numbers as the internet hasn’t been fully adopted in China yet.

Xumii – Mobile Social Networking

The warmup act was Xumii, which is a company from San Francisco. It is developing a platform to use across existing social networking applications for mobiles. It’s great little application where you can chat to all your friends across different instant messenger platforms like MSN, AIM, googletalk, etc.., check the status of your friends, have RSS sent to your mobile, access facebook, myspace, etc… Consider it like a friendfeed for mobiles. It doesn’t really create anything new, it just lets your social networking applications talk to your mobile.

Friendfeed is brilliant in this way, and Xumii‘s use is quite similar. It allows you to keep track of your social applications and gives you a single access point from your mobile. They have worked together with Facebook, youtube, etc.. to use their existing features and security log ins.

You can drag all your contacts from online to your mobile and it lets you have private conversations with different groups of people. Instead of sending an SMS to all your friends to find out where they are, consider this scenario: check the status of your friends to see whether they are on the computer or on their mobile Xumii’s. Message the group of people that’s out and about telling them where to go and also upload a gif image of a map to direct them.

For me, what we are seeing, is a mobile being used as a greater social tool to organise and keep in contact with your friends. We don’t have to talk to them to know what they are up to. That is the beauty of facebook, its allows you to voyueristically see what your friends are up to by looking at their status, what’s going on in their lives by checking the messages on their walls and perusing their photos. Xumii brings that mindset and capability to the mobile.

The biggest question facing Xumii and its competitors is how to monetise this platform – because Xumii is free. The presenters mentioned having wall or profile page where advertisers could display current events coming up that the user is interested in – like local concerts, discounted offers, etc… They also mentioned revenue share with the carriers and so on. But as a business proposition, one really has to wonder how they will make money off Xumii. It is the same problem facing other social media like Facebook, Youtube, etc…

Overall, I thought it was cool application bordering on a product pitch to VC’s in Silicon Valley. My other concern besides monetisation is competition. Because of the similarities to Friendfeed, if Friendfeed developed a mobile application, would Xumii have trouble competiting? That remains to be seen, despite this, I think this is a step in the right direction for the future of mobile.

However, do people want to be contactable by their 400 friends on Facebook, so they can see what they are up to all times via their mobiles? For someone like me, who is really into web 2.0 products like RSS, social bookmarking, folksonomies, facebook, etc… I think its pretty cool. But they are times where you just dont want to be bothered by other people, I can understand if people simply switch off their phones to escape from the madness of the world.

Future of Mobile – Google Android

The main event of the night, was Google’s presenter Justin Baird on the future of mobile. He started off by presenting some interesting stats such as there being 1.3Billion people having internet access versus 3.3Billion having mobile phones. Obviously, mobile presents a wealth of untapped opportunites. there are more people sending SMS than using search engines. Everyone in the developed world has a mobile – if not one, than two!

Justin talked about a bunch of other stuff, but the only stuff which I remember was what we had all been waiting for – The Andriod – Google’s answer to the Apple Iphone. A very cool device I must say. Again, this bordered on being a product pitch, but that’s what happens when you attend a marketing event.

The Android is really different to any other phone because it an open source product, which I found rather interesting. The Apple Iphone or any other phone, is a static device because you only use the applications already found on your mobile i.e. they have already been preprogrammed on there. Being capable of open source, means that new developments and applications can be constantly added. Google is adopting a similar practice to its igoogle portal which has open source for its applications. I’ve got a igoogle portal, and I’m fascinated by the amount of widgets they have developed for it. You name it, and they’ve got it. If they dont have it, you can develop it, if you have the necessary know how. That is one of the reasons facebook is so popular, because new apps are constantly being developed by the user community.

I think we will see a lot more mashup apps involving google maps. What the phone does is triangulate your position using cell towers, giving you a fairly good idea of where you are. The thing that really blew me away was compass function using google maps. Imagine having a screen showing you where you want to go. When you move, the phone acts like a compass and adjusts the picture based on where you have moved, giving you a real picture. Very cool.

In addition, because Google is behind it, you know that search has to be incorporated somehow. the stats really surprised me. The click through rate for display ads on google typically is 0.2%. However, on mobiles, that rate is 2%. That’s a 10 fold increase. I tell you why – because the ads become even more relevant based on your location. If your current location is say Parramatta, and you search for restaurants and ads come up for that area, you are more inclined to click on those ads on your mobile. With the unleashing of True Local, we will really see the power of geographic based ads.

From the presentation and my own experience overseas, Australia is really behind globally in the mobile experience. But we are catching up. I remember friends of mine in New York, using blackberries to search for places using google maps. In the U.S they also have unlimited data ability for their phones. Phone data charges here are quite prohibitive – the carriers have to work together to find a way to somehow get to the level of unlimited data downloads. But its probably not going to happen because we can’t get enough people onto the network to make that feasible.

After this presentation, I really do think there are lot more marketing and innovative opportunites we can use with mobiles. I mean more people have mobiles than computers. A mobile is our social currency and keeps us attuned with our friends and family. It is only natural that it becomes even more extended into our lives. Once we can get full internet functionability on our phones, we will really see the true power of mobiles. And there really won’t be a distinction between online and offline. We’ll always be connected.

I’m out like dial up phones.

Matt Ho.

Originally written on 9 May 2008.
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In a world of discovery, we are all searching for something

We look to find ourselves, to find other people like us, and to find the answer to life’s greatest mysteries. We believe the answer to most things lies somewhere……. out there. In our search for answers, often the first point of call is not religion, the trusty encyclopedia, the dictionary or the wise old sage.

Instead we turn to mankind’s answer to all things: the search engine.

What is the capital of Kazakhstan? Obama or Hillary? What should I study? The Celtics or the Lakers? How do I fly there? Why are people protesting about Tibet?

Millions of these kind of queries are fed into search engines each day. The search engines never sleep. It never fails. It always computes.

More than a decade ago, when we were still using Altavista and living in a pre-IPOD world, it was thought that it was all about internet portals. The idea was that you had to keep the user there as long as possible on the search engine page. More content they screamed! They did not want you to leave to find your search results. Refining and gathering the most relevant answers to our queries was not as important.

Internet companies had also not figured out how to make money from search. A voice in the distance cried out “Sell the keywords!”. Someone had come up with the idea that advertisers could be charged for buying the keywords and having their ads displayed with relevant results. That voice was Bill Gross of Idea Labs, a serial entrepreneur. He decided that advertisers could bid for the keywords in an auction style system, paying differing amounts according to the clicks they generated. Thus this was a way to monetise search engines.

When he told the world (i.e. Silicon Valley), they laughed at him and declared him crazy. Clearly, a man before his time. His company, Overture would later be sold to Yahoo to run the advertising on their search engines for billions (Interestingly enough, Yahoo has been the subject of a failed takeover bid by Microsoft in an move to compete with Google)

At the same time, two Stanford PHD students had begun working on the worlds most audacious search project – Google . Two other Stanford PHD students had co-founded Yahoo. These guys were developing something special, but they just could not figure out how to make money from the internet and looked around for a solution. They saw the Overture model, liked it and took it. When they told the world in 2002 about this idea to auction off the keywords, they were hailed as kings. Later Google, would settle out of court with Overture but it was too late – Google was already too dominant in the world of Search.

Google’s secret sauce lies in its PageRank methodology. The heart of it lies in something known as backlinks. The two academics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin looked at the concept of academic research – how a thesis is considered more authoritative the more times it is citied. They applied this concept to the world of search and analysed the links linking back to a website. It is the equivalent of hitting the back button on the internet browser and figuring out how many times it is linked. Using this method, they could measure how relevant a website is. A crude but effective measure. The PageRank formula also looks at a million other variables, but that is the core of it.

In a world of search, ideally you want your website to appear in the first three results on the first page of the search results. There is no benefit being on page 10. You want to be considered relevant. There are ways to optimize your website by putting more of a particular keyword in the headings, in bold, using it more times on a page, etc…This is a practice known as search engine optimization.

Another practice is known as search engine marketing (aka paid search). These are the results that turn up on the right hand side of Google’s search results as if someone had magically put them there. But no, someone is going to pay money for that. The amount an advertiser pays is worked out in one of two methods. You can pay only if someone clicks on the website, and nothing if they do not click – a practice known as cost per click (CPC’s). The other method is on a views basis i.e. the number of times your page has been viewed. This is known as cost per impression (CPM) and is based on 1,000 views.

Most advertisers would prefer the CPC basis because they only pay is someone clicks. However, there are times where advertisers would prefer a CPM basis as it is more predictable and the budget can be forecasted better.

Different advertisers will pay varying amounts depending on click through rates (CTR’s) and who they are. A search engine ideally wants the most relevant ad to be placed next to relevant results for a particular keyword. They would prefer a good advertiser and can ban someone from advertising if it may cause more harm, even though they are prepared to pay more for that keyword.

As an advertiser it is important to understand what kind of words a user will be entering into a search engine to find a particular product / service. For example, a business selling mobile phone will want to buy the following keywords: phone, mobile, 3G, handset, nokia, network, Telstra, call, SMS, etc…

Ah, the world of search, where you can discover anything and pay to be discovered.

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If you want to read more, I can recommend “The Search” by John Batelle and the Googlepedia (a brief encyclopedia) about Google.

Or maybe you could just search for it?

Interesting post from one of my favourite bloggers, Mark Cuban. He theorises whether it is possible to beat google at their own game. Offer the top 1-5 search results for the top 25,000 keywords money to be TAKEN off google. We will never know if there is another search engine that could be as good as Google unless someone tries.

Hmmm. would that work? i dont think so. As one reader puts it, Google has already reached critical mass. People go there as a natural instinct and its become to big and popular now, another website can easily step in if the top 1-5 results for that key word left. Google is just too big to mess with right now – you’d rather work along with them then try to disrupt them. And no one’s got deep enough pockets to do such a bold move.

Beating Google ?

May 14th 2008 2:08PM

But what about the Google Index, all the websites that are indexed by Google ? What is it worth to be in the Google Index ? What would you, as a website owner require in order to remove your site from the Google Index and no longer be available when someone does a google search ?

It should just be a matter of dollars and cents and sense, shouldn’t it ?

How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted ?

Mahalo.com thinks it needs to support the 25k most common search terms in order to be successful. What would happen if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and paid them to leave the Google Index ? …………….