Mobile internet in the wild: it is out there

A customer asked us to check how many people in his target audience have mobile internet available on their phones. With the rock festival “Pukkelpop” taking place at 500 meters from our offices, this was an invitation for a nice field test.

We decided to distribute a Pukkelpop widget application amongst the 152.000 visitors of the festival. To keep the test small-scale, we only distributed 500 flyers. The flyers invited people to send an SMS to receive information on the playing schedule of the 212 groups and artists playing.

pukkelpop flyer

The results of our little action where the following:

SMS messages received per operator:

• 64% Proximus
• 20% Mobistar
• 16% Base

Clickthrough rates per operator:

• 35% Proximus
• 50% Mobistar
• 40% Base

The distribution of the users by operators is very much different from the current market situation in this segment (youth). The more expensive operator is overrepresented, the cheapest operator is underrepresented. This means that customers of the more expensive operators are more likely to purchase online services then customers from cheaper operators.

The clickthrough rates indicate how many people actually downloaded and used the Pukkelpop application after receiving the download SMS. Two conclusions can be drawn from these numbers:

Firstly, we now know that at least about 40% of Belgian mobile phone users in the youth segment have mobile internet enabled by their operator, have the internet setting configured correctly and have a compatible mobile phone. In fact, the number is likely to be much higher, since from the remaining 60% we have to subtract the users that didn’t pursue the download for some other reason (lack of knowledge on how to use the internet features of their phone, lack of interest, didn’t notice the SMS, didn’t understand the English content of the SMS with the flyer being in Dutch, etc). We can safely say that more then 50% of the youth can use mobile internet applications on their phone.

Secondly, we see that Mobistar customers produce higher clicktrough rates. This probably means that they do a better job at automatically configuring the phones of their users for mobile internet. In any case we see that we should not forget to target the Base customers. Their budget conscious audience actually shows the highest clickthrough rates. Focussing on high-end customers might not be the best strategy for your mobile internet application.

webraider

Market research can be as simple as this. By putting in an hour of fieldwork, we learned more about our users then in a day of reading market reports.

Tom Claus, aka. Webraider, is the proud author of the Pukkelpop widget that was used in this test. If you want to give his widget a try, check out the Flash version on his website.

The end of free Twitter SMS messages in Europe

The success of Twitter is really amazing. Since its launch in July 2006, the micro-blogging site built up a community of more than 1 million users that send 3 million messages each day. But will this success continue now that Twitter announced that free SMS updates are history?

Twitter growth

Much of the attractiveness of Twitter lies in its group-SMS like features. When you send a message to Twitter, all of your followers instantaneously receive the update. Twitter started this service in the US, where people are used to pay for the SMS messages they receive on their phone. As the sender of the message, Twitter has no cost to distribute the updates to the mobile phone carriers. Some people have even suggested that Twitter could be earning some kickback fees from the mobile operators.

In Europe, the situation is different. Users don’t pay for receiving SMS. It is the sender who has to pay for the message. For Twitter, this means that they have a huge cost to pay the outgoing SMS messages to the operators.

Today, Twitter announced that they decided to no longer send SMS updates in Europe. Their explanation is that the cash burden is no longer sustainable. In the last months, Twitter has tried to negotiate a win-win situation with the European operators. But apparently these negotiations failed.

It’s a pity that the mobile operators can’t see the value in the Twitter community and decided to keep protecting their SMS cash-cow. Once again, they are taking a defensive position when it comes to new emerging internet services. It is clear that users want to see SMS, instant messaging and micro-blogging integrated in 1 Twitter-like service.

Twitter updates over SMS

On ZDnet, Steve O’Hear proposed a couple of potential business models for Twitter:

• Become a distributor of third-party apps and services that use Twitter and take a cut in return.
• Design and sell hardware such as a cell phone with “Twitter baked in”.
• Or, better still, partner with mobile device makers and carriers to offer superior Twitter integration.
• And finally, sell the service to a carrier.

On a positive note, it is highly probable that Twitter users will seek alternative ways to stay up to date with what their friends are doing. There is no doubt that many of them will discover mobile internet and start using Twitter’s mobile website and applications.

We are already looking forward to see someone upload a mobile Twitter widget on glowe.org !

The 7 rules of mobile data user experience

Sometimes it’s good to dig up old news and see what we can learn from past experiences. With all the enthusiasm that is emerging around mobile Android, iPhone or Symbian applications I revisited an old article on mobile data user experience.

The original article was written two years ago by Elliot Drucker, a regular author of Wireless Week. I have summarised it for you here and added my personal interpretation.

Rule 1: Consistent User Interface

Natural and intuitive user interfaces are great, but consistency is even more important. Users don’t want to learn a new interface with every application.

Lesson: Use a framework to develop your frontends.

Rule 2: Simplified Data Entry

We tell users they can use the web on their phone, but this is far from true. Websites rely too much on typing and scrolling. Mobile applications should use pick lists and radio buttons instead.

Lesson: Complement your mobile application with a website where users can fill in their configuration data so they don’t have to do that on their mobile.

Rule 3: Efficient Network Utilization

3G networks deliver more speed, but total network bandwidth stays limited. Especially response times will become a problem as the mobile internet grows. This means that mobile websites will suffer from “click & wait” behaviour.

Lesson: Make sure your application stores & reuses the data it fetches from the nework.

Rule 4: Offline Functionality

Wireless networks are everywhere. At least, that’s what we think. But many people live in rural areas with spotty network coverage. Your applications needs to handle the on/off behaviour of the network in a graceful way. Preferably it even needs to work offline.

Lesson: People use mobile applications when they have time to kill, like in the subway. Make sure they can use it when not connected to the network.

Rule 5: Automated Data Sharing

Users do not understand that different applications keep asking them for the same data. Applications should be engineered so that if a user enteres his adress in one application it automatically becomes available in another application.

Lesson: Use a backend-services framework that allows to share data between applications.

Rule 6: Dynamic Personalisation

An application can learn a lot about the user by monitoring his behaviour. If the user requests a weather report on New York, he should see New York as a suggested city next time he opens up the weather reports.

Lesson: Use a profile service for your application that can monitor and predict user behaviour

Rule 7: Mobile Device Independence

A mobile application will end up on a lot of different device types. This is different from the PC world, where there are only a few operating systems. Mobile applications should not only work on as many platforms as possible, they should also work in more or less the same way.

Lesson: Develop your application in a multi-platform engine instead of developing a native application and having to choose for a specific mobile phone operating system.

When you’re interested to learn how you can implement these 7 rules, take a look at the City Live Glowe and Hydra technologies.

Koen Delvaux, CTO

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Which mobile internet services do Flemish newspapers offer?

I’d like to take a look at the newspapers in Flanders. What kind of mobile internet services do they offer? Since the launch of the iPhone in Belgium a few weeks ago, mobile internet has become a hot topic. It has ‘a face’ since then, and more and more people want to try it out.

• De Standaard (publisher: Corelio)

One of Belgian’s quality papers, De Standaard, offers a mobile website to its readers since the 16th of June. Via m.standaard.be a mobile-fit website is provided. The service contains all kinds of news, from sports and politics to celebrity updates. Apart from that, the mobile website offers the weather forecast and up to date traffic information.

Welcome to the brand new City Live blog

Welcome to this brand new City Live blog.

Which will deal with

• mobile news: what is going on in the mobile world and what does it mean? Depending on the topic, our marketing, technical, sales or community manager will analyse facts and trends.
• corporate news of City Live. Not the (boring) press releases, yet inside stories and view points.