First of all, I didn’t write stuff here for a while, sorry. I was busy finishing my Bachelor thesis about mobile advertising, I’ll tell you all about in a week or so. But first I need to deal with a big frustration about Nokia:

You are probably all familiar with this. You just bought a new phone and it turns out to be cursed. I experienced this with my freshly bought Nokia N95 8GB in December. At first I couldn’t log on to any Wi-Fi network, although this was a minor problem it kind of frustrated me. Besides this I experienced a lot of problems with PC-suite, but I don’t think that’s very surprising, since PC-suite is just a crappy piece of software of which you always hope you’ll never really need it. The real trouble began back in March when all the sudden the screen started flickering and eventually died. I had no idea how this happened. Continue reading…

Recently I realized that in my life I’ve come to a point to make some serious decisions. I’m almost a graduate in Communication Science and as from September I can either pursue a postgraduate degree, start my own business or take on the adventure of a job abroad. I chose the latter and started applying for a job in London. But deep inside of me there’s this little voice that wants to start a company, based on a great creative idea and a lot of guts. The last couple of days I started listening to that voice and it kind of confused me.

Yesterday things changed when I occasionally sat down for a coffee with a friend (Ernst-Jan Pfauth). After I told him my concerns, he adviced me to read Hugh MacLeod’s manifesto “How to be creative?“. This morning I read MacLeod’s writings and I became hugely inspired by his Sex and Cash Theory. Continue reading…

After Russell Beattie’s post about the end of Mowser, a mobile transcoder, last Monday, a lot of bloggers reacted fiercely on his controversial viewpoints about the end of the mobile web. As a mobile marketing professional I feel kind of obliged to write about my view on the future of the mobile web.

Let’s start with a short recap about what happened this week. On Monday Russell Beattie, founder of Mowser, an application that transcodes normal websites to mobile websites, announced that Mowser has stopped. In this very personal article Russell came up with different reasons for the end of Mowser, such as lack of funding and personal debts but mostly Russell’s lack of confidence in the future of the mobile web. Russell states:

…I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to. In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I’m tired of wasting my time…

With this kind of powerful expressions, the commotion he caused in the blogosphere doesn’t come as a surprise. Almost every mobile blog I’m subscribed to wrote about it. Especially the articles at MobHappy, MobileMarketingWatch and mocoNews.net were worth reading, But what is Russell actually saying? Continue reading…

One of the first mobile advertising campaigns in The Netherlands was the mobile internet banner campaign of Microsoft, to promote their Office 2007 suit. This was a collaboration between Universal Media, MoMac and WebAds Interactive Advertising and was served on five Dutch mobile internet sites. The campaign generated 700.000 views and gained a Click Through Rate of 1,18%, which is very high compared to regular online advertising. The campaign also included a survey, which was completed by 910 users. 54% of these users indicated that they were positive about receiving mobile ads on their phone, 30% of the users were neutral and 16% indicated that they were negative about receiving mobile ads. Continue reading…

Currently I am busy preparing the keynote of my company at the Dutch Mobile Monday in Amsterdam. At this moment we’re still in an exploratory phase finding interesting statistics, researches, articles and presentations to present our viewpoints in a convincing and entertaining way. So you probably imagine I come across a lot of interesting content. One of the most inspirational presentations I found is the one below. It’s a presentation of Paul Isakson about the future of marketing and advertising. Paul has a couple of interesting viewpoints on modern marketing and supports them with great quotes and images. I especially like the part about the integration of marketing into the product, which is a necessity nowadays. Products like iPod, Starbucks-coffee and Ferrari are already proving this quite some time. If you’re product is not cool enough, you should add value through content: content is the new currency (what a oneliner!). Continue reading…

Last week I visited The Next Web Conference 2008 in Amsterdam. It was a truly inspiring conference with speakers that showed great vision regarding the future of the web. Besides great speakers, the conference allowed twenty-four start-ups to show their five-minute pitch to the crowd. Among them were five start-ups operating in the mobile area. Some of them looked really promising, here you will find a short review of all of them.

Goojet: you had no idea your phone could do this

France based start-up Goojet offers a mobile widget application that looks really neat. Based on what I’ve seen in their pitch presentation and on their website the navigation seems easy. By the way, a Goojet is how they call the little widgetlike squares out of which the Goojet desktop is made up. Goojet uses the same interface for mobile devices as they do on their website, which makes it easy to understand. Another plus is that it’s a Java based application so it will work on almost all mobile devices. Goojet allows you to import things like RSS-feeds, a weather channel, Flickr-photo’s, a microblog application, polls, your resumé and notes. Continue reading…

As from now, this blog will continue in English. I found that my ambitions exceed the borders of the small town called The Netherlands and found that the language of my blog must suit these ambitions. So all of you, citizens of the world, you will now be able to read this very inspiring personal blog of a mobile marketeer, blogger and student, currently based in Amsterdam. But not for long, I hope to follow the example of my weblog and go international as well. I keep you posted!

P.S.: Please give me some time to fully translate all the stuff in the sidebar. In between you can practice your Dutch at the rest of this blog, it’s not that hard!

Waar men in Afrika en India al tijden mee bezig is, begint nu ook bij ons in Europa door te breken: Betalen via je mobiele telefoon. Morgen is dit het onderwerp van de tweemaandelijkse Mobile Monday. Eerder schreef ik voor de blog van The Next Web-conferentie (die overigens donderdag en vrijdag plaatsvindt) een artikel over mobile micropayments in Afrika. Daar is deze techniek een echte uitkomst voor mensen zonder woonadres en bankrekening. Hier in Europa ligt alles net even anders, we hebben bijna allemaal een vast adres en een bankrekening, dus mobiel betalen is voor ons slechts handig en heeft niet de noodzaak die het voor de Afrikaanse gebruikers heeft. Een gevolg hiervan is dat het systeem in Europa honderd procent waterdicht moet zijn en bovendien toepasbaar moet zijn in winkels en horeca, terwijl het in Afrika vooral betalingen tussen personen betreft. Payter is een Rotterdams bedrijf dat zich al enige tijd bezighoudt met mobiel betalen en zal hier morgen ook uitgebreid over vertellen tijdens de Mobile Monday in de Rode Hoed te Amsterdam. Hieronder is de demonstratievideo van Payter te zien, waarin duidelijk wordt hoe breed toepasbaar mobiel betalen is. Continue reading…

Mobile marketing is nog een relatief nieuw begrip in Nederland. Dat is goed terug te zien in de hoeveelheid informatie die hierover beschikbaar is op Nederlandse blogs en websites. Dat is schrikbarend weinig. Dat is ook één van de redenen dat ik sinds kort bij Mobile Cowboys blog en dat ik deze weblog ben gestart. Een goede weblog of website over mobile marketing is er simpelweg niet in Nederland. Met tijd en wijlen verschijnt op de grotere Nederlandse marcomblogs een artikel over mobile marketing, maar degelijke, specialistische en actuele informatie moet toch vooral op Amerikaanse blogs gezocht worden. In deze post licht ik vijf van mijn favoriete blogs over mobile marketing uit. Ik vertel hun verhaal, de strekking van de content en waarom ik deze blogs op de voet volg. Als klap op de vuurpijl geef ik een overzicht met de RSS-feeds voor zowel Netvibes als Google Reader, op deze manier weet jij zeker dat er geen mobile marketingnieuwtje meer aan je voorbijgaat. Continue reading…

De titel van deze post heeft eigenlijk een korte introductie nodig. Binnen het vakgebied mobile heb ik namelijk een voorliefde ontwikkeld voor location based services. Ik geloof heilig dat de mobiele telefoon met de ontwikkeling van LBS uit kan groeien tot de ultieme personal assistent. Een assistent die overal en op elk moment precies weet wat jij nodig hebt, het voor je opzoekt en je er naartoe brengt. Echter besef ook ik me dat het nog lang niet zover is, er moeten op het technisch, juridisch en sociaal gebied nog een aantal hordes genomen worden. Tot die tijd is het wachten. Wachten op de killerapp. Terwijl we met z’n allen wachten, bericht ik hier af en toe over een nieuwe applicatie die ons weer een stapje dichterbij de ultieme location based service brengt. Vandaag is dat LightPole, een applicatie voor geo-contextual content publishing. Een nieuw buzzword is geboren… Continue reading…