Ok, I admit, this is not very recent news, but I recently discovered the Grazia application and couldn’t curb my enthousiasm. Grazia succesfully collaborated with the biggest shopping mall in Europe to create an iPhone application. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the business model behind these sort of applications.

The Grazia application is technically just a guide to get around in a shopping mall, but the fact that it’s whitelabelled by a fashion magazine gives it a lot more appeal and makes it a one-to-have for all the fashionistas reading Grazia. This is how I envisage the future of mobile applications, great applications that in itself don’t make money, monetized through whitelabelling to brands that use the application to promote their brand in a new, innovative kind of way. The brands give the applications a ‘face’ that appeals to their customers. Continue reading…

Very recently I was thinking of a mobile platform for all the things you need when it comes to grocery shopping, from list to location, from discount offers to payment methods. And apparently I wasn’t the only one thinking about this. Look at this conceptual clip below to see how all our lives will change when it comes to the supermarket and everything related.

And how refreshing is it that this little clip was originally found on the digital design blog by Razorfish, a media buying agency. We all know what it means when the media buyers get it. It means that advertisers almost get it.

<a href=”http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:8d7a2ef7-84cf-4daf-9a4d-2531c273f756&showPlaylist=true&from=shared” target=”_new” title=”Retail Future Vision”>Video: Retail Future Vision</a>

Via: Andrew Grill / London Calling

After years of boring banners there is a new mobile display ad format in store. The expandable mobile banner has recently been developed by the digital rich media developers of Pointroll. And because mobile ad network Millennial Media, that sells mobile advertising on the iPhone site of USA Today, we are now looking at the first mobile expandable banner campaign in history. On your iPhone now? Go check it out here. Otherwise just watch the screen grabs below.

These days, most brands still haven’t even touched mobile, but there are always those brands who do keep up with the latest developments in media usage and take every chance to communicate with their target audience in new and innovative ways. Many of them have launched a mobile marketing campaign or created a mobile website, but very very few of them have done what I would consider the best thing: getting on people’s phone. There aren’t many more engaging things a brand can do to establish a relation with its customers than releasing a (good) mobile application. And making beautiful and helpful applications is just what Apple has made much easier with the iPhone (Google is doing a great job with Android too, but their Android Market is far from mature and reach through Android-enabled handsets is still too low).

Although it may sound easy, releasing a mobile application isn’t anything like putting a banner on a popular site. The marketing department has to realise that the application has to be downloaded and used by people to make it truly succesful. So how do you do that? Continue reading…

As an iPhone user there’s always one thing that keeps on amazing me. Their App Store. There are so many things Apple did exactly right when they created this new mobile store. And by doing all these things, they showed the world how mobile phones will undisputedly become more than an instrument to stay in touch.

At first, Apple has showed the world where the future of mobile connectivity lies. Which is a blessing for people in the mobile marketing industry. As a mobile marketeer, evangelizing is an important part of your job, you basically have to convince every single soul of the purpose of your existence. Last year the iPhone has become an important and very convincing actor in that story. Where many people always assumed that all internet activity on phones had to happen in a browser, like on PC’s, this is not how mobile internet will evolve. You have to think of a browser as an application that uses the mobile internet connection. It’s about connectivity. Continue reading…

Call it the beginning of a new era, or just another iPhone app. In the infamous area of mobile tv, one of the big promises of the mobile phone that doesn’t really seems to take off, Livestation comes with the first mobile tv app for the iPhone. The UK based company runs in closed beta during the festive period and tries to gain as much learnings from a small userbase that is testing the service in the coming days. Livestation already runs a TV app for PC/MAC in beta, and now they have managed to bring the same technology to the iPhone.

Being one of the lucky ones to test the Livestation app first I must say I had a real ‘wow’ experience when I opened the app first. Even on a 3G connection the app offers a seamless TV watching experience. Livestation really shows that watching mobile TV through an internet stream doesn’t have to be lagged and pixely and that, with mobile connections becoming faster and faster, there’s no real sense in building expensive DVB-H chips in phones anymore. Continue reading…

For this story I’m taking you back to an age long long ago, before the release of the Samsung Omnia, Blackberry Bold, T-Mobile G1 and iPhone 3G, even before the release of the Nokia N95 or the iPod Touch. Let me take you back to August 2006…

Around this time students Egbert Veenstra, Sytse-Jan Kooistra and Sam Baas were philosophizing about a new school project they had to work on. And as they were having a drink and a laugh in the summer sun they came up with the perfect idea for their project. They realized that the phone as we knew it back in 2006 could be so much more and wanted to develop a new revolutionary phone. Well, develop…they obviously did not have the resources to actually build a new phone, but they were armed with a much bigger weapon: their creative minds. And as they put their minds to work they developed a concept of the ultimate new phone. It had a touch screen that didn’t require a stylus, service-side processor power (whatever that is, but sounds really cool) and some ingenious ways for finger-touch text input. So they developed a concept phone by using some 3D designing software they used for their study and by making a picture of a table and a screenshot of their own phone’s screen they pulled together a nice mock-up. Now they only had to come up with a name and given the total switch their phone would make in people’s perception of a mobile phone they decided that it had to be named Switch. But while they were working on their project, they were also thinking of sending their concept phone to some leading tech blogs to see how hard it was to fool those guys. They only needed to associate their concept with a big company. Apple? Google? Microsoft? Continue reading…

Operator portals were doomed to disappear when the walled gardens opened up about two years ago, but after the rise of the smartphone and introduction of unlimited data packages they are doing better than ever. Still, most of the mobile internet use takes place within the borders of these portals. The predicted growth of off portal inventory goes much slower than predicted.

Smart mobile start-ups

However, it must be noted that a couple of smart mobile startups did a great job filling up this new space. Mobile-only communities like Itsmy.com, myGamma, and Flirtomatic are growing rapidly these days. Their big advantage is the painful absence of the bigger brands on mobile Internet, which results in most of the off portal advertising budget ending up in their pockets.

No mobile versions

On the other hand, this is exactly what’s withholding mobile media buyers to spend more budget off portal. Most established websites do simply not offer a mobile version of their successful online product. This is why media buyers who represent big consumer brands don’t want to spend budget off portal. Brands attract brands. Simple as that.

Be ahead of the pack

So why are these online brands still not available on the mobile Internet? I guess they’re simply waiting when the time is right, but they should be ahead of the pack because they are the main drivers behind the availability of premium off portal inventory. Their motivation might be that it’s still hard to drive traffic to a mobile site. While using their phone, people are often too lazy to enter a URL.

So all the traffic derives from really motivated people that are dedicated to find a certain mobile site and Google Mobile (which seldom directs you to a mobile site). Well, what about directing people to your mobile site from your online site? Offering an on-the-go version of your brand? Enhancing your site with an extra service because you like your users so much and want to offer them your content whenever they want to?

Best place to start? What about TheNextWeb? That picture is TheNextWeb on a mobile phone looks like at the moment, as the brand new mobile editor this is definitely the first challenge ahead of me. TheNextWeb is going mobile! Keep you posted.

A week ago I suddenly realised that this blog is a way for me to show what I can do and what I know. A so-called portfolio blog. I never had the intention to grow a big audience here. I just needed a site to point people to that are interested in me or my work. However, after a while I became a bit disappointed about the lack of comments at my blog. Although I was completely aware that I wouldn’t get a big audience without daily blogging and some SEO work, I started to miss an audience to share and discuss my views with. At that moment I decided to contact a close friend, Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in-chief of The Next Web, to ask him if he could use some expertise on mobile on The Next Web. Fortunately his answer was positive.

Nothing will actually change here, everything I’ll write on The Next Web will be found here as well. Even a bit more (like this nice little post). If you have never heard of The Next Web (shame on you) do pay us a visit (and bookmark and/or subscribe to the RSS feed). The Next Web is best described as the European TechCrunch. The Next Web focuses on European start-ups in the digital industry and addresses all the issues this young industry and the young people who work in it, have to deal with.

According to most mobile marketeers the last ten years were all ‘the year of mobile’. Every year again they were telling that ‘mobile is really going to take off this year’. Well, since the end of 2007 I’m working in mobile and I think I’ve stepped in at the perfect moment. Although mobile marketing revenue might not be flying in at the moment, 2008 has until now really been the year of educating agencies and advertisers. Most of the big brands have run a trial campaign by now, and most of these campaigns gave a reason to proceed spending advertising budget on mobile. It makes sense to predict that in 2009 mobile marketing will manifest itself as a frequent part of the media mix.

Last Tuesday I attended a mobile marketing roundtable at the offices of MVNO Blyk. In this two hour discussion among thirty mobile experts it became clear that the mobile marketing industry is still not fully understood by agencies and advertisers. Because of the multiple mobile marketing possibilities, agencies and advertisers tend to get confused and switch off. Continue reading…