Over the ensuing years we’ve seen a proliferation of sexy new handsets with all sorts of clever advancements in the underlying hardware capabilities and Microsoft’s software platform has slowly evolved into today’s Windows Mobile 6.5.

However, as we are all aware, everything changed back in 2007 when the original iPhone was released and it created a new standard for mobile interaction that rather took the world by surprise.  Since then we have seen the emergence of other mobile OS platforms, most notably Google’s Android, so consumers now have some real choice about the kind of mobile experience they buy into.

As a former Windows Mobile 6 user I am all too painfully aware of why many people out there were rather underwhelmed when Windows Mobile 6.5 was finally released last Autumn. It’s probably been said many times before, but that’s not going to stop me reiterating what I personally found so frustrating about using Windows Mobile.

Its greatest strength is that it’s closely related to the Windows we know (and love?) on our desktops i.e. a common interface, familiar terminology, strong MS Office support and (mostly) reliable synchronisation capabilities etc.  On the flipside, its greatest weakness is that it’s closely related to the Windows we know (and hate) on our desktops i.e. an operating system designed for PCs (not mobile devices), an interface that is neither intuitive or easy to navigate on a small screen and (most annoyingly) that suffers from frequent and inexplicable device freezes which require us to “reboot” our phones or occasionally the need to actually remove and reinsert the battery…  frankly, IMHO, it’s pants.

Microsoft originally suggested that Windows Mobile 7 (i.e. the brand new, completely rewritten OS that would address all the issues and put them firmly back in the game) would be released in 2009. That did not happen and in its place Windows Mobile 6.5 (”an interim release”) hit the streets in October 2009.  Suffice to say that despite some cosmetic improvements not much had really changed and Windows Mobile 7 was still a distant dream.

Which brings me to the point of this blog – it appears that “Windows Phone 7” (yes, believe it or not that’s what it’s now officially called) will probably be launched in October.  After waiting literally years for Microsoft’s brand new mobile OS (remember, Windows Phone 7 is a totally new platform – not an upgrade of Windows Mobile 6.x) users are fully justified in expecting great things, so I thought it timely to see what the early indications are.

This comprehensive review from Engadget is mainly positive and genuinely seems to like some of the new concepts in the brand new “Metro” UI.  On the other hand, there are those who are clearly not convinced judging by the rather extreme verdict found in this Infoworld article.  Taking the middle ground, I think it’s fair to say that as far as PC World is concerned, the jury is out.

So, what we have is a broad spectrum of opinion, enthusiasm from some quarters and a healthy degree of scepticism from others.  For my part, I hope that Windows Phone 7 is a huge leap forward for Microsoft. I hope that it addresses all of the issues that have dogged the Windows Mobile 6.x platform for years and I dare to wonder if on this occasion they have succeeded in introducing a truly innovative new approach to mobile interaction to complement the current market leaders. Only time will tell.

However, I have a nagging feeling that it may not actually matter how good (or bad) Windows Phone 7 finally proves to be.  It has taken so long to reach this point that it’s probably irrelevant and simply a case of too little too late.  In the last quarter of 2009 Microsoft lost 20 per cent of its users to other smartphone platforms (mainly Android) and the fact that there will be no upgrade path from Windows Mobile 6.5 to Windows Phone 7 does not bode well for its future.

Watch this space…

Peter Skinner

July 23rd 2010

Mobile apps (Juniper Research) The global market for mobile applications is expected to more than triple from just under $10 billion at the end of 2009 to $32 billion in 2015. By the end of April 2009, Apple had confirmed that downloads from their App Store (to iPhone and iPod Touch combined) had just passed 1 billion; by early-April 2010, this number had exceeded 4 billion.

Mobile email (via Email Marketing Reports) An October 2009 report from the Radicati Group suggested there were 139m mobile email users in 2009.  This number is predicted to rise to over 1bn by the end of 2013.  A Litmus report from February this year gave the iPhone a 4% share of the email client market, making it the sixth most popular client overall.

Mobile video (Nielsen) The 20.3m people who watch mobile video in the U.S. spend an average of 3 hours, 37 minutes each watching video on a mobile phone.  The age group watching mobile video for the longest time (as in hours spent) via their smartphones are those aged 12-17 who watch 7 hours, 13 minutes per month on average with the next being the 18-24 age group with 5 hours 47 mins.  Users aged 25-34 are the largest group in the mobile video audience at 29%, while more males (55%) than females (45%) watch mobile video.

Mobile internet usage (comScore) 14m people in the UK used their mobile browser to access the internet in October 2009 and more than 18m people were using apps by the end of 2009.

Mobile internet (Essential Research) 76% of UK mobile phone users aged 16+ are not accessing the internet via mobile phones, 60% of UK mobile phone users aged 16+ claim not to even own a mobile with internet access, and just 30% of these non-owners are interested in getting an internet-enabled mobile phone.  Only 10% of mobile phone owners access the mobile internet via their phones daily and 15% do so at least once a week.  Something for the marketers then – 42% of mobile internet users earn over £40,000 a year (household income) compared to 31% of non users.  Daily users are also significantly more likely to spend more on their monthly mobile bills – 55% pay over £30 a month compared to 10% of non-users.

US mobile internet usage (eMarketer) eMarketer predicts that the number of US mobile users accessing the internet will jump from 73.7m in 2009 to 134.3 million in 2013.

Worldwide mobile internet usage (Gartner) Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web-access devices worldwide by 2013.  It’s estimated that the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.

Not altogether surprising then but always nice to know.

Peter Richards
July 2010

My reluctance to take the stage and wave my arms around in a passionate display of mobile affection wasn’t so much the fear of defeat (and the motion was squarely defeated…), it was more a response to the depressing realisation that the B2B industry is catastrophically unable to respond quickly to game-changing shifts in market development.

I sat in the front row and listened to the argument against the importance of mobile and, if you were there, the person snorting and spluttering, unsure whether to laugh or cry, was me. In the panel discussion following the formal debate someone ‘rested their case’ with the comment, “Ask yourself this, if you’ve just been told that your budget’s going to be cut by 25%, what would you do without? – Yeah, [pause for effect] mobile.” The comment (and the vote) highlights the staggering degree of ignorance about mobile technology in the B2B space.

A better question would have been, “If your budget was cut by 90% and you only had 10% left to play with, what is the single most essential activity that will deliver the highest returns in the next 12 months?” Yeah, mobile. Idiots.

“I don’t want people to have my mobile number” was one comment from the floor. “I don’t want more spam texts or unsolicited calls on my mobile” was another. Is that really the extent of understanding of the mobile platform? Has the B2B industry again failed to grasp the significance of social empowerment, this time in a mobile context?

No one is talking about SMS. No one is talking about telemarketing. That was the 1990s. It’s now 2010. ‘Push’ marketing pretty much died, fairly quickly, but painfully, with the advent of Social Media. That’s the thing that changed the world of communications forever – you know, the thing that has transformed Facebook into the equivalent size of the world’s third largest country.

What does that have to do with B2B? Well, irrespective of budget cuts, we can barely afford to push even if we wanted to. We have to ‘pull’ social-savvy audiences towards our products and services. If we do nothing else, we should ensure information is accessible when customers come looking for it. Richard Robinson, Industry Head of Business Markets at Google said in the debate, that mobile traffic has increased over 600% in the last year. Your customers use their mobile devices to access and request information online. No one heard that of course, because they were worried about unwanted SMS messages…

Your customers want to use their mobile devices – SmartPhones, NetBooks, Tablets – to access content (your content) when it’s convenient to them, which is hardly ever whilst they’re sitting at their desks. They want to see your content at the airport, on the train, in a coffee shop, on the street, while they’re waiting for something else, whenever they have a spare moment.

Now reach for your mobile (it’ll be right next to you) and punch in the URL for your own brand’s website and have a look at how well your company content performs on a 3” screen. It’s not good is it? Would you spend time engaging with your brand in that context? No, you wouldn’t. So why should your customers? It’s not even a difficult (or budget-breaking) problem to solve. Mobestar, who also spoke in the debate, can fix most mobile content delivery with a simple technology nip and tuck. If you do nothing else in the next 12 months, fix your content for mobile delivery – you can do it with one call, from your mobile. And if you don’t, just remember that your customers are already engaging with those that have. Ok, now you can vote.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

This is an interesting development, and even more significant when you realise that only 12 months ago RIM were on 46 per cent, Apple were on 19 per cent and Android had only 6 per cent.  So in the last year RIM’s share has dropped 10 per cent, Apple’s is up a measly 2 percent whilst Android has grown a whopping 22 per cent!

So why have we seen such a swing in Android’s favour?  It seems likely that much of Android’s popularity stems from the fact that it has been adopted by a striking list of handset manufacturers including Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, HTC and LG.  This has in turn led to a wide choice of Android devices – currently over 30 in the US – that consumer’s can select from.  Perhaps even more significantly, Android devices offer great value for money compared to the iPhone.  Here in the UK there are many offers around which provide an Android phone for free on a £20-a-month contract whereas you typically still have to fork out £200 or more for an iPhone on a similar contract.

So what happens next?  This is a highly volatile market with new devices being launched all the time.  The first few months of 2010 has seen the release of many impressive Android phones including Google’s Nexus One, Motorola’s Droid and HTC’s Desire to name just three.  Meanwhile, the Android OS platform continues to be enhanced and the upcoming Android 2.2 release includes a list of exciting new features and (allegedly) dramatic performance improvements of 450 per cent!  I predict we will soon being seeing announcements from most of the aforementioned device manufacturers about new handsets that will be launched to exploit the potential of the new platform.  HTC have got in first with their barnstorming EVO 4G.

All things considered, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that we will continue to see Android gaining market share and providing Apple with some serious competition.  However, Apple will clearly not go down without a fight and the soon to be released iPhone 4G will doubtless renew interest in the iPhone family and may help to slow the pace at which Android grows.  Despite this, Gartner are predicting that the surge in Android’s success is unlikely to stop anytime soon and will ultimately overtake iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile with a 14 per cent share of the global market by 2012.  They may be right, but then again, they may not.  Either way you can be sure it will be fascinating to follow developments over the next couple of years to see just how things pan out.

Watch this space…

Peter Skinner – May 14^th 2010

It really should not be the case when you have nearly 3,500,000,000 mobile phones in worldwide circulation and mobile has long been acknowledged as the marketeers ‘silver bullet’ for global domination.  So with apologies to Tom Waites : it  really is Big in Japan so why not here in Europe?  Japan has much higher mobile Internet penetration than the US or Europe. This high usage of the mobile Internet (and mobile data generally) means mobile advertising/marketing is considerably more advanced than elsewhere.

There are good reasons why Japan is king of mobile – it’s not just a cultural thing – and the mobile ecosystem in other countries would benefit greatly if these were emulated. The Japanese operators take much of the credit for fostering this environment (European operators are you listening). NTT DoCoMo, KDDI have the lowest churn rates (i.e. the highest customer loyalty) in the world; SoftBank is fifth. All three are in the top 10 for revenues.  There are 15,000 official sites on NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service (the largest operator portal in Japan) – that’s more sites than mobile ad network AdMob has on its entire global network – and that’s a fraction of the mobile sites in Japan. Everyone else benefits too –  for example  McDonald’s Japan mobile site has over 16 million registered users – that’s more than 12 percent of the Japanese population, and its mobile coupon service (two years old) is used by 4.5 million.

69 million Japanese accessed the Internet via their mobile device in 2009. That’s 62 percent of the 111 million mobile subscribers in Japan, more than twice the percentage in the US, or the five top nations in Europe.  The global penetration rate for mobile Internet is even lower than this at around 11-12% of mobile subscribers.

So why are they so much better than us. First and foremost, 75 percent of Japanese mobile data users are on flat-rate plans (first introduced in 2004 by au KDDI) so consumers have no fear of bill shock. At over 95 percent, 3G handset penetration is extremely high, and network quality and coverage are both outstanding allowing  rich mobile content and engaging campaigns. The Japanese mobile network operators only take 10 percent of content revenues generated via their mobile portals (which are massive). Furthermore the carriers approach has been “open garden” from the start, where Western carriers tried to keep consumers on their portals.  The standard messaging technology is mobile email, not SMS and MMS (which play no role in Japan), i.e. much richer content and cheaper to send.  Japan has a very homogeneous handset base, as the operators have kept strict control of mobile development. This means developers and marketers don’t have the device fragmentation issues that are getting worse in the US or Europe. Finally, fierce competition for subscribers means very high-spec devices, and that cutting-edge technologies highly relevant to mobile marketing appear in Japan first, then trickle down to other markets.

So it really is not too hard and we really must look beyond a sexy looking iPhone App as the answer.

The answer is out there somewhere let’s just hope the operators take heed and help us out.

I got the style but not the grace

I got the clothes but not the face

I got the bread but not the butter

I got the winda but not the shutter

But I’m big in Japan I’m big in Japan

But Heh I’m big in Japan

“Tom Waites – Mule Variation” 1999

Peter Richards  – April 26th 2010

Most of these are pretty straightforward to follow, and have been written in an attempt to show you just how easily you can improve on your campaigns, or, if you’re just starting out, what to look out for, when buying and setting up mobile marketing campaigns.

First, some background, for those of you not entirely familiar with the concept of Interactive SMS Marketing.  It’s called interactive because consumers are required to initiate the process of participating in the campaign, by sending an SMS to a short code, or virtual number, starting with a predefined keyword, and usually followed with some other text.

We are seeing stacks of examples of this every day, sometimes without even noticing it (or if you’re already in our business paying more attention to the mobile marketing advert than the rest of the page content) and they are typically of the form ‘Text XXX to YYYYY to Win/Vote/etc’.

But let’s get on with the actual hints & tips:-

• Know your audience

This is the single most important factor, and it is just as true here as for any other type of marketing campaign. With mobile marketing however, you are targeting people at a much more personal  level. Their mobile is their most personal electronic device. Being so personal, people are highly selective about what they see and do on their mobile. It is important therefore that you take the time to think about the people in your audience as individuals, not as a single lumpen mass. If you think it through and plan your campaign well, the results may pleasantly surprise you.

• Pick your rate / tariff

Continuing from the theme above, your audience usually fits within an age range / social class, etc. but it’s vital that you also consider the size of their wallet.  Think about how much they would spend.  Don’t think about how much YOU would spend – you are not buying  the product. This also depends on the value of the ‘prize’ or the service being offered. It is certainly worth asking  people in your target audience before you start your campaign what they’d be happy paying and perhaps charge a little bit more.

• Get a good deal

Just because you picked the right tariff doesn’t mean you’ll be maximising your profit. If you don’t own the short code (which can be expensive if you’re just looking to start an SMS campaign), depending on where you are in the world, you’ll be charged set-up fees (per short code / keyword / sub-keywords, etc — this depends) or you’ll only receive a share of the revenue generated by the SMS (e.g. for 20% share you’ll get 0.2 euro for every 1 euro (+VAT) SMS people send in. Or you might get charged both. Do a little market research because it can really make a difference.

• Choose between short code / virtual number

Short codes are usually 4-5 digits and are easier to remember because they are (obviously) shorter(!) Virtual Numbers are like mobile phone numbers (i.e. same number of digits, e.g. 10) but they’re called virtual because they’re not bound to a specific SIM card.  Any SMS sent to that number is routed to your software for processing, no SIM needed. So why might you need a virtual number then if it’s longer? Answer, because it supports roaming.  People from abroad (e.g. tourists) in your country CANNOT send an SMS to a short code, because it gets routed through the roaming network, to their own home network, and from there to the short code within their country. Short codes only work in a specific country, virtual numbers work everywhere. Short codes are (much) easier to remember though. Decide whether you want roaming support and take your pick.

• Pick a good shortcode / virtual number

Ok, now you’ve got the rate / tariff right, and a good deal, it’s time to think about the actual number. Just choose something that’s easy to remember, or something that makes some sort of spelling sense (e.g. 77493 spells ‘PRIZE’).  Just a word of warning, you may find that the companies with the best short codes / virtual numbers charge more, so be prepared to look for alternatives.

• Pick a good keyword

Your short code’s all setup, but you still need a keyword to bind to your service in order to make it all work. A keyword is the first sequence of letters until the first SPACE character. Note: some SMS marketing platforms (use Google to find a suitable one) will trim leading spaces (i.e. when the SMS starts with a space), others will treat this as ‘no-keyword’. You want your keyword  to be:  i) easy to Remember, ii) easy to Spell, iii) Relevant to your service and iv) Short.  I use the RSRS shorthand to remember this.

• Also buy/use misspellings of your keyword(s)

I’ve included this as a separate bullet because I think there’s extra value here.  DO NOT just get ONE keyword. People misspell and mistype all the time (and not just bad spellers – everyone does this).  Aim to get (if you can afford it) every possible misspelling you can think of to maximise participation.

• ADVERTISE — publicise call-to-actions

You might think that you’re now good to go, but you’re nowhere near done yet. Given that you’ve gone into so much effort to design a service specifically for your audience, clearly they will all want to participate – they just don’t know about it yet… Now is the time to go out and tell people about your fantastic new service / contest / vote / quiz / etc.  Again, think of what is the best way to approach YOUR target audience and use the appropriate medium (TV, print, radio, internet, etc.) or even better a combination of these with the same call-to-action.  The more people find out about your campaign the more will participate.

• Show the costs

If there’s a cost for the consumer associated with sending in an SMS (which there most probably is), tell them about it. Don’t let them find out on their phone bill – you will feel their fury, I kid you not. Put it in small letters beneath the call-to-action but NOT tiny – you are not trying to hide it from them, you want them to make an informed decision (that’s why their participation is so valuable after all). You just want them to know what it’ll cost them. Only state the cost, don’t tell them ‘only 1 euro’ is little to pay. They might still think it is, but don’t be the one to tell them – let them find out.

• Send participation confirmation SMS

Be sure to send back confirmation SMS messages to all incoming SMS. That way people know their message has been received and processed. Otherwise they might end up with more than one SMS, which might mean more profit for you, but it also means frustrated participants – do you really want that?

• Give feedback about incoming SMS

If your SMS marketing campaign is such that you can give direct feedback to your participants about their incoming SMS, do so. If it’s a radio or TV show, do comment about people’s views and opinions. It will make them feel valued, and they will keep on participating. And you will build your very own audience of followers.

• Tools

You will definitely find it helpful if the software tools you use to view and manage your incoming SMS campaigns automate routine tasks such as exporting to file, reporting, running draws (so that you can give out prizes), sorting and searching through incoming SMS messages, etc.  Just make a note of this as another thing to be aware of.  Most software/providers offer this sort of functionality, but do tick it off your list before you pick one, or you may live to regret it!

Peter Richards  – March 24^th 2010

When will brand/community owners wake up to the fact that to get to these consumers they have to appeal to the masses and not restrict their target audience to a handful of the enlightened? Please feel free to correct me but is the mobile web, whilst not perfect, at least commercially viable and what is more, generally available to everyone with a ‘non steam driven’ phone.  So why not create applications for everyone that anyone with any phone can use.  “Well” I hear you say “you would have to create a new instance of your application for every smart phone”.

At this point I must advise the reader that, not only can we deploy fantastic looking applications at Mobestar but we develop once and deploy over a multiplicity of handsets. Will this capability make any difference to the headless chicken iPhone rush?  Probably not in all reality – but I do hope that in what’s left of my lifetime that businesses will adopt the mobile web and use it properly.  I hate to sound like the proverbial prophet in my own land – but Apple obsessed marketers please note that I did try to warn you.

Peter Richards – March 8th 2010

The conclusion that we are expected to reach appears to be simply “the more apps the better”.  Please don’t get me wrong – choice is clearly a good thing, and I’m sure that there are some excellent applications amongst the 40,000 new entrants but am I alone in feeling that there should be other metrics for success rather than just sheer volume of numbers?  Let’s be honest, I doubt that the majority of even the most ardent iPhone app fans have seen (let alone downloaded) more than a handful of apps so the fact that the total continues to grow to such stratospheric levels seems somewhat irrelevant.  Furthermore, it’s not just Apple’s App store that is exhibiting this trend.  Although it’s a long way behind, the Android Market is also growing at a breathtaking pace, recently doubling from 10,000 to 20,000 apps in just over 5 months.

To put all these numbers into perspective, I recently attended a conference on the future of app stores and it quickly became apparent that applications which are not in the top 1% are unlikely to ever be seen or downloaded.  This situation is made worse by the fact that very popular apps inevitably feature in everyone’s “Top-10 list” and the snowball effect ensures that they attract ever more attention and hence more downloads whilst little known, unpopular apps remain doomed to obscurity.  Furthermore, despite the huge numbers of downloads that are frequently reported in the press very few of these translate into long-term users (i.e. less that 10% after 10 days dropping to less that 1% after 90 days.)   So where does this leave us and is the mobile application phenomenon more hype than reality?

In my humble opinion, the mobile application space is an exciting new area of technology that promises enormous potential for both individuals and businesses over the next few years.  However, I believe that it is still in it’s infancy and is only now just entering its second phase of development.  I would argue that the first phase was driven primarily by the rapid uptake of games, social networking tools and what I would categorise as “personal” applications and utilities.  (The majority of the apps mentioned above clearly fall into this category.)  Things are now starting to change and we are beginning to see the emergence of mobile applications for business.  Areas such as mobile banking, insurance and remote PC access are now spawning new applications that support people in their day-to-day business activities but even these fall well short of the potential that exists.

I believe that the exciting growth area will be for mobile applications (both downloadable Smartphone apps and cloud-based applications) that mobilise core business systems, thereby enabling organisations to offer improved customer service, more channels of communication, a richer customer experience and potentially new sources of revenue.  Examples are likely to include business information systems (e.g. access to financial data, analytics, reports etc.), field sales/support applications (e.g. mobile interaction for field-based employees with sales, job-scheduling & customer support systems etc.) and highly sophisticated mobile portals which deliver pertinent, timely information and exclusive offers for mobile users.  The key factor that will distinguish this next generation of mobile applications will not be how many of them there are but rather the value that they can deliver.  Hopefully we can start to measure the success of mobile applications by their quality rather than by their multiplicity!

Peter Skinner – February 2010

The other day, however, I was caught short. Being able to muster only £4.50 of the requisite £5.50, I was forced to concede and call the parking hotline. Imagine my surprise when I completed the entire registration and parking transaction in less than two minutes – entirely without defaulting to ‘operator assistance’. RingGo has the best voice recognition system and user experience I have ever encountered on a phone. I was so impressed, I did it again a few days later from a different station and I audibly squeaked with excitement when the automated voice recognised me, my car and my new location using geo-positioning on my mobile. I simply confirmed and was on my way, barely breaking stride.

I assumed that every mobile transaction would be as simple – or at least when I parked my car. Oh no. Why on earth would life be that simple? Having been lured into mobile voice transactions, I returned to my normal car park and decided I should embrace the change that mobile transactions could enable. But this was a different system. It didn’t have voice recognition, it wasn’t a seamless, intuitive process and it didn’t work. It wasn’t RingGo. I had to punch out every letter of my number plate, and my credit card, and my address. The menu system was appalling and just as I neared the end of the registration torture I was kicked out of the system. 12 times. Oh, how I laughed…

If there had been a mobile internet application, the whole transaction could have been so much easier. With a quick click and a couple of swipes the job would have been done. But of course, mobile internet ‘app culture’ has just arrived, or, more accurately, is just arriving. Which means there’s an opportunity, and a danger, for brands engaging in the mobile space.

The opportunity is to get it right. I didn’t just buy a ticket the first time I used my phone to pay for parking, I bought a mobile experience. It was one that worked initially, and then I discovered I had to be selective about the brands that I trusted for mobile engagement. If it says RingGo on the parking sign, I can trust it. RingGo is good, their competitors are shit. Had I tried the crap system first, I would have stuck to coins. The same is true of any other mobile experience. It will be important to make sure that the online brand experience we have created for our audiences actually works on mobile.

How, for example, does your glorious new corporate website perform and engage your audience on a three inch mobile phone screen? Mmmm. That part’s easily fixed, but beyond WAP enablement and iPhone apps, there’s a world of mobile that everyone’s using, except the B2B marketing community. As we increasingly migrate our business communications to mobile devices, it’s going to be important to distinguish between the brands that can migrate seamlessly, and those left standing around in the car park jiggling the loose change in their pockets. Let’s hope it’s loose change at least.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
scot@birddog.co.uk
twitter: @ScotMcKee

Mass adoption of the other smart phones by both vendors and consumers from 2010 onwards, coupled with the rollout of app. stores from the same suppliers will engender a much more balanced marketplace. “And not before time” I hear you say but all this market share noise, whilst being very important to Wall St. analysts and the like has very little to do with helping the average brand deciding on what their mobile strategy should be. Every marketing person worth his/her salt should be thinking about using the world’s 4 billion mobile phones to deliver their marketing messages but sadly a disproportional number of them still believe that creating a series of appealing iPhone apps to deliver their messages will be the good fairy in Pandora’s chest. Wrong!

Whilst the mobile phone market is out of recession and growing (at last) the iPhone only accounts for 17% of the touch phone market and 2.7% overall. Now I’m no Carol Voorderman but that still leaves a massive 97.3% of the market using other devices. Therefore, when planning and executing your mobile strategy ensure that you take this into account and allow for the vast majority of your target market. If you are designing applications make sure that they will be consumed by as many people as possible and design ubiquitous campaigns and content. The mobile web is now used by just about everybody so make the most of it.

It is easy to be drawn in by the hyperbole and the appeal of the latest wave of mobile mania but do not restrict your own activities to a single focal point. It’s a big, wide, mobile world out there so make the most of it.

Peter Richards