Mobile Subscriptions to Reach 4 Billion

August 6th, 2009

If you’re in the job space and need more convincing that mobile is the way to go when it comes to recruiting candidates, listen to this.

A new report from Bitkom found that there will be more than 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions throughout the world by the end of this year. Although there are more than 4 billion handsets, the number only refers to the amount of in-use numbers or connections.

Bitkom, a German industry association, took its research figures from the Berlin-based Information Technology Observatory. If you take into consideration that the world’s population is currently estimated to be 6.8 billion, that means three out of every five people will have a mobile phone.

“The strongest growth in mobile phone usage now comes from emerging and developing countries,” Bitkom’s Friedrich Jousssen, who also heads mobile phone provider Vodafone’s German operations, said.

For instance, in India alone, mobile phone usage is expected to increase by 32 percent this year to 457 million people. A 14 percent increase is anticipated in Brazil and a 12 percent increase is expected in China, bringing the number of people in that country using mobile phones to 684 million.

On the flip side, industrialized countries are seeing more modest growth rates.

The European Union already has more mobile phone contracts than citizens, causing the industry to focus on mobile internet provision via advanced UMTS technology, the fastest mobile-phone signal currently available. That technology is expected to grow by 36 percent to reach 172 million users in Europe, and could increase by 74 percent to reach 108 million American users.

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ChaCha Ranks High in Traffic

August 4th, 2009

ChaCha has answered 150 million questions in only 18 months.

According to the recent Q1 Mobile Messaging Report from The Nielsen Company, ChaCha ranks within the SMS services with the most traffic, along with American Idol, Twitter and Facebook.

ChaCha is a free mobile answers service and is considered to be a main competitor to Google’s SMS search offering. The site allows users to ask a question and get an answer in real time using a mobile phone. Users call 1-800-2ChaCha or text their questions to ChaCha (242242) and receive an answer within minutes.

Most recently, ChaCha received $4 million of a $5 million round of funding. Of that money, $2 million will be used to pay back a loan from Citigroup. In march, the company raised $12 million, which it planned to use to expand its sales activities and open an office in New York.

Susan Marshall, VP of marketing for ChaCha, said that during July, the company revied 1,043 job-related questions per day and 31,290 for the total month. She said people are looking for advice, opportunities and pay information. You can see some samples of questions on the site’s Careers and Employment section.

Some examples include:

QUESTION
What should my career be?

Answer
You should look for a career in green energy. Jobs are plentiful and they are in high demand. Thanks for using ChaCha tonight!

QUESTION
What will i do as my career?

Answer
If you’ve got the charisma of Barack Obama, you can be a career politician. Thanks for asking ChaCha!

QUESTION
What are some places hiring in Las Cruces, New Mexico 88005

Answer
Harris Corporation, Convergys, Allen Medical Group, and Sitel are all hiring in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Thanks for using ChaCha!

ChaCha employs a group of expert “Guides” to search and answer questions online. Guides are paid on a per-transaction basis and make anywhere from $3 to $9 per hour. The company also pays people 4 cents per transcription of a recording question to a text question.

“Hitting the 150 million answer mark changes the search dynamic,” ChaCha CEO Scott A. Jones told MarketWatch. “Our explosive progress reflects the way today’s very mobile consumers want to search and retrieve information – ChaCha is a huge win for both our customers and our advertisers.”

While ChaCha’s basic services are free, the company does offer paid versions for marketing campaigs. The company claims to drive engagement with your brand around a certain initiative. The service allows companies to buy certain categories and target ads to users who ask related questions.

ChaCha’s previous clients have included Best Buy, Cocal Cola, Palm, McDonalds and President Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign.

The site currently has 5.5 million unique users and receives a new user every 5.4 seconds. Of those users, 52.1 percent are male, 47.9 percent are female, 49.3 percent are 18 to 24-years old, 34.7 percent are 12 to 17-years old and 44.7 percent do not have a Web-enabled phone.

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QR Codes Coming to America

July 29th, 2009

Could the QR code become mainstream in the United States anytime soon?

QR codes, sometimes called URL killers, are 2D bar codes that contain data. In order to read a QR code, a mobile phone user simply launches a reader on their device and takes a picture of the image. The software then triggers the appropriate response, which can include launching a URL in the phone’s browser or streaming a video or MP3.

So far, QR codes have mainly only been popular in Asia, but a slew of new activity could bring them to the forefront in the United States.

AdvertisingAge recently reported that the following are taking advantage of QR codes:

  • “9″: The new film, produced by Tim Burton, will use QR codes as a promotional device. Anyone who has a QR reader on their mobile device will be able to scan the code for exclusive clips from the movie and commentary from the director.
  • Green Day: In order to promote “21st Century Breakdown,” the band’s newest album, Green Day put QR codes in magazine ads, posters and stickers. Through Delivr, the codes direct users to a special mobile site where they can download exclusive images and videos.
  • YouTube: The video site now allows you to generate a QR code that embeds a link to the video when you visit YouTube through an iPhone or Android phone.
  • Firefox: Mozilla recently created Mobile Barcoder, an add-on for the Firefox browser that allows users to generate a QR code of a URL or selection of text in order to easily transfer it to a mobile device.
  • Louis Vuitton, Takashi Murakami for Marc Jacobs: SET, which is based in Tokyo, is using QR codes to promote the designs of these companies.

These aren’t the first QR code campaigns to take place in America. Last year, Citysearch created a pilot program in San Francisco that allowed users to get restaurant reviews from stickers placed in the windows of participating establishments. Other advertisers, such as Pepsi, Siemens and Volvo, also have create QR campaigns.

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Sprint Nextel Buys Virgin Mobile USA

July 29th, 2009

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Thanks, Sarah

July 25th, 2009

We’re a bit late in recognizing this, but much love goes out to Sarah White, Chief Strategy Officer with HRMDirect, for her recent blog post outlining May’s Kennedy Conference. In it, she talks about our presentation on mobile recruiting:

By far the best session of the event was Joel Cheesman’s breakout session on mobile recruiting. Not because it was particularly showy, but because I appreciate the laid back presentation style and loved the topic.

She went on to proclaim, “I can see a day where there really are no longer job boards – peoples matching jobs are simply texted/messaged to their phones instead of the e-mail and they can automatically submit their interest – no online job search needed. I can see marketing and recruiting in consumer product organizations finally actually getting together on something instead of just talking about it.”

She then pimped our white paper. We love Sarah. A lot. ‘Specially ’cause we weren’t hugged much as kids.

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Representing mJob

July 16th, 2009

Checkout contractor Gary Fountaine chattin’ up mJob at an event in San Francisco.

Gary

Gary

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SAP’s Mobile Marketing Campaign

July 16th, 2009

Last month, SAP unveiled a new mobile marketing campaign, along with related online and print ads.

As part of the campaign, the company used an ad network to seed banner display ads on the mobile version of 11 different IT and business technology sites, including CBS, Gizmodo and CNN. Users can click on the display ads and connect to an SAP site that hosts five different short videos. Those videos focus on the connection between clarity and successful business and are hosted by such notable people as Accenture’s Royce Bell and James Surowiecki, a writer for The New Yorker.

The company began using mobile marketing in an attempt to reach its target audience of C-level executives and senior business decision makers. Although this particular campaign is too new to have quantifiable results, OgilvyOne found that mobile banner ads have a 2 percent click-through rate, compared to Internet banner ads, which have a .15 percent click-through rate.

As mobile usage in general continues to grow, it’s likely that more advertisers will jump on the mobile bandwagon. Currently, 11 percent of the country’s 267 million mobile phone users own Internet-ready smartphones. Even big companies like Buick, Kraft and Wal-Mart have begun building mobile-ready Web sites.

Other viable mobile marketing options for advertisers include text messaging and Quick Response Codes. M:Metrics has reported that 49 percent of mobile phone users in America actively use text messaging, making it a convenient way to reach a target audience.

QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that, when scanned by a phone, connect you to a specific URL. This option is more popular in Japan, where QR codes have been used since the mid-90s and come preloaded on mobile phones.

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Mobile TV is Growing

July 15th, 2009

Mobile TV seems to be catching on in America, and that could mean new avenues for advertisers.

Strategy Analytics predicts the mobile TV broadcasting market will increase by 50 percent this year, from $200 million last year. Some big name brands, such as Ford and Microsoft, are already buying commercial spots within mobile network content.

Until recently, mobile TV wasn’t that popular in the United States. South Korea led development and now half of that country’s 45 million cellphone users watch mobile television. Japan and Hong Kong have grown fond of it as well.

In hopes the American audience will soon grow, broadcasters and technology companies have created Mobile Digital TV, a technical standard for transmitting video to portable devices. That will be tested later this month in Washington, D.C.

MobiTV, a California-based company that provides subscription-based content across 20 mobile networks, already has 7 million subscribers and has seen a 600 percent growth rate during the last three years. Flo TV, Qualcomm’s mobile TV service, is planning to expand to 100 major U.S. cities.

According to a report from Transpera, the largest mobile video ad-network in the country, more than 13 million Americans watched TV on their mobile phones during Q1. This is a 52 percent increase from the same time last year.

This means mobile TV advertising could soon start to grow. Several TV networks are hoping that will be the case, as a total of $1.5 billion in ad revenue was brought in during Q1, a decrease of about 11 percent from the $12 billion brought in during the same time last year, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising.

During the last few years, there has been a migration from the television to the Web, and now it seems to the mobile phone. CBS, ESPN, MTV and Disney have all launched programming made specifically for phones. These include live broadcasts that show the same commercials that are seen on TV and on-demand videos with ads already chosen.

An example of mobile TV’s success is the Rachel Maddow iPhone app from MSNBC. That app, which allows viewers to watch a three- to five-minute segment of the show or the whole episode on their iPhone, BlackBerry or Palm Pre, brought in $750,000 during June. Another example is the 1 million people that watched the recent Michael Jackson memorial from their phones.

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Facebook Focuses on Mobile

July 14th, 2009

In an attempt to focus more on mobile users, Facebook is teaming up with DeviceAnywhere to ensure its mobile applications are optimized for specific handsets.

DeviceAnywhere is an SaaS platform that allows application developers and device manufacturers to test software on a variety of handsets from more than 30 mobile operators throughout the world.

Facebook has already had some success with its mobile applications, as the iPhone Facebook app is often on the App Store’s most-downloaded list. Now Facebook is hoping to have that kind of luck with other smartphones.

“Although many companies offer mobile sites or applications for their consumers on-the-go, Facebook is taking it a step further by developing multiple applications that are customized to a user’s device,” DeviceAnywhere CEO Faraz Syed said. “Not only does this require testing an enormous amount of handsets, but also on carriers and networks on a global scale.”

Almost 20 million users access MySpace through a cellphone, causing the company to look at the mobile market as a strong growth avenue that could be monetized with relevant ads. However, neither Facebook nor MySpace have been able to significantly monetize its mobile users. The fact that neither company has strong location integration – a strong facet for other mobile social networks like Loopt, Brightkite and MocoSpace – could be the reason why.

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palm pre commercial

July 14th, 2009

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