770 Party
December 15, 2005 | Comments770 Party: "With way way more users on the mobile side… why isn’t the mobile web driving the wired web instead of vice-versa?"
Where Have All The Single-Function Devices Gone?
December 10, 2005 | CommentsWhere Have All The Single-Function Devices Gone?: "Consumers faced with so many technology choices are forced to ask themselves when a device crosses the line from manageable multitasker to operational overload."
Musings of a mobile marketer: What is mobile marketing?
December 09, 2005 | CommentsHelen Keegan has one of the most comprehensive descriptions of mobile marketing that I've ever seen:
"Whenever I meet someone new and I tell them what I do for a living, they usually assume one or both of the following:
1. That mobile marketing is sending junk text messages to get people to subscribe, unwittingly, to a mobile content subscription service. Ergo, mobile marketing is bad.
2. Mobile marketing = marketing using SMS (text messaging)
Neither assumption is true so this is my lowdown on what mobile marketing includes."
ICUE launches
December 09, 2005 | CommentsICUE launches: "Starting up was surprisingly easy. You simply send a text message to 64888 with the word ICUE typed into the text section. You soon receive another text message inviting you to click on a web address. After three or four clicks you are on its website and free to choose from a number of books. I chose the free one, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and opted to store it on a memory card rather than on the phone itself. It is claimed to work on most cameraphones."
ICUE is another one of the things that's been keeping us busy over the last few months: a huge stack of novels (over 250 at the last count) distributed as MIDlets for 42 handsets (so far), with a WAP store presenting them for sale. Visuals by Blair Kimber, implemented by a crack team of FPers: Ms Lozdan, Mr Andrews, Mr Hopper, Mr Leies and Mr Skinner.
Handset UIs don't travel
December 09, 2005 | CommentsJapanese don't buy European handsets: "Nokia denied that there was a sales problem but admitted that there was "user confusion" over Nokia's keyboard buttons since Nokia insists on using a different convention to other handsets in the Japanese market."
And hmm, look at the poorest handsets that we get over here: those with UIs from Japanese manufacturers (yes NEC, I'm looking at you) which just haven't adapted to the UK. I'm increasingly coming round to the view that UIs are much more culturally dependent than I'd realised, or that there is some sort of Asia/Europe/USA divide, which seems ridiculous to me intellectually but seems to be the case: American handset UI is awful but tolerated over there, European UI seems to be OK and transfer well across European territories, and Chinese/Japanese is terrifying to a poor old European (and vice versa).