Last night I was at Mobile Monday London to catch four presentations. The topic: advertising on mobile. The summary: there's a need for better measurement.

Claire Valoti from Mindshare was up first, giving the agency view of mobile advertising. She split the appeal of mobile in a media plan in to two parts: as a delivery mechanic (to extended reach, getting to a winder audience in a different mode); and as a platform (for couponing, or video uploads). She then went on to describe some issues and themes... and standardization and measurement were pretty much top of the list. That is, there's currently no good standard measure of reach, sessions, traffic or users for mobile advertising. And even if there was, it needs to be integrated into existing web buying systems, rather than via a mobile-specific system.

Claire had a good observation on social networking, and the importance for mobile. The m:metrics numbers quoted showed that the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups were more likely to be using social networking from the mobile, compared to 13-17 age group. It's not just about a youth market.

Another good point was made that events drive handset usage, as does "the right handset". An example given: at the end of the football (soccer) season, there's a drop in usage; during the season people are out and about and will use the mobile internet to look up news. As for "the right device", just look at the figures for internet usage on the iPhone compared to anything else....

Obviously mobile advertising has to be used in the context of the whole campaign, and it has to be relevant content: don't go taking an ad made for TV and slapping it on a mobile. Use the right techniques to get reach (banners, SMS, bluetooth), use location information to make it relevant, use coupons and free content to make it useful to the customer. And the user experience needs to be more streamlined: don't issue mobile coupons without telling your retail staff how to handle them.

Aside from measurement, another barrier to growing advertising budgets is the number of people involved in setting up a mobile campaign. The buying experience needs to be more streamlined.

Mobile advertising challenges were summarized as: speed, reach, cost, ROI, standards, and measurement. As examples of reach issues: Claire was interested in QR codes, but only 10% of mobile devices have a reader installed; buying from Blyk or similar to get an audience was described as having "limited reach" at the moment; mobile search needs to scale up as, right now, it's hard to spend the budget.

Shan Henderson from Vodafone kicked off his presentation by saying that it's the metrics that matter. Click rate is not the full story, but it's often the headline. Also audience demographic, behaviour, session length, frequency and reach are all important because "money follows measurement in media". He showed the "measurement gap" graph. I'm sure the slides will be available soon, but for now I've done a shaky recreation:

(I'm guessing Edward Tufte would not approve). So, we all agree it seems: we need better standards for measurement and more efficency in the buying and selling of advertising in order for the market to grow.

To address this, Shan went on to describe the GSMA Metrics Study which aims to make it easy to plan and measure mobile media. Later this year it's going to produce (one or more of): guidelines, best practices, definitions, technical standards, responsible ad practices, content standards. This will all be via an as yet unnamed ABC-like trusted independent organization.

Russell Buckley took the stage to talk about Admob, a self-serve and full-service ad network, shifting 2.bn ads a month, in 160 countries via 3000 mobile web sites. They select mobile sites, put ads on them, and share the revenue with the site. He described mobile advertising as good for: bands; to promote mobile websites; for operators to monetize their sites; and content owners to have access to a new marketing channel.

There was then a page of logos of who's advertising, and it showed that the US is generally ahead in terms of adopting mobile advertising. In fact, ad requests by country (to March) showed 47% of ads were for the USA. Other figures were: India (9.8%); UK (6.7%); South Africa (5.3%); Indonesia (4.7%); Romania (1.9%); Canada (1.3%); Philippines (1.3%); France (1%); Israel (1%); RoW (20.1%). By handset, Nokia were the top, although they are dropping: something that's not yet reflected in their market share.

Russell presented some case studies. MTV wanted to drive traffic to an awards site, and using text adverts they had a 300% traffic boost and 400% increase in downloads. Land Rover USA saw 23% of users interacting with an advertised landing page, with 3% going on to click the link to make a call to a dealer. Adidas saw a CTR of "well above 3%". Coca-Cola saw a CTR of 1.31%, but 130% watched a mobile video that was being promoted (some people watched it more than once).

Ray Anderson from Bango described the basic model for using advertising as: select a channel, measure response, look at user purchases, analyse ROI, then... repeat.

He made some great observations on the issues of search. Depending on the combinations of search provider and operator, you may find you get very different results from the advertising spend (especially if the content is transcoded). But he had a graph that compared the revenue Bango customers had received over time from Orange and Vodafone: the doubling (or more) in the graphs when the operators introduced a search page was impressive.

After the talks there was a brief panel session. All good stuff. And held in a great building.

Photos: from Route79, from appelquist, from Alex Craxton

Video and audio: usual appear on the Mobile Monday web site after a little while, so check there.

I was at a one-day conference last week, Future of Mobile, held at the IMAX at Waterloo, London. Great idea to have a conference in a cinema: huge screen, good sound, comfy seats, cup holders.

What follows are the remarks or thoughts I noted down...

Consumers

• Mobile phone users are not consumers, but creators. Phone calls, text messages are made up of a create and consume pair. I've heard this a great deal lately, especially in the context of the iPhone. There's clearly some truth in it, but I wonder for how long: if my phone has a music player in it, that's more consumption that creation. If I'm browsing the web, that's consumption. If I'm updating a social networking site from my phone, or uploading a photo to Flickr, sure, that creating, but it's not unique to the phone. Email and IM can also be a create and consume pair, and that's something you can do on the desktop or the handset. I'm not sure the whole active v. passive consumers meme is terribly useful.
• Mobile's combination of location plus attention is a unique advertising opportunity.

Content creation

• "Vodafone UK and Novarra are breaking the mobile web". (See TechCrunch)
• If you're anti One Web, Luca Passani's alternative to the W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices will be something you'll want to read: Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web
• One Web is about thematic consistency: "Ensure that content provided by accessing a URI yields a thematically coherent experience when accessed from different devices."
• WURFL has 3,000 developers, and WALL (Wireless abstraction library - a markup system to help automatically output the right kind of markup for different devices) is going into a new version: WNG. Slides are available for that announcement.
• .Mobi exists to "help the mobile web grow". The Device Description Repository (DDR) API is due in Dec 2007/Jan 2008, but isn't based on WURFL. The reason is that .mobi want to "add trust" and "add industry" to the API, protecting companies against possible royalty payments, and to provide confidence via a brand.
• Google mobile search is currently terrible.

Mobile AJAX

• Daniel Appelquist: Mobile Ajax will replace a class of application currently written in Java, will reduce time to market, open up the space to more developers, and result in more apps.
• Challenges for mobile Ajax: access to device hardware, consequences of privacy control, need for developer guidelines.
• Charles McCathieNevile: ECMAScript 4 is a "proper programming language", which might help reduce the amount of battery power that Javascript consumes.

Android

• It's a full-stack mobile solution, and open source. Based on Linux 2.6, plus a hardware spec, apps, and Java.
• Android exists to promote openness, build a loyal developer base, grow Google experience, and make handsets cheaper (software is 10% of the handset BOM).
• Each application is a separate Linux process, and all apps are equal to the operating system. It will include two-way synchronization (it'll be interesting to see how they've solved that problem).
• Google are not worried about writing specs, and just wanted to write it and get the code out.
• The architecture does allow for support of MIDP applications alongside Android applications. The Java implementation is Dalvik, plus a collection of useful Java packages.
• The claim is that the richer APIs provided give more control compared to MIDP.
• The system will be completely open source as soon as the first handset shipped. This isn't expected until late 2008.

As is normal for me, I spent only a morning at the Symbian Smartphone Show. I tend to skip most of the keynotes, which can be vapid, and hit the
vendors exhibitors I need to talk to.

This year I wanted to catch up with...

• Opera, and their platform. Looks like with Opera 9, sometime in 2007, we'll have off-line widgets which can embed themselves in the OS as native-looking applications.


• Google, to see how they built and tested their wonderful wonderful mobile maps application. I guess it was asking too much to see if they had solved the problems of testing mobile applications since last month :-) but it was a great opportunity to have a chat with them about the application.


• Sybase, to get a grip on their Anywhere range of products. I've had a long-standing "to do" item to look into what Sybase are offering. The two main product areas I'm interested in are M-Business Anywhere and SQL Anywhere. Unfortunately, they weren't pushing them at the show, so I was only able to get a rough overview. Still that's more than I knew before I went.

The photo, above, is from the one keynote I did sit in on: "Google in the Mobile World" by Alan Eustace. Mobile advertising, click-to-call adverts, and of course mobile search were the main topics. Interesting to note that users enter on average 2.3 words per search on mobile, which is the same as on the desktop. I'd have expected it to be less for mobile, but for no good reason. If you find that kind of thing interesting, there's a PDF study that goes into more detail.

Update 2006-10-23: The Register comments on some of the Mobile Web 2.0 presentations I didn't get chance to attend.

Presumably this will ensure Java is included by more handsets and other devices, including as a default on more Linux-based devices. What happens there is probably determined by the license choice. The intriguing possibly is that ME technology could become common place on device other than phones. Although some will shudder at that idea, remembering back to the original diagrams describing "profiles" and "configurations", it's what the technology was designed for: a configuration, like CLDC, is a set of classes for a range of devices; a profile, such as MIDP, is the collection of APIs for a vertical market.

Apparently "there could be gaps in the Java ME stack that would need to be filled, perhaps by contributions of relevant code from other open-source projects" (IT Week). That's a great opportunity for a small organization like ours to contribute to the source running on the next two billion devices out there.

I assumed that the open sourcing is going to be help during debugging. But then again, maybe not. It depends on who's using Sun's implementations. Symbian, Nokia, IBM, Sony Ericsson and all the other licensees all probably put in a lot of work for the platforms they support. Looking at it the other way round, it's a chance for manufacturers, networks and OS vendors to head-off fragmentation by contributing back to the Sun implementations.

Links:

• Rich Green video announcing open source Java ME.


• Sun's plans for open source Java.


• Update from Sun on August 14, 2006.


• A list of Linux mobile phones.


• IT Week talk to Simon Phipps about Java ME open source.


• Introduction to Consumer and Embedded Technologies, with Java.


• Symbian and Java ME.


• PDF: Java Platform, Micro Edition, for Sony Ericsson mobile phones.


• A list of Java ME licensees.

However, blogs from Lukas Hasik and Florian Beer pointed out that you can hack the mobility downloads to make it run on Mac OS X, so I took the plunge with it under NetBeans 5.5 beta with the enterprise pack. And sure, it works:

A couple of differences from the blog instructions: I didn't add a JDK class set to my path when setting up the platform, I added the MIDP API zip (because you don't want to try to use JDK 1.5 code on a handset just yet). Oddly, the Hello World Midlet that NetBeans generated was broken, and I've seen a few IndexOutOfBounds exceptions using the IDE, but I'm using beta software, so that's fair enough.

I'm not overly enamoured with the code generation, but perhaps I'll grow to love that as I customize it. The nice thing is about the mobility pack is the easy-to-use "press the run button to compile, preverify and run the application". Behind the scenes it's running ant, which is what I do anyway, but somehow just having the button to press to do it for all you makes a difference.

Looking ahead to Mobility Pack 6 there's at least the possibility that when the mobility pack is open sourced we'll get a ZIP distribution, but probably not full support for Mac OS X. If this is an issue you care about, take a moment to register at Netbeans.org and then cast a vote for issue 53076. Take care with the voting, because it's not just a matter of clicking the "vote for this issue" link: after that, you need to scroll down, enter a number in the text field opposite the 53076 entry, then scroll some more and click submit.

UPDATE 2006-11-16: For the Netbeans 5.5 final release I also had to edit NetBeans.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.clusters and add mobility7.3 to the end of the list.

It'd been a long time since I'd used a Nokia handset, so I decided to spend a while—pretty much the last 12 months in fact—with a Series 60 Nokia N70. I now need to get this off my chest: I hate this handset, and I just don't like Series 60.

I'm starting to wonder if Sony Ericsson have re-wired my brain away from the Nokia UI.

I quite liked Series 40, and it's still highly usable despite often looking dated. And I've really tried to get into Series 60, but none of the Smartphone Hacks have helped, and none of the applications (including Lifeblog) and none of the 3G features (like mobile TV) make it worth the pain.

The handset itself is actually pretty feature-full (2 megapixel camera, 3G, bluetooth etc...), but it runs too slowly for my liking. Writing messages is slow and clunky; making phone calls from the address book is overly awkward, and the functioning of the navigation keys next to the big red hang-up button means you will quit an application by accident at some point. I challenge you to use voice dialing without accidently calling someone random from your address book.

At least the N70 syncs well with iSync, once you know the magic incantations. I'm being pushed into the arms of other handset manufacturers....

Thank you for listening. That was therapeutic for me.

• It's not on-demand, so you watch what's broadcast.


• There's no EPG, which is strange. Not even an "now and next".


• News channels like to put text overlays on the picture, but you can't read anything but the main headline ticker. This is a digital medium, so you'd expect one day for the text to be transmitted in a way that let's the device render it appropriately.


• Yes, you get mosaicing and stalling.


• Some of the channels are broadcasting mobile-specific content, which seems to mean making the programmes shorter. The Discovery channels is branded as "Discovery Mobile".


• Yes, there are adverts.


• On the Nokia N70 incoming calls interrupts TV completely, have to exit out of Real Player, back to the browser, select the stream again. There's no TiVo-like pausing.


• Sport, as you'd imagine is pretty much unwatchable. Except for slow mo replays, which are just fine, and in fact are the saving grace of sports.


• It's not possible to watch while on a train. I've tried on the Brighton to London route, and on other routes out of London, and you just drop out of 3G or the picture breaks up. Coverage will improve, and buffering will help, although once you get to 100% buffering you effectively have a video iPod.


• I now fully appreciate that a big part of TV is sound. If you're sitting in a noisy environment, trying to watch mobile TV through the poor quality headphones usually shipped with handsets, then you're going to have a tough time.


• There are no BBC channels offered: I wonder if there's a TV license fee issue.

I'm not alone in trying this out, as according to The Guardian:
"40% of Vodafone's 3G phone customers used the service in the first 10 days, about 136,000 customers. They downloaded 1m streams of content. These numbers are good, but the content is free, so the real test will be February 1 when customers must start paying £5 a month for each of the two Sky Mobile packages on offer." And in the US, 1.2 million people watch TV on the mobile phones (say eMarketer).

I'm having problems understanding who mobile TV is aimed at.

It's not for commuters because the bandwidth isn't there when you're moving at the moment. That will change with a switch to broadcast TV, rather than IP TV.

The Vodafone offering is only good for TV browsing, and I'm not really a browser. Would I make use of it for some special events, such as a World Cup this year? Maybe... if I had no other option, and assuming the TV rights for the World Cup make it affordable to watch.

If I was starting out, and didn't already have a TV, I might be interested in my mobile phone being my only TV.

There's some development of made-for-mobile content:

• If you're addicted to Big Brother, the catch up clips on mobile might make sense.


• Classic clips, or five minutes of a standup comedy routines, might have some appeal, but this is a move to more on-demand TV. BBC Three, I notice, allow you to watch some program clips, although they are more like adverts and are downloaded rather than streamed.
  


• There's a mobile-specific soap opera in the works.

We need better on-the-move quality and on-demand content. And even then I'm not sure how much I'd use it.

1. Different user interfaces: different screen sizes, for example.


2. Different capabilities: some devices have Bluetooth support some don't; some devices will play some media formats, but not others; differences in performance characteristics...


3. JCP specification that aren't tight enough, leading to different interpretations of the APIs.


4. Configuration issues: handsets not configured for data access, or the operators messing with data as it goes through the network, or different behaviours depending on the tariff the customer is on (apparently).


5. Bugs.

To some extend the second item, and definitely the third item, is being addressed by the MSA (JSR-248 and JSR-249). It's all about tightening up the specs—putting in more MUSTs and less of the SHOULDs and MAYs—and making the TCKs more rigorous. That has the potential to make a substantial difference, but don't hold your breath.

The last couple of issues will benefit from the development community pushing back on the handset manufacturers and the operators. It's not acceptable for, say, SonyEricsson to charge me for the privilege of reporting bugs: sometimes you have to do it to bottom out an issue, but it's not something I'm going to do unless I really have to. I'd like to see less emphasis on the self-service forums, and an opening up the bug databases. With that, though, comes the burden on developers to submit simple reproducible bug reports.

The approach we're taking with our messaging services looks to be very similar to the approach the BBC are using. This is a nice reassurance given that the BBC team have to deal with breakfast radio stars who get their audience to text in 14,000 message at once.

You can get the audio on-line, but you'll also want the presentation (7M PDF) to look at. It's great work, and well presented.

It's been a few months since I moved away from a P800 to a V800. I wanted a handset that had good enough PIM functions, that would sync with my Mac, had the usual range of bands for roaming, but compared to the P800 I wanted something I could use while walking (it turns out I can't use the P800's stylus and move at the same time).

The Register gave it a positive review, and I think it's fair. The battery life is a little suspect, it's a little larger than it should be, but what can you expect of an early generation 3G handset?

My biggest gripe is with the keypad: too many keys, and the space in the wrong place. I can only guess that putting the space over on the right under the 9 key is either for left-handed people or for two thumb texting. For texting with one hand, when you're right handed, it's a form of torture for your thumb. (The middle zero key is where the space should be).

I wouldn't have touched the handset if it didn't come with a generous selection of Java APIs: MIDP 2, CLDC 1.1, Nokia UI, WMA (JSR-120), MMAPI (JSR-135, for audio and video playback, and camera snapshot), JTWI R1 (JSR-185), KDWP, but not the bluetooth API (JSR-82). The applications we've written run fine on it, although I'll be re-reading the RMS spec because I've made some gross assumptions about record ordering in Punch.

The handset also supports SVG-T and Java 3D (JSR-184). As we've recently been working on some 3D data visualization, I'm looking forward to see what the mobile Java 3D can do.

I'm not yet convinced by the clam shell design. On all the previous phones I've owned, some part of the screen is always visible. That's great for spotting a missed call or message. To get round the lack of feedback, the V800 has a 2.2 inch TFT display in the lid of the phone. This works fine, but feels a bloated solution. There must be a simpler way.