Mobile Marketing Blog by Punchkick Interactive

It would seem that WiMAX’s impact on mobile technology in the United States might be closer than we all originally thought.

NextWave Wireless Inc. (Nasdaq: WAVE), a global leader of all things WiMAX, announced that it has retained Deutsche Bank and UBS Investment Bank to explore the sale of its extensive spectrum holdings in the United States. NextWave’s U.S. spectrum footprint covers over 251 million people in the United States and includes major markets such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Houston, and Detroit.

What drove the surge? Possibly Allen Salmasi, chief executive officer and president of NextWave Wireless, when he remarked:

Since the completion of the recent 700 MHz auction, we have received multiple offers for our U.S. spectrum assets. [N]ow is the perfect time for us to sell these valuable assets while network operators are trying to finalize their band plans and spectrum holdings for their continuing 3G and planned 4G rollouts. Monetizing the value of our substantial spectrum assets would allow us to further strengthen our balance sheet, retire debt, and continue the commercial introduction of a wide range of innovative wireless broadband and multimedia solutions such as our high-performance WiMAX and RFIC chipsets, advanced multi-mode, multi-band TD-CDMA, WiMAX and LTE enabled base station platforms, breakthrough MXtvTM and TDtvTM mobile television systems.

Adriana Gil Miner created a great video for her blog, Digital Ecologist, outlining today’s issues with SMS spam, privacy, and how mobile marketing law in the United States may be influenced over the next several years by the CAN SPAM Act. This follows up on Pogue’s Post about The Worst Spam Ever.

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While using Google Calendar this morning I noticed a new feature titled, “Google Wake Up Kit!” I clicked on it because I often have trouble waking up. Unfortunately, however, it was just an April Fools Day joke from Google.

The wake up page reads:

In combination with the kit, you can receive a new type of notification from Google Calendar, called the “wake up” notification. This notification is relentless in ensuring your timely awakening from restful slumber.

The “wake up” notification uses several progressively more annoying alerts to wake you up. First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used. The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters. Learn more.

Learn more about Punchkick Interactive’s custom mobile software capabilities.

As a resident of the United States, I’ve longed for the latest mobile phones from Japan, Korea, and other more “tech-fortunate” countries throughout APAC and Europe. I live in arguably the most powerful industrialized nation on the planet, and yet I still can’t video chat from mobile to mobile like they do in Japan. My free-phone-with-a-two-year-commitment doesn’t come with a QR Code™ reader pre-installed. And, let’s be honest, most entry level phones in the States don’t even include Bluetooth or a 1.3 megapixel camera. Until recently, I was convinced that the U.S. mobile market is behind the times.

So what gives?

Very recently, a number of studies have surfaced leading me to think that maybe, just maybe, things aren’t so bad on this side of the pond. For example, according to the CTIA in Wireless Wave Fall 2007 - A Continental Idea:

[..] earlier this year Merrill Lynch reported that Europeans still pay an average of 19¢ per minute for an average of 153 minutes a month, compared to 5¢ per minute for 834 minutes a month for customers in the U.S. The U.S. is the leader in offering bucket plans, driven by competitive market forces to offer more minutes at a lower effective rate.

3G penetration stats are looking up, too. According to industry analyst Chetan Sharma, President of Chetan Sharma Consulting, “Because of the heavy penetration of the Internet over the desktop, as well as the late advent of 3G in the market, there was not a big driver for mobile Internet until the last one or two years. As 3G penetration has been increasing[,] now we’re up to 15 to 16 percent penetration (in the U.S.).”

M:Metrics — which conducts an on-going survey of thousands of wireless customers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the U.S. — recently found that a slightly higher percentage of U.S. consumers browse wirelessly for news and information than their European counterparts.

The study also shows that the U.S. is at the top in average number of minutes used per month at 832 (Canada, the number two country, averages 429 minutes). The country with the lowest average revenue per minute — a measure of the effective price per voice minute — is again the U.S. at $0.04 USD (South Korea and Mexico are tied for the number two spot at $0.11 USD). And finally, the number of wireless carriers with over one million subscribers is the largest in the U.S. at 10 companies. The country with the next highest number is the England.

My conclusion? Maybe it’s true that the grass is always greener on the other side.

Bill Perry (Mobile evangelist for Adobe) has just posted the Flash Lite install base forecasts for 2008 from the Strategy Analytics Flash-Enabled Handset Forecast from January 4, 2008. The forecast includes the installed base of Flash Lite devices by Region, Country and Version. Bill’s PDF highlighting the 91% Global Growth of Flash Lite in 2007 can be downloaded here.

Worldwide, the totals for 2008 add up to: 461,733,000 mobile devices with Flash Lite pre-installed.

The score card for 2008 reads:
1. APAC - 154,761,000
2. Western Europe - 107,832,000
3. Japan - 77,603,000
4. Americas - 64,561,000
5. CALA - 32,024,000
6. Central Europe - 24,952,000

What are the biggest surprises?
I truly did not expect the Flash Lite 2.x numbers to be so high. Adobe is forecasting that in 2008 the Americas and Western Europe will have higher Flash Lite 2.0 or 2.1 adoption than 1.1! Despite this, Flash Lite 1.1 will still most likely stay the obvious standard.

I am very excited to see that the Americas are so close in numbers to Japan. Additionally, they have more than double the numbers of Central America, Latin America, and Central Europe. It’s no surprise that Western Europe and APAC still top the charts.

What does this all mean?
As companies like Verizon continue to grow with Flash Lite, consumer adoption rates will no doubt go up as well. As a full service mobile marketing firm that is passionate about mobile and pushing the medium forward, we can continue to pursue Flash Lite development with our clients—knowing that one day in the near future it will become the mobile standard of third party development.

We have been working commercially with Flash Lite for some time. Our projects have ranged from oem user interface development, to consumer content such as custom applications and games. We couldn’t be happier about the news.

Every once in a while—perhaps as often as the solar equinox or emergence of the breeding cicadas—I open my mouth and say something I later regret. And when I do so, I feel it is my duty to own up to my mistake. So, with my sneaker on my plate, I apologize to all of you about my July 5th rant, Why a True Apple Fan Would Never Buy an iPhone.

Why, you ask? Allow me to explain.

I decided that I needed a smart phone with true email capabilities about two months ago. Looking around at the options out there, I wasn’t particularly blown away by any of the smart phones I played around with at the Verizon store. On second look, the iPhone started to seem like a phone I could (*ahem) learn to live with.

Fast forward two months.

My iPhone and I are best friends, and in some countries, possibly married. I absolutely cannot live without it. The email software is incredible and syncs perfectly with my .Mac account and IMAP business account. The camera is beautiful and I find myself constantly taking pictures with my phone—something I’ve never done in the 11+ years I’ve been a cell phone user. I use the iPhone religiously for iPod purposes, and my video podcasts have never looked better. And the Safari browser has proven to be a mid-argument-dispute-resolution miracle on more than one occasion.

Sure, the iPhone has some problems. Edge isn’t too quick, and 8 gigs just isn’t enough memory. But the goods FAR outweigh the bad. Software updates have even fixed a number of the issues I once complained about. Reading through my previous post, I’ve had to ask myself: Am I so jaded that a technical marvel like the iPhone can elicit a complaint from me?

Mr. Jobs, if you’re reading this, please accept my apology. Please continue to deliver me gadgets like the iPhone. And please forgive us tech-geeks when we are overly critical. We don’t mean it.

*Sometimes.

Learn more about Punchkick Interactive’s iPhone software development capabilities.

Cameron Moll has just finished and released his book, Mobile Web Design.

Much has been written about mobile devices. Plenty has been written about developing websites for the so-called “standards era” of the web. However, little has been written about the two colliding. This resource aims to fill that void.

As a reviewer of the book, and more specifically the Flash Lite section, I have had a chance to read through the entire book and it is really a great piece of writing. It is certainly not written for the mobile Web expert, but rather, it speaks perfectly to anyone in a position to develop for, manage, or give advice regarding your organizations foray into a web strategy for mobile devices.

PDF copies can be purchased for $19. Well worth it for anyone interested in the mobile space. You can also download a preview sample.

Via The New York Times, “Google said yesterday that it had bought GrandCentral Communications, acquiring a service that lets people use a single number for all their phones.

Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

GrandCentral users can also create a single mailbox, accessible over the Internet, for all their phone messages, Google said on its Web site.

Users register their phones and can set all or some of them to ring based on who is calling.”

• Is Google going to launch a Google-branded handset?
  A short post asks this question citing Google’s announced partnership with LG Electronics.
• Creating and Testing Mobile Web Sites with Adobe CS 3
  Short article on testing .mobi sites with Dreamweaver CS3 and Device Central. It’s another great read from Scott.
• Vodka Authentication by SMS
  Apparently, counterfeit Vodka is running rampant in Russia. To combat that effort, the Russian government is creating a Vodka authentication system via SMS. “By sending the serial number of the bottle to a designated short code, they will get a response by SMS certifying (or not) the product.”
• Penrillian .sis Packager
  Penrillian have recently released a useful .NET application that allows anyone to package up passive content (music, images, ebooks etc) as part of standard UIQ or S60 .sis install.
• Nokia Mobile Web Server
• ustwo is hiring interface designers
• iPhone guided tour from Apple
• Top 10 phones for playing games
  It is what it is. Every list of links needs a good “top 10″ article.
• Appleiphany
  “Appleiphany (noun): The feeling experienced when using or viewing an Apple device, questioning why the heck things haven’t worked like this all along. Example: When viewing the recent iPhone Guided Tour, I kept asking myself why mobile phones don’t already do all this stuff… seriously, it’s so dang obvious. See also hindsight.”

Sources at WWDC are reporting that there is officially no Flash support on the iPhone. Apparently, in the State of the Media address yesterday, the announcement was made that: “There will be no Flash support at the moment on the iPhone.” Developers are being told not to serve video via Flash, as there simply isn’t a player built for the phone yet.

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Punchkick Interactive has authored it’s first article for Adobe.com. Zak Dabbas and myself (Ryan Unger) co-authored Developing Flash Lite for BREW applications for Verizon Wireless. This article covers not only the technical side of developing applications for BREW for Verizon Wireless, but also the marketing aspects of distributing content directly to Verizon Wireless or to a content catalog partner such as Atom Entertainment, FunMobility, or Smashing Ideas.

The article has three main sections:
1. Understanding the Flash Lite for BREW marketplace
2. Becoming an authorized Qualcomm BREW developer
3. Testing content on a Verizon Wireless handset

Read the full article on Adobe.com

Introduction
At the October 2006 Adobe MAX conference, Adobe and Verizon Wireless announced a partnership that would make Flash Lite content available to over 37.5 million Verizon Wireless subscribers. Flash Lite developers were understandably excited about the announcement, and teaching developers how to create content for Verizon Wireless became a central focus of the MAX conference.

This article will teach you how to develop Flash Lite for BREW content directly for Verizon Wireless. It will detail the process of becoming an authorized Qualcomm BREW developer, testing your Flash Lite for BREW content on a Verizon Wireless handset, and selling your content through Verizon Wireless.

In addition to understanding the technical specifics of creating Flash Lite for BREW content, this article will also discuss the pros and cons of using the direct model for developing and distributing Flash Lite for BREW content—including the real costs and anticipated returns on your development investment. It will also briefly cover the process of selling content through an content catalog partner, and the pros and cons associated with doing so.

Also, we would like to thank Phil Pastore for helping out with the headshots.

Learn more about Punchkick Interactive’s Flash Lite development capabilities.

This mobile marketing blog, Punchkick Interactive, is now available for download on EyeMags.com. I assume that most people reading this know what EyeMags.com is, but for those of you who don’t I’ll offer a brief description.

EyeMags is essentially a service that streamlines mobile blogging. With a simple download you can receive updated streams of any blog, or “mobile magazine” as they EyeMags would put it. The service does a pretty great job of presenting this content on a mobile device.

Learn more about Punchkick Interactive’s mobile Web site design capabilities.