If you head over to Google Mobile Products you'll be able to access a list of countries where Google supports mobile products. This is a fairly new area of the search engine.
I suspect coders will be interested in the doctype Google uses for these mobile pages.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">
I'm just back from the Internet Advertising Bureau (UK)'s Engage conference. I thought I would share some stats. These come from Matthew Kirk, Orange's Director of Portals. The fine print of his slides may have cited additional third party sources but his name will do for now and, if you're a member, you should be able to download the original from the IAB.
Much to the audience's dismay - Display will be bigger than Search in mobile marketing in 2010. Nevertheless, the figures here are all huge. Skip to the end and look at the in-game figure. Sure, that's the smallest (there are smaller still but I didn't scribble them down) but it's worth noting that Microsoft where plugging their Massive in-game advertising solution to us today. Massive is, of course, the in-game advertising company they bought to rival Google's purchase of AdScape.
Here are the exact figures for mobile marketing in 2010;
Display - £88,000,000
Search - £51,000,000
TV Broadcast - £23,000,000
SMS - £7,000,000
VoD - £7,000,000
In Game - £4,000,000
What about a breakdown by age? Glad you asked. 
The figure for that graph;
Under 24 - 29%
25-34 - 30%
35-44 - 22%
45-54 - 11%
54+ - 8%
Twice as many men as women use mobile internet. That's not surprising. I found Orange's frankness surprising, though. Kirk was upfront in saying that mobile growth had slowed to only 5% (49m out of the UK's population of 60m have mobiles) and so the networks need mobile marketing as a revenue stream.
P.S. I may make a series of posts like this and if I do I'll tag them all Engage 07.
Just 11 days after launch O2's branded Facebook group has over 63,000 members (sub needed).
The group encourages students to make "noise" by uploading pictures and comments. This explains why such a young group has so much more rich media than others of its size - but also explains why the comments are so dire. 
There's also a price. The University with the most comments wins a £50,000 branded party.
Gareth Jones from Haymarket's Marketing magazine points out that O2's Facebook group is now ahead of H&M's branded community (~23,000) and Virgin Mobile's (~1,100).
So, a £50,000 prize and an agency run Facebook group? It's likely that O2 will be writing much of the money as Brand Spend. However, the goal here is to attract students to O2 Favourite Place tariff (students being a target as they have their halls of residence as a favourite place) and so O2 may well be able to measure the success of the campaign by looking at the Facebook activity, which Unis were noisy on it and then what the Favourite Place tariff subscriber count looks like from those post codes.
P.S.. In other operator news Vodafone has had their 'Pee your pants' (sub) advert cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA ruled that the poster was a light-hearted reference to laughing. Just so you know.
O2 is a big mobile carrier in the UK. They have the iPhone contract. They're part of Telefónica.
O2 has just signed one of their first (probably of many) made-for-mobile content deals. I blog about this with this with Tuesday's post questioning whether content or communication is king on mobile.
Certainly it seems that O2 are lining up their ducks. iPhone users might ask; "Now what?" after they've played with the device and it might just be that a mobile drama series will suit that big screen very well.
Big names are involved in the drama (which will be called Cell) - Endemol UK and Mobstar Media. Endemol are the people behind the infamous Big Brother TV show. I've never watched Big Brother but I may watch Cell just so I can be part of the premiere.
Do you know the big problem with being clever and calling the series Cell? That's right - it'll be a bitch to rank for. If you search for [O2 Cell] or [Endemol Cell] you'll get a bunch of results about mobile/cell phones.
I'm on O2 so my mobile will be able to get this. I'm interested in how they're going to announce this to me. An SMS seems most likely. If you're not on O2 - fear not - the series will be shared with other providers and aired online after O2's customers have had the first chance to view it.
Is this a first? Not really. It just seems like another significant step forward and another increase in the heat around mobile content and mobile marketing.
It's worth noting that Endemol is doing pretty well with its mobile content. They've already had a fly-on-the-wall mobile series which followed the pop band the Sugababes.
One thing I've noticed is that many SEO blogs aren't covering the growth of mobile content very well. This is will be partially due to the differences between European, American and Canadian mobile usage. European mobiles (oh, I mean; cell phones) tend to be closer in technology to the latest Asian mobiles (or are a Nokia or Sony Ericsson in the first place). A high percentage of European users are pretty close to being mobile power users too.
My prediction for bloggers most likely to cover this story are: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim as the site does well to cover a broad range of digital topics and Barry Schwartz who may well have an iphone tag on his personal blog.
Philipp Lenssen's just posted to say that Google's bought Jaiku.
Jaiku talk a lot about "presence sharing" and Philipp succinctly translates that as "your friends know where you are & what you’re up to by looking at their cell phone using Jaiku’s service". This is very much the same arena that dodgeball played in - before the founders quit Google.
So what are Google up to here? There are no mobile community leaders yet. There's no mobile gathering site that's similar to what YouTube did for video or what LiveJournal did for early blogging. Google is betting there will be a mobile community market leader. Google is betting that we'll all become addicted and that we'll all spend hours each week on our mobile keeping up to date with the mobile community. Google want to make it as easy as possible for that community to happen and they want to place appropriate adverts in the community to help fund it.
This is an area where, I suspect, the savvy mobile operators (the likes of Vodafone and t-mobile) will be unwilling to surrender to Google without a brawl.
We've even seen Nokia plan a future around this sort of mobile content community. The Register reckon Nokia is doomed to fail here. No one will be willing to pay for mobile content in the long term (which is why we're likely to see Google go on an ad funded model). The Register also predict that the operator networks will fight the phone makers in the pay-for-mobile-portal arena and charmingly use the phrase "two bald men fighting over a comb".
A good question for any Search Marketer to walk away with today is "Is content really king? Or is communication king?" ... if mobile takes off then it's likely to be on the strength of easy communication rather than strong content.
On Thursday I wrote about Cleaner Content. So did The Register.
On Friday Garret Rogers noticed Google claiming “Claim Your Content” domains and variants.
Today, Ionut Alex Chitu drew attention to a YouTube video where John Battelle interviews Eric Schmidt. Schmidt explicitly talks about CYC – Claim Your Content.
I think that’s it. Cleaner Content is Claim Your Content. This may well be an audio issue. The two sound the same!
In the video Eric Schmidt says that he believes Viacom are negotiating with Google. He points out that Google removed all the Viacom videos on request which complies with the DMCA.
Schmidt also says that the future is very much about mobile. Good. I’ve been saying this for a while so I’m glad to have some more “told you so” clout to point to!
Google is really putting a lot of resources into mobile search. I think their unofficial base for mobile is their engineering level in Belgravia House.
If you've heard me talk about mobile search then you'll have heard me point out that there are more mobile phones in the UK than there are computers. In fact there are more mobiles in the UK than there are people. What's more - the UK public are incredibly mobile savvy and really able to use their phones.
One of the obvious areas for mobile is the social side. The mobile phone is seen as a very personal device. How often do you let a SMS sit in your inbox for a day or so before you reply? Far less often than you let an email reset in your inbox before you hit reply. It seems to be far more rude not to reply to an SMS than it is not to reply to an email. Friends know that I'm not always to reply promptly to an email but I don't have such a strong excuse for ignoring an SMS. Some friends who know my BlackBerry (work) email have started to use that address rather than any of my myriad of personal addresses. Why? Simply because they know that my work email address is connected to the mobile device.
I think a great way phone networks could encourage loyalty from their subscribers is to offer a mobile social networking platform that's coupled to the network. Leave the network and you'll also have to leave that mobile social platform behind. Many people pick their networks simply through a social selection process. My friends are on Network X and therefore it makes sense for me to be on Network X.
Of course, right now there are platform independent social sites. Google's own Dodgeball is something of an example (if a little left field from what I've just been discussing). Dodgeball is a social offering in that it knows your friends and you uses it to be social. If Dodgeball ran here in Edinburgh or in London and Manchester then I'd "ping" my friends as I traveled back and forth between bigmouth's UK offices. London friends would know when I was out and about in London. They would know that I was in the Pizza Express around the corner from my hotel if I wanted.
Last week Carat (sibling agency to iProspect) won the contract for Pitch Entertainment Group's mobile social networking service. Pitch's offering is a bit like MySpace but is purely mobile. Users can upload information and photographs. There will be instant messaging too. Instant messages from mobile to mobile is far more engaging form of IM than, say, messages from one forum profile to another.
This is reported to be a six figure deal for Carat. That's a sign of how seriously Pitch Entertainment Group are taking their mobile social site. I think it is a good idea. I think first mover advantage is still there to be had in the mobile social space. We are certainly still to see the first market leader.
