Plastic Mobile: top company to watch in 2012

A recent InsightExpress study suggests that mobile and print would make a great team. The company found that mobile users are also print junkies: “Based on our findings, it’s clear that brands and retailers should be incorporating mobile into their print strategies,” said Joy Liuzzo, vice president and director at InsightExpress.

Print and Mobile, sitting in a tree...

Liuzzo goes on to say that there’s more to this relationship than just a little QR coding. There are a number of ways to strengthen this bond, including article archiving or sharing and information gathering. The company specifically focused on QR codes and user engagement, finding that smartphone owners who use their mobiles for six or more daily activities were also reading or subscribing to print publications. These users are a hot target for advertisers as they have diverse tastes extending even beyond their reading mediums to any number of lifestyle routines (eating, shopping, etc.). The study found that these people were also more inclined to connect with companies via their mobile devices. “The biggest surprise to me was with the segment of smartphone owners that do six or more activities on their phone every day and their print media consumption,” said Ms. Liuzzo. “This group is both subscribing to, and reading more, print materials than any of the other groups (smartphone or regular phone owners).”

According to our friends over at Mobile Marketer, InsightExpress then delved into an investigation of this market’s varying reading behaviours and discovered that magazines came out on top in terms of user engagement. For example, tearing out articles or tracking down a product mentioned in an article or ad.

Turns out, traditional print media isn’t out of the game just yet. It just needs to get wiser and learn a thing or two from it’s new young partner. From here, who knows where this dynamic duo can go? What do you think? Are print and mobile a match made in heaven? Tweet us your comments to @plasticmobile.

This week, the Internet marketing research giant and data specialist, comScore, released its MobiLens service data, revealing key trends in the Canadian smartphone industry. As of September 2011, eight million Canadians owned smartphones – a figure representing 40% of the total mobile market in Canada. The highly anticipated data reveals that the Canadian smartphone adoption rates are increasing aggressively; with a seven per cent increase in just the past six months! One surprising fact to come out of the comScore data was that RIM still leads the pack with a 35.8% market share, albeit, followed closely by Apple’s 30.1%. Also, although Google’s Android is sitting in the number three spot with only 25%, it is important to note that Android has doubled its market share during the last six months; corresponding fluidly with the global surge in Android device purchases within the past few months. (FYI: Android gobbled up more than half of all global smartphones sales in Q3 alone!) The dying fossil Symbian is ranked at the fourth spot, with 4.2%, followed by the new kid on the block, Microsoft (at 3.2%).

In terms of content use, it seems Canadians are using the phones to consume a very wide and diverse range of content and information, and of course to no surprise, the smartphone users are outdoing the feature-phone users in every form and aspect of mobile content consumption, as shown in the chart below.  With such a fast pace of smartphone adoption and such diverse and broad range of smartphone use, the Canadian market is shaping to be the perfect place for businesses to embrace mobile technology and provide the added comfort and value that the Canadian consumers are soon going to automatically expect.  Instead of waiting for mobile access to become a mainstream consumer service before you invest the necessary resources, which you will inevitably have to do, we suggest hopping on the mobile train in its relative infancy, and taking advantage of its current indie and avant-garde profile to garner some serious respect and up your street cred, or as we say in the marketing world “gain some competitive advantage by becoming and early adopter.”  For being so forward thinking.

Congratulations are in order as Research In Motion’s Blackberry App World has finally reached 1 billion downloads last week. For those who don’t follow tech news, RIM has been struggling for the past several months (understatement). Approximately three years ago, RIM shares were trading at $150.00 apiece; currently they are trading at roughly $26.00.

Shareholders must be ripping their hair out!

Although we are happy for RIM, we cannot side track from the fact that it took about two years to accomplish this whereas, Apple’s app store has a total of 15 billion downloads to date and hit it’s 1^st billion in just nine months. Google’s Android has a total of 4.5 billion downloads to date.

In the latest shareholders meeting, RIM confirmed that it is planning on releasing seven new phones in the upcoming months. SEVEN? RIM hasn’t stated what new smartphones they will be launching but they are most likely to be upgraded models. The two most talked-about Blackberries to be released are the Bold 9900 and the Torch 2 (9860), as for the other five, we will just have to wait and see.  Also, RIM announced that the new Blackberry OS 7 would be the OS running on the Bold 9900.

We are thrilled to see the new operating system but rumor has it that current blackberry users would not be able to upgrade to OS 7. Let us hope that this is just a rumor.

But could this be the beginning of a comeback or the coming of Rimageddon?

Most will agree with the latter, it’s just too difficult to stay optimistic! Just a couple of days ago, RIM announced they plan to lay off 2,000 employees, which is equivalent to approximately 11% of their workforce. The intended purpose for this is to help RIM achieve higher growth, realign strategic objectives, and restructure senior management. These lay-offs will allow RIM to reduce costs and supposedly, introduce products to the market in a more timely manner (i.e. faster).

The next couple of months should be exciting.

Good or bad move by RIM?

Good luck RIM, you’ll need it.

Google has finally launched the much anticipated Nexus One phone that runs the Android operating system.  With Google’s history of market domination, is their entry into the phone market going to follow foot steps of their entry into the search engine market?

An HTC-built phone has a new tweaked and updated Android interface with a great sleek design but is it really the Google product that the world has been waiting for?

Hardware

• 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB RAM, 32GB-capable microSD slot, a 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display at 800×480, a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and 720×480 video capture @ 20FPS, dual microphones for noise canceling and a trackball.
• Ultra-thin body
• Sleek curved edges
• Unmistakably and HTC device but there are plenty of design cues that scream Google.

Software

• Runs on Android 2.1
• Cool graphics and animated effects. (I only worry that this may hinder performance and speed but I can not tell just yet)
• Voice recognition that lets you speak into almost all fields.  This means you can dictate text and email messages.
• It’s fas. Partly from the Android 2.1 operating system

Battery Life

• Comparable to other similar devices and so far not complaints on battery life

Cost and Payment plans

• Unlocked for $530 or subsidized, with a T-Mobile contract for $180

The feature set seems impressive and the OS has some great applications and features that make Nexus One a good contender.  Would I trade in my iPhone for this device?  I still prefer the full touch screen capability of my iPhone, its sleek design and the 100,000+ applications that virtually let me do anything I can think of on my iPhone.  I am still waiting for “THAT” device that compels me to switch my iPhone ways.

You may not have heard but the new Droid phone by Motorola was released today and it has created quite a buzz in the tech world not to mention an unfortunate drop in some GPS on board navigation manufacturers.

The new Droid phone is the very first Android phone to run Android 2.0, and Google Maps Navigation is the talk of the town.  Not only is the Google Maps Navigation application better than on board navigation devices since its connected and online, but it is a better navigation tool than other mobile devices since it has a slew of new and advanced features including:

• Easy search (no need for address)
• Voice search
• Traffic information (from data sources and crowd sourced from app),
• Street view close up pictures when you get near your destination.
• The car dock mode gives bigger icons and auto-voice mode

It’s impressive to see such grand strides in the mobile space but not unexpected since for companies like Google its just an extension of what they currently have.  As Google leads the way, we will see that it is only natural to extend digital offerings to mobile devices.

Enjoy the video and if you don’t have a data enabled phone you love, give the new Droid phone a real consideration (if for nothing else than the street view on the Google Maps Navigation app).

Google just announced that they optimized AdSense for Mobile for smartphones.  You can now use standard AdSense formats to target smartphones or “high-end” phones like the iPhone and Android.  Both standard text and image ads will be available for display on mobile apps.

This is of course great news for all developers looking to generate revenue from advertising or marketers looking to target mobile devices as part of their usual campaigns with AdSense. The program is still in “beta” mode and more information is available here.

Here’s the demo / announcement video from Google’s Laren Usui:

More information can be found on their blog.

With all the hype and popularity around mobile (native) apps across smartphones and their respective app stores it’s important to remember that the web browser capabilities on most of these smartphones is quite robust and a lot of the mobile native apps out there can be achieved as a mobile web app as well.

For example let’s take a look at the Webkit browser which is being used on the iPhone, Android, and S60-based phones. It allows for mobile web apps to take advantage of the following capabilities:

• Advanced Javascript and AJAX
• Complex animations and graphics support (CSS3 + Canvas)
• Embed and use a local database
• Multi-touch navigation
• Linking to phone and mapping capabilities
• and more

What does this mean? With these browser capabilities the user experience seen in most native apps can be equally brought forth as a web apps – of course 3D immersive games are not included. Also, as browsers evolve and adopt other W3C standards such as the GeoLocation API, the gap becomes narrower between their native relatives. Furthermore, as smartphones get shipped with these robust mobile web browsers, the web applications can support a wide variety of devices. This is currently not the case with native applications when dealing with cross-devices

Of course, there is an obvious benefit to mobile native apps over mobile web apps – App Stores. App stores can help companies and brands easily distribute (and monetize) their application(s). Looking to how the (desktop) web exploded and is currently being monetized – I am sure similar paths will be taken.

A great example is the latest version of GMail for mobile web browsers. Google introduced a new version of GMail for mobile web browsers at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. It exposes a lot of the rich capabilities on smartphone (iPhone and Android only for now) web browsers and allows for GMail to be used offline much like a native app. Below is a demo of it (priovided by iPhone Buzz).

Is it just me, or are all new mobile phones being released these days all look + feel exactly like the Apple iPhone? By coincidence they all seem to have very similar feature-sets as well and they all claim that they have just come up with an innovative new product. Are they really to blame? Apple may have just created the perfect mobile phone. For example, take a look at the new Palm Pre and the LG Arena KM900 that are releasing soon.

As if making their phones look and feel like the iPhone wasn’t enough, they’re also knocking off Apple’s monetizing approach with their App Store. Here’s a a list of all the App Stores announced post-iPhone:

1. Google Android’s Market store
2. BlackBerry’s App Center
3. Microsoft Windows Mobile’s SkyMarket store
4. Nokia’s Ovi store
5. Palm App Catalog

Apple’s competitors really need to work at innovating and not just ripping off their product and strategy. At least if you do so, please do not pretend that you’ve come up with something revolutionary.