Watch Plastic Mobile’s Friday Video Blog: 60 Mobile Seconds With Melody Adhami

Every Friday, Plastic Mobile brings you a video blog that answers some of the burning questions surrounding mobile, e-commerce, the future of retail and other exciting mobile topics. Watch the “Queen of Apps,” Melody Adhami, and other industry experts, squeeze their answers into “60 Mobile Seconds” (or, close enough, anyway).

Spending money on lavish items is fine, if you have the money. However, there is a limit to everything, and we say a $50,000 featurephone has definitely exceeded that limit! Pricey luxury items should at least try and justify why they are pricier – unfortunately, the Gresso Grand Premier does no such thing. Yes, there is about 150 grams of gold and 138.5 carats of sapphire crystals in each handset, but if that is what you are looking for, why not just buy some serious jewellery?

What really gets to me is the fact that this bedazzled phone isn’t even SMART (meaning, it’s not of the smartphone variety)! In a time where everything is moving towards mobile – from the way we communicate to the way we shop or entertain ourselves – Gresso has the audacity to design a phone with an ancient S40 UI and charge $50,000 for it! Who is exactly the target market here? We ask you.

Maybe it’s just me, but even if I had the cash, I would rather buy an iPhone and use the rest of the money to purchase a YAMAHA Disklavier Piano, a beautiful Arkiane Kephren fireplace and a 16 year old bottle of Lagavulin scotch. That way I could stare at my stunning fireplace and sip on my scotch while I ask SIRI to play me some Wagner on my Disklavier Piano.

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.

Research In Motion introduced its BlackBerry Payment Service, enabling developers to monetize their software via in-application purchase options.

According to RIM, BlackBerry App World developers can offer in-app digital goods including content such as ebooks, magazines, and photos, as well as other services like video streaming or voice transcription.

However, RIM does not allow BlackBerry developers to sell virtual currencies or in-app credits, physical goods or services, and digital goods used across multiple applications.

In other news, RIM is giving BlackBerry users work-life Balance through their new feature, BlackBerry Balance.

Research In Motion will allow its handset owners to split work and personal data stored on the devices using this new feature.

The decision to separate work-related emails sent using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) from personal photographs, social networking activity and web browsing is BlackBerry’s bid to stay competitive in both the business and consumer markets.

Balance is expected to make its debut onto handsets in North America in the next two months, but there is no indication of a wider release yet.

It is expected to be available on all BlackBerry devices in the future, including the company’s as-yet unreleased PlayBook tablet.

Undoubtedly, the mobile space is drastically changing and particularly as a result of the changes that are occurring in the smartphone category.   With the release of the Apple iPhone and the growth of BlackBerry handsets, people are starting to browse more on their mobiles and data plans have shifted in Canada to allow for this.  Mobile company’s like us (Plastic The Mobile Agency) are really excited about this shift and see all the great possibilities that exist to expand and grow the mobile industry.  More and more we hear our competitors, clients  and industry experts speak about browser capabilities, applications and new technologies that are taking advantage of these better devices.

The technology and the possibilities excite our curiosities and stir our imagination but we also also have to consider the analytics.   How many people can be targeted?  What is the reach?  What is the engagement level? What is the ROI and what is the per user acquisition cost?  Unfortunately, we are at a time with little access to mobile analytics and looking at handset usage and penetration rates paints a gloomy story.  There are still millions of people who don’t use their phones to browse and even more people without smartphones so how can you really get maximum reach?  For this reason I still believe in the power of SMS and campaigns oriented around text-messaging.  In fact, SMS is superior to other modes of communication such as email or direct mail. There are many benefits to SMS campaigns and these can be used by brands to communicate with their audiences:

SMS allows you to:

• Reach a greater number of people as an overwhelming majority of mobile handsets are SMS enabled (95%+)
• Allows for better use of marketing spend. SMS is as very cost effective way to reach users and is far cheaper than traditional print advertising
• have effective campaigns since SMS campaigns are estimated to be 10x more effective than print advertising
• Track and evaluate your interaction with users whereas print advertising does not allow for responses.
• to targeted towards 13-35 age range.  It is estimated that about 1742 SMS messages are sent per month in the (13-17 age group) and 790 sent in the (17-24 age group). The third highest usage is  331 messages per month for the  (25-35 age group) according to Nielsen.

With a greater reach,  more user interaction, better response rates by your audience, better tracking and more cost effective, it sometimes blows our minds why some companies are not taking advantage of this great mode of communication.

Plastic Mobile Agency located in Toronto Ontario helps our clients evaluate their mobile needs and understand their targets.  We provide mobile strategies that are suited for our clients and suggest to them with the most effective use of their marketing budet.

Thanks to BoyGenius there is report focused on the a recent patent application by Apple.

So the patent covers biometric and other embedded authentication systems and this has the tech community all riled up.  How can Apple work so hard to hinder jailbreaking and then as part of a very official document, contain images of a jailbroken device. See the images below and lets just wait and see what this is all about.

Apple made their announcements today regarding the anticipated release of their iPhone 3.0 and Mobile enthusiasts can’t wait for what is about to come.  Some really great and exciting new features, over a hundred new added in the new release (I will not go through them all), but here are some of the big ones below:

1. The long anticipated Cut & Paste is here and in a good way.  You can double tap over your selection and a prompt will pop up asking whether you want to cut, copy or paste. You can expand your selection area using your thumb and if you make a mistake when you are pasting, just shake it away…I love it..like eraser dust!
2. The famous spotlight on a mac is now going to also be available on the iPhone and you would be able to search your entire device.  That is handy!  Search will also be available in Mail and Calendar.
3. 3G tethering– this is available so you can use the internet on your phone through your computer….no word on whether the carriers are supporting this.
4. Landscape keyboard has been added to some of the applications, most notably Mail.
5. MMS now available for the iPhone (this should have been available on the 1.0 but I guess better late than never)
6. Shake to shuffle music in iTunes
7. Safety features such as anti-phishing and parental control
8. Voice Memo application- allows for voice recording
9. PUSH NOTIFICATION– this is a big one and it is long overdue

There are more features where that came from but and I am sure we will hear all about them in the coming weeks. Come back and I will keep you posted.

Would you ever have believed it 5 years ago is someone told you to take out your phone and start your car?

You wouldn’t need a car starter and your phone would do it for you.  Living in Canada and having to warm up my car in the dead of winter would mean that an iPhone car ignitor would be my dream come true.  Ok before we all get carried away and run out in a trek to find this ignitor we have to understand it only sits in one concept car at The Geneva Motor Show. Rinspeed, the maker of the iChange concept car revealed an impressively revolutionary, highly innovative concept car with jaw dropping features that revolve around the iPhone.  The iChange is an an electric and solar powered that is aerodynamically designed to reduce air resistance and lesson its fuel consumption which in its case it electricity.  Not only is this car environmentally friendly and appeals to the tree-huggers but its also technically innovative to appeal to the geeks.  Especially us!

The entire vehicle is built around Apple’s popular mobile handset, which hooks into the dashboard and acts as the car’s key – locking and unlocking it, as well as turning on the engine and performing other functions.

The iChange which has been supported by the Swiss government, might seem far-fetched, but the team behind it say it is intended to stimulate the struggling car industry into innovative thinking.  As the entire world faces challenging times, innovation will lead companies out of touch time.