Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

A prepaid mobile phone is only useful if you’ve got enough airtime to use it, particularly here in the U.S. where subscribers are charged for making and receiving calls. But for the rest of the world, subscribers aren’t charged for calls and texts that they receive, although running out of prepaid airtime is still a problem. For South Africa and its millions of pay-as-you-go users however, this isn’t an issue. If they have no airtime and would still like to contact a friend or a colleague, all they have to do is to send a free ‘Please Call Me’ message (PCM) to let the other party know that someone is trying to reach them. The recipient simply clicks on the PCM to call back the PCM sender.

A New Medium

PCMs were introduced by South African operator Vodacom in the early 2000s as a replacement for ‘beeping’ – the prepaid subscriber practice of ringing a party’s number once as a signal that they had no airtime left and would have to be called back. South Africans were sending millions of beeps a day, clogging Vodacom’s network and prompting the carrier to think up of a less resource-intensive means of beeping. They introduced a solution on a USSD platform – similar to SMS except that you can’t store and forward USSD messages – and thus PCMs were born.

Today, South Africa’s 45 million prepaid users send tens of millions of PCMs daily – Vodacom alone claims to process between 10 to 20 million a day. There are so many of them, in fact, that they’ve turned into a viable advertising and communications medium. MTN, Vodafone and Cell C initially attached short messages at the end of PCMs (which can handle about 120 characters) that announced carrier-specific promotions and activities. Eventually, they opened the service to mobile content providers and advertisers, charging fees or asking for revenue shares for every million PCMs they tagged with an advertisement.

A Relevant Message

The power of PCMs to influence an entire society became truly evident when it was used as a vehicle to promote HIV consultation and awareness in a social marketing campaign launched by SocialTXT and South Africa’s AIDS Helpline. During a six-week trial in which the Helpline was promoted on a million PCMs a day, the call center experienced a 136% increase in calls – over 1,500 additional callers a day. For the 5.6 million South Africans coping with HIV, PCMs are becoming a lifeline, quite literally. For more about the SocialTXT HIV campaign, see Corinne Ramey's blog entry at MobileActive.org.

- David Zarraga

Ring in Memorial Day weekend with our staff's memorable finds from the week.

Samantha

I Can Has Cheezburger iPhone App
If you can’t bear the thought of being away from Lolcats while out and about, this app is for you. It really just pulls pictures and videos from the I Can Has Cheezburger website, but when you need a mindless break mid-day, this is it. And, if you somehow manage to get tired of random pictures of cats with poor grammar, you can also use the app to view posts from FAIL Blog, I Has Hotdog, Pundit Kitchen, GraphJam, Totally Looks Like, Engrish Funny and ROFLrazzi. It’s quality content on the go.

Allison

Stweet
This mashup overlays tweets on top of a Google Street View map of where they were sent from, adding real-time commentary to locations. The functionality is pretty limited—you can’t choose a precise location beyond a city name— but this is more art experiment than social utility. And it can be rather addicting to just watch the map jump from street to street and see what people there are saying.

Andrea F.

Past Portables
I was feeling a little nostalgic today, so I took a walk down memory lane with this slideshow of portable electronics from the past.

Jeremy

Sonar Festival
Barcelona’s annual Sonar Festival is a veritable feast of experimental art, music and interactive multimedia technology. Last week’s Sonar preview at New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center offered a taste of what visitors will get to experience at next month’s main event in Spain. The show featured interactive multimedia installations by artists like “Metamembrana,” whose work includes a video installation of Hieronymus Bosch-style animations controlled by the sound of participants’ voices, movements and digitized faces. Meanwhile, music-lovers were serenaded by the eclectic mash-up DJ stylings of Jace Clayton (aka DJ /rupture), an increasingly well regarded DJ whose mixes combine everything from Latin-American Cumbia to Bollywood soundtracks to Hip-Hop. If you happen to be on the Iberian Peninsula in mid-June, make sure to stop by Barcelona for the festivities – you won’t regret it.

Michael

Travelpod
Travelpod, a website dedicated to world travel bloggers, developed an interactive map game to test your geography IQ. Five minutes after you play, you’ll embed the program on your SNS and bug your friends to participate. It’s our natural reaction to use “insistent word-of-mouth” when we become addicted to anything. And this is why I’m uncomfortable with both runners and American Idol fans.

David

Hybrids Aren’t Just For Cars
What’s the biggest challenge facing carriers in a market where most customers already have at least two mobile subscriptions? How about trying to sell them a third?

In the United Arab Emirates, where mobile penetration is a whopping 198 percent, mobile carrier Du launched a subscription plan to try and do just that. The ‘Elite Plan’ is packaged as a ‘personalized, post-paid contract’ with a fixed monthly fee and an SMS bundle. However, what makes this package unique is the *dial feature. By prefixing ‘*’ before dialing the number you want to call (e.g. *716-123-4567), you can deduct the call from a separate prepaid account so that it won’t eat up your monthly allotment of voice minutes. Subscribers have the freedom to control how much airtime they want to upload into this prepaid account and can choose to upload credits specifically for local or international voice calls.

In these tough times, this prepaid-postpaid hybrid plan sounds like a good way for US mobile subscribers to curb overage charges and reduce the size of their monthly bill.

Reming

I Lego N.Y.
I love this artist that is featured in the NY Times’ blog, Abstract City. This posting, “I Lego N.Y.”, is really clever—a vision of NYC through his kid’s Legos! Also, check out his other post “The Boys and the Subway,” which tells of his kids’ love of the NYC transit system through chalk illustrations. You may want to check it out before we begin cursing overcrowded subway cars in the sweltering summer heat. It’s a nice reminder that sometimes the simplest things can bring the most happiness!