Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet” [TechCrunch]
The scandal on the blogosphere this week was the hacking of Twitter staff email and subsequent (and somewhat questionable) posting of secret internal documents on TechCrunch. These include:

- Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch
- Twitter’s Financial Forecast Shows First Revenue In Q3, 1 billion users in 2013
- Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”

The Future of Search: Social Relevancy Rank [ReadWriteWeb]
As real-time search services like BingTweets, Collecta, and OneRiot continue to grow, a Social Relevancy Rank will emerge. Based on the same principle as Page Rank, this means that whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph.

Google: Browser is the Platform of the Future, Even on Mobiles [Mashable]
Google is investing a lot of resources into Chrome, which most likely will be released on mobile as well. The idea is that browsers will become the ultimate platform for devices, fitting into the emerging cloud computing model.

Google Looks to Campuses for 'Cloud' Converts [AdAge]
Meanwhile, Google is looking to breed a generation of workers comfortable with the concept of "cloud" computing, particularly their version of it in which Google provides free web-based services in exchange for advertising dollars. To do this, they are providing free hosting and services to colleges and universities, an attractive proposition given the economy, and Google is signing up new campuses at a rate of 70 to 75 a quarter.

Surprising Mobile Video Consumption Patterns in Japan [What Japan Thinks]
Some interesting findings on Japanese video mobile usage: 53.6% have watched a video on their mobile, and only 23.5% watched it on the move.

The GRID Introduces Location-Based Advertising [CScout]
The GRID, Vodacom’s location-based social network mobile phone Java app, has been around for a couple of years in South Africa, but now the network has grown in size, making it economically viable to test various ad-based revenue models.

Molson Coors Uses Adeye Mobile Marketing for Different World Drinks Brands [Adeye]
Molson Coors is rolling out a mobile marketing campaign to its specialty beers. Tickets to a boat launch event were sent out via SMS and recipients were directed to a site for more info on the beer and for a chance to win a meal for two. While at the event, Bluetooth was used to deliver an app that acted as a multimedia brochure.

Landshare Lets Communities Grow Their Veggies Together [TrendHunter]
A new initiative in England called Landshare is connecting local food growers to plot owners who want to share land. Through a dedicated site, users access a map of who is offering what around them.

Kenyan Mosque Jams Mobile Calls [BBC News]
In an effort to have prayers a little more focused on God (and less on text messages), a mosque in Kenya has installed a cell phone jammer. The move is actually leading other prayer centers to start considering cell phone disabling devices.

Ethnicity vs. Culture in Advertising [Advertising Age]
The evolution of race perception in the US has led new generations to enter into cultural mindsets that are somewhat unrelated to race. "Urban" for example, is moving away from a certain ethnicity, and now expresses a way of life.

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

Every Thursday, we each tell you one thing that hit our radar (and stuck there like chewed gum) over the past week...

Jeremy

CNN's Holograms
Was anyone else freaked out by the integration of live holograms into CNN's election coverage on Tuesday? It was like Star Wars revisited. Will we be seeing more of this reporting technique in the media moving forward?

Allison

Mobikasi
Some of the coolest things in mobile are coming out of South Africa (and we don't just mean Michael Sharon). This "geo-tagged documentary for your mobile," part of the South African location-based social network The Grid, reconceptualizes the walking tour. It has 25 one-minute vignettes of youth street culture in Soweto, tagged with the location where it was shot. Viewers can explore virtually on a multimedia-filled mobile streetmap, or they can actually follow it and play a clip for each place on the route. Check out the promo video here.

Laura

In a textbook migration (pun intended) from runway to sidewalk, feathers are dotting downtown ensembles post-pillow fight style. From head wraps, bands and clips to fabric trims and - in cases of extreme trend consumption - entire pieces, feather embellishments are catching on faster than you can say "tweet." Those keen to join the flock take note: the right balance of quills to modern pieces will ensure the look is more hip than Cher.

Andrea D

Fire Flower
I think this concept is great -- so many people get burned in restaurants and kitchens all the time, so having something that works quickly AND looks like a decoration when it's not in use? How much better can you get?

Solar-Powered Bonsai Tree Charging Station
I hate wires. Hate them. Anything that charges my devices while hiding my wires and creating an awesome focal point on my desk or table is good in my book.

Forest

Zhiing
Zhiing simplifies location-based technology by cutting out the extras and sticking to a friend-to-friend finder system. So, if you're at a party and you want to "Zhiing" a friend to come check it out, simply pull up the program and send them your location. If your phone has GPS, your location will be sent automatically and your friend will receive a message, complete with a map and turn-by-turn directions. Since it's just person-to-person, there's no need to type in directions because the sender's GPS will be able to tell exactly where that friend is. Zhiing can be used mobile-to-mobile, mobile-to-computer or computer-to-mobile.

Andrea F

A future competitor to the iPhone perhaps? T-Mobile and Google are stepping up to the plate and guess what kids? Not only does this phone have a touch screen similar to that of the iPhone, it also has a keyboard. Read more here and here.

Jain

NY Times.com Election Word Train
Super simple election day collective consciousness visualization!

Lawrence

Blackberry Bold Released through AT&T, Walmart
A number of chunky ideas to wrap your head around in this article:

• First time line up for a Blackberry release...a la iPhone fever of this past summer (luckily not as zealous of a camp-out)
• RIM is not longer optimized for only email...2 megapixel camera and blazing internet through 3G
• Aesthetic...eye candy that gets you salivating and a screen that's crisp as a clear fall morning
• Wally's out for blood...2nd time in two months that Walmart has undersold a major carrier on the hottest release (T-Mobile's G1 felt the heat earlier)

Marisa

Good for consumers, bad for Geico, there may soon be less accidents on the road.
Thanks to project I-WAY an acronym for ‘Intelligent co-operative system in cars for road safety', wireless networks will soon be using data from in-vehicle sensing systems allowing consumers to receive highly advanced warnings and alerts for traffic jams or accidents to avoid crashes. Project I-WAY is slated to be complete in January 2009, currently a European project, but this type of advanced sensor model is much needed and probably not long off for the US!