• The IPhone Seven-Month Itch
    This is a tawdry tale my fiancée just loves to tell. "It's his second iPhone. He WASHED the first one." In fact, while LG, Samsung, and Nokia are all working the lab rats overtime in developing their own "iPhone killer," I had no trouble murdering mine -- in one wash cycle.
  • Be The Platform
    "Dad, you have how many Borders Books coupons on your phone?" my daughter says with profound disbelief as she rifles through the SMS threads on my iPhone. In fact, Borders is making my life easier with these coupons, which ordinarily I have to print from their regular emails and remember to bring to the store. Instead, the email I get every week or so is in synch with a coupon showing up in my phone, so I know I will have the latest discount code on me all the time.
  • Making Our Numbers
    I am enough of an old Web media fart to recall the days when another digital ad platform was struggling for the respect of advertisers. Back in 1999 and 2000 the hype surrounding the Internet was far ahead of the actual ad spend, even as more eyeballs migrated here. We are at a similar point in mobile now, because we are not ready yet to answer some basic questions, like what role mobile plays in a larger campaign or an overall media strategy for a brand.
  • Eye On Personalization
    Visitors to CBSNews Mobile this week will experience something a bit new and novel for the world's most "personal" device: some actual personalization. For the past few weeks, CBS partner Aggregate Knowledge has been analyzing click paths among the site's users to produce personalized headline recommendations that now appear at the top of the home page for registered members.
  • Don't Forget To Flush
    I understand immediately the sensibility of the mobile CrushorFlush.com site, if only because I am now standing guard over a sixteen-year-old lass who is attracting more strays than the ASPCA. Crush or Flush, from IceBreaker, Inc., cleverly combines a flirting/dating/social networking community with one of mobile's strong suits, sampling data shallowly and quickly. You upload a pic and profile of your own and then browse others by gender, geography and tags. If you "Flush" them, you move on to the next profile, but if two people Crush one another, then the system hooks them up anonymously via text chats. It …
  • Say 'Hola' To The Underserved
    One of the first things I learned in covering the digital media beat back in the mid-'90s is that companies that serve ethnic niches early in the technology cycle will gain that population's deep brand loyalty. Underserved markets never forget the companies and brands that made the effort to address a particular group's identity and needs when the majority of big brands couldn't be bothered. I watched sites like AsianAvenue and BlackPlanet go ballistic in the late '90s, and there wasn't a bit of rocket science involved. These simply were among the few places designed and operated for Americans with …
  • Marketing To The Disinterested
    We in the mobile media and marketing realms tend to live in a self-serving, self-satisfied bubble. We forget that many, many consumers feel a bit besieged by technology. Even supposedly bleeding-edge mobilistas like my daughter bring to their phone experience a specific purpose. The rest is just clutter -- and tech freaks like Dad talking to one another.
  • A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Branding Campaign
    When I pop open my phone and hit the mobile Web, I may be coming into the platform in one of several different modes, but none of them is quite like my relationship with the Web. The Internet is always on and humming in the background of my foreground work. I dip into it for breaks, for mail checks, and often for deliberate research. On my phone, I am almost always after a quick check of headlines, email, RSS feeds, or maybe a deliberate search (movie times, the answer to a trivia question, mapping an address). The phone is not …
  • Code Scanning Goes To School
    At Case Western Reserve University this semester students should be seeing more and more of those geeky-looking 2D mobile codes around campus, in the school newspaper, perhaps even on pamphlets from other students. Run by Mobile Discovery with the cooperation of Case's Master of Engineering and Management program, this purports to be the first cross-carrier mobile 2D trial in the U.S.
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