• Playing Rough With The Franchise
    I tried to be a good entertainment consumer this week and play the mobile marketing game as Hollywood intends. "Wall-E" and "Wanted" are two of the more enticing film releases tomorrow, and like clockwork, licensed mobile game versions of both films appeared on my phone by mid-week. In a perfect mobile marketing world, these games would serve a promotional function in generating pre-release interest and then extend the brand by letting filmgoers relive the experience (maybe even prompt a second go). Of course, in a perfect mobile marketing world, the game versions of media properties would be good.
  • What Are We Looking For?
    In some pathetic circles of men, mobile search has become a hunting/gathering ritual. When Nielsen Mobile released its Q1 2008 market share stats last week, the headlines focused on Google's dominance of the field with 61% search share. I was struck a bit more by the gender imbalance in searches, with Google skewing 65% male and Yahoo 63%. Sure, there is the usual early-adopter gender bias at work here. Boys will be gadgeteers. But we all have seen the cluster of guys doing a mobile search race. Asking "Where is the nearest Staples?" is like throwing red meat to wolves. …
  • Digital Options: Immerse, Then Pitch
    Controversies over programming types, formats and especially ad units in Web video only get larger as the screen gets smaller.
  • Cellfire's Great Mobile Coupon Caper
    Cellfire is the kind of mobile savings tool dedicated couponers love. Like a phone-based weekly circular or snail mail ValuePack, the applications sits on your phone and maintains coupons from partnered vendors in your general area. Hollywood Video and 1-800-Flowers have been longtime partners, but the company has expanded to Sears, SuperCuts, McDonalds and scores more.
  • Widgets, Widgets Everywhere
    From the time I first played with mobile widgets Plusmo and WidSets, the format appealed to me as a cool way to organize data sources on a phone. Like their online counterparts, mobile widgets let you skim across a range of data quickly and customize the experience in an attractive way. Take the new version of Zumobi that launched last week. Zumobi is a Windows Mobile widget platform that started at Microsoft and then got spun out into its own company in order to develop on other OSes. The BlackBerry version is imminent.
  • The Mobile Web Overnights
    As longtime readers already know, my teenage daughter and her incessant cell phone use is a bottomless pit of market research for me. Most kids have to remind their parents "I am not a child." Mine just barks, "I am not a focus group. " I believe she is getting this slogan printed on T-shirts and occasionally makes tattoo threats.
  • Bad Acting
    Now that the media spotlight moves towards mobile, predictably the bad actors start getting a disproportionate share of attention. As OnlineMediaDaily's own Wendy Davis reports this morning, Google is on the receiving end of a lawsuit involving deceptive practices among some of its ringtone advertisers. Google has a standing policy about how landing pages for these ads must outline terms and conditions in a fair way. The litigant claims Google is not enforcing its own policy. This suit comes on the heels of a settlement with AT&T last week over phone charges involving mobile content subscriptions.
  • The Widget Box
    "Your phone is screwed up," my daughter announces as she hands it back to me in disgust. "You wrecked it." Actually, all I did was customize the phone by pushing all of those iPhone and Web app icons around to my liking. In the process, I rudely obstructed my daughter's hijacking of my phone as her back-up device.
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