Xellular Identity - All About Mobile Content & Marketing

Carnival of Mobilists at Smart Mobs

Get ready for the best mobile writing of the week! This week, Judy breck of Smart Mobs is hosting the carnival . So head over and enjoy! Also, check out the winners for June. Way to go Rudy and Stephanie! :)

The Mobile Life Report 2006

"The Mobile Life Report 2006", a new and interesting study held by Carphone Warehouse in collaboration with the London School of Economics, is now available on the web (a free PDF).

It contains very interesting figures about how mobile influences our lives (interpersonal relationships, parenting, work, health and safety). Short and simple and really worth reading.  You can download it here.

Technorati Tags: The Mobile Life Report 2006, Carphone Warehouse, London School of Economics, mobile culture, mobile behavior

No Woman Is an Island

You see a woman that attracts you. You want to approach and say “hi” (or some other not so creative pick-up line). Wait and examine the field. Is she doing something with her mobile? If she’s talking, sending SMS or any one of those things people usually do with a mobile - abort mission. She’s not interested.

According to a new study held by Carphone Warehouse in collaboration with the London School of Economics “Women are now using the mobile phone as a barrier signal, or 'personal bodyguard', to deter overly keen men from trying a chat-up line.“

Women not only use the mobile as an unwanted-man repellent, but as a safety tool as well. Having the mobile in hand makes them feel secure; feel connected to their entire social network, which is only a phone call away.

Also, many women, and especially teenage girls, feel awkward being in a social setting by themselves. To me, it looks like having the mobile in hand is conveying the following social message: “I’m not really alone here. I’m actually talking/ texting/ communicating with people…”. This message is addressed to the world and to the girl sender, reassuring and calming.

No woman is an island, especially having a mobile at hand… :)

Technorati Tags: women, gender, mobile culture, mobile behavior, safety, social network, man repellent

Gender & Self-expression - Burning Questions

According to survey results presented by Sprint:

"Ringtones are more popular among women - 54 percent compared to 42 percent of men. Personalized ringtones also are more appealing to women."

"Women have unique needs and preferences when it comes to the features and look of their wireless phones and accessories," says Alana Muller, Sprint's director of marketing."

[via Wireless Week]

• How come women use the mobile phone as a utility for self expressing more than men do (ringtones as well as mobile accessries)?
• Do women have a stronger need to express their uniqeness than men? If so, why?

Technorati Tags: women, gender, self-expression, personalization, ringtones, mobile accessries, user survey, sprint

Carnival of Mobilists at Mobile Opportunity

Hi everyone, get ready for the best mobile writing of the week! This week, Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity is hosting the carnival and has done a great job. So head over and enjoy! :)

Update: Interoperable Avatars?

According to jeff Hester from BigBlueBall Forums, the Yahoo and MSN IM interoperability doesn't include avatars... was obvious, ha?

Anyhow, you're welcome to follow the link for screenshots and install instructions.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, interoperability, avatars, Yahoo avatars, MSN Dynamic Display Pictures

Yahoo: Serve Yourselves

What would be next? Buying a carton of milk and walking outside to milk the cow ourselves?? Yet there are enough enthusiastic teenagers and film students that would grab the opportunity to be famous and do the work.

Technorati Tags: yahoo, user generated content

Mobile Romance

Hey everyone,

I decided to share a sweet pic I got from Idan. What do you think? :)

Technorati Tags: mobile romance, mobile, Idan Aderka, sweet guy, personal

Interoperable Avatars?

Yahoo! and MSN have finally put up together interoperability between their messengers, starting with a limited beta test of a service that will enable users of Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger to connect with each other, creating a huge community of nearly 350 million accounts. Finally, I can have one messenger less on my taskbar :))

What I’m curious about is the avatars… up till now, each company has been promoting its own brand (Yahoo avatars vs. MSN Dynamic Display Pictures), having free as well as paid content. So how’s this is going to work from now on? Will MSN and Yahoo take interoperability all the way?

Technorati Tags: Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, interoperability, avatars, Yahoo avatars, MSN Dynamic Display Pictures

Carnival of Mobilists at Mobile Jones

Yay, the Carnival of Mobilists is here again. This week, Mobile Jones is hosting the Carnival. So go ahead, look around, read and share thoughts and opinions.

Update: Teen BuzzTones

Lately I get a lot of traffic coming from people searching for the teen Buztones, also known as Mosquito.

So... I have a special treat for you: Tom Sella sent me the file, so here you go: Download mosquito_RINGTONE.mp3  enjoy! :)

btw, I'm 26 yrs and I can still hear it...

Technorati Tags: tom sella, mosquito, teen buzz, youth, mobile trend, ringtones

The Carnival of Mobilists no. 35 Is Here

Hi everyone!

After a month of the football craze, the world cup is now coming to the climax with the final being played this weekend with the Carnival of Mobilists! Two of the European superpowers, the aging French team against the attacking might of the Italians are going to sweat on the field for the title... The excitement is everywhere (especially at my work place) so read these great posts divided to a few fields and then go for the best (and last) football mania moments :)  And... let the game begin!

The Mobile Web Field

Starting with the captain, Martin Sauter, with my favorite post of the week: a great tip to operators - note the little things that make or break the user experience, the little difference between a goal and a missed shot!

Dennis at the Wap Review joins the field and takes a look at the new beta version of Yahoo Mobile email finding it promising and more attractive - even though there’s always a room for more…

Wanna shoot a goal? Wanna know how can Samsung, Sprint, Palm, Verizon or Nokia turn into a mobile internet company? The Pondering Primate answers it thoroughly.

The Social Networks Field

C. Enrique Ortiz responds with his 5 reasons why social networks (mobile and web) fail to a received ball from Tristan Louis, who defines the basic elements of a successful (and unsuccessful) social network. Great team work boys!

On the same team of Social Networks: Anders Borg summarizes the current state of the mobile IM and distincts it from the usage of SMS/MMS. No doubt that the mobile IM offers new outlets to sharing and expressing which will generate revenues for the operators.

Justin Oberman explores the field of Second Life and the mobile opportunities lying there, saying "the field is free, pass the ball here"...

And to my contribution to my team: I'm covering Cellcom's attempt to leverage the web 2.0 success with its users generated content and social network to promote the operator's new 3G services. Looks like identifying the next mobile trend is not enough...

The Mobile Marketing Field

Among the cheerleaders we have two real experts, one screaming "yay" and the other screaming "boooo":

David Murphy at the Mobile Marketing Magazine brings a great example of choosing the right medium to the conveyed message (for a recruiting IT engineers campaign) by using MobileTag solution.

Helen Keegen shares her unplesant experience of receiving Lakeside Shopping Mall's lame SMS marketing efforts and shares her insight and comments as a mobile marketer.

The Mobile Apps Field

Thomas Landspurg introduces a new field for our players: the mobile (and web) widgets as the equivalent of “Web2.0″ apps for the mobile. Interesting!

Darla Mack asks, why on earth would you pay for something you can do on your own?! Save the ticket money and watch the game at home...

The Mobile Industry Field

In honor of Canada Day (and the Canadians who didn't get to play in the world cup), Stephanie Rieger writes a deep review of the mobile (wireless?) industry in Canada: penetration figures, stats, lifestyle, "some local context" and Stephenie's interesting predictions for the future of the Canadian mobile industry.

Daniel Taylor looks at Sybase's last moves announcing the information product suite on action replay and raises some interesting questions about them. 

Well...

It was a real pleasure having you all here, cheering and screaming, you crazy fans! ;) But every game ends after 90 or so minutes, the team hits the showers and gets a rest and the crowd goes home... (I bet it didn't take you that long to read all the way through). Hope you enjoyed and see you next week at Mobile Jones!

Technorati Tags: carnival of mobilists, mobilists

Heep: For Now No Reason For Hype

Cellcom, one of the 3 Israeli operators, is trying to leverage the web 2.0 success with its users generated content to promote the operator's new 3G services. Being the last operator to launch its 3G services, promoting music as its main content offering as Cellcom has done by now, isn’t enough to beat the competitors.

So it looks like Cellcom has managed to be the first among Israeli mobile operators to identify what seems like the next mobile trend - the user generated mobile content (like music, short videos, and other MMS content).

To promote this goal, cellcom has launched on Monday its new web and mobile community Heep. For now, the mobile is only a supplementary experience to the web experience, since the mobile web is another tool (and a less comfortable one) to get to web content. So the (rather obvious) key to success lies in a successful website. Yet, the only problem is that big user generated content sites lay over the internet and not over the mobile sphere. And, as much as Cellcom wants to generate mobile traffic, its major tool here is the web. How will it convince users to generate more mobile traffic?

From a web point of view, Heep is far from being a successful site… For now, a user can’t send or publish his/her content in other blogs/websites (walled gardens), and can’t sign up to receive more contents from friends/ users. Also in comparison to web’s successful YouTube's (and others') content, Heep’s content is very borring (well, it's still the beginning). For Cellcom it can be very easy to provide better quality content being a big sponsor for Israeli music, even copyrighted. However, Heep has managed to recruit the new born YouTube star with over 6.5M views and arm her with a new HS with a camera to start generating mobile contents; hoping she could pull the rabbit again.

Technorati Tags: cellcom, Heep, web community, 3G, user generated content, mobile content, web 2.0, YouTube

Please Update Your Feed Subscription

Hi everyone,

Finally I made a little time to do something that I wanted to do for quite a long time... I spent a few hours to work on the blog. One thing I really wanted to is to have a single feed so I could know how many readers I have in total and not divided by different types of feeds (atom + rss). So I played around with FeedBurner and now my new feed is up. Please update your feed subscription using this feed:

thanks!

Technorati Tags: feed, blogging, Xellular Identity

Stardoll: An Avatar Or A Doll?

Successful consumer brands allow customers to assign their own meaning to a product or service. This gives them the opportunity to project themselves to others, to get a feeling of self-expression. To provide greater added-value, consumer brands usually use celebrities to promote themselves.

Stardoll has taken the power of celebrities being brands themselves. Instead of dressing your avatar or paperdoll - the way it's called there - with brands you can choose Brad Pitt, Halle Berry or any other celebrity out of a list of 400, and get them dressed from a very limited collection. [I don’t know how they got the approval of all these celebrities to use their faces... Anyhow, copyrights and royalties aren’t my issue here].

The celebrities are a sure attraction no arguing here. Yet, instead of using the power of consumer brands and engage it with the need for expressing the personal identity on the web, these avatars are taken to the childish world of play and fantasy. I’m offered to play with my favorite celebrity’s paperdoll, dress it up, identify with it and become the celebrity during the playing time, just like when girls play with their Barbie dolls or boys play with their action figures. This is why they’re called “dolls” rather than “avatars”: you can play with it for certain time and that’s about it(!). There's no other outlet for your paperdoll, like different messengers, web communities and in the future - the mobile… Having this restricted outlet, this service can only be targeting the segment of 5-13 yrs girls, during the dolls' period of glory, and therefor the sweet pinkish tones of the website.

Anyhow, it is an interesting example of combining web identities and consumer brands.

Technorati Tags: stardoll, avatars, paperdolls, celebrities, consumer brands, self expression, marketing, web identities