Xellular Identity - All About Mobile Content & Marketing

NYT: People and Their Avatars

The NYT published a beautiful series of portraits by Robbie Cooper in this weekend's magazine about people and their avatars, in virtual environments such as Second Life and Everquest. Follow the link for more pictures

The interesting is to witness how the created avatar is very closely tied to the personality of its creator in one of two ways:

• The avatar can be based on the user’s true physical appearance by keeping the same external characteristics such as color of eyes and skin tone, style of haircut and more...
• The avatar can present a desired but imaginary appearance: thinner, younger, more muscular, curvier, the opposite sex and more...

Klonies For Adults? -Yes!

I was reading some very interesting bloggers' opinions about the Klonies service at Skype by Jean Mercier and by Phil Wolff and wanted to answer both. As my comment was becoming longer and longer, I decided to post it here and offer a bonus - Klonies pics!

Before actually addressing the points raised by both Jean and Phil, let me provide some background info for those of you who are not familiar with Klonies; Klonies are a new service of personalized Avatars by the mobile solutions provider Comverse, that enables the creation of Avatars from a big content library of body types, eyes, hairstyles, hats, glasses, moods, clothes, branded accessories, etc., which can be used in traditional web forums, as well as to extend this experience to the mobile arena. Comverse has created a mobile Caller ID service, by which a user can create his Klonie either on the Web or on his mobile handset. Klonies let youth segment do something they could never even dream of doing before: create expressive avatars that represent them on other people’s phones. Klonies give the users extended means for self expression: they define how they are seen by their friends, on their phones.

Both Jean and Phil talk about the workplace and the adult Skype users segment; both raise a certain feeling of discomfort with the young looks of the Klonies; this feeling is associated to the older users (of Skype and in general).

As a member of the Klonies team at Comverse, let me share some insights: at a trial we had at a European TIER 1 mobile operator a few months ago, we received very enthusiastic responses from young adults (19-24) and adults (25 and up) participating the trial. Both young adults and adults participants replied that they find the Klonies content to be appealing and fun to use and that they would be willing to pay for this mobile service.

As for the Klonies looks, yes, Klonies are good looking and juvenile, as they are primarily targeted to the youth mobile market. Klonies are good looking as they are our alter ego, our “wanna be web\mobile persona”. Klonies are also means for playing with our identity. Over the web we can “try” different characteristics as if they were different outfits (or costumes), we can express hidden parts of our personality that we don’t expose in daily life, such as our desires.

As for "rugged", "mature", "experienced", "damaged", “fat” avatars, the question is who would want to have his exact body shape and look to be his\her web representation? Imagine yourself this situation: I’m a very cool teenager but my face is all covered with pimples. Would I want my avatar to be polka dotted as well? -of course not! Would I want to have a button that adds zits to my avatar’s face? -no!! Nobody thinks zits are a good way to promote yourself. We all prefer to show an improved image of ourselves. If an “add a zit" option exists in the avatars building studio, and I’d deny its existence because I want my avatar to look cool and hip (who wouldn’t?!), my friends would say I’m lying about the way I look. The bottom line is that no button that adds flaws is welcome in avatars world. Better not have this possibility\option.

And last note about the Klonies looks - we are working on different skeletons to address different market tastes:

Also, different cultures have different conventions of how to present our body and how to pose:

 

Thanks Jean or sharing your thoughs and Thanks Phil for raising great ideas (I tried to reply to all of them at the comments section).

Gaia: Avatars Online Social Network

I was going through my feeds and was excited to read Gigaom’s post about Gaia online avatar social network.

First, a few words about Gaia for those who are not familiar with it; Gaia is an online world with a series of virtual cities where Gaian avatars can socialize (up to 100 in a single space), with apartments they can own, and treasures they can find with no combat, whatsoever). I have been familiar with Gaia ever since I entered the avatars business and learned the avatars market and offering of those days.
However, stumbling upon avatars websites is very common on the web. The real excitement is to be able to get usage numbers. Fortunately, Wagner James Au (correspondent for Gigaom) managed to bring us the usage numbers of Gaia online social network:

• 300,000 log in daily, according to the company; average unique visit is two hours a day.
• Average concurrency: 64,000 users. Maximum: 86,738.
• 85% of users are based in the US
• 10% are English-speaking but non-US (with 5% a nebulous Other)
• Breakdown by gender: 55% Girls - 45% Boys
• About 20% of subscribers put up their real life photo in their avatar profile.
• Number of Gaia gold “millionaires”, as of last week: 1385
[via Gigaom]

Putting the numbers on ice, one of the interesting features that are worth to notice at Gaia is the incentive mechanism where users get incentives for participating in the online community’s life:

“A unique innovation is the way the company distributes its virtual gold currency: instead of selling it for real money (as with There) or allowing its trade on the open market (as with Second Life), Gaians are automatically given gold for participation: You get gold for posting on the Forums, for riding events, for uploading content, for exploring the world. Subscribers are rewarded for engaging in Gaia, in other words— and the reward incents them to engage in Gaia even more.”

To summarize, every avatar social community that succeeds is a win for the entire avatar business. Way to go Gaia!

Mobile Phones as Multi-Functional Accessories

Based on a survey of U.S. users who have a wireless phone, comScore Networks, released yesterday a study that analyzes differences in behavior and attitudes among the following key wireless consumer segments:

• The Cellular Generation - Ages 18 to 24, these young adults grew up with cell phone awareness, experiencing cell phones as a part of their everyday lives.
• Transitioners - Ages 25 to 34, these people fall in between two distinct groups: those who grew up with cell phone knowledge and those who did not. Cell phones began to infiltrate everyday life during their teen years and early adulthood.
• Adult Adopters - Age 35 or older, this group was not exposed to cell phone until adulthood. Adult Adopters tend to have the most functional view of cell phones, with many requiring just the basics and showing limited interest in emerging technologies.

""During the past decade, cell phones have dramatically changed the communication habits of American consumers," said Serge Matta, senior vice president of comScore Telecommunications Solutions. "While the youngest consumers grew up with the technology, those just a few years older did not, resulting in some pronounced differences in attitudes and behaviors towards cell phone usage across the various user segments. As cell phones continue to evolve in terms of design, functionality, and features, it is vital that cell phone providers and manufacturers understand the differing needs and desires of these distinct consumer segments.""

Cellular Generation Views Their Cell Phones as Accessories

"Cell phones offer far more than simply a means of voice communication. They can provide entertainment, convey social status, and express one's individuality. While consumers in both the Cellular Generation and Transitioners are likely to view their cell phones as multi-dimensional devices, adult adopters tend to have a more functional view. Approximately one-quarter of both the Cellular Generation (26 percent) and Transitioners (25 percent) said that "trendiness" was of high importance when selecting a cell phone, as compared to just 10 percent of Adult Adopters. Additionally, 41 percent of Cellular Generation consumers strongly agree with the statement "I like my cell phone to be personalized" with options such as color schemes and ring tones, while only 19 percent of Adult Adopters feel the same."

[via Cellular News]

Forgot Your Password? Try A New Identity

Danah Boyd has written a very interesting post about youth's tendency to forget things, like their login passwords etc and their approach when being locked out of mySpace/Xanga/Blogger happens:

"Sara created a MySpace using an email address that she made specifically for that purpose. After vacation, she couldn't remember her MySpace password (or her email password). She created a new MySpace page using a new throwaway email address. When i asked her if she was irritated that she had to do this after investing time in the previous profile, she said, "nah.. I had too many Friends that I didn't know anyways."

"Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They're going to a new site, they want to start over. [...] Some teens chew through IM handles like candy; their nicks are things like "o-so-funny" rather than the first name, last name standard that seems to pervade professional worlds. It's not seen as something to build an extensive identity around, but something to use to talk to friends in the moment."

[via zephoria]

Forgetting the password and creating a new account is a great opportunity to start over a new account with a new profile, i.e. a new identity. It is even more appealing for youth because adolescence is the age when many 'roles' are being tried/played with as part of the process of constructing an independent (from parents) identity.

in contrast, let's keep Cyworld with its 'real-name policy' and huge success among teens and young adults in mind...

Relevance Marketing - The Messengers

Sony Pictures is a great example of clever segmentation of target audience and a great example of leveraging segments’ needs and behavior to promote a new product; in this case, the upcoming thriller movie "The Messengers".

According to The Hollywood Reporter:

“To promote the upcoming supernatural thriller "The Messengers", Sony Pictures has included in its dossier of digital-marketing tools a ringtone only young consumers can hear.”

"The ultrasonic ringtone -- ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not adults -- are a featured aspect of the film's promotional campaign, which is geared toward a teen audience.”

Understanding youth’s need to belong to a peer group and the place the mobile phone holds in the lives of youth as a tool to make a personal statement about themselves, Sony Pictures is promoting its new movie through a ringtone that only teens can hear. Besides having a thematic relevance to the movie since “the movie's story line about a young female protagonist insisting she hears voices that her parents cannot hear”, the ringtone has huge relevance to youth’s psychological and behavioral needs.

And Sony Pictures don't settle down with just ringtones to promote the movie,

“Along with the thematically-integrated ringtones and online interactivity, Epstein [executive director, worldwide digital marketing strategy, Columbia TriStar Marketing Group] also noted a blog on the Weblog community Xanga and an eventual 1-800 number as other communicative features tied to the film's marketing efforts. The hope is that it feels like one continuous conversation with Jess [the main character in the film] -- you see her profile on a social networking site, you call her and IM her -- as she draws you into her current situation," said Epstein, noting the intent of the campaign is to have users transcend a couple of digital mediums.”

And if you're interested in more about relevance marketing and youth - here's a link and my previous thoughts about the ultrasonic ringtone.

SMSing Under The Dinner Table

Hi everyone,

The forth part of the mobile youth trends coverage will be posted to next Thursday due to the mobileYouth Tends Summit that will be held tomorrow (Friday 24th of November) at the Tower Hotel, London. If you’re thinking of attending - I’m sure it is worthwhile.

Looking for mobile news related to youth I’ve found a very amusing research related to the American holiday season held by T-Mobile which shows how mobile has created new family dynamics at holiday dinners and family gatherings.

In the survey:

• 70% of young adults (ages 18-22) and 56% of parents surveyed say they've made or answered wireless calls during a holiday gathering.
• 35% of young adults say they've read or sent an e-mail or text message under the dinner table during a holiday family gathering.
• In addition, 67% of parents and young adults now agree that it is ok to use their mobile phone during holiday gatherings. Moreover, 73% of people surveyed agree the mobile phone can improve the holidays by keeping people in touch with those not there in person.

[via Cellular News]

One thing wasn’t very clear and changes my opinion entirely (regarding the described findings): whether “using their mobile phone during holiday gatherings” means “SMSing under the dinner table” as the title given by Cellular News implicates. If we’re talking about literally texting under the dinning table, sneaking letters without accidentally getting caught - you might say I’m too conservative… I think it’s pretty rude to sit with your family and text to friends under the dinning table. That’s me. As Dr. Tracy Wellens said, it might “include more people than ever before at family gatherings”. Yet it seems more like bonding with teenager’s peer group at the stake of disrespecting the people who made a big effort to be able to sit together at the dinning table… How about waiting for after dinner to reply?

****

And don't forget to drop by next Thursday for the last part of my "mobile youth trends" coverage!

MocoSpace

The other day Justin Siegel of JNJ Mobile shared that MocoSpace has just gotten a facelift. My test drive of this social software raised a few questions which Justin kindly answered and I decided to publish them here.

The first thing that intrigued me was the added value for MocoSpace mobile\web users, having other MoSoSo in the mobile neighborhood:

Justin: Today, there are no sites that offer people the combination of communication, self-expression & content sharing available on MocoSpace. The added value for MocoSpace users is that with MocoSpace they can now enjoy the benefits of finding friends (chat, browse profiles), staying connected to them (mobile email, messaging, guestbook), self-expression (personalized profiles, blogs, favorites, photos, videos, etc.), and content sharing (photos, videos, blogs, wallpapers, etc.) all on 1 great site available from virtually any device including mobile phones, smart phones, and personal computers. 

At MocoSpace, we think that it's crucial to incorporate several "best practices", which include

• safety features that allow members to protect themselves and allow site admins to monitor and address abuse issues
• a design that facilitates navigation and minimizes clicks
• broad handset support (wap 1.0, 2.0, xhtml)
• free and premium service options
• privacy levels for members
• customer support & help sections

MocoSpace’s competitors come mainly from 3 distinct areas. First there are the Web content competitors, ie MySpace, Youtube, Facebook, etc. These are sites with lots of content and big existing social networks. Second are the Web communication competitors MSN, Yahoo & Google.  These companies will continue to roll out mobile offerings that cover email, chat, and IM. Third, are the early mobile competition primarily led by WAP chat sites such as AirG and Jumbuck.

Regarding MocoSpace’s placement at the MoSoSo market:

Justin: MocoSpace is in an excellent position in the MoSoSo market thanks to the strength of its product offering and also its location, i.e. North America. In the US, unlike Asia for example, there are not many if any players really taking aim today at what we are doing in terms of breadth and depth of their offering. Some companies are offering photo sharing or chat, but none are offering a product that truly combines the notions of connectivity, communication, and content they way MocoSpace is today.

And some thoughts about the future:

Justin: MocoSpace will continue to enhance its existing features to further enable communication as well as content sharing & creation. Without giving away too much about our product roadmap, I would suggest that our next area of focus will be music.

Mososo is such a broad term that covers so much ground, it's practically impossible to try to predict it's future because the "it" is vague and continually changing. That said, the future of this category of sites and services is going to be huge, it's going to be ad supported, and it's going to obliterate the remnants of operators' walled gardens. I think it will take the idea of connectivity to a new level in terms of people always feeling plugged in to their friends, peer groups, etc. I'm not a big fan of the pursuit of the "killer app" beyond voice and email. However, I do think that MoSoSo is probably the closest we've come to a killer category. I sure hope our evolution as an industry didn't peak with Crazy Frog!

Don't Let Your Private Life Hang Up By Your Career

These tips for job applicants concerning your mobile self expression were caught in one of my news alerts:

"Your cell phone is ringing. If you are job hunting, the person calling may be your future employer. If it is, you have obviously impressed them with your application or stellar resume -- you don't want to ruin your chances by handling the call unprofessionally.

"In recent years we have found a majority of applicants list only their cell phone number for direct contact. However, some applicants are too casual when using their cell phones. Often, recruiters are greeted with voice mail messages that should never be heard by a prospective employer."

"While the latest trend is to personalize your ringback tone with the hottest music download, usually it does not reflect a professional image. Your friends and family may enjoy listening to your favorite song before you answer, but a prospective employer may not."

"Select an appropriate voice mail message. Keep it short and include your full name so the prospective employer knows they have reached the correct applicant."

[via KOTA]

The article describes the inevitable encounter of the professional and private spheres. While it advices to pretend that we don't have a private life, I think that if someone calls my personal mobile phone, it is only natural for the caller to be exposed to private aspects of my life\personality.

Very popular online news narrative is the story of applicants who weren’t hired due to facts\personal opinionswritten in their personal blogs\mySpace profiles etc'. Also, many experts advice us to be very careful with what we put online. While I agree that we should think before publishing personal content online -- if someone knocks on my door in the middle of the night, why would he\she be surprised to find me in my polka doted pajamas?! Should I deny having one or quickly change to my business suit? -- I hope you all agee that this is ridiculous; Likewise, if someone calls my private mobile phone, he\she have to realize that he\she is stepping into my personal world and that he\she will hear my personal greeting or my personalized ringback tone. We all have a professional persona and a private one at the same time. By no means it should disqualify an applicant from getting hired for the job.

Having said that, if this still bothers you, you don't have to get rid of your ringback tone. Today, you can have multiple ringback tones and multiple voice mail greetings set according to the person calling you. So you can set up “How I wish you were here” for your girl\boyfriend and “Work All Day” for your prospective employer. There's no need to hide.

Interviewing Jan Kuczynski on Mobile Music and Youth Trends

Welcome to the second part of the mobile youth trends and behavior coverage. Today, Jan Kuczynski, Associate Manager at the Wireless World Forum, who is also the co-author of the mobileYouth 2006 report will be visiting here! Jan has been with Wireless World Forum for almost a year with a focus on emerging mobile trends and technology. Prior to joining W2F, Jan spent two years in snowy northern Japan and one year in the sunny south of France “I can personally recommend the Jurançon sec to anyone into their white wines”.

For those of you who missed the first part of the mobile youth trends coverage: Nick Wright, Jan's colleague, visited Xellular Identity last week and we had a great conversation - you can read it here.

Well, enough said... Jan, the stage is yours!

-Hi Jan, how are you?

Good thanks, Xen. Thanks for inviting me at Xellular Identity!

-How’s the weather in London?

We’ve been really lucky recently actually - it’s another bright and sunny autumn day!

-What got you interested in mobile?

I’ve always had an interest in the latest technology, but I suppose I really fell in love with my mobile when I spent two years living in Japan. There were some great handsets and services over there which kept me busy during my daily train commute. I would always be using my mobile to shop on Amazon, check maps using GPS or just browse around. Since I came back to the UK, I’ve stopped using my mobile so much. I still like to keep my eye on some of the new mobile developments back over in Japan - though sometimes it makes me just a little jealous…

-What takes up your time other than mobile?

Reading (I’ll have to look into your recommendation of Murakami’s “Wind-up Bird Chronicle”!), rugby league, skiing and getting out of London now and again to see the rest of the world. I’ve also been in big trouble with my housemate recently for repeatedly stealing their new Nintendo DS with tetris!

-Today’s topic is mobile music - do you use your mobile as a music player?

Actually, I don’t! The biggest deal breaker is that my handset doesn’t have a regular headphone socket. I really hate the standard headphones that come bundled with most ‘music phones’ these days so I would only use my phone as a music player if I could use my headphones. The other issue that holds me back is the lack of a good all-in-one music service that will let me use my mobile music on my PC and not cost me a fortune in data charges for OTA downloads from my phone.

-OK, not a mobile music convertee yet ;) but you’re a music fan, right?

Yes I am - and so it was fun to do research into the new trends in youth music consumption and try out some of the services that are so popular with today’s teens - in fact, I even went to two concerts of artists that I found out about on MySpace!

-Does music take a different role in the lives of teenagers and adults?

Yes, it does. As we grow older, we tend to have smaller groups of close friends, but for teenagers, friends, peers and social groups are the most important things in their lives. Music is a powerful social tool for teenagers - it gives them something to talk about, social status from knowing about the newest and coolest bands and the type of music you listen to can even define which social group you belong to (in my school you were either a metal-er or a raver based on your music tastes - I’ll let you guess which one I was ;) ).

-What are the key drivers for music’s appeal to youth?

Youth don’t just play music - they explore, display and share music. Firstly, youth can only use music as a social tool if it’s up-to-date, so unless youth constantly put feelers out to explore new music, they get left behind. Secondly, teens like to display their music tastes - whether it’s through their CD rack, their Coldplay t-shirt or simply by turning up their headphones so everyone can hear. Thirdly, youth like sharing music as it earns them social currency and reinforces peer bonds - that’s why teenagers spend time and effort burning compilation CDs for their friends.

-Has the way youth consume music changed over the last 10 years?

The key drivers haven’t changed - youth still want to explore, display and share their music - but the music industry itself has undergone a big transformation over the last few years. Music formats have shifted from analogue to digital and sources of new music have become more diverse. When I was younger, there was only one music chart, one MTV and just a handful of radio stations for youth. Now there’s the internet, a whole spectrum of music charts and channels and more and more specialist music genres (HipHopera or Neo-Rave anyone?).

-What music services are most popular among teens?

The most popular teen music services now are internet services which help youth best explore, display and share their music in the new fragmented, digital music world. Some services focus on improving one of these aspects (for example, Last.fm focuses on exploring, BBC’s Musicubes are a new way of displaying and Kazaa is mainly about sharing), whereas some enhance all three. MySpace, for example, is all about exploring for new music through a social network, displaying your music tastes on your homepage and sharing new tracks with a community of peers.

-How can we make mobile music more appealing to youth?

I think we need to move beyond the “mp3 playback” mindset to make mobile music a competitor for other popular youth music services. Just adding mp3 playback to a handset doesn’t exploit mobile music’s potential to let youth explore, display and share their music.

I’ve started to see some great new mobile products and services which do exactly that. For exploring, mobile technologies such as QR codes, image and audio recognition provide really interesting opportunities to use the mobile to discover new music. For displaying, there is a growing market for Bluetooth speakers which help youth make a display of their music collection, and there’s a great handset called “Neon” in Japan which shows the track title and artist in glowing LEDs along the side of the phone. For sharing, Vodafone have developed a DRM system where young people can swap music over Bluetooth, MMS, infrared and memory cards and there are some new music services that let youth share playlists with friends.

Mobile music has great potential, but I think it’s only by using mobile technology to build on the key drivers of exploring, displaying and sharing that we can make mobile music services more appealing to youth.

Thank you Jan! :)

* *** * *** * *** *

Next week there will be a new guest visiting here and talking about the art of marketing mobile services for the youth segment. Wanna know who??? - don't forget to tune in next Thursday to find out!

Cyworld Insight from Plus Eight Star

Just finished reading Alan Moore’s interview with Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star, on a new report about Cyworld.

I wanted to highlight 3 interesting observations Benjamin made regarding topics that I’ve covered here many times in the past:

Personalization as a major revenue generator:

"You mentioned best practices, what is there to learn from Cyworld for
foreign community services / social networks?
To start with, the richness of the Cyworld service itself can support the product planning of foreign services. Among the most interesting aspects are Cyworld's business model relying on micro-customization, which concerns not only avatars but the whole page with music and many other functions. Also, the mobile aspects of Cyworld can certainly inspire companies who wish to step into this next 3-billion dollars industry'."

The use of ‘real name policy’ vs. anonymity online:

"The key point in Cyworld is its 'real-name policy'. Basically you need to use your real name associated with your official ID number to register. This has become more or less a standard among South Korean Internet services. It is a bit counter-intuitive, but real name policy does not damage free speech, it brings responsibility, courtesy and a lot of benefits for users themselves in terms of trust in the information they can find. We faced the same elements when doing a benchmark of best practices in online 'serious dating' services: trust and reliability brings a very high value to services.

Another very important aspect that sets Cyworld apart from 'western style blogs' is that minihompy are about social and emotional presentation of the self, while Western blogs tend to be rather intellectual. It is very different to have an 'online self' and a 'public journal'. This has an important impact on economics as users want to present the most attractive online self for their friends, and friends and emotions do not have a market price!

Users' value in Cyworld:

"In Cyworld we found the following drivers:
a). Not being left behind
b). Their creations
c). Their relationships
d). Their image"

[via Community Dominate Brands]

I really encourage you to read the full interview, it's a worth reading so don't miss it!

Interviewing Nick Wright on Mobile Youth Trends

For quite some time I was thinking about covering a wider scope of the mobile youth trends and behavior. Reading and looking for a body of knowledge, I got to know Nick Wright, a Research Associate at the Wireless World Forum, who is a co-author of the mobileYouth 2006 report. Nick has a BA in English and has worked in film journalism, English teaching and publishing. He joined Wireless World Forum in 2006 after a year living and working abroad in Russia and Turkey. Having made an incredible gesture, Nick will be my special guest at Xellular Identity during the month of November. First, I will be publishing the email interview conducted earlier, and later on Nick has agreed to answer your questions(!)

Well enough talking, let’s give Nick a worm to the stage!

Getting to Know Nick

-Hi Nick, how are you?   
Great, great to be here :)

-What brought you into the world of mobile?
What appealed to me when I joined Wireless World Forum 2 months ago was the consumer focus inherent in their approach to research. I had just finished a period teaching English to kids in Russia and Turkey and I knew the importance of appealing to young people and getting their attention. When I joined I knew as much as the next person about mobiles but within a very short time I discovered that this was an area where huge leaps in development were possible on a daily basis. It’s an exciting area to be involved in and it’s rare to see an industry so passionate about the possibilities that their medium offers. What we are trying to do with the mobileYouth report is refocus that passion to keep it relevant to the youth consumers so that all that energy isn’t lost.

-Other hobbies, fields of interest?
I’m an avid film buff but I temper the long time spent sitting in front of the screen by keeping active though running, rowing and yoga. Recently, it’s been an exciting time for me since the London Film Festival has been showing all over the city. The new, the strange and the classic jostle for attention around London and I’m frankly spoilt for choice. Last Sunday it set a world record for showing its much-anticipated, completely unknown “Surprise Film” on 50 screens at the same time (including a hospital, a prison and some lucky person’s living room). It turned out to be Robert Altman’s hilarious and touching new film “A Prairie Home Companion”, his first for 5 years. It was worth the suspense!

-3 birthday wishes?
1) A solution (or a basket of solutions) to solve the climate crisis we’re facing right now. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth comes at an all-too convenient time.
2) The persistence to train for the London marathon for next year
3) The Complete Stanley Kubrick Collection on DVD.

-What did you get for Christmas last year?
A Russian chapka from my parents: I was in Moscow teaching English and the benny hat wasn’t doing the trick any more!

mobileYouth

-High influence of the peer group, the need to build an independent personality, search of identity… adolescence was always about those burning questions, so what has mobile to do with it?
The relationship between youth and their mobiles is not necessarily based on being “fun, cool, or entertaining”. It’s a key social tool employed in the dynamics of the peer group. Youth consume mobile products - as they do others - to make statements about themselves and their relationship with their peers.

Self-expression is such a key aspect of young people’s lives that they would rarely choose a non-branded alternative over an identifiable brand. 98% of teens for example would choose a brand/logo designed T-shirt over a plain one.

Mobile is most importantly a symbol of belonging to a group, both as a physical product (you must own a phone to be part of our group) and its communicative possibilities: texting is essential to youth not because of the content (very limited) of the texts themselves but because each text is a reaffirmation and a reminder that “I’m with you”.

If mobile operators are to make the most of this underlying desire for social interaction amongst youth peer groups, then they need to ask how they can benefit youth and improve their communication. So far the emphasis has been more about giving young people things to play with on their phone which don’t enhance or build on existing behaviour. The result is, at best, small-scale adoption and faddish blips but no long-term successes beyond texting.

-How is the mobile phone changing the lives of teenagers?
A pretty broad question! I think it’s fair to say that it’s allowed youth to remain hyper-connected at all times, to the extent that 14% of US mobileYouth surveyed admitted that they couldn’t live without their phones. Other surveys point to the fact that an increasing number of young people are bing admitted to clinics as “text-addicts”. Overall, youth may be building up a dependency on mobiles which have increasingly become a sign of social status and self-esteem: many admit to feeling depressed if they pass a whole day without receiving a text.

We found something similar in the recent vox pop survey we caught on camera last week. One person admitted that he didn’t know “how people survived before mobile phones” and almost all admitted that they loved texting. If you’d like to see what other information we gathered from the video interviews please visit this link.

However, overall it is fueling the more extrovert and allowing shyer teens to communicate more easily. One of the more interesting findings is that mobiles have come to take the place in youth culture traditionally held by cigarettes. They provide or allow private communication, the activity is carried out largely unsupervised and they effectively create a rare private space for youth to interact in.

The most popular aspects of the mobile are features that can be adapted to suit the needs of youth. Texting is easily understood (though it needs practice to reach the blurry speeds of some of the more proficient) and adaptable to the stage where adults find the language unintelligible. Wallpapers and handset choice allow for personalization which allows youth to express themselves and advertise their identity as part of their peer group.

One of the reasons for the low adoption of new mobile services is because youth cannot access the service easily either due to budget or the difficulty of setting up the service to begin with. One of the key factors in reaching the youth mass market is the ease of use of a service which allows it to become widely accepted across peer groups.

- Is there a special usage of the mobile phone when it comes to youth? Usage patterns? How youth’s usage/consumption of mobile services differ from other segments?
Youth are compulsive texters, as I have explained. Globally they spend four times as much  on texting  as the average mobile phone user (US$ 6 a year compared to US$ 1.5 across all ages). 29.8% of their ARPU is on data services, compared to 11% across all age ranges. There is a lot of room to exploit future data services for the youth market as long as operators exploit existing youth behaviour rather than churning out technological features that have little relevance to kids’ lives.

-What is the market size of mobileYouth?
Currently youth from 5-24 make up 28.1% of the mobile phone ownership market. They spend US$ 130 million on mobiles which is 24% of the total spend on mobiles for all ages. Youth spend on data services is US$ 38 million and, importantly 80% of that spending is on texting. Youth spend on data services is 43% of the total, which shows just how heavily they rely on text as opposed to voice to communicate.

-Do culture and orientation influence mobileYouth behavior? How?
Although we argue that the underlying social drivers behind youth consumers are broadly similar, there are superficial cultural differences that have often been given too much emphasis when, for example, some industry professionals dismiss Korean and Japanese youth markets as “gadget-obsessed”.  These markets are far more developed in their adoption of the mobile internet and the uses of camera phones but these are all easily explained in other terms that the Japanese being obsessed with technology.

Japanese and Korean youth have even higher levels of mobile data service ARPU than youth globally: 47.6% of mobileYouth ARPU was data, compared to the global average of 29.7%. One of the most popular mobile services in Korea is a mobile social networking site named Cyworld, which is essentially an extension of MySpace in that it allows youth to create their own virtual rooms and literally buy furniture to decorate it. It’s hugely popular (90% of Koreans in their 20s have used the service) and provides a perfect environment for youth to fulfil five of their basic social needs, as we identified them: Social Networking, Communication, Status display, Personalisation and acting as a Behavioural Platform.

To explain: Social networking essentially allows youth to keep connected to all their friends, reconnect with older friends (as in the case with Bebo, a UK-based social networking site for school students, for those children forced to move school) and meet new people with similar interests.
Communication is simply the ability to communicate via as many routes as possible: text, voice, IM, PM, e-mail etc. Cyworld allows consumers to interact in all these ways.

Status Display and personalisation are shown by the ability to adapt and personalize in a way that shows off the young author’s identity, likes and dislikes (specifically related to music), friends, profile and the customizable room. As in real life, the virtual world holds virtual objects that convey status in the same way as branded Nike trainers or ownership of the latest music does in real life.

Ultimately, since so many youth are on Cyworld, it essentially forms a behavioural platform for youth as well. By this I mean it presents a set of rules, perameters and structures for youth to interact around. A great way for youth to advance their status is to become a master of a certain behavoural platform. Specific sport varieties are also behavioural platforms so, for example, if you are a great skateboarder you will be given a higher status amongst your skater peer group. In the same way, collective familiarity with a certain platform, when everyone has access to it and understands the “rules”, tends to strengthen peer group bonds and the attachment to the platform itself.

Thank you Nick! :)

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For the second part of the interview and more insights about the mobile youth behavior, the mobile music market, and the future of this market - don't forget to tune in next Thursday!

Korean Avatars Market Review - Part IV (Mobile Avatars Offerings)

Recently I was asked to give a presentation about the Korean avatars market, trying to understand the craze and predict other mobile markets’ behavior. Knowing it might interest some of you, I’ll be publishing the content of the presentation at this blog. Due to the length, I’ve been posting it in a few parts every Thursday. If you missed the opening, here’s the link to the first part, second part and third part.

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Mobile Avatars Offerings

The medium of avatars is naturally focused on community, since users need an audience to present their character. As such, avatars can increase operator's attractiveness using its viral affect to mobile operators. Also, operators can use avatars in order to utilize the loyalty established by online communities.

However, the mobile industry had stumbled upon barriers to provide a mobile avatars offering: the mobile internet hasn’t reached the web’s speed, latency, and user interface. Also there’s a big difficulty in implementation.

Having said that, there are already some players in the Korean mobile avatars arena. The first player was NEOWIZ which began supplying mobile avatars to KTF in August 2001, to LG Telecom in April 2002, and SK Telecom in August 2002. According to company’s reports, mobile avatar sales grew to over 2 billion won per month in 2004 (which are about $1.5 B).

The second player was NATE. SK Telecom's Nate launched its avatar service in October 2002 and provides avatar service similar to those provided by web portals. This move was the result of the wired-wireless convergence with SK Telecom’s acquisition of a Korean web portal. Nate offers clothing brands for avatars, providing its users with replicas of the genuine clothing lines. The fashion and consumer brands companies enjoy the advertising by increasing actual product sales, while NATE profits from avatar sales.

What avatars demonstrated to the mobile industry is that mobile phones are a strong extension of self for many users. By personalizing the mobile with avatars, the mobile becomes much more than a communication tool. It has become an extension of either how the user views himself\herself, or would like to.

To summarize, avatars should be linked with other services and not just be a cute application to play with. Avatar service has been generating sales related to community-based services like gaming, forums, chats, IM, and minihomepies. Integrating the web and mobile increases the usage of avatars provide the ability to use the digital identity created practically everywhere.

Korean Avatars Market Review - Part III (Avatars Offerings)

Recently I was asked to give a presentation about the Korean avatars market, trying to understand the craze and predict other mobile markets’ behavior. Knowing it might interest some of you, I’ll be publishing the content of the presentation at this blog. Due to the length, I’ve been posting it in a few parts every Thursday. If you missed the opening, here’s the link to the first part and second part

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Avatars Offerings

Consumption of all kinds of online content has extremely grown in Korea ever since broadband internet service became popular. I’ll also add here a little piece of valuable info I got last week (Thanks Melanie) to get the idea of “heavy connectivity” that was discussed last week: on average, Korean Internet users spend 12.2 hours online per week and participate in 3-4 community websites!

South Korean users were the first to adopt avatars as their web representation. Respectively, the demand for avatars has grown with the fast adoption of online social interactions in a bodiless, ageless and sexless sphere. This amorphous presence has evoked the need to establish a visual presence by nominating a visual representant.

Most of the avatar providers are portal companies which entered the avatar market to upgrade their web offerings. This companies recognized that avatars can increase revenues by promoting more frequent and longer visits and by serving as a bridge to additional services. Only later down the road service providers realized that avatars are a consumer goods which should have a business model of their own. The avatar service evolved to a pay service which increased the quality of the offerings.

What makes the avatar phenomenon so interesting for many, is the fact that so many users are willing to pay to dress their avatar with clothing and accessories. Understanding that the avatar has a major role in self-representation in the social world over the web, service providers offer only a basic avatar. Many times the basic avatar doesn’t wear more than pajamas or a fig leaf. Service providers understood that users want to have an avatar that resembles them as much as possible, so they offered premium content for extra charge.

The major avatar providers in Korea are NEOWIZ (SayClub), Cyworld, Daum, MSN Korea and Yahoo! Korea.

NEOWIZ operates one of the most popular avatar sites - SayClub. SayClub has over 20 million subscribers which are equivalent to nearly 50% the population of Korea! Neowiz launched the first avatar service in 2000 and has occupied one of the leading positions among Korean internet companies offering avatars and games ever since. According to the company’s reports, Q1 2006 avatar revenues reached $2.4 M!

NEOWIZ was the first provider to employ an “avatars distributed for free, clothes and accessories sold for small amounts” business model. According to this model, users can buy designer avatar clothing and other premium content, with licensing fees being paid to actual consumer brand. This has led to the reality where Korean avatar owners spend more money on clothing for their avatar than they do for themselves. In a society where most of interactions happen over the web – this makes sense.

MSN Korea launched its MSN messenger in 2003 which includes “dynamic avatars”. Dynamic avatar changes according to the typed emoticons or certain words like ‘happy’, ‘angry’, etc’ in the chat window. Dynamic avatars require server capacity which is equal to the online games; which makes it harder for small portals to provide similar services. MSN Korea offers users a “multi avatar feature” which enables the user to employ up to 4 avatars. The displayed avatar depends on the chat partner. To initiate the service, users need to pay cyber money.

The last major avatar provider, which got a lot of coverage after its entrance to the U.S. market, is Cyworld. Cyworld is a social networking leader in Asia with localized sites in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, owned by a subsidiary of SK Telecom, the country's largest wireless provider. The Cyworld service is a combination of minihompies, online communities, music downloads, picture sharing, messenger and eBay. Cyworld’s users have avatars that visit (by linking) each other's "minihompy" [= a miniature homepage that looks like a 3D room which contains user’s blog, photos, and virtual items for sale]. Cyworld users also buy and sell music, ringtones, and clothes for their avatar. They can also buy skins to furnish their virtual minihompy. The service is free yet a big part of the content is available only for a fee, paid in virtual currency. Cyworld has astonishing penetration rates with 90% of the 20-year-old Koreans.

Daum, another major avatar provider is one of Korea's largest portals. Currently it has more than 35 million subscribers.

Next week - I’ll be talking about the next big thing... avatars entering into the mobile arena! So don’t forget to tune in on Thursday.

Korean Avatars Market Review - Part II (The South Korean connectivity culture)

As I told you last week, I was asked to give a presentation about the Korean avatars market, trying to understand the craze on the web and predict other mobile markets’ behavior. I started to post it in a few parts every Thursday. If you missed the opening, here’s the link to the first part and now let’s move forward to the second part:

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South Korean connectivity culture

South Korean users were the first to adopt avatars as their web representation and very quickly it has turned to be a very prosperous market for avatars providers. To understand this phenomenon we should look into the South Korean connectivity culture.

South Korea has quickly become the world's most wired nation. A friend of mine who just got back to Israel after being relocated in South Korea for 1.5 years shared that he "couldn’t grasp how much the web had to offer until I got to Korea. You suddenly realize how FAST it can be! An average South Korean apartment has a high-speed Internet connection of 8 megabits per second” - which, just for the comparison, is 8 times the typical broadband speed in U.S. households. That's FAST!

But we’re not only talking about the speed. Korean broadband penetration leads the world being one of the fastest, and its subscription rates which are among the lowest in the world. 78% of the total Korean households or some 11 million homes, have broadband accounts. This makes Korea a fertile land for broadband services.

Massively multi-player online role-playing games or MMORPGs are one of the beneficiaries of Korean broadband’s high penetration. These games form entire fantasy worlds (and economies), where players meet, interact, and even fight (together or against one another). All is done by using their avatars, their web representations. MMORPGs where the first arena where the need for having a personalized self-representation was understood and answered.

The demand for avatars has grown with the fast adoption of online social interactions in a bodiless, ageless and sexless sphere (at MMORPGs and elsewhere on the web). This amorphous presence has evoked the need to establish a visual presence by nominating a visual representant.

Service providers, on their behalf, entered the avatar market to upgrade their web offerings, recognizing that avatars can increase revenues by promoting more frequent and longer visits and by serving as a bridge to additional services; wherever you go, you take your avatar with you. For the different Korean Avatars offerings you'll have to tune in next Thursday... :)

Korean Avatars Market Review - Part I

Recently I was asked to give a presentation about the Korean avatars market, trying to understand the craze and predict other mobile markets’ behavior. Knowing it might interest some of you, I’ll be publishing the content of the presentation at this blog. Due to the length, I’ll be posting it in a few parts every Thursday.

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Email, IM, VoIP, P2P file sharing, online social networks etc’... we all use these to communicate with other people. It makes our lives easier, it extends our availability (and our working hours) and it makes us manage more "mediated" relationships than we used to have in the past; meaning we communicate more through emails\mobiles\IM and less in person, face to face. Having said that, we should examine the influence of these medias on our lives and what we gain from them.

One of the key attributes of the internet is that users are liberated from their body, age, sex and occupation. For many, this is a major attraction while others loathe the lack of boundaries. Either way, users need to supplement information that otherwise can be gathered easily, like age, sex, personal traits etc’. To do so, users adopt a personal referent that stands for them over the web. It can be a screen name, a user ID number, an email address… Yet many users find that a graphical representation provides a better service for this purpose.

That graphical representation is what we call an avatar. An avatar can be based on the user’s physical appearance as close as possible, if not identical, to how he\she is seen in real life or, in contrast, present a desired but imaginary appearance; a manga fairy, a medieval warrior, cute Hello Kitty... Anything or anyone. Thus, avatars empower users. Avatars are users’ alter ego.

Also, users can change their avatars frequently to better fit their mood and the actual settings.

Scholars have found major interest in the self-representation over the web mechanism, and dealt a lot with the following questions:

• Does web self-representation resemble to the real-life self-representation?
• How users manage consciously and unconsciously their self-representation over the web?
• What message users want to promote about themselves?
• How users read and decode this visual information?

Moving to South Korea...

South Korean users were the first to adopt avatars as their web representation and very rapidly it has turned to be a very prosperous market for avatars providers. To understand this phenomenon we should look into the South Korean connectivity culture. So don’t forget to tune in next Thursday for the second part.

WeeWorld Now on AIM

Congratulations to WeeWorld people for steping into AIM with their WeeMee avatars. Now AIM users can have their personalized WeeMee as their AIM expression. This is great news for the entire world of avatars. :)

And here is my Weemee:

 

No Mobile? No Social Life

Noted - the mobile is the yardstick of teen's social life:

"78% of 11 to 17-year-olds believe having a mobile has given them a better social life as it meant it was easier to keep in touch with their friends. By contrast, many young people - especially teenage girls - admit they would feel unwanted if the day passed without their mobile ringing."

[via BBC News}

In my days it was getting invited to better Friday's nights dance parties\hang outs...

Mod Your Mobile

As a personalization evangelist, I've been familiar with ringtones, wallpapers and screensavers, colorful shells, Klonies as your Virtual mobile persona, mobile jewelry... Also I've been familiar with the fact that this is a major personal need of adolescence. But this is something I haven't seen yet... (and thanks Darren) :)

"'Mod' is short for modification, it's big in Japan and it's going to be massive over here. Show us what you can do with a tube of glue, some paint and a bit of imagination."

[via Orange UK]

To encourage users to express their creativity (ahm ahm...), Orange UK even has a prize winning competition for best 'modders'. Having my unique handmade mobile HS might make me want to keep it longer; yet if the modding didn't turn out as I wanted or I accidentally spilled too much glue on the screen - mom+dad are gonna need to buy me a new one...

   

Itzle - Nice but Lacking (a lot of) Sex Appeal

Tom pointed me to this social tool I wasn’t aware of. Itzle is a new tool that gives you a visual presence while visiting at a webpage “as if it were an actual, physical place”. The aim is to meet other people in the same virtual location and communicate. Tom also points out that He sees it

“as the reincarnation of Odigo's base idea: while being able to IM with your friends, how do you make new friends?

the idea was that you would see on the Odigo 'radar' people being on the same web page as you (you could further drill down to sex, age, spoken language, etc), as well as leave notes for other to see on the web page.”

My criticism is about the visual appearance: the Itzle avatar is nice yet very schematic. The personalization options are very basic and only allow you to change the colors of the hair, shirt, pants and text. The user can't even change the most basic option of all customizable web identities - determining his/her gender. Today, with a huge market of web avatars, this is just not enough. If this seems redundant, just think how would someone attract others into initiating communication while visiting the same webpage when they all look the same??! Would you just try avatars randomly? I don’t think so.

It’s nice, yet this browser add-in will have a tough time gaining popularity with the proliferation of social apps in the online neighborhood and with its avatars' low sex appeal…