CBS to test location-based mobile advertising
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The company looks to strengthen its already substantial advertising network by adding text message ads to its portfolio.
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New Doubleclick technology lets customers schedule, show ads on mobile phones.
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(InfoWorld) - Starting on Tuesday, when Sprint Nextel customers use the search bar in their phone browsers the results will automatically incorporate the users' location. Some customers will also be able to use voice commands to conduct searches. The capabilities are an extension of aÂ relationship that Microsoft and Sprint formedÂ late last year that initially involved including Microsoft's Live Search in the browser on Sprint phones. Microsoft is now adding automatic location detection to search results so users won't have to input their zip codes in their phones before getting local search results. Search results will include results from the Web, the phone and local information such as maps. Most recent Sprint phones include location-finding capabilities. In addition, users of five of Sprint's high-end phones will be able to download a client that will let them use voice commands to conduct searches. Once they have the application, users press the talk button on the phone to speak a search term. If the search is for a local business, for example, the results will include directions, the ability to press a button to call the business and the option to send directions to the place to a friend via text message. Sprint users of the Samsung a900, Samsung a920, Motorola Razr, Sanyo 840 and LG 550 phones will be able to download the voice search client. The application is based on technology from Tellme, the speech recognition company that Microsoft bought earlier this year. The services are not exclusive so they could become available via other operators in the future, said Phil Holden, director of mobile services at Microsoft. While other similar services are available to mobile users, this location-based search offering is more apt to be used because it comes built into the phones, Holden said. Earlier this year Ask.com came out with an applications that phone users could download and use to combine search with location information. In August, Nuance Communications began offering a service for BlackBerry users that lets users search and get driving directions using voice commands. Microsoft rivalÂ Google offers a mobile serviceÂ that automatically combines maps searches with a user's location. It's available for download on certain phones with location capabilities. Microsoft earns revenue from such offerings in two ways, Holden said. Microsoft shares in the revenue stream from the data services offered by operators and also from advertising, he said. The software giant hopes that it will be able to deliver more targeted advertising along with services like these that offer local search results.
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A new advertising platform attracts a major radio network. What will the experiment tell us?
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Cell giant introduces a GPS application that lets subscribers search for products in nearby stores from their phones.
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Early tests will cover in-person mobile coupons, payment by phone, and over-the-air account management.
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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has adopted new rules requiring wireless telephone providers to move toward testing location-based emergency dialing service at the local level.
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SEATTLE _ Coming soon to a cellphone near you: advertisements.  Widespread mobile advertising will still take years to develop, but for now wireless carriers and marketers are looking at several ways to incorporate brands on the mobile phone.
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The company said that its new product would establish a cellphone advertising network in which Google would match ads with the content of mobile Web pages.
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(InfoWorld) - Money talks. That's why mobile phone advertising has become such an irresistible topic. As mobile phone executives converge on the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, which runs from Monday to Thursday, many plan to meet and discuss how they can benefit from the rush toward ad-funded mobile services. Interest in mobile ads is being fueled in part by higher-speed devices that are encouraging more users to surf the Web, by new broadcast mobile TV services that could attract a new breed of viewers on the go and, above all, by numerous ambitious startups, particularly MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators), which are eager to sink their teeth into a huge market. More than 2 billion handsets are spread across the globe, and their numbers are growing by the minute. Arguably, the mobile phone is the most personal consumer goods device we own. It's a trusted communication companion, for the businessperson and consumer alike. And unlike a newspaper or even a computer, it's assigned to a single owner. That has marketers licking their chops. They're excited over the prospect of being able to target their ads in a highly personalized way. And mobile operators, which have been reluctant to leverage their customer base for mobile marketing purposes, now see an opportunity to create a new revenue stream they simply can't resist. Several groups are already testing the waters or are just about ready to dive in. In Europe, for instance, HotSMS in the Netherlands currently delivers a free, ad-sponsored SMS (short message service) offer. Blyk in the U.K. and i-Wood in the Netherlands are preparing to launch free or heavily-subsidized voice and data services in exchange for mobile phone users' consent to receive ads. Vodafone Group, Europe's largest mobile phone operator, is working separately with search engine giants GoogleÂ and Yahoo. Google is developing a service that would link advertising to Internet searches -- a counterpart to its flagship business of selling ads linked to regular Internet searches. With Yahoo, Vodafone aims to jointly develop advertisements in a variety of formats, including banner ads and short videos. To help make ads interesting to customers, the operator plans to offer discounts on services such as mobile TV, games and MMS (multimedia messaging service). In the U.S., Sugar Mama, an MVNO owned by Virgin Mobile USA, gives prepaid customers additional minutes by watching online ads, answering questions by SMS or filling out surveys about products and services. Another MVNO startup, Xero Mobile plans to provide college students with subsidized talk time in return for viewing targeted, relevant advertising. AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Verizon WirelessÂ have signalled interest in developing mobile advertising strategies of their own. Earlier this year, U.S. startup AdMob opened for business as a middleman for managing cell-phone ads. It joins Third Screen Media, which helps companies deliver ads to phones without a glitch. Not surprisingly, in Japan, which is often far ahead of the curve in delivering new mobile phone services, NTT DoCoMo Inc. has been running small banner ads on its mobile portals for more than five years. Clearly, there's money to be made. Informa Telecoms & Media, a division of Informa, expects mobile phone ad spending in 2007 to more than double from 2006 levels to $1.5 billion. By 2011, the market researcher projects spending of more than $11 billion. As enticing as mobile marketing is, industry experts warn advertisers, mobile phone operators, MVNOs and others to move carefully into this new area. The high level of personalization enabled by mobile phones makes these devices inappropriate for blanket advertising and any attempt to leverage users' IDs for unsolicited "spam" ads is guaranteed to alienate consumers, according to Emma Mohr-McClune, principal analyst at Current Analysis Inc. Mohr-McClune argues that consent and relevancy are the twin keys to unlocking mobile marketing's potential, without busting the lock entirely. Operators will have to offer their customers something in exchange for advertising consent, and they must make it relevant. And customers are more likely to accept advertising on a mobile phone if the promotions appeal directly to their own tastes and interests. All of which suggests that mobile phone advertising will most likely appeal to younger customers. "This is definitely a youth-driven market," Mohr-McClune said. "Youth is very price sensitive so they'd be interested in services that are free or heavily discounted." Ask a few and they'll agree. "If the phone service is free or a lot cheaper than what I'm paying now, sure, I'd be interested," said Michael Amos, a 25-year-old cook in DÃ¼sseldorf, Germany. Amos currently has a flat-rate subscription, which he said is comparatively low priced but something he'd drop for a cheaper service. If operators are prepared to lower fees or drop them altogether, they'll want to make sure they generate enough money through ads to offset lower subscription revenue. One way is to keep users in "walled garden" mobile portals where operators would have better control over the flow of mobile ads and the revenue they generate. Some operators may find it easier to work with companies like AdMob, which also serves as a broker and can strike deals for advertisers with individual carriers around the world. Still, mobile phone operators, MVNOs and others entering the mobile ad market should be aware that the service is no free ticket to print money, warns Sarah Harris, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics Inc. in London. There have been failures, such as Spotcast Communications Inc., which launched an advertising-supported service in Hong Kong in 1999 but shut it down a year later, she said. Harris speculates that the service was canned because only the most strapped-for-cash users were really adopting it with any eagerness. Not necessarily advertisers' favorite people, these consumers were happy to "play the game" and receive the ads but not willing to go out and spend money. Similar advertising-supported services were launched a few years ago in Europe for fixed-line phones but "you really don't hear anything about them anymore," Harris said. If the ad market for online PCs took years to mature and generate revenue, the market for ads zapped over the airwaves will take time, too. Nevertheless, momentum is growing as new ad-hungry MVNOs sprout up like mushrooms. Operators know that if they don't carve out a chunk of the mobile advertising pie before the others, they could be left nibbling on the crumbs.
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The company has come up with some on-demand advertising. Will it woo viewers?
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While many industry and internet specialists agree that a genuine convergence between technology and content for mobile has been achieved, many questions still remain on what exactly are the opportunities for local merchants and search marketers. Is now the time for search marketers to enter mobile and bring their clients with them?
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DotMobi, the group that promotes and manages the mobile-phone top-level domain, is publishing a list of specifications for virtually all phones on the market in a bid to make life easier for developers.While such lists are available from other companies, this one will be cheaper, making it more accessible to smaller developer companies and individuals, said Paul Nerger, vice president of advanced services and applications for dotMobi.Unlike the PC market, where most computers and widely used browsers comply with accepted standards, mobile phones each have different specifications and attributes. Developers must tweak their applications and content for different phones, even those running the same operating systems, so that the content fits onto the phone screen and so that applications work properly on phones that might not have certain capabilities.In the U.S., the same phone might even have different requirements based on the operator that sells it, since service providers sometimes disable features. That makes it hard for developers to build applications that can be used by a very wide population of phone owners.While dotMobi&#39;s list doesn&#39;t solve that problem, it does make it easier for developers to identify characteristics of phones and deliver applications to them that will work well. That should encourage more mobile development, Nerger said. &quot;Our job is to make the mobile &#39;Net happen,&quot; he said.The database will be free for anyone to view and browse. Developers can also choose to buy dotMobi&#39;s device detection software, which they can use to detect attributes of phones that are connecting to their Web pages in order to deliver content and services that best suit the devices. The price for that was set to cover costs for dotMobi, Nerger said. Developers will pay US$99 a year for the software; dotMobi customers will pay $79.DotMobi first announced that it was developing the list, which aims to include phones for sale worldwide, in the middle of last year and originally intended to release it at the end of 2007.One developer of a similar list thinks the dotMobi effort will be good for smaller developers, but likely won&#39;t meet the needs of bigger companies. Mobile Research maintains a database of all phones sold in the U.S. Workers there actually buy each phone, testing them for over a thousand different attributes, said David Adams, the founder of Mobile Research.Subscribers to the list, such as mobile Web sites, mobile application developers and content providers, plug it into their databases so that when a phone hits their sites, they can deliver the formatted site or content to fit the phone.Subscribers pay upwards of $10,000 per year for the list, which is continually updated.DotMobi is compiling its list by collecting information from a variety of sources, including phone makers like Nokia and operators like Vodafone. It will also use the data available from WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File), an open-source project that compiles information about phones around the world, collected from users and developers. DotMobi isn&#39;t planning to buy and individually test each phone and so Adams suspects the list won&#39;t cover as many attributes as his.Mobile Research counts Microsoft, Google and T-Mobile among its customers.
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To locate emergency calls made over mobile VoIP phones, company used several location-finding technologies, such as GPS, a technology that triangulates high-definition television signals and one that surveys local Wi-Fi access points.
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InfoWorld - Location-based services appeared here, there, and everywhere at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, as service providers maneuvered to take advantage of the increasing number of mobile phones shipping with integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) modules. Many of the services put the emphasis on finding your friends, not finding your way, as GPS evolves into more of a social tool.
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Widgets, or small Web applications that supply useful information direct to the desktop, could soon be appearing on your cell phone screen.
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Sprint Nextel Corp , said on  Wednesday it would kick off a new advertising campaign