Clever Stuff

At the IDMF (International Direct Marketing Fair) and Internet World show at London’s Earls Court, where a couple of mobile applications caught my eye. The first is SnapNow, a mobile visual search solution. This looks very clever.
The idea is simple. You take a photograph of something with your phone, a CD cover for example, and send it to a shortcode via MMS. A few seconds later, you get either a page of search results, or a link to a site where you can buy the item in question, returned to your phone. What’s clever is that it doesn’t need any application download to your phone. The intelligence is programmed into the item you’re photographing at the back end.
For example, it could be an ad in a magazine, or a billboard that you take a photo of to be sent a link that takes our browser to the company’s mobile website. Photographing a magazine interview could take you to a video download of the interview.
Managing Director Mark Sait told me that the company is aiming to build a library of over 2 million CDs and DVDs by Christmas, so that UK consumers will be able to snap any mainstream CD or DVD cover and get a link to a mobile site where they can buy it sent back to their phone.
The company says it is working with creative agencies to build its initial inventory, as these tend to act as the major advertisers’ brand custodians. It is also talking to network operators, though Sait says the company’s ambition is to build SnapNow into a global brand, not to act as a white-label offering for the networks. He admits, however, that he would love to have the SnapNow application preloaded onto handsets as an alternative to MMS. 
What I like about SnapNow is the simple way it drives consumers to mobile content without keying in shortcodes and keywords, and without the need to download a barcode reader to their phone. True, it requires someone to populate the catalogue of items that can be photographed and take someone somewhere, and someone to educate consumers to the fact that if they take a picture of this ordinary-looking CD cover with their phone, something will happen. But after seven years developing the technology, SnapNow is clearly in this for the long haul, and the technology looks to have considerable promise.
The second application that caught my eye was Wimob. This enables consumers to transfer multimedia content from websites to their mobile phone via Bluetooth, infrared or USB, without paying network data charges. Relevant content is identified on the publisher’s website with a Wimob icon. The user then clicks on the icon to open up the Wimob window and transfer the content. The first time the user tries to download something, they are invited to enter their phone’s details so that the content can be rendered in the most appropriate format.
Once again, it doesn’t require any application download to the mobile phone, though interestingly, it could be used as a means of transferring a mobile application from a website to a phone. Or to send a QR Code or barcode to act as a discount voucher, enabling a consumer with a non-QR-enabled phone to use a QR Code.
Wimob says it is talking to some major companies about the technology, including Nestle, 20th Century Fox and Google. A call to YouTube is also on the company’s To Do list. These big brands would pay a licence for the professional version of the application. A ‘lite’ version, ideal for bloggers and small publishers, is available for free from the Wimob website. This is another thoughtful application that could have legs.

David Murphy
Editor

Comments

[Sarah at Bango]

The question you have to ask yourself is: Are you going to get truly independent results from AdMob? We greatly respect AdMob and the ease with which marketers can run mobile ad campaigns but at the back of your mind, you do have to question true independence. That's why the likes of Omniture and Coremetrics have an important role to play in the PC world. We believe the same is needed on mobile. We launched Bango Analytics in February so marketers could track the success of their mobile ad campaigns - www.bango.com/analytics - with independence upmost in our minds.

Customers of our analytics products use AdMob alongside a range of other ad networks and they not only value independence but also use us an auditing tool as you can see with the Tapatap case study - bango.com/casestudies

[Dean Collins]

Ahhh it's nice to be a market leader and have imitators try and keep up, imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery.

Being first to market in October last year we are in a position that since having launched Amethon Mobile Analytics there have been 6 other vendors who have now launched mobile analytics applications in one form or another.

They all have their strengths and weaknesses (check out an independent review by Bryson Meunier of Resolution Media http://www.brysonmeunier.com/the-mobile-seo-s-guide-to-mobile-analytics if you want a list of vendors).

It’s important to point out that Amethon are still the only vendor to use Wireline Capture – so we see 100% of the traffic from the cellular phone browsers to the mobile content webservers, importantly this also means that there is no additional ‘weight’ added to the content pages through the use of page tags or pixel beacons which whilst not an issue on desktop analytics is a heavy burden on limited mobile bandwidth.

It's great to have more competition from Admob but as was discussed at the New York Mobile Monday panel earlier this week the real issue with using an advertisers networks analytics is you are then stuck with them. You are tied to relying on their platform to tell you how much money you spent with them, and you are also not able to track alternative competing ad network providers.

It's a great solution when it's free but free always has strings in one form or another.

If you want a truly independent view on what's happening with your mobile content come over and check out www.Amethon.com

Regards,
Dean Collins
www.Amethon.com
Dean.Collins@Amethon.com