Over the last 2 weeks I had the opportunity to travel to Europe for a ski and adventure trip to Zermatt, Zurich, Paris, and London.  It was my first time back in Europe for pleasure in a few years and it gave me an opportunity to observe & immerse myself in European mobile culture.

Here are some highlights of what I learned:

1. SMS is ubiquitous. We took a bus from Luton Airport to Heathrow (coming from Paris to London to home) and the Coach bus we took had cling-on signs on many of the windows encouraging passengers to text their feedback on the driver, comfort or experience to a shortcode. Who needs to write a letter, send a fax or call an automated IVR system when you can simply text instantly?
2. Even Grandma is mobile.  Standing on a train I watched as an older and white haired women gleefully shared an MMS picture of her grandson and his dog to her friends that she had just received
3. Many phones but not necessarily smart phones.  I saw very few blackberrys, iphones, or other smartphones. People we interacted with mostly carried Nokia, LG  or Samsung phones
4. Wifi is everywhere but not very reliable. Having turned off my data roaming ability on my iphone in order to keep my phone bill under $1,000, i was constantly searching or checking for wifi.  Many cafes had wifi – but it either wasn’t working or you had to go through a 7 step process to get access. I tried to pay a few times on some of the city services, but the sites weren’t optimized for mobile and only in French… which made it difficult to figure out what to do.
5. Roaming rates are killer. If you go to Europe, make sure your mobile device is unlocked so that you can buy a local SIM card for data so that you can cost effectively use your GPS, check email, or look for things to do.
6. 2d codes are not yet ubiquitous. The Metro paper in Paris didn’t have any 2d bar codes, but interestingly enough many of the free tourist guides came with QR Codes. The call to action sent consumers to 2dscan.com – the same site the National Post uses to auto-download 2d bar code readers for their paper. It’s also the same one I’ve used recently for our SKI PRO Ontario magazine.

Like in Canada, it’s expected that the iphone will be offered from multiple carriers all over Europe over the next 6 months.

In combination with the next generation android-based devices about to hit the market, I’m sure my next visit will yield very different observations about how mobile fits into the European culture.

About a month ago I began researching something called Augmented Reality (AR). In the process I’ve gathered dozens of pages of notes and references and instead of publishing everything all at once with my point of view, I’ve decided to publish a series of AR articles for the savvy marketer looking to get a crash course on what I think is the future of digital marketing, gaming, communications, and life as we know it today

What is AR?

In a nut shell, it’s adding a layer of information on top of “reality” – or what your webcam or mobile camera is projecting on your screen.  Like a QR or 2d bar code, an AR 2d bar code is interpreted by your webcam but instead of being sent to a URL, data is layered on top of the AR code – creating an augmented reality. Check out this demo:

What is Mobile AR?

Take the above example and instead of creating a gaming or 3d layer on top of your mobile camera, imagine leveraging the GPS capabilities of your device to give you contextual information of where you are right now. This is where the Terminator vision comes in… except it’s on your phone. Imagine walking down the street of a new city and you are totally lost. Open up your Google maps and activate the AR mode an suddenly all the buildings around you are labeled.  Consumer ratings of restaurants float above signage. Now imagine going to a networking event and pointing your device to the room and people’s name and relation to you (relative to linkedin or some other social network) appears above their head.

Check out the video below which shows a real prototype of this application. Look for this to be the killer feature in the next release version of Android:

Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

But wait… there’s much more!

Recently Tom Purves gave a presentation on AR at a refresh event. Lucky for those of us who could not attend, Tom uploaded his awesome presentation to slideshare. Check it out below:

The annual world mobile congress (wmc) starts today in Barcelona, Spain.  

The WMC will bring a lot of news and announcements. As the largest mobile phone show in the world, GSMA not only attracts people from around the world, but also sets the stage for what will happen in wireless for the next 12 months.

Although this will be the first year in a few that I haven’t had the opportunity to participate directly, I’m looking forward to following some of my favorite mobile blogs and news sites this week to stay at least partially connected to what is happening.  Look for mini-updates in my twitter feed and some summary stories on this blog. 

Look for some big announcements this week including a new smartphone from Toshiba and Acer, an upgraded mobile platform / os from Microsoft, hopefully news of a 3G GSM version of the Palm Pre, more Google Android devices, news on rival app stores to compete with Apple, details into how Nokia is going to focus more on services than hardware and probably nothing from Apple who were noticeably absent last year as well.  

What are you hoping will be announced this week?

Around this time last year I made some outrageous predictions about what was to come in 2008.  Let’s take a quick look back and see how well I did: 

1. SMS third party advertising will take off.  Didn’t really see this take off in Canada and with the mobile web / and mobile widgets taking off, I can’t see this as a big focus in 2009. Having said that, there are more services popping up that allow media planners to venture into SMS as well as the Mobile web.
2. Mobile Web Advertising will become part of your media buy. This definitely happened in 2008 in Canada with Quattro and Yahoo offering a good mix of inventory to buy. This will only continue to grow in 2009. 
3. MMS Common short codes will arrive. This did happen in 2008 – although not all mobile aggregators are able to facilitate this for you. MyThumb mobile was the first to offer MMS short codes and now you can also go through Magnet Mobile too. 
4. Mobile payments will start to emerge as a new payment medium. There was a great conferences this year on the subject in Canada facilitated by the Canadian Institute.  RBC and Visa launched their pilot program for contactless payments in Canada. Visa also recently launched 4 new international pilot programs. Mastercard also announced this past May that they’re launching a pilot to extend their pay pass program to mobile. 
5. The iphone will finally arrive in Canada. It sure did – and I was right that they waited until the 3G version came out. I also predicted that other retailers may offer the device – which didn’t happen… although both Walmart and select Sam’s Club stores will be selling them in the near future.  Best Buy and Future shop also announced that they would be carrying it. 
6. Fixed or low-cost data plans will be universal. Although not as low as we’d like, we finally have affordable plans in Canada. Yah! I was paying $80 for 500 megs last year and now I’m paying $45 for 500 megs and includes a voice plan. 
7. Mobile web will catch fire. I was partially right here. Thanks to smartphones like the iphone, more consumers discovered the mobile web, but more specifically mobile widgets that grab data from the mobile web have really taken off thanks to the iphone app store. 
8. New mobile carriers will be announced. This happened and was blogged about here.
9. Google will launch their own phone (gphone) with their own operating system and buy U.S. spectrum. The first two happened, but they decided not to aggressively pursue spectrum… this time. There are other auctions coming up in 2009…
10. Social Networking will make the leap from desktop to Mobile as a primary interface / access point. We definitely saw a huge leap in 2008 to mobile – with facebook, linkedin, hi-5 and twitter all offering great mobile options through widgets and mobile web. Twitter saw over 600% growth and a big part of this can be attributed to mobile.  Mobile only social networking sites such as itsmy.com also saw big growth in 2008. They even partnered up with my favorite mobile and social search tool taptu to enhance their member services. 

I published a second list in August as part of a mobile insert at Strategy Magazine.  We’ll take a look at those ones in my next post before making some super crazy predictions for 2009

This week Yahoo! announced that they now know where you are… well as long as you give them permission first with their new Fire Eagle location based services (LBS) platform.  

Isn’t Fire Eagle really another term for describing a phoenix… as in the rising of the Phoenix - or is that a bit too ironic… or iconic for them given everything they’ve gone through with Microsoft this year?

Marketers should be really excited about this new platform. Besides making social networking kinda creepy (as blogged here last November), it adds context and relevance to your online ads.

Adding location (aka relevance) to an online behavioural targeting program attached to a CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per action) model is an online marketer’s wet dream. 

The way Fire Eagle works is that you either tell it where you are (country, city, town, zip etc…), or give permission for GPS enabled devices to do it on your behalf.  Fire Eagle will then publish your location information to the services that you have approved – whether it be a restaurant review site or facebook. Relevant ads will follow.

The neat thing about this new service is that it is completely open to the development community with a robust API – which means you can add geo-specific information to virtually any web service you want. It could be as silly as tracking where your friends are on the way to Collingwood for that weekend getaway on a google maps mashup. It would be like getting directions then seeing where people are relevant to those directions.

Already over 50 services have adopted Fire Eagle’s platform into their own offering including Six Apart’s blogging service Movable Type, messaging platform Pownce and neighborhood news site Outside.in

Whether or not this service will compete with Apple (they have similar services on their iphone platform) or the upcoming Google Android platform or becomes a complimentary web service to the above remains to be seen.

I’m not sure people really want everybody to know where they are at all times… but fortunately you can control your own settings – even manually update location to defer people from where you actually are…. like saying your current location is your home address where you are “working from home” instead of announcing that you are actually on the golf course AGAIN on a Friday afternoon