This afternoon I decided to follow the live blog from Apple on their new iphone 3.0 software over at CNET.

Here are some highlights:

• Copy & paste functionality is finally coming to the iphone. It will work across the platform – including SMS messages. This has been the longest running complaint since the original 2G version
• Cross-device search feature also arrives – allowing you to search for anything from anywhere – including applications.
• Landscape keyboard now available in all applications – not just web browsing
• New voice memo abilities
• MMS capability – but only for 3G phones
• Expanded software developer kit (SDK) that will allow for subscriptions for applications and increased video and audio streaming abilities
• Expanded bluetooth capabilities – including support for stereo bluetooth (only for 3G). This should be especially exciting for proximity marketers who have not been able to bluecast to iphones until now

Things we were hoping for that didn’t happen:

• Tethering – which would allow your device to act as a wifi hub for your laptop, game machine etc… although they did say the ability to do so was now part of the platform but it would be up to the carriers to enable it on their side
• No multi-tasking / background abilities. This means you can only run one application at a time – unlike the Palm Pre which will allow you to run several background apps. The reason is apparently the need to conserve battery power
• No flash lite support (unlike new Nokia & Palm devices)
• No hardware preview of the next generation iphone

Overall the updates addressed most of the major user complaints about the iphone and positions them well to stay competitive with the Palm Pre.

Here we go again…  here are my 10 informed best guesses on what will happen in the Canadian market place this year. Click here to see how I did against last year’s predictions. 

1. It will be the year of the App store. Every manufacturer in the smartphone space will have a mobile application store, but Apple will continue to dominate the market because they are the only ones who focus on usability first
2. There will be several new models of the iphone announced and launched this year – including a “nano” version.  I predict that copy & paste will still not be among one of its many features
3. Palm Pre will do better than any Android device. Friends, peers and industry pals all mocked me for predicting that they would make a come back when I published some predictions in August, but I’m sticking with this one
4. Mobile security and privacy will become a big focus for marketers and the industry as more people use feature rich smart phones (25% of Canadians are already on them)
5. Mobile payment systems will finally reach retail as both MasterCard and Visa should be ready to go  
6. MMS will fail to reach its promise as the market shifts to the mobile web for richer experiences
7. Both Bell and Telus announce GSM compatibility / network infrastructure upgrades in order to get a piece of the lucrative GSM roaming market and to counter efforts by new regional and national carriers who will be entering the marketing in Q4
8. Microsoft will release a new OS for mobile that includes a 2d code reader that supports their own proprietary M-Tag.  This will finally bring 2d codes into the mainstream in North America
9. All major Canadian news / content websites will have a specific mobile enabled website
10. 40 Billion SMS messages will be sent in Canada – up from about the 20 Billion fore-casted in 2008.

What do you think? Feel free to comment /add your own predictions.

Reliance is like the SONY of India – doing major deals in the U.S. ranging from hunting for U.S. startups to striking deals with Dreamworks. They have over 100 million customers and touch 1 in 10 Indians every day.

Zapak.com, one of Reliance’s ADA companies and India’s largest PC gaming site, has connected with U.S.-based, Greystripe, to add 900+ mobile games and applications to their mobile offering, essentially offering the App Store experience, except all of the games are free and ad-supported.

With everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft launching their own versions of game and application storefronts for cell phones in the U.S., Greystripe is one of the first companies to provide a solution similar to an app store in India.

As proven through the popularity of Apple’s App Store, mobile games and applications are a critical category for media companies looking to get into the mobile market.

What’s interesting here?

• India’s biggest media company is looking to seize on an App Store-like experience for the 5.1 million registered game players on Zapak
• Media companies, including NBC and now Reliance, are all want their own versions of branded app store like distribution – and they’re partnering with established content providers and networks such as Greystripe
• Look for this trend to continue across the industry with other media giants

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

The CWTA released their quarterly report last week and highlights are consistent with year long trends.

More Canadians are texting more often.

It will be interesting to see if proposed new charges for incoming texting as announced last week by Bell and Telus will impact overall numbers. It will also be neat to see the impact of the iphone…  will Canadians text even more or will they simply migrate to mobile instant messaging (MIM), Twitter, and other mobile web based communication options?

I know – it’s not just about the iphone – super awesome third generation mobile devices from Blackberry (Bold), Palm (Centro) and Samsung (Instinct) promise to make the next quarter an exciting one for our market.

Here are some highlights to the report:

• 4.1 billion messages were sent peer to peer in Q1 (note messages related to mobile marketing campaigns are not counted). Note that 10.1 billion were sent in all of 2007
• 1.4 billion messages were sent in March 2008 alone
• 42% of Canadian mobile subscribers sent at least one peer-to-peer message in March 2008. Imagine what that number would if your friends who return your text with a phone call because they don’t know how to text… figured it out?
• MMS-capable common short codes were made available for the first time
• As of May 14th, North America’s first user-generated mobile picture messaging service on broadcast television was launched in Canada
• There are 25 active mobile micro-payments (m-commerce) applications approved in Canada

For those who have been following my blog for a while will recognize this phrase “user experience will trump superior technology – every time.”

Apple has proven this again and again… and this past week as the world rushed to get their second generation or 3G iphone (and crashing Apple’s itunes server in the process!) it will again be the user experience not the technology that will give this device staying power.

Don’t get me wrong – a thinner version with better reception and real GPS is super awesome – but it’s what comes with the new software OS that really makes this device a consumer’s (and potentially a marketer’s) dream.

The 2.0 OS software on the iphone is backwards compatible with your first generation iphone – so the 200,000 or so first generation iphones in Canada will be able to upgrade and enjoy many of the benefits of the second generation device.

Specifically as a marketer, I’m most excited about the App store – think of it as itunes for software designed specifically for your iphone. No longer will you have to jailbreak your iphone to customize and personalize it to meet your needs. Like itunes, you’ll be able to select what apps (games, productivity software etc…) you want and let the app store do the rest.

iphone apps are like widgets for your blackberry – but far easier to download

Smart marketers will also leverage the localization capabilities of the device to bring you a mashup of something truly useful.

Marketers who think mobile marketing is all about text to win campaigns are missing out on the r/evolution of interactivity.  If you’ve hired one such company to work with your brand or agency, you need to rethink your strategy before submitting those 2009 budgets which are due shortly…

With yesterday’s report from the Globe and Mail that both Bell and Telus would start charging 15 cents for incoming SMS messages for customers who are not locked into an SMS plan and Roger’s announcement of a data plan for the new iphone that was widely seen as uncompetitive and unfair to consumers, I figured the future of mobile as a mass marketing medium would be still-born until new carriers enter the market next year.

All may not be lost

In reaction to all the negative press received over their original iphone plan, Rogers / Fido this morning announced a new data plan for the new 3G iphone to be released Friday of this week.  Here are some details:

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate until August 31, 2008 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan. For example, with 6GB of data, iPhone 3G
users can visit 35,952 web pages, or send and receive 157,286 emails, or watch 6,292 minutes of YouTube videos each and every month.

You can read the full news release here.  Rogers has also indicated that they will not charge for incoming SMS messages either – making them appear far more pro-consumer than they did just a week ago.

Per my earlier post this week, I still wouldn’t rush to buy that new iphone. Rates and plans are bound to only get better from here.

Many people buy Apple products because they are great fashion accessories.

The ultimate fashion accessory was big news last week as Steve Jobs announced the much anticipated SDK (software developer kit) for the iphone which will allow developers to create applications, utilities, and games leveraging the same platform Apple used to create their own widgets. Starting in June of this year, consumers won’t have to “jailbreak” their phone in order to customize it.

Also starting this June, enterprise users will no longer have to beg their I.T. / technical support department to open up the corporate email server to hackers and SPAM attacks in order for them to access their email from their nifty iphone.

The iphone will be getting some proper business chops.  

[Read more →]

Today Canadians everywhere waited with baited breath for news from the MacWorld 2008 Conference and Expo in San Francisco that the iPhone would finally be coming to Canada to a Rogers plan near you.

That news never came

Industry speculation is that Rogers won’t offer fixed or cheap data plans to match what other countries have offered. While you can get an all you can eat data plan for the iphone in the U.S. for around $20 / month, the best you can do right now on Rogers is an $80 monthly plan for 500 megs of data…which sounds like a lot, but wouldn’t be enough for those who want to take full advantage of the media rich features that come standard with the iphone.

Apple wants to control every part of the user experience – so getting an unexpectedly high bill for your fancy new iphone could negatively impact brand perception and advocacy for Apple. I certainly wasn’t thrilled with the $400 bill I received from Rogers the first month after hooking up my iphone on their network.

Now the good news

As reported in the Toronto Star this week, there is a chance that Telus will make the switch from CDMA (a common format in North America) to GSM – which has been adopted by the rest of the world.  An industry source also indicated to me this week that Bell is also investigating a potential switch to GSM.

The reasons are three-fold:

1. To get a piece of the global roaming fees that are currently exclusive to Rogers
2. To get access to a wider array of mobile devices that also offer more margin and more flexible terms
3. To compete with the pending new Canadian wireless carrier who is expected to build a GSM-based network as well

More Canadian GSM-based carriers mean more competition which means more choice and better value for Canadians.

It also means when new mobile devices such as the iphone burst on to the global scene, we won’t be the last industrialized country to get it.

It also means I will no longer be one of the few in Toronto with an iphone.. but I can live with that