Over the past year I’ve blogged on more than one occasion about the frustrations many Canadian Marketers have had around the lack of data available on how Canadians use and interact with mobile.

This week Lemay-Yates Associates Inc. (LYA)has released a 100 page report after conducting extensive research into the Canadian broadband mobile market over the last few months covering handsets offered by 17 mobile carriers, flanker brands and MVNOs/resellers, as well as their features.

LYA also surveyed Canadian consumers to assess which mobile data services they currently use and to characterize the overall penetration and current usage of Canadian consumers.

Check out this 7 minute interview that highlights many of the findings (sorry for the secondary browser link – bnn does not offer video embed – shame!):

Their mobile report also addresses questions such as:

• What is the status of brand competition in each region of Canada: from BC, top Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces
• What is the status of handsets with GPS capabilities for each service provider?
• Which carrier is the champion in supporting social networking applications?
• What is the current penetration of social networking applications such as facebook and MySpace among Canadian consumers?
• Who currently uses heavy data applications such as watching streaming TV or YouTube?
• How many iPhones could Rogers sell over the relatively short term and which carriers are more at risk of losing customers to the iPhone?
• How much do Canadians think mobile data is worth to them?
• Mobile carriers and service providers, broadcasters, third party applications developer, equipment and handset suppliers will gain new insight and a better understanding of this rapidly emerging market by purchasing this Report.

Want more details? Go to their website here.

One unintentional outcome of opening up the facebook platform last year was that  facebook pages started looking a lot like myspace pages – littered with silly applications that not only cluttered up the page, but created unbelievable load times on servers. 

The new facebook design streamlines the user experience.

At first I was like many of my friends and didn’t like the new interface. It’s such a huge departure from the old site that it took a while to figure out where everything went and how to navigate around the site. I’m not against wholesale changes to a site as long as the user experience improves and / or there is some inherant value being added.  

Overall the site is still pretty easy to use, but their new design has one major flaw – it heavily discounts all individuality.

Although facebook feeds represent much of the content that drives the social graph and facebook ecosystem, it was the ability of users to customize their facebook page to reflect their personalities through their badges, applications and customization of the page layout that made the site one of the stickiest sites ever on the interweb.

Now my landing page and everybody else’s looks the same.

Whoever thought “boxes” was a good tab name to stick all the items that used to be on the landing page should have their head examined. You might as well have called it “all the stuff that made you come here in the first place but which facebook has deemed irrelevant on your behalf.”

I would love to see the stats on application and group use and removals since the new design as i’m sure their drop would rival the stock market right now.

What use do I have for my twitter feed, travel map, delicious bookmarks or QR code if nobody sees it? They were effective before because people didn’t have to click to find them. Having a strong sense of self-identity online encouraged me to participate and add to the social graph. 

If all I wanted was a feed of friend and network activity, I would just use friendfeed, social thing, yahoo oneconnect or some other feed aggregator.  

It’s like when you first arrived on your first day of university or college at your dorm – all the rooms and hallways are painted the same colour and looked the same. Sure you still have a community – but no real social interaction occured until people personalized their rooms and halls.

Before you could join the crowd, you had to first assert your individuality. 

I totally get why the new design was necessary and overall they did a pretty good job at it.

My suggestion?

Allow some degree of customization on the personal page so that people can still hang a few badges on their site to maintain a sense of individuality. While they are at, please rename “boxes” to “applications that no longer fit on your homepage, so remove it because nobody is clicking here, man.”

The highlight for me yesterday at CTIA was the keynote address from Yahoo executive Vice President Marco Boerries where he announced the introduction of Yahoo! oneConnect for the iphone.

The live demo demonstrated how this new application (optimized for the iphone) takes your address book and makes it social by aggregating all your mobile messaging via IM and SMS and all your lifestream feeds into one amazing interface.

Like friendfeed and Social Thing, you can add myspace, last.fm,dopplr,twitter, friendster, bebo,flickr,youtube and facebook feeds to oneConnect under their Pulse feature. You can now scan what is happening across all networks from one mobile interface.  This also means you can update your status in one place and have all your other streams automatically updated.

Users will also be able to track their contacts on a single screen, with information on their status and the ability to quickly call or send an IM or email.

The application is available for free in the app store – although it wasn’t indexing yet on their search tool. If you are having problems finding it, go to mobile.yahoo.com/oneconnect/iphone and click on the app link. This will bring you into the app store for immediate download.

I’ve spent some time on it so far, but I’m afraid of the roaming charges associated with customizing it right now, so look for additional perspective later.

Yahoo plans on releasing versions for other platforms, but it’s hard to imagine how they’ll be able to create a comparable experience on other platforms.

After each new post on this site, there is a natural spike in traffic from those who have subscribed to this site via RSS. Traffic increases again significantly when I tag items for facebook newsfeeds. So much so, that it’s now part of my post-publish routine. Friends and colleagues more often refer to my “facebook feeds” than their own RSS feeds.

Call it the natural beacon effect?

Whatever you want to call it, as a blogger or marketer you need to incorporate a facebook strategy as part of your overall marcom plan. 

Blogger tip: Add social bookmarking to your blog template so that people can tag your article to their favorite tool. Also include a twitter push so that everytime an article is published you will automatically tweet your followers with link.

We knew this was coming… but results from a new report from Opera, a Norway-based mobile browsing company even surprised me!

According to the report, 40% of global mobile web traffic starts with popular social-networking sites such as MySpace, hi-5 and facebook. 

That number grows to 60% when you look at U.S. numbers – which is not surprising as Americans tend to spend more time on the mobile web relative to SMS than other markets. No Canadian specific data was published in the report.

It will be interesting to see how mobile-first social networking site and utilities will impact this number in the next 12 months.

Other mobile social media sites to watch are:

• itsmy.mobi (and check out the blog & demo I published back in Feb here)
• bebo.com
• faceparty.com
• friendster (making a come back?)

Interesting enough, Nokia’s own mobile social media site (mosh) did not make the top 10 most visited on any of the countries reported in detail within the report. I guess owning ~40% of the global handset market does not guarantee software or mindshare dominance.

You can read the full report here.

I’ve recently installed the Weather Network blackberry widget on my Blackberry 8800. One of the advantages of creating a device specific widget is that you can enrich the user experience beyond a typical mobile website.

The Weather Network is no exception – taking full advantage of the blackberry Java platform to delivery an intuitive and easy to manage widget.

Once you’ve downloaded the widget, you can select your city of choice for weather updates. Coming soon – the ability to add up to 5 more cities – although I believe there should be an unlimited city option like there is on the iphone weather widget by Yahoo.

The neat thing is that once your choice city has been selected, you can get the current temperature by just scrolling over the icon on your blackberry desktop. Clicking on the icon will give you a detailed forecast for that day. Using the options button, you can switch to short and long term forecasts too.

Want to try it out? Point your blackberry mobile web browser to: http://weyebb.pelmorex.com

[Read more →]

Just as marketers are finally figuring out what the heck facebook is and why they should be embracing the platform as a way of reaching & engaging their customers and potential customers, there is a new trend developing that may impact facebook and other social mediums…

Enter social aggregators.

Aggregators won’t replace facebook – but much like RSS feeds have supplemented users visting websites directly, social aggregator services could mean marketers looking to reach and engage people through social media sites like facebook will find a smaller direct audience to engage with.

I’ve signed up with socialthing and others are raving about feedfriend. Both do about the same thing – they take updates from all your social media sites like flickr, facebook, twitter, yelp, linkedin and stream them as one interface in something called a “lifestream.”

The idea is great – instead of checking for updates on multiple sites, you can get them all at once – much like how i use Netvibes or Protopage to aggregate all my RSS feeds.

Personally I get everything I need from Netvibes. 

I can add twitter or facebook status updates to Netvibes… and i don’t really care for the extra features social aggregators include such as comments on the different feeds. When I also consider the fact that most of my friends aren’t as geeked out as I am on ‘web 2.0′, it makes even less sense. Just getting my friends on facebook was a monumental task.

Having said that, the mobile interface for Socialthing is a thing of beauty.

They also have an optimized interface for the iphone which makes checking out lifestreams on the go a pleasant experience.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with my RSS feeds (270 currently) – I’m not sure I have enough time (or care enough) to follow the lifestream of every person i know. Having said that, it could be really useful if you are stalking following a few choice people…

How can marketers get in on this?

Websites got around a similar issue when RSS feeds became popular by not including all the content in the feed – so users who liked the lead content were driven back to the site… where sponsored ads could be displayed in all their glory.

One suggestion – build your own branded social aggregator…. and include your own relevant content as one of the feeds.

I could see this working really well for Automotive, Financial, Pharma, Retail… well pretty much any brand looking to participate in & influence a person’s lifestream.

Last week at CTIA Wireless I had a chance to sit down with Michael Chang, the CEO of Greystripe to talk about mobile gaming and more specifically about his mobile advertising platform.

Greystripe currently has over 800 java based mobile games which are distributed through their own site (gamejump.com) and about 100 other sites and partners.

What makes them unique is the fact that any person with a java-enabled mobile device can download their games for free as Greystripe’s gaming network is ad-supported.

Users downloading games must view 2 pre-game ads and two post-game ads in order to access their games.

Mobile Ads have not been a barrier to engagement

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Now that you know what 2-D codes are, the next question is… how do you get one for yourself?

It’s simple really.

1. Contact codes. If you are looking to add a 2-D code to your business card to impress your friends at home while running with the hip crowd at the next CTIA or WMC conference, check out the contact matrix code generator at mobiletag.com 
2. URL codes. If you are looking for a simple 2-D code that will simply redirect to a mobile URL, go to shotcode.com
3. facebook codes. Create a QR 2-D code like the one in this post that will redirect users to your facebook profile. To get your own, login to facebook and do an application search for “qr codes”
4. Phone number, text, or SMS codes. Looking for a simple 2-D code that will display a message, send an SMS or phone number? Check out this free QR-code generator.
5. Do a google search for “free 2-d code generator.”

Remember – having your own 2-D code is only step one. Unless you live in Japan, chances are you also need to download a 2-D code reader to your mobile device. iphone users can download imatrix to their phone through the installer application with a jailbroken phone. 

Do you want to learn more about 2-D codes? Be sure to check out the site of two industry leaders; Scanbuy and Neomedia.

SMS mobile marketing is so 2007. 

2-D codes will do for mobile marketing what web 2.0 site have done for digital media.

Do you Twitter?

Last October I posed that same question and blogged my perpective on what Twitter is and what it’s good for. You can read that full post here.

Fast forward six months and despite a nifty integration option with my facebook status, I’m yet to reach a critical mass of followers to make it truly useful.

It’s not yet a useful marketing channel – but some colleagues are now “following” industry subject matter experts / celebrities as an additional research channel. If you’re using Twitter and getting a great return on your time investment, post a comment and let us know how.

For those of you still trying to figure out exactly what it is, check out Twitter in plain english by the common craft show below: