Much like the introduction of the iphone in 2007 defined the smartphone, the introduction of the iAd platform from Apple will likely re-define mobile advertising as we’ve known it.

In short, Steve Jobs explained that iAd’s app ads will achieve the right balance between being interactive and emotional. He used the analogy that advertisements from the TV are emotional while flash ads on websites are interactive.

Here are three reasons why I believe iAds could really work for brands:

1. Users choose the site not the Ad – so by keeping the Ad experience self-contained within the existing page, Apple ensure a better user experience over most other types of mobile Ads.  This means brands and advertisers who are putting more and more of a premium on engagement vs. impressions will be satisfied
2. Speaking of experience, the level of interactivity possible through this platform looks impressive. It’s like building a full microsite flash experience – but without the flash or the need to build a stand-alone site.
3. Brands who do not yet want to commit to building a full mobile website or application to support a campaign no longer need to – you can do data collection (like for a contest) right within the iAd.  Having said that, engaging consumers through an iAd is only going to increase demand & expectations that there will be a mobile friendly experience accessible too.

One thing holding me back from fully embracing this platform is the reach potential of iAds in Canada. Although we will almost certainly run a test budget against the platform when it launches this summer, it cannot replace the established mobile networks overnight – especially as iphone’s market share is still only about 20% in Canada.

With that said, since iAd is built entirely on HTML 5, this platform can be extended to the mobile web which will instantly make your interactive iAd’s accessible to a much broader audience – even those on other smartphones!

Want to see more? Check out the demo below:

Last week I was in NYC for a new business conference (as tweeted) and I decided to pick up an iPad.

I’ve already blogged about all the reasons I wouldn’t be buying one - and all those reasons still stand true – but I decided it was my duty as a digital marketer to get familiar with it for research purposed only.

Here are my 10 first impressions during the first 6 days with it:

1. The sunset background image that comes default with the iPad has shooting stars. At first i thought they were scratches on the surface!
2. It’s actually smaller than I had imagined it would be – and many friends have made the same comment
3. It’s heavier than you’d expect it to be. Holding it with one hand is at most a 20 minute exercise. Best to hold with two hands
4. The icons are too spread out on the interface – they could be a lot tighter (like on the iphone / ipod). There should be an option to optimize your screen – even the size of the icons
5. Typing sucks. I still can’t get used to using a full touch-only based QWERTY keypad. Thankfully I have a bluetooth keyboard that i can throw in my bag
6. The mobile web is beautiful. It’s truly a great experience and in portrait mode you can fit about double of what you’d normally find “above the fold” on your desktop browser
7. There aren’t as many Apps as I would have expected – but the BBC App and the NBA Playoffs App are beautiful. I’ve been debating App vs Wap (or mobile web) for a while on smartphones, but so far App wins hands down for the iPad – especially with the larger screen and multi-touch capabilities. For the first time I feel like an interface designer can create something truly beautiful and functional at the same time.
8. Setup was a breeze. All my iphone Apps migrated over easily – although most don’t look that great. By default the app shows in its native size – but you can “double” it to fit most of the screen. Although this makes the App a bit pixelated, it’s still quite readable. One thought here – with the introduction of multi-tasking in the next major software update, it would be great if I could open 6-8 iphone apps all at once and arrange them on the big & beautiful iPad screen. It will be like creating my own personal App dashboard.  Bonus points – allow me to specify the size of each so that i could have my RSS reader down one side, tweetdeck along the other, and other apps in the middle.
9. For those of us who are “international” customers of Apple, you’ll need to get your own U.S. itunes ID in order to download or even access the App store for the iPad.  Considering the delay in releasing it in Canada (now end of May at the earliest) and longer in other countries, you can’t afford to wait.  Here’s what you do… first go buy a pre-paid MasterCard at your local Shoppers Drug mart. This will allow you to buy Apps against a “valid” credit card that doesn’t need a US address for verification. Go into itunes and create a new account. Change country of residence to US and input any US address. I just picked one from NYC – anything will do.  Setup & sync your new iPad while logged into your new US account. You are good to go!
10. Overall it’s a great media device and I love reading the news on it. It’s got great potential as a gaming platform – but it can’t replace my laptop or netbook and it’s too big to replace my iphone. I haven’t even setup email on the iPad.

The Jesus tablet has been revealed and the product hasn’t lived up to its hype.  I’m intrigued by the device, but it’s not really a great mobile device – nor is it a great netbook. In fact, it’s not really even a tablet as we’ve defined them.

It’s essentially a large ipod – or a Kindle on steroids.

Here are 5 reasons why i won’t be buying the first version:

1. Poor resolution – 1024 resolution is a major disappointment. You can’t watch full high definition video.
2. No Camera – most laptops now come with a camera for things like skype calls and making raw videos. 80% of all new mobile devices also come with a camera…. So not including one with the ipad was odd and a major miss. You also can’t access external content from outdoor media and printed magazines that are increasingly coming with 2d (or QR) codes and AR codes. No camera also limits potential gaming applications.
3. No GPS – along with no camera, having no GPS means you can’t use the device for navigation or for any of your geo-social media apps – like foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp. The future of digital media is going to be location driven – so why make the ultimate media device already irrelevant? Now I have to carry around my mobile phone and the tablet. No GPS also means Apps such as Layar that leverages augmented reality to add data to your view will also be restricted to your mobile device. Outside of layer, how useful is google maps without GPS on a mobile device?
4. No flash support – so many websites that you’ll now be able to enjoy on a larger screen will have lots of broken buttons. I know that flash is dead (or dying), but many sites including the new york times integrate flash elements to enhance the browsing experience. I’m sure site designed for the mobile web (even the iphone mobile web) will look great – but on a screen that stretches nearly 10 inches, I’d want the full web experience.
5. No expandable storage or USB port – so that means I’ll need to carry my netbook or laptop in addition to my iphone along with the ipad. That’s too many devices for even me to carry around

Don’t get me wrong – the device looks beautiful and the user experience will be typically amazing as Apple always puts a premium on it; however, it fails as a true tablet device and even at its attractive price point, I will wait at least until the second generation of the device to appear (likely next year) before I consider picking one up – or at least paying for one out of my own pocket

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.

Recently I was having a healthy debate with my friend Steve Sorge over at Mobile Fringe around “Wap vs App” – or should marketers focus their efforts on building out a mobile website vs. building out a mobile application.

Since my presentation at marketing magazine’s mobile 2.0 conference, my point of view had been shifting towards Wap – or the mobile web. My reasoning being that with the mobile safari browser webkit being commonly adapted by nearly all smartphones we can now build once and deploy many times with few changes to fit each platform while outputting a very rich experience.

This is not only cost effective but ensures reach – which is key if your audience isn’t on an iphone yet.

Steve pointed out that most people with iphones would rather search or browse on the App store than on Google – a huge shift in behaviour. With over 85,000 applications and 2 billion downloads, the App store is evolving to become your life tool for anything you need. After all, isn’t there an App for everything?

I was being trumped with my own traditional point of view – user experience trumps technology every time.

Yesterday it was announced in the media that the iphone is coming to Bell and Telus next month. Having recently completed upgrades to their networks to enable GSM (which is what the iphone works on), they can now offer the iphone and compete head on with Rogers. With iphone users already driving +60% of all mobile web traffic in Canada, what will happen when you suddenly make the most popular device available to everybody else?

2010 will be the year that the iphone changes the mobile landscape in Canada.

Although Canadians have other great options in the Palm Pre and the pending new Storm from Blackberry, making the iphone available to nearly all Canadians is a game changer – for both consumers and marketers.

So… Wap or App?

I’m back to the middle. You should probably do both, but start with a mobile website – unless your target audience is already on the iphone. By this time next year, that could be everybody.

Late last week I downloaded the latest iPhone app for facebook dubbed version 3.0. Within minutes of downloading this app it was clear that this was not only the best version yet for facebook, but one of the best apps period. Here are some highlights of the new app:

• Brand new interface that better leverages the native iPhone interface which makes what was a good user experience even better
• Better search that is also integrated into the entire experience
• Updated news feed
• Ability to “like” and “comment” more easily
• RSVP for Events
• Ability to create new photo albums, upload photos to any album, zoom, easier tagging, and profile Pictures albums
• Access to pages – FINALLY!

This last upgrade is especially relevant to marketers who have been frustrated at spending time and energy in creating a business or brand page on facebook only to have it unavailable for viewing on mobile

You can now browse pages and even bookmark your favorite fan pages right to your main homepage screen.

What’s amazing here is that it’s now easier for me to access my top fan pages on my iPhone than it is on the desktop version.

What’s missing? Push notifications that could make your facebook app more relevant that your twitter app. Stay tuned for version 3.1 which should add this ability – which again will give marketers and brands a chance to better tap into this social community.

Last month ZoomPass launched in Canada giving Canadians the ability to send and receive money through a new mobile enabled service. Here’s how they describe their new service:

Zoompass is a unique mobile payment service that offers a new way for you to send, receive, and request money quickly and securely, using a mobile device operating on the Bell, Fido, PC Mobile, Rogers, Solo, or TELUS network. With a mobile application that can be downloaded onto your mobile phone and synchronized with your phone’s contact list, you can use Zoompass anytime, anywhere while on the go.

Zoompass funds are held in a stored value account that is linked to your personal bank account or credit card, which makes loading your Zoompass account and transferring money simple and convenient. You can also use the optional Zoompass Prepaid MasterCard® card with PayPass™, linked to your Zoompass account, to make purchases in-store and online or withdraw cash from an ATM.

Think of it as paypal for Canadians that is fully supported and enabled by Canadian carriers.

It’s a great idea that is long overdue for our market.  After receiving an SMS from ZoomPass notifying me that I’ve received $1 from a friend, I decided to register and take this new service for a test drive.

ZoomPass unfortunately was anything but quick or easy.  Here is a summary of my experience:

1. I received an SMS message that $1 had been sent to me. Super!
2. The SMS message contained a registration link. I clicked on it and was brought to a website that was not optimized for mobile as the flash movie showed up as an empty box in my mobile browser. Moving around the broken flash box on,  I found a registration link and began the process. The SMS should have brought me directly to the registration page and that page should have detected I was coming from an iphone and delivered an optimized experience. Many consumers would give up upon seeing a broken / non-optimized page.
3. The registration process was long. I actually abandoned the process and started over again the following day when I had time to go through the entire process. A better practice would be to allow users to stop & save where they are in the process if they need to continue later. Having to start over again will not motivate people to go through the process again… well unless of course there is a ton of  $$$ waiting for them
4. I received another SMS message with a verification code that I was instructed to enter in step 3 of online registration process. I had to then go to my laptop, go to ZoomPass and then enter the verification code received since this simply was not easy / intuitive for me to do on my mobile device.  Ideally when I received the SMS message with the verification key all I would have to do is click on a link that would auto-verify. This would save time, energy and make the experience much better.
5. After successfully registering I realized there were fees attached to actually depositing my $1 into my bank account – which also required extra steps to validate my banking information. At this point I decided to abandon the process

I then read their press release and discovered 2 points of interest:

1. They have a mobile enabled website at zoompass.mobi which I discovered is fully w3c compliant… which means it will work on all mobile devices. Although great,  their mobile website is very basic with little functionality and is designed for the lowest common device denominator.  As very few Canadians on non-smartphones actually surf the mobile web, I think they need to develop a mobile web version that is optimized for today’s devices and should have an auto-detection script enabled on their website that will serve the right version. Having to promote 2 URLs (one for the desktop experience and one for mobile) just doesn’t make sense anymore.  Typing in zoompass.mobi on my laptop should auto-redirect to the desktop version and visa versa when I type in zoompass.com on my mobile device. This is a best practice that is easy to implement.
2. They have a mobile application! I went to the iphone App store and did a search for zoompass and came up with apps for Meteors, Photo Mania, and DinoColor!  I did some further research and discovered that their app is only available for the blackberry storm! Although the storm is a good device, it doesn’t have nearly the market share of the iphone.  Recent industry reports from Admob and others indicate that there are about 2.5 million iphones and itouches in Canada and about 250,000 Storms. Given that the iphone is driving well over 60% of mobile web traffic, it would have made more sense to launch with an iphone App first so that reach & buzz could be maximized. Apparently an iphone app is in the works.

In order for this service to get mass adoption, it needs to be dead simple & easy for the average consumer to find, use, and share with others. It’s still way easier for me to use my paypal account or send an email money transfer (EMT) through my online banking site.

ZoomPass is in beta mode – so I’ll cut them some slack and remain cautiously postive and optimistic about the future of this service.

If they can address some of the usability issues identified above, they will be well on their way to not only being the first multi-carrier supported mobile payment system, but the defacto standard in Canada.

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?

Today while reviewing the weekly carnival of the mobilists, I came across a review of Palm’s new Synergy over at atmaspheric.

What’s most interesting about Synergy is that it accesses the “cloud” in order to sync all your calendar, email, and contact accounts.

Unlike Microsoft and Apple’s iphone, you don’t need a central computer to sync or save data. There isn’t even a button to sync.. all you do is use the device and when changes, additions, or deletions are made, the Pre will automatically make the updates through the cloud to the original sources.

For example, if you are accessing your facebook contact list and you update a phone number on your Pre, it will auto-sync your facebook account.

As I commented on the original post, wouldn’t it be super if they went one step further an aggregated & synchronized all your social data? It would be like Yahoo’s oneconnect or friendfeed for mobile – but native to your mobile OS.

By leveraging the cloud and aggregating all data, we could see some nifty new services that create the semantic web experience (or web 3.0) many have been talking about since the term “Web 2.0″ was coined.

Microsoft has introduced their own 2d bar code called the “Microsoft Tag” (how original) which differentiates from most other types of 2d codes by being colour based and using a different shape pattern than what has been typically seen.  See article here at onedegree.ca for overview of 2d codes.

Microsoft makes it sound like they invented this space, but the reality is that their distribution reach and power online and offline (especially through gaming) means this could quickly become the de-facto standard worldwide for 2d bar codes – even though the QR code has been around since 2002 and already widely adopted in Japan, Korea, and even the Uk.

What are the advantages of the Microsoft Tag over other 2d codes?

Functionally there doesn’t appear to be anything unique. You can encode your own Microsoft tag to link to your facebook profile, blog, video or whatever you like – just like every other 2d code.

Having said that, the Microsft Tag is the first 2d code that works really well on my iphone. 

I’m not sure if that’s because the code reader is better equipped to handle low resolution cameras (like the one on my iphone), or if their 2d code is just easier to read & interpret due to fact that it may be easier to interpret colour over little black lines.

Getting my iphone setup was as easy as doing a search on the app store and downloading the free reader.

Check out their promotional video here. What do you think?