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

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.

itsmy.com, one of the largest global mobile communities has chosen Taptu, an award-winning, pure-play search engine designed specifically for mobile, to provide itsmy.com’s growing community with a super fast search service, and access to an index of mobile-friendly web content.

The move will see itsmy.com’s mobile community of over two million users gain instant access to a variety of content via Taptu. Taptu’s strength is entertainment search; helping users find and enjoy a wealth of mobile content such as videos, music, images and lots more.

Taptu finds the best of the web for mobile phones; serving content to mobile devices that looks great and can be easily shared amongst friends. itsmy.com has chosen to add Taptu’s search functionality to give its users a rich mobile search experience; they can now search for entertaining mobile Internet content from within their community and also directly from their personal mobile homepage.

In addition to core search functionality, Taptu can now offer mobile partners, like itsmy.com, mobile search sponsored links. This provides partners with a new incremental revenue stream, and gives advertisers access to high-value and young audiences in a relevant and efficient way. With worldwide mobile advertising projected to surpass $2.7 billion in 2008*, the opportunity is clear.
*Source: Gartner “How to Move The Mobile Advertising Market Forward. March 2008.

Steve Ives, CEO at Taptu says of the partnership: “Despite the tightening financial environment, the mobile Internet continues to grow and advertisers are demanding better return on investment around marketing spend. Mobile search advertising offers far greater efficiency. It’s important for Taptu to partner with companies that share our vision. itsmy.com, like us, is focused on innovation and so we feel that this partnership is beneficial for both of us.”

Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO at itsmy.com says, “We as a pure play mobile community wanted to work with a company that really ‘gets’ mobile and understands that desktop search isn’t mobile search. Taptu is made for mobile and we love its unique and social way to search the mobile web. That’s exactly what we were looking for in a partner and that’s why we have replaced our existing provider.”

Want to learn more? Check out previous posts on each here:

1. WMC: Mobile search goes social with Taptu
2. WMC: Mobile search goes social with Taptu – part two
3. Mobile social network itsmy.com lets users decide what advertising to receive

Earlier this year I made 10 predictions for mobile – and many of them have already come true! Check out the original post here. 

As part of their mobile insert this month, Strategy Magazine asked if I could provide 10 new sets of predictions… so here they are 10 predictions for the Canadian Mobile marketing ecosystem over the next 12 months as printed in this month’s issue:  

1. Fixed Bluetooth networks will appear all over the country – giving marketers and advertisers proximity marketing abilities as seen in the UK and South Africa
2. One carrier will start the 2d bar code craze by introducing a line of devices that come with a decoder pre-installed. Scanning heads of lettuce for nutritional information will become common-place shortly after (as they already are in Japan)
3. The Mobile web will become more important for marketers as a channel than SMS as devices such as the iphone and the blackberry bold (and rumoured thunder) will raise the bar in terms of overall experience with a high speed mobile web experience on our national 3G network
4. Mobile widgets and applications become bigger drivers for consumer behaviour than the device itself. It will no longer be just about the hardware
5. Palm will make a comeback and once again compete in the “smartphone” space
6. Thanks to built-in GPS in many devices, Location based services (LBS) mashups will make your mobile device more personal and relevant. Marketers will be shortly behind
7. A new Social Networking utility goes totally mobile (with LBS) – and competes with facebook for Canadian mindshare
8. Mobile gaming will explode in popularity – leading to strong growth in mobile advertising
9. At least one new GSM national Carrier will enter the marketplace and will compete directly with Rogers. They’ll probably sell the iphone too. Look for either Bell or Telus (or both) to signal a move into supporting GSM in Canada as well
10. Over 30 billion SMS messages will be sent in Canada – up from the predicted 18 billion this year

itsmy.com – a popular mobile-only social network with over 1 million registered users announced today that they will be handing over control of ads to their users.

Users can now self-select from 15 categories what types of ads they’d like to receive. For example, there are fashion, sports, and entertainment categories. An initial test of 20,000 users saw 82% make their own ad selection. CTR response rates in the test group was 3%.

This whole strategy is interesting and worth following over the coming months as it’s essentially taking the exact opposite approach of behavioural targeting which has been working great in other online channels.

If they can combine user behavioural targeting with self-selection, my bet is that response rates would improve even more. I would even test a subscription model for self-selecting “no-ads”.

Having said that, many mobile devices do not support cookies or other user tracking mechanisms, so trying out a self-selection model makes sense… for now.

Here’s a re-post of a video demo of their platform from this year’s world mobile congress:

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.

The Globe and Mail reported today that Microsoft is again talking to Yahoo. Get the full article here.

Seen largely as a way to counter any potential Google and Yahoo advertising partnership, a new Microsoft relationship would bolster their rating and access to the market while giving Yahoo shareholder value without raising too many regulatory eyebrows around anti-trust.

The long term play

Although still relatively small compared to the desktop web market, partnering with Yahoo now means Microsoft can also get access to their leading mobile platform.

Within two years mobile advertising in Canada will include inventory for marketers that will reach beyond Carrier on-deck portals. Already we are seeing early versions of mobile search (with proximity capabilities), mobile video, and mobile social networking sites with built-in ad-serving abilities. This market is going to be massive.

It also sets up the possibility of another takeover attempt in the not so distant future.

I’ll be getting on a plane Sunday afternoon to Barecelona, Spain for the 2008 Mobile World Congress – formely known as the 3GSM.

My plan is to blog at least once a day with summaries, points of view and perspective on a variety of mobile related topics including: 

1. How MMS is working as a marketing device in Europe
2. Applications of LBS (location based services) in Asia
3. Bluetooth marketing messaging in Africa
4. Mobile Search
5. Mobile web vs. Mobile widgets
6. Mobile advertising platforms, case studies and trends
7. Mobile Social Networking
8. Demos of 4G technology
9. New devices, or device trends
10. Off-deck content and applications

The plan is to also attend several events related to the conference including the Mobile Monday Peer Awards, Mobile Entertainment forum, Canadian breakfast forum, Mobile Jam session and the GoMo News blender.

Do you have other topics you’d like to hear about while i’m there? Send me an SMS, comment or email me through the contact form on this website.