This is an excellent question posed by the panel audience earlier this week.

The short answer is – nearly 100% of mobile devices in Canada have a mobile browser.

Every new device comes with one and consumers are updating & replacing their devices faster than ever. It used to be that every 2-3 years a consumer would update their device. Now it’s about every 6-9 months. Also, thanks to Stephanie at Yiibu for this link which shows device market share by Country.

Having said that, keep in mind that the mobile web experience varies greatly from device to device. You can design and develop sites that will work just fine on every device if you follow the standards laid out by the W3c and dotmobi.

Unlike the interweb where we are often designing for the lowest common denominator, you can design for the highest common denominator for the mobile web.  We can auto-detect your device before serving content so that you can serve up a very rich experience for smartphones (i.e. bb bold, iphone) and a more basic experience for your standard clamshell device for example.

Data plans in Canada have come way down in the last year. You can get unlimited data plans for as low as $7 / month from Bell and Telus for your flip phone, and as low as $30 / month for your smartphone from Rogers.

Summary: The mobile web is a viable channel to extend your message.  Be sure to design for mobile and user context instead of trying to cram an interweb site into a smaller screen.

Here’s a really interesting concept and tool for those looking to build a mobile website that will be compatible across all devices – for free. Including hosting.

mobiSiteGalore has introduced a desktop and mobile based publishing platform that allows anybody to build their own mobile website within minutes using a templated system that walks you through 6 steps that ends with your own mobile site published on their sub-domain.

The entire process is mobile web driven – so you don’t need to download any widgets, applications, or peform complex downloading sequences.  The templates are pretty restrictive (unless you’re a code geek), but it needs to be to keep it simple.

Having said that, you can add feedback pages, upload images, format content, restore to previous versions, add hit counters, send email and SMS invitations, optimize for SEO and include auto-redirect to your desktop website if someone attempts to access your mobile site on a laptop or desktop.

You can even do all that from your mobile device – a first in the industry.

Check out their online demo of building a site through a non-smartphone mobile device here.  

What surprised me was that the “free” user generated websites on their sub-domain did not include mobile banner ads or other forms of mobile advertising…. which begs the question – why do this if they aren’t generating revenue?

If you don’t like the idea of promoting a sub-domain, you can always setup a redirect from your dotmobi or mobile enabled domain to their sub-domain.

Now what’s your excuse for not having a mobile website for your company, service, or brand?

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

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

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 recently reported that mobile advertising was years away from a breakthrough. You can read their full article here.

Although I agree we are still in the early stages of mobile advertising, I would suggest that “years” is more likely about two years. Just as we’re seeing exponential growth in leveraging the mobile channel for marketing activities, we are now seeing similar growth in mobile inventory for brands looking to place ads on carrier networks (both on and off-deck).

In Canada, there was virtually no mobile ad inventory to buy a year ago. Today, there’s well over 5 million impressions in mobile inventory to be bought on and off-portal. Although relatively small in comparison to email or the desktop web, this is growing rapidly.

Industry insiders have indicated that the metrics are looking pretty good too.

[Read more →]

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 →]

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.

It’s a silly excercise, but everybody does it.  After a banner year for mobile in Canada, here are 10 outrageous predictions for 2008:  

1. SMS third-party advertising – every SMS you send is 150 characters…most of which is sent as blank space. I predict new services will take advantage of this in 2008 to deliver SMS advertising to off-set mobile costs for the consumer (but only if they opt-in of course)
2. Mobile Web advertising will take a piece of your media buy. We’ve seen it happen with online media…now with more inventory becoming available off-deck, the time is right to test and pilot this channel
3. MMS Common Short Codes will finally arrive and usher us into a new era in Mobile marketing in Canada….or at least catch us up to the rest of the world.
4. Mobile payments (m-Commerce) will start to emerge from text books, blogs, and sales pitches.  Look for pilots from Interac, Visa and at least one of the major banks next year.
5. The iphone will finally arrive in Canada – but it will be the second generation 3G phone that will support higher internet access speeds and cool features like video calling. This will be offered exclusively on the Rogers network – but don’t be surprised if another non-mobile retailer offers them for sale first
6. Fixed or low-cost data plans will be universal across all carriers in Canada. It’s already started with Bell and Rogers now offers an $80 / month plan for 500 megs of data – plenty for most of us. It’s still a long way from other plans around the world that are 4 times cheaper or better, but it’s a start
7. Due to fixed or low-cost data plans, look for the mobile web to catch fire.  Marketing campaigns will start incorporating mobile web strategies as part of their marketing mix
8. A new mobile carrier will be announced. The Canadian government announced the opening of new spectrum and is reserving a piece of it for a new player and with special engagement rules that will make it easier for a new competitor to enter the market.
9. Google will continue its charge towards world mobile domination. Look for their gphone sometime in the 3rd quarter and look for them to either bid on spectrum in the U.S., buy a carrier like Sprint outright to own a piece without having to go through the auction process or leverage their new mobile platform called Android to get direct access to many subscribers across many carriers.
10. Social Networking will make the leap from desktop to Mobile as a primary interface / access point 

Even if only a few of these come to fruition in 2008, it will be a great year for Marketers and a great year for Consumers.

Happy Holidays!

The CWTA just released their third quarter report on the Canadian mobile industry. Highlights include:

1. September 2007, person-to-person text messages totalled 946.7 million (approximately 31.5 million per day), up from 795.3 million in June 2007.
2. The total number of person-to-person text messages sent during the first three quarters of 2007 totalled 6.8 billion, surpassing the total of all text messages sent in 2006 which was 4.3 billion messages. Canada is on track to deliver over 9 billion text messages in 2007.
3. There are now over 19 million mobile subscribers in Canada or about 60% adoption overall. Adoption is around 70% in major urban areas and around 80% in major cities.
4. There were over 500,000 new subscribers in the third quarter.
5. 80% of mobile customers are on postpaid plans – so 20% are on prepaid plans.
6. There have been 18 applications processed for mobile micro-payments (mCommerce) in Canada in 2007.

What does this mean for marketers in Canada? It’s time to divert marketing budget to mobile. If you are looking for support with customer acquisition campaigns – SMS is still the way to go… or at least where you should begin your efforts.

Mobile web (including advertising) is growing and it’s now possible to buy inventory off-deck. Off-deck means developing something that isn’t carrier specific or that does not rely on the carrier for delivery. This means you can now promote your product or service beyond the confines of the “on-deck” carrier web experience.

For marketers looking for customer retention or growth tactics to compliment existing initiatives - SMS is still a great place to start by offering alerts, timely news, or information that is specific and personal to your customer. Stay away from many to 1 messages. Mobile is a very personal channel that rewards 1:1 communication. 

Marketers who have had success using Mobile have seen 94% open rates or better on SMS and 15% response rates to a call to action.   I don’t know about you, but that’s information I’ll be sharing with all our clients as we roll into the new year.