The pendulum swings back to “paid for” content

It looks like the swing towards “ad funded everything” is quickly coming to an end, and there is a trend back in the direction of selling products and services to users.

“Ad funded” for many businesses really meant “shareholder funded in the hope of later monetization”. Meanwhile, people actually selling things were ignored – that was thought too “dirty” or “difficult”. However, in difficult economic conditions, remember the Yorkshire expression: “where there’s muck there’s brass”.

Apple iPhone Software Store generating sales

According to Apple, sales of software in the iPhone App store were $30 million in July.
“This thing’s going to crest at half a billion, soon,” Jobs told the Wall Street Journal: iPhone Software Sales take off. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1bn marketplace at some point in time. I’ve never seen anything like [...]

Transcoding the Truth?

There is an interview with Novarra President and COO, Jayanthi Rangarajan in Mobile Marketing Magazine that really takes the biscuit when it comes to spinning the truth around transcoding – its benefits and drawbacks:
http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.co.uk/2008/05/talking-transco.htmlMs Rangarajan, as COO of Novarra is at best badly mis-informed or at worst blatantly transcoding the truth in her interview with the [...]

So how was CTIA?

The flight back from CTIA was taken up by trying to “close off” as many actions as possible by emails, and then on lying back and reviewing what I had seen at the show – ready to report back to all the people who would say “so how was CTIA?”.
In a word: Quiet
CTIA has traditionally [...]

Are you happy for somebody to wrap advertising round your mobile site – and sell it?

If you operate a web site, are you happy for ISP’s around the world to edit the content of your sites and add banner advertising to your pages – without telling you or getting your agreement? 
Several mobile operators have started to place “transcoders” or “filters” that intercept and replace web (HTTP) traffic going to their phones. 
The effects are [...]

I saw what you did and know who you are

It’s not Big Brother, but with the launch of Bango Analytics this week, mobile website owners will now get a unique view on who their visitors are and what they are doing.  Also it’ll provide valuable information on how mobile ads are performing, right across different ad networks.  All this is done without revealing any [...]

Free My Phone

Veteran Technical Reporter / Guru Walt Mossberg wrote a great article in the Wall Street Journal on Monday.  Full of great info and a call to action to get carriers to open up their walled gardens.
Extract:
Free My Phone
A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by [...]

Hassle watch

Acting for thousands of content providers, collecting payments from over 100 countries through many different payment channels gives Bango a great view into the byzantine complexities of tax and financial laws around the world.  We are going to start blogging some of the hassle we encounter, ranging from odd local practices to mobile carriers who [...]

“Revenue Leakage and” “Breakage Bonusses”

I recently read an interesting article about Revenue leakage over at MocoNews: http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-vodafone-fesses-up-on-faulty-reporting-content-companies-setting-up-own/
There are definitely inaccuracies in reporting, but it goes both ways:
A major carrier has outages in its billing system from time to time – usually no more than a few minutes.  When this happens, off-deck connectors into the billing system can’t collect money, [...]

Bar codes and other camera stuff

There is some interesting discussion about bar code scanning from mobile phones over at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon
Bango worked with Interactive Wireless on phone to web stuff in 2002,
and again with another company (that sold out to OD2) in 2004. We
also did a big trial with Vodafone in 2005.
http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/July2000/3721.htm
http://bango.com/assets/data/pressreleases/57_bangospot.pdf
http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com/2005/07/mobile-marketing-its-
biggest.html
We discovered the “two gotchas” about this technology:
(1) Walled garden [...]