Fortumo was invited to present at Baltic Development Forum, a high-level summit of business leaders and politicians in Scandinavia and the Baltics, taking place this week in Tallinn.
Rain Rannu, co-founder and CEO of Fortumo participates at a panel “Young Leaders of Today and Tomorrow”. Matching with the vision of Fortumo, his presentation focuses on the role of entrepreneurship in creating growth in Scandinavia.
A few days ago social networking site Facebook announced mobile extension to its popular developer platform. Great move, as mobile is definitely where things are going these days. However, it seems that it’s not very stable yet, and they have rushed a bit to get this news out.
In addition to showing snippets of information on the Facebook mobile page (m.facebook.com), application developers could use the API to add SMS interaction to their applications. SMS is great for allowing instant communication with the users wherever they are. However, it has also proved of being one of the most accessible and convenient ways to collect micropayments from users. There are several success stories of social networking sites in Europe, that have made fortunes using one or two simple premium SMS services neatly tied to the otherwise free website. For example, you can make your photo appear on the front page for some time, by sending premium SMS costing let’s say €1. This amount is then added to your phone bill and mobile operator is sharing the revenue with the website.
Eric Eldon from VentureBeat wrote:
Mobile apps may be a good way to monetize, though, Shen [RockYou co-founder Jia Shen] tells us: “Lots of people are thinking about how to run micropayments through phone bills” as high schoolers don’t have access to credit cards for doing things like buying Facebook’s virtual gifts.
At its current version though, Facebook Mobile API does not seem to support premium priced SMS, nor do they share any revenue with application developers, but I’m sure they’re thinking about it. As contextual advertising does not work, I think that SMS could become one of the easiest ways to monetize Facebook apps.
I was surfing around other day and found an interesting startup called trutap. Usually all the fancy apps and innovative solutions are for wider audience, but actually they are only available in bigger countries like US, UK, Germany etc. Cool is that people for example in Malta can also easily use tartup. Trutap should be available in 210 countries across the world at the moment.
Trutap is a free mobile service that combines all the elements of people’s social life into one application. With trutap users can connect and converse with friends and family, wherever they are, whenever they want. Users have the ability to use IM, group message, upload text and pictures to blogs and send pictures via a mobile phone. It leaves all the the doors open for the future, i wonder when will we reach to the point where there isn’t any difference whether you are talking to a person face to face or via computer, cell or with something else. At the moment tartap is in closed beta, so it is possible to show your interest and maybe they will let you in.
What is trutap?
* Combines all elements of your social life into one application, for the first time
* Offers the ability to IM (MSN, Yahoo!, AIM (AOL) and ICQ), group message, upload text and pictures to blogs and send pictures via a mobile
* Instant Messenger (IM) - access all accounts and converse with everyone at the same time
* Blog and Photo Sharing - supports Blogger, Blog.com, Livejournal, Flickr, Friendster, Xanga and others so text and pictures can be uploaded
* Messaging - picture messaging, online status and group message with ALL-Reply functionality
* No need for special configuration and easy to download
* trutap offers privacy - restrict access and even block users
* trutap will also be available via a web browser from a computer shortly
* trutap is free, fun and it works. Go on, you know you want it!
Some time ago i introduced a new device Bluepod Media had developed and talked a little about bluetooth marketing. I might have been a little too untimely with conclusions. So i decided to invest some time and find out useful things about bluetooth marketing.
First what is bluetooth?
Bluetooth is an industrial specification for wireless personal area networks. Bluetooth provides a way to connect and exchange information between devices such as mobile phones, laptops, PCs, printers, digital cameras, and video game consoles over a secure, globally unlicensed short-range radio frequency.
Bluetooth also said as Proximity marketing is the localized wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place. The process of Bluetooth based proximity marketing involves setting up Bluetooth broadcasting equipment at a particular location and then sending information which can be text, images, audio or video to Bluetooth enabled devices within range of the broadcast server.
It used to be that due to security fears or a desire to save battery life many users kept their Bluetooth devices disabled. To overcome this problems marketers have combined bluetooth marketing with advising via traditional media - such as posters, television screens or field marketing - suggesting people to enable their Bluetooth handsets in order to receive free content.
Nowadays mobile phones seem to have usually bluetooth switched on by default. Many other devices like car kits and handsets are usually bridged over bluetooth, so users now leave bluetooth switched on for easy connection. How effective bluetooth marketing will become time will tell.
Google launched AdSense for mobile 7 months later than Yahoo! its mobile display ad system for its Mobile Web service. When Yahoo! started with 19 countries Google replied with six fewer, they are offering AdSense for Mobile in 13 countries: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (available in the coming weeks).
It was just a matter of time when AdSense was developed for mobiles. Since there are about 6.6 billion people in the world and about half that many mobile phone subscriptions and there are currently more mobile devices worldwide than personal computers and televisions combined so it could be a promised land for Google. But the best part is that ad blocking on mobile handsets isn’t an issue. No worries it will be pretty soon.
Google’s ability to profit from mobile advertising will depend largely on how much it knows about those viewing its mobile ads and the extent to which it can convert that knowledge into ad targeting data. While telecom companies typically know a great deal about their subscribers, they tend not to share that information without compensation, if at all. That leaves Google to either make deals with telecom partners or to deepen its own data about those using its services both on the Internet and mobile devices.
We will see how it goes, meanwhile you can keep an eye on AdSence blog.
When time passes it gets harder to draw a straight line between different
communication channels. The borders were a bit hazy but Yahoo! managed to make
it quite blurry.
According to press release Yahoo Mail service, allows users to send real-time messages to
wireless handsets in the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines via
the IM platform. Users can also send instant messages from Yahoo’s e-mail
program to Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. The service is free of
charge to the Yahoo user.
This solution gives a lot of opportunities for interesting services, it is
difficult to predict how crazy things can go, i hope that we don’t have to
integrate spam filter to our cellphones.
But i sincerely hope that google will somehow response to it and rest of the
world will also be able to benefits from this solution.
We all know that mobile technology has passed through several “generations”. In a mere 10-15 years, it has went from huge handsets and low network coverage (of the 1st generation) to colorful displays, high speeds and mobile internet (of the 3rd generation).
So have mobile services - all these fun and useful things one can do with his or her mobile besides talking. In less than a decade, mobile phone has become exacltly what Howard Rheingold once predicted: “a remote control for our life“.
In somewhat simplified terms, the evolution of mobile services and their provision has been the following:
First generation
In the late 90ies, only mobile operator could provide a mobile service. Mobile services were few and far between. Nobody really used the phones for anything else besides talking.
Second generation
In the early 2000ies, with the emergence of SMS-service providers, the mobile (or SMS)-services went to a boom. New services started out everywhere, ranging from wallpapers and melodies, text-to-win campaigns, SMS-chat and voting in TV, SMS-based info services, SMS-payments etc. etc. Texting became hugely popular, and not only among the young.
Third generation
However, as it turned out, providing a mobile service was still expensive and feasible only to bigger brands and mobile service providers. Only now, in line with the rise of blogging and social networks, a new trend in mobile service provision emerging - where everyone can create their own SMS-service as easy as setting up a homepage or a blog.
Fortumo is happy to be part of this exciting development.
