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The mobile advertising industry has become consumed by short term hurdles and must focus on long-term strategic issues if it is to become a truly multi-billion dollar industry, according to the latest report from Informa Telecoms & Media, Mobile Advertising: Cutting through the Hype.

Informa forecasts that the global mobile advertising market will be worth US$12.09 billion by 2013. In 2008 mobile advertising will be worth US$1.72 billion, with 80% generated by the mobile content providers.

“The mobile content market is creating the mobile advertising opportunity, while the big brands remain sceptical about the return on investment that will justify the premium rate card already associated with this emerging medium,” says report author Nick Lane. “The situation will change, but the plethora of companies looking to get a slice of the revenues must remain patient. Releasing the big brands’ spend is key to unlocking the potential of mobile advertising”.

The report claims the majority of early-adopter big brands are yet to transfer more than 0.5% of their advertising budget onto mobile. While this is in part down to the much-maligned issues of non-existent measurement and premium pricing associated with early formats of mobile advertising, the report argues that these are short-term hurdles. The mobile advertising industry would be better served concentrating on educating the consumer and providing a visible and measurable return on investment to the brands.

“There is an absence of innovation in mobile advertising that has enabled the industry to accept Internet-based models devoid of the functionality and capability that mobile technology delivers,” Lane continued. “True mobile advertising does not exist today; what we are referring to is ‘advertising on mobile’. When mobile advertising combines user profiling, location and communication with unique mobile inventory, the industry can justify charging a premium rate over existing immeasurable advertising channels.”

The report makes a number of recommendations designed to spur the adoption of mobile advertising. Recommendations include utilising unused mobile inventory such as banner ads to advertise mobile advertising: a call-to-action to encourage consumers to visit a WAP site explaining the benefits, such as subsidised or free mobile services, in exchange of receiving advertising on their mobile device.

Further recommendations include an “advertising mode” button to allow the consumer to control the extent of adverts being delivered to his mobile device, based on activity and location requirements.

Full table of contents available here.

It had to come. IP telephony makes calls so cheap that there already are companies such as JaJah that give them away. In the US they already offer free calls between cell phones. You only have to register and no headset or a microphone are required.

Under its funny name, JAJAH joins Skype and other new companies that laugh themselves off phone carriers. What Jajah is offering are free calls between its registered users, using regular phones.

How does it work? First you register on their web site. Then you enter from which and to which numbers you want to call. In a few seconds, your phone rings and a voice announces the connection is being made.

That is, the callback system we have been using for years from phone booths, but via a web site.

Prices vary from zero to 52 (Euro) cents per minute, depending on where you live. Zone 1 covers the US, Canada, China, Singapore and Hong Kong. Zone 2 covers most of Europe, as well as other countries such as Thailand, Argentina or Venezuela.

Which calls are free?

The only free calls are between registered users. If a registered user calls a non-registered phone number, the call has a cost. The news is that Zone 1 users can also call for free from their cell phones. True, they must install a Java program in their phones, and it only works with Nokia, Motorola and Samsung devices with the Symbian operating system.

Users in Zone 2 (including Spain) pay 15 to 28 cents per minute if they use their cell phone. Not cheap for calling another cell phone within Spain, but a bargain when calling cell phones in other European or American countries. Calls between landlines in these zones are quite cheaper at two cents per minute.

All of the above prices are exclusive of VAT, but there is no cost for setting the call up. Jajah pays for the free calls with the revenue from the paid calls, and it also limits the duration of the free calls. It also offers some interesting plug-in programs to call directly from applications such as Outlook and Firefox, to send SMS and business accounts.

The rates are slightly higher than SkypeOut’s, Skype’s system for calling to fixed and mobile phones from a computer. The major difference between Skype and Jajah is that the latter uses the computer just for entering the phone numbers. Calls are made with regular phones, thus not requiring any fiddling with headsets or microphones.

For starters, Jajah gives 50 cents of credit, that you can recharge via credit card, funds transfer or the Moneybookers and PaySafeCard systems. PayPal is not accepted for obvious reasons: PalPal is owned by eBay, and eBay also owns Skype.

Some examples

Calls within Spain

• Between Jajah users: free
• Fixed to fixed: 0,02 €
• Fixed to mobile (or the other way round): 0,15 €
• Mobile to mobile: 0,28 €

Calls from Spain to the US

• Between Jajah users: free
• Spanish fixed to US fixed: 0,02 €
• Spanish fixed to US mobile (or the other way round): 0,15 €
• Spanish mobile to US mobile: 0,28 €

The relationship between music and mathematics is firmly established. Therefore, we are not really surprised by Xavi’s discovery: a web site where users can easily create and download for free their own, unique ringtones, generated by configurable mathematical models. Now this is cell phone customization!

by Xavier Caballé

The people at Wolfram Research, developers of Mathematica (the reference application for math calculations and their graphical representation), have set up a site for generating really unique ringtones for cell phones: WolframTones.

Using musical theory and Mathematica, the site generates short music sounds, ideal to be used as ringtones in mobile phones. Moreover, each tone is unique and not-repeatable, so it all becomes a form of customization.

The composition page allows choosing among several styles (classical, dance, hip hop, jazz, rock, pop, r&b, blues, country…) but it also allows working with individual instruments, tones and timing… with many different variations.

Once you have found the tone that fits your mood, you can save it (in MIDI format) or e-mail it directly to your cell phone. By the way, it supports the Treo!

Skype’s marketing machine seems to be working at full speed. Either due to alliances or to actual product developments, these days we’ve been seeing Skype everywhere: four WiFi phones that will allow computer-less calls have been announced; you can purchase USB pen drives including the Skype client, so you can take your IP phone with you; and there are not one, but two new versions of Skype for the Mac, one of them with video.

One would say that such ubiquity by a single company might be taken as arrogant were it you-know-which-companies. However, this is Skype, who allows us to phone free, so everything is forbidden.

The first news is the future availability (they say after September) of four WiFi phones, ready to phone via Skype over a wireless Internet connection. We’d be hard at calling them fixed phones, because they lack a cable and they don’t connect to a computer, but they’re not cellphones either, given the absence of cellular features (neither GSM nor UMTS). Therefore, none of them is a hybrid model, the market for those is estimated by In-Stat to reach 132 million units in the year 2010. However, all of them synchronize automatically with the user’s Skype account and his/her contacts, so while the user remains under WiFi coverage, they allow talking for free with other Skype users, and for a small amount with any user of a standard telephone.

The four sets just announced are made each by a different manufacturer, all of them better known as suppliers of network equipment:

• Belkin F1PP000GN-SK (180 $)
• Edge-Core WM4201
• NETGEAR SPH101 (299 $)
• SMC WSKP100 (199 $)

The four WiFi phones look almost identical, with a candy bar design, standard numeric keypad, call and hangup keys, color display, five-way navigation button and two function keys. Therefore, all of them stem from a single reference design, developed with Taiwan-based Accton, from which Belkin strays a bit, as their model is black while the others are in immaculate iPod white. Functionally they are compatible with WEP, WPA and WPA2 network encryption. Advance orders are already accepted both via Skype’s website and Amazon.com

Skype in a USB pen drive

For those who’d rather continue using Skype on a computer, SanDisk is including the Skype client application in its Flash USB memories from Cruzer Micro and Cruzer Titanium series, so the user can take its IP phone with him/her, including all account data and contacts, and use it from any Internet-connected computer. SanDisk’s Skype packs also include a month of free voice mail service. Cruzer Micros come in capacities from 512 MB (40 $) up to 4 GB (200 $), while Cruzer Titaniums can be of 1 GB (75 $) or 2 GB (120 $). Besides Skype, all of them include applications for managing passwords, synchronizing files and antivirus. They are compatible with Windows 2000 and XP only.

Skype para Macintosh gets video calls at last

Mac users are also getting their share of IP telephony. Via faq-mac.com we learn that you can already download Skype 1.5 for Apple’s OS X operating system, even if a beta (preliminary) version. Actually, this beta provides several performance improvements, but it is mostly a cosmetic upgrade looking more Mac-like. But there’s also another downloadable beta, mucho more interesing, that adds the expected feature of video calling from Mac computers fitted with a webcam, such as the current iMac and MacBook ranges from Apple. Thus Skype for the Mac is now at the same level of features than the Windows version, that has been offering video for months. We have tested this preliminary version for OS X, and found that it works well on Macs with a Power PC processor, as well as on the newer Intel-based models.

Not a single month goes without Google mobilising another of their web services, by releasing a light version adapted to the smaller screens and slower connections of mobile phones and handheld computers. Now it’s the turn of the Google News news aggregator.

(este artículo también está disponible en español)

The mobile version of Google, the popular Internet portal (calling it just a search engine falls quite short) has just added a new option to its home page for mobile devices: now it’s the mobile access to Google News, the service that gathers continuously the stories from major news outlets in each country (that’s 4.500 news sources in the US, 700 in Spain and Germany, 500 in France) and displays their headlines on a home page, grouped by sections.

The new access to Mobile Google News is located just under the search options and just above the mobile version of the Gmail webmail. The home page of the new service displays the three main headlines, followed by the sections menu (US, World, Entertainment, Sport, Sci/Tech, Business and Health), with an option to expand each section to display their first three headlines too.

The best part is that, unlike other mobile news aggregators, the links in Mobile Google News don’t take the user to the regular web pages of the news sources, but directly to their mobile versions, which further streamlines ‘light’ browsing using a small screen and a slow connection.

Google News’ new mobile version is available only for U.S. news sources, but not yet for localized versions such as Google Noticias, that aggregates Spanish media. Therefore, any user who has configured his/her mobile access to Google in another language must switch it back to English. Hopefully this limitation will be solved soon…

The offering of real-time email services, so crowded as of lately, has just got a new contender: Microsoft announces the launch of Exchange-based push email services for Windows Mobile devices in Germany and the Netherlands, in association with local mobile carriers.

The announcement has been made by Pieter Knook, Microsoft’s VP for EMEA, at the 3GSM World Congress (listen to the audio). Windows Mobile Email is based on the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system for smartphones and other connected mobile devices. The new Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP) allows real-time synchronization of the email messages, including attached files, received through a corporate Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, as well as any tasks, contacts and appointments stored in the user’s Outlook program. The system also enables remotely erasing the memory of the mobile device, should it be lost or stolen.

The service is addressed to corporations and small/medium businesses. In the Netherlands, the mobile carrier will be providing a hosted Exchange mailbox for 10,95 € per month.

Windows Mobile Email is the most recent entry to the thriving market of mobile, real-time email, where solutions from Visto, Seven and Good compete with RIM’s BlackBerry, the market leader. The first European countries where Windows Mobile Email will be available are Germany, through Vodafone, and the Netherlands, for T-Mobile subscribers. Microsoft says the service will be extended to the UK and France in March, and to other Euro countries during 2006.