This is a guest post by Sam Peters.
The biggest conflict we have seen all year has been in the smartphone industry. iPhone and Android have been battling each other all year long, which has actually put several phone makers in court. So which really is the best? Should you go with Android or iPhone?
Should smartphones be smart? That is the question I should have asked earlier in the day. What I did ask was, Is an iPhone still a phone with Siri. I would have thought the answer was self-evident but of all people Andy Rubin (SVP of Mobile with Google) takes the contrary view.
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This is a guest post by Mariana Ashley.
Everyone now-a-days talks about smartphones and tablets (or netbooks for those who are poor and uninteresting ) aka smart or iPhones and iPads ( for those who are very rich and very interesting aka “smart”) like they are the be-all, end-all of technology. Sure, they’re incredibly useful and mobile, but some people even go so far as to say that desktops are stupid, clunky, and irrelevant. Even obsolete!
For those on the go, Google continues to add interesting innovations to its search facilities. As Google announced you can now refine your searches by location.
Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you’re a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer’s market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. We have now added the ability to refine your searches with the “Nearby” tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding “Minneapolis” to your query and missing web pages that only say “St. Paul” or “Twin Cities.” Check it out by doing a search, clicking on “show options” and selecting “Nearby.”
Naturally this also works when you do a search on your mobile device. If your local restaurant has also decided to add an advertisement using AdWords then you can now even click on their phone number in their mobile ad. It would seem to be a win win situation.
Calling the business is now easier thanks to a feature that allows advertisers to add a clickable local phone number to their mobile ads. If you’re using an iPhone, Android, or other smartphone, you just click the number to call the business.
The results of this process can be really staggering. Below you will see a Nearby search for pizza here in Langley BC. As might be expected, there are quite a number of pizza restaurants, many of which do not even have websites. It was particularly pleasing to see a mention of a pizzeria in Fort Langley.
Perhaps the only surprising thing to remark here is that still Google has not included the new Golden Ears Bridge, now in operation for nine months. Perhaps it is a question of priorities. After all, Translink, the agency for the Golden Ears Bridge has no need to spend money on Google advertisements.
In some parts of the world, more of your customers would be trying to find you on a mobile device than via a regular computer. That mobile device might be an iPhone or a Blackberry or even a cell phone.
If you rely on local customers visiting your establishment, then the odds go up dramatically that some customers will be trying to find you while they are on the go. If you hope that your existing traditional website will be visible and give a pleasing introduction to your company then you may be in for a big disappointment.
Some mobile device browsers such as the Opera Mini browser do a remarkable job in doing the best they can to make a traditional website mobile friendly. However only a very small fraction of mobile users are using this browser. Even if they do, a website that has been designed to give a good user experience at a typical screen width of 1064 pixels presents challenges at even 300 pixels. It implies an unacceptable amount of downward scrolling.
Another factor that brings the mobile web closer is the increasing popularity of Twitter. People are used to working with very small snippets of information. One Web Is Here is how F J van Wingerde sees it.
This is not new. Even back in 2007, Johann Burkard was encouraging all to Get your website ready for the Mobile Web in 10 steps. His steps were:
There some good suggestions there but this oversimplifies the problem. What is required is a website designed specifically for mobile devices. It must be very much simpler and ideally should require minimal scrolling. SMM has such a mobile website at www.lbost.com. It offers Local Business Online Smart Tips (LBOST).
It uses a CSS stylesheet appropriate for mobile devices with one small addition that only operates on traditional computer screens. In this case a maximum width of 300 pixels applies. This means that even on a traditional screen, you see the website as you would on a mobile device.
This is achieved by the following lines in the CSS stylesheet together with putting the whole web page within a div with the id container:
@media screen { #container {
width:320px;
margin: 0 auto;
} }
It is useful to see the mobile content in a more limited width like this. It is a constant reminder of the challenges that are faced in trying to keep it simple for a mobile device.
Communicating well with that growing audience of local customers who are on the go is not just a question of having a good mobile device display. As in the traditional Web, a big determinant of the number of visitors is visibility in the search engines. Google et al. are having some difficulties in doing local search effectively. Important showcases here are the Google Local Business Center and Google Maps.
LBOST provides a window on this rapidly evolving scene. To be on the leading edge, subscribe to the RSS news feed and get the news as it happens.
If you accept that keeping up with the competition requires that you have a mobile Web presence then why not contact us now.
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Tailor the Internet toward smartphones is the word from Rogers Communications Inc. It plans to recast the definition of the Internet and how it is used as more Canadians transition toward smart-phones.
Rogers chief executive Nadir Mohamed in the keynote address at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto said:
The notion of Internet at home [or] Internet at the office is changing to: your Internet, wherever you are. It is very powerful. Canadians’ appetite to communicate, access information and entertainment, and even make transactions through their wireless device is becoming insatiable.
He added that Toronto-based Rogers, the largest wireless carrier in the country, is moving quickly to bring mobile Internet to the masses.
By 2014, more than three million Canadians will be users of smart-phones, such as the Apple iPhone or the Research In Motion BlackBerry, which surf the Web and provide e-mail.
Rogers will shortly introduce the iPhone 3G S, Apple’s latest device, which is at least twice as fast as its predecessor.
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The Cellphone is hardly a toy in the kitchen according to the NY Times.
One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone. It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.
Although restaurant chefs have often resisted new technologies, cellphones have now crossed the technology barrier from the office into the kitchen.
Chris Cosentino, the chef at Incanto restaurant in San Francisco, says his iPhone has greatly simplified the math in his cooking. He said that he sees multifunction devices like the iPhone as the real technological revolution for chefs.
For amateur cooks, new cellphone software helps control the chaos of planning, shopping and cooking dinner at the end of the day. You can always use software from BigOven.com, a Web site with about 167,000 recipes. BigOven has a free iPhone application, searchable by ingredient, by rating, and by course. This has been downloaded more than a million times since it was released in October.
Of course there is a question of how much of the recipe and ingredients can easily be seen on a small cellphone screen. Here you may possibly need Recipes reduced to their Twitter essence. In other words all compressed into 140 characters and spaces.
Maureen Evans is the person who thought of this approach. You can now follow her tweeted recipes at twitter.com/cookbook. They are now followed by more than 13,000 people. Evans is now fielding numerous calls from cookbook agents and the media.
While Evans loves her stacks of cookbooks with “verbose top-heavy instruction from celebrity cooks that tell you how every minute of the process is supposed to look and smell and feel,” she also sees a place for “just a small amount of assistance to get dinner on the table after a long day at work.”
Having such information readily available on a cellphone clearly meets a real need for many people. Meals on the go just got even more portable.
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Previous figures had suggested that the recession was slightly dampening mobile web growth. You would hardly know that from the latest Comscore data showing that the number of people accessing news and information on their mobile devices more than doubled in the past year from January 2008 to January 2009. (Tip of the hat to Warren Riddle)
Among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35 percent) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year. Here is a table from their press release.
That excludes access to social media but as Frank Reed suggests, the increased involvement with social media, whether Facebook, Twitter or some other is changing the way people, particularly those under 35, are accessing their online contacts and information.
“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” observed Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”
“We also note that much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications, such as those offered for the iPhone, and by text-based searches. While smart phones and high-end feature phones, like the Samsung Instinct and LG Dare comprise the Top 10 devices used for news and information access, 70 percent of those accessing mobile Internet content are using feature phones.”
In January, 22.3 million people accessed news and information via a downloaded application. Maps are the most popular downloaded application with 8.2 million users, while search was the overwhelmingly favored use for SMS-based news and information access, with 14.1 million users. Overall, 32.4 million people used SMS to access news and information in January.
This is all good news for advertisers, who are struggling to find an effective place to reach people in a year in which their budgets are significantly smaller than last.
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As The Economist points out for Mobile telecoms in the recession, it is Boom in the bust.
Despite the recession, the mobile industry is enjoying a promising transformation. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, although many bemoaned the downturn, on the show floor it was hard to keep track of all the new “smart” phones and services.
Makers of handsets will be hard hit: unit sales are expected to fall by at least 10% this year, having increased by 6% in 2008 to 1.2 billion. But at the same time the industry is going through a transformation that promises to fuel rapid growth in the years to come. To draw a parallel from computing, it is as if the personal computer (PC), its graphical user-interface, high-speed internet access and open-source software had all taken off at the same time.
The momentum has been created by a newcomer to the mobile industry: Apple. By the end of 2008 it had sold more than 17m of its elegant iPhones, and there have been over 500m downloads from its “App Store” since its launch last July. Others are now following in Apple’s footsteps. In Barcelona, for instance, Microsoft and Nokia, the world’s largest software firm and handset-maker respectively, announced their own application stores. Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry, and Google, the world’s biggest internet firm, have done the same.
It is likely that the current operators will not be the ones who control the mobile internet. Others such as Apple, Google or Nokia, are more likely to become the gatekeepers.
Informa, a market-research firm, projects revenues from content and data services of $240 billion by 2012. Despite the economic turmoil elsewhere, the industry seems justified in its confidence that the smart-phone is finally emerging as a powerful, innovative and lucrative new computing platform.
One interesting question to ponder in all this is who will come through the recession with the best resources to capitalize on this inevitable growth in the Mobile Web.
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John Markoff in his New York Times blog post, Google, iPhone and the Future of Machines That Listen, raises some important issues. He is talking about Google’s new speech recognition service for the iPhone, which was released on Monday.
He suggests that it will understand you most accurately when you speak to it just the way you enter queries into the Google search box. .. The accuracy is far from 100 percent, and probably not even 95 percent (Google execs demurred when I asked if they had any meaningful accuracy statistics). My experience is that it captures your voice query substantially more than half the time, and that in itself is a revelation.
More and more people seem to be finding that voice recognition systems can often do the job. As cell phones become smaller, it seems likely that speech technology will become the preferred way to input instructions and questions.
Another important influence here may be changing population age structure. Senior citizens may prefer to talk to their cell phone, rather than trying to hit those incredibly tiny buttons. Even if someone mumbles, what they say includes extremely rich data. With the right software, the cell phone can undoubtedly figure out what is wanted. At worst it can ask a question or questions for greater precision.
On the other hand (no pun intended), if you hit the wrong key, the cell phone may still assume that this was intentional. Trying to figure out when the cell phone should question you on whether you intended to hit that key would not be easy. It would also lead to much frustration as the cell phone refused to accept your command.
There are challenges either way, but I believe those facing speech technology will prove to be solvable in very user friendly ways. With all the resources the big guns are applying here, it is likely that acceptable, commercial solutions will be seen within 18 months
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This is one of the SMM blogs. Contact us for Local SEO and Social Media Marketing (Google+, Facebook, Twitter) for SMBs and NPOs in Langley, Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.
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