Textopoly Mobile Blog » WAP

Vitaminwater’s Going Mobile

Naushad — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:33:44 +0000

Vitaminwater recently launched their newest campaign staring the genius that is Gary Busey. In the new ads Gary Busey plays Norman Tugwater, Fantasy Sports Attorney. He’s fighting to get monetary compensation from fantasy sports players for the athletes that he represents. The whole thing is pretty funny and quite entertaining, but Busey’s nut-job cheesy TV attorney character takes the cake.

The most interesting part of the whole campaign would be the texting component that they have going on – we are a mobile company and into the whole mobile thing. It’s nice to see a campaign with integrated mobile components. By texting in TUG to 70734, users receive a call from Gary Busey followed by an SMS with a link to their mobile site. Once on the mobile site, users can watch the viral video and share it via Facebook and Twitter. It’s a pretty robust campaign, from the Facebook page, videos, billboards, and OOH. We salute you Vitaminwater, welcome to the mobile club!

Kickin Facts…

Asif — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:26:17 +0000

You want exposure? You want people to know about your brand, your product, or your service; well the answer is in your pocket!

Mobile usage across the globe is growing faster and stronger than a 13 year old girl can say Justin Bieber! First, let me hit you with some facts:

- According to the International Telecommunications Union, mobile subscribers will surpass 5 billion in 2010, which is over 70% of the global population! The world population in April was 6.8 billion! The ITU says growth is being driven by advanced services and handsets in developed countries and increased take-up of mobile health services and mobile banking in the developing world.

- Gartner (March 2010) predicts that by 2011, over 85% of new handsets will be able to access the Mobile Web!

- LeBron was never the king, SMS ruled all! According to Portfolio Research (Feb. 2010)

SMS is used by 4 billion consumers worldwide
In 2009 worldwide SMS traffic topped five trillion messages, and that figure is set to exceed 10 trillion in 2013.
MMS, mobile email and mobile IM are all growing strongly. The driver for MMS is the number of camera phones, for mobile email is the business market and while IM is popular with the youth market.
The global mobile messaging business is worth over US$150 billion, and will hit US$233 billion by 2014.

If your brand isn’t capable of reaching more than 2 million people, you’re not using mobile! And if you’re not using mobile, you are definitely not at full potential! Check the facts, call us up, let’s have some lunch, and then drop it like it’s hot.

Want to be at full potential? Email me at: asif[at]textopoly[dot]com. – P.S. – I don’t think Miami is going to win the championship this year.

Movin’ On Up, Smartphone Usage Rises

Guest — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:05:53 +0000

As most people in the United States know, mobile phones are no longer used simply for calling someone for a piece of quick information or directions from A to B. Mobile phones have become our lifelines.

If you’re anything like me, which probably 80% of the people I interact with on a daily basis are, we would be unable to function without the use of our handy (no pun intended) mobile phones with their ever-expanding capabilities. Whether it be the iPhone, Android, or Blackberry, users have become infatuated by the unlimited number of games, messaging applications, and internet use that are available with one touch of a finger.

To support my belief that mobile phone users are becoming more and more addicted to the multiple capabilities of a smartphone is a statistic showing that between the months of March and May 2010, smartphone usage has increased by 8.1%.

A few statistics that should have companies who want to sell their products salivating;

Nearly a third (31.9%) used their smartphones for web browsing
30% used downloaded applications
20.8% used their phones to access social networking sites or blogs

This is great news for companies who are hoping to expand their products and advertise in the mobile world. With the rise of smartphone usage, and overall web browsing on any mobile phone; companies and agencies are now given the opportunity to reach out to their audiences and give them the information they are seeking through WAP/mobile sites (which in my opinion are brilliant), text messages, and applications. These tactics just make things that much easier for their consumers to devour whatever their hearts desires!

If you feel like your brain just hasn’t taken in enough to convince you, feel free to check out the article yourself and let me know your thoughts!

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=131673&nid=116386

The Business of Luxury and Mobile

Taj — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:16:45 +0000

Recently, I was at a Financial Times Conference that focused on the business of luxury goods, examining trading research for my investment fund. One of the more interesting quotes included the following:

“Digital connectedness is becoming too much of a burden. Disconnected will become the new luxury”
-William Powers

As the resident horologist for Team Textopoly, I began to look into how many luxury watch brands are using mobile wap, app or sms and eschewing Mr. Powers’ analysis. Some of the luxury watch brands use mobile to not only connect, but also inform potential buyers, giving them additional tools to use when they visit their authorized dealer.

Venerable watch maker Patek Philippe, with pieces starting from $12,300 up to $1 million, believe in the Powers quote with good reason:

“When you buy a Patek Philippe, you need to feel and touch it and you need good advice. Patek Philippe is not only about business but also about passion. If I sell online, I’ll lose that,” said Thierry Stern, chief executive of one of the very few remaining family-owned Swiss watchmakers.

Mr. Stern is absolutely correct, as the weight of the watch, the look of the crystal, the feel of the material or metal is important. However, some other brands are not only embracing online, but are looking at mobile apps and waps to engage future potential buyers. Here is a review of some:

IWC¹ – IWC, a Schaffhausen-based watchmaker known to adorn the wrists of people like John Mayer and designer Tom Ford, offers a mobile application that allows users to envision an IWC on their wrist, as well as detailed collection information. Most importantly, it offers locations where buyers can go and take Mr. Stern’s advice.

BELL & ROSS² - Bell & Ross is another Swiss made piece founded by French watchmakers. Entertainers such as Zach Braff and Bruce Springsteen prefer this brand. B&R’s mobile site & app offers a display of their collection, locations to purchase and a short in-house produced video to show the power of their “instrument” watch.

A LANGE & SOHNE – ALS is an older, German brand whose mobile app offers a view of their collection gallery, in addition to messages from the firm. Point of sale and service information is also included on the mobile app.

PERRELET – Perrelet originated the self-winding mechanism in 1770 and jumped into the mobile app world in 2009. Their app showcases their turbine model as well as contact information for the company.

HUBLOT- Hublot is an iconic brand built upon their Big Bang series and offers a Maradona watch for football fans. This brand has a robust wap site that shows their diverse collection and news.

MARVIN – Swiss based Marvin Watch has an iphone and wap enabled site that offers news, brand information, collection and contact information. Marvin takes it further and has a “Community Manager” Jerome Pineau who actively uses social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs like Hodinkee.com) to connect with current and potential buyers. His participation has definitely influenced me to get my hands on the brand.

Clearly, there are some luxury brands that understand the importance of having a presence in the digital world and using that presence to introduce new generations to their wares. If that presence begins with mobile (or facebook, or iPad, etc), then Team Textopoly is the one you should call.

Here is something interesting, too. Swiss watchmaker Ulysse Nardin³recently announced plans and a website (http://www.uncells.com/) for the worlds first hybrid luxury watch and cell phone (“The Chairman”) running on the Google Android. Similar to how a mechanical watch is powered by kinetic energy, The Chairman’s battery will be backed up by the mechanical rotor inside the phone. Eat your heart out iPhone and Vertu!

*For the record, I am a hardcore Paneristi, but my collection includes Big Pilot^1, a BR01-92²and a Maxi Marine³

away we go…with mobile

Taj — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:40:42 +0000

I tend to travel quite a bit both professionally as well as personally with my wife and small children. There are a few constants that stay with me – my smartphone and my mini laptop. While my mini with WiFi card allows me access quick flight and hotel information, sometimes my cell phone has to get the job done. Below are a few brands that use mobile and use it well:

UNITED (mobile.united.com) – I’ve flown United since college and enjoy the simplicity and ease of their wap site. Its quick, robust and easy to read with check-in, status, Red Carpet Club and Mileage Plus info and more!

DELTA (mobile.delta.com) very similar to United but also offers travel alerts for those of us who travel internationally

SOUTHWEST (mobile.southwest.com) – SW allows you to buy flights on their mobile site as well book autos with their 6 rental partners

Many of the hotel wap sites immediaelty recognize that you’re accessing information from a mobile device and send you to their mobile wap site. Some brands below also use mobile apps:

Accor Hotels – Accor (The Sofitel for my LA folks) uses a mobile app function to offer promotions and the ability to book their hotels across the world.

Hyatt – Hyatt offers reservations, checking in & out as well as access to their frequent traveler program PASSPORT. You’ll be able to find great promotions and offers exclusive to their mobile site.

Hilton – Hilton uses a mobile app that also allows for reservations, HHonors Points and specials.

Marriott – Marriott offers booking availability, Rewards account features and city guides. Marriott also uses SMS to provide great deals.

This is only a few of the travel related brands using mobile, however, many are not yet truly integrated into the digital world. If you’re a brand manager for a hotel, airline, or rental company, look to Textopoly to make it easier for business travelers like myself to find you and use your brand!

WAP Sites – What Are Brands Waiting For?

Shehzad — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 03:33:25 +0000

I am a man on the move. I, like millions of others, like to use my mobile phone to make phone calls, check email, text and browse the internet for whatever my heart desires. But, every day I run into sites that are not optimized for mobile. I am shocked at the number of brands that still don’t have WAP sites! Unfortunately, some of my favorite brands make that list: Subway, Virgin America, Club Monaco, GAP, NY Magazine, etc, etc. So, I ask – What are brands waiting for?

Maybe brands think that mobile-internet hasn’t caught on? That can’t be it. Mobile-internet usage is increasing at near-exponential rates – 110% increase in 2009 over 2008. (http://leep.it/hR)

Maybe brands think that most people don’t have internet-accessible mobile devices. Don’t think so. Nearly every (if not all) new mobile phone can access the web. Granted, viewing may be more pleasurable on smartphones, but even smartphones are more prevalent today than ever before. Every carrier offers a myriad of smartphones and many have become very affordable – special thanks to Google for indirectly paying carriers to sell Android phones (http://leep.it/hS)

Could it be that brands think users are happy accessing their normal websites from their mobile phones and thus they don’t need to create WAP sites? Nope. A recent report shows that 60% of mobile-internet users have had problems accessing websites on their mobile in the last 12 months. Additionally, 51% have experienced content on websites being too large or too small. (http://leep.it/hT)

So I am left dumbfounded. What in the world are brands waiting for? Do you know?

Get at me!

Naushad — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:49:19 +0000

This is a quickie – I’ll randomly post brands that I was thinking about that would be fun to work with.

Johnny Rockets & Atkins are two I was thinking about today.

A mobile site (and/or iPhone app) for JR with location finder, nutrition info and fun bells and whistles would be cool. For Atkins, a strategy that would tie into their social media efforts on facebook and a strategy using SMS/WAP for health tips, menus, meal plans, etc.

$21 million for traditional and $0 for mobile

Naushad — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:40:30 +0000

Is this really the ‘year of mobile’ when you have a premiere brand like Kaplan set to spend over $21 million dollars this first quarter on Online, Print and TV – yet $0 on mobile? Did Kaplan think that Google and Apple dropped over 1 Billion dollars in one week in mobile because they had an untimely brain-freeze?

The full story was posted on Media Post last week (http://leep.it/cR). I won’t rant on and on about this. However, it is amazing that neither mobile nor social media made it into the final plans of how to spend $21 million dollars. They could have allocated less than 0.01% of that and created some truly engaging interactions with mobile to compliment their TV,print and online elements. Even if they didn’t want to expend the effort in creating original interactive mobile engagements, or placing ads on the mobile internet, or creating mobile landing pages where their target users (full-time workers) could get more information while they eat there $5 subway footlong, they could have at least added text call to actions on print & TV ads to get some measurement of the media spend!

If you’re interested in knowing how we would have used SMS/text, mobile ads, a mobile site and social media for Kaplan give me a holla’, we’ll chat over a footlong & a diet coke. Naushad out.

The Headache of Building a Beautiful Mobile Web Site

Naushad — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:24:06 +0000

A while ago we were contacted by Yamaha who wanted us to build out a fully function WAP site featuring their Marine Division’s new product line for 2010. This sounded like a great opportunity for Textopoly and after several rounds of designs we were ready to set it up and make it work. If anyone has ever had the pleasure of building a site to make sure that it works in Internet Explorer 6, then they would understand what a headache it is to build for micro browsers. First, let’s break down what WAP is – Wikipedia states that WAP is:

Wireless Application Protocol (commonly referred to as WAP) is an open international standard^[1] for application layer network communications in a wireless communication environment. Its main use is to enable access to the Mobile Web from a mobile phone or PDA.

What they are trying to say is:

WAP is how you access the internet on your phone. A WAP browser (Micro Browser) is your phones internal browser.
– Evan

Originally this site was designed and built for iPhone users. As an iPhone user myself, I know how beautiful a website and/or WAP site can look. Being able to break out of the mold of either full sites which look tiny on the screen or a slimmed down/image free version of the site (think Amazon’s WAP site) was also a unique challenge that we took great pride in overcoming. We created a site designed specifically for the iPhone, each page textured and rendered to look stunning on the portable computer. As Utopian as we were becoming we realized that there was one slight drawback when developing for the iPhone – Blackberry, Motorola, Samsung, and many of the other handsets had errors that we didn’t expect.

Through testing on all major devices we realized that we had some major formatting issues. Blackberry caused the page to reformat itself, because, well, the browser is buggy. Blackberry defaults have style sheets turned off. It also likes to break code, reformat pages, and destroy anything and everything in its wake. It’s like the Terminator of browsers. For being a ’smart-phone’ you would think they would have built a better browser. The annoying part is their new phones are not much better. Additionally, Motorola and Samsung phones would show the area that is supposed to be transparent in a PNG image, defeating the purpose of a PNG image. All in all, these were some of the minor issues among many.

To boil down to a point, if you’re interested in viewing WAP sites, building WAP sites, or even thinking about WAP sites you pretty much have two handsets to think about – Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. I say we as an industry give up on what it looks like on other/older phones. It’s kind of like IE6, we should just stop supporting it and focus on the future instead of the legacy. We’re on the cusp of a potential tidal wave of designer sites. This is the best way to push ourselves as designers and developers. By limiting us with older handsets, we limit our creativity and imagination. Besides, people on older handsets aren’t looking and utilizing WAP sites anyway, they’re too busy playing Snake. I loved that game.

We’re in the process of re-working the Yamaha WAP site, but to see the original design before it changes go check it out for yourself by having a link sent to you. Go to our homepage (www.textopoly.com) – enter in your phone number and presto you’ll have the site sent to you!

‘Oh Disney Where Art Thou?’

Asif — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:20:54 +0000

I starting writing this blog while listening to a webinar about mobile; one of the panelists was explaining how brands and agencies will pay more attention to mobile if they can understand its full potential ‘reach.’ We’ve heard many times before that most agencies and brands don’t fully understand the reach of mobile, or how to utilize it. Now, I’m not going go into detail about statistics of mobile nor try and to pitch mobile, but I will tell you how Disney has used mobile and how their reach is global.

Disney currently covers almost every available mobile content delivery method available: Disney mobile WAP sites, streaming mobile video, mobile games, ring tones, wallpapers, SMS updates and news, mobile Disney radio app., SMS campaigns and more! Disney entered the mobile space in 1999 and since then is the number 1 mobile entertainment media; with a mobile presence in over 40 countries and deals through 80 carriers and over 6,000 products across 20 product categories all via mobile. This seamless integration of their brand into mobile allows them to reach its consumers clear across the world, including impoverished countries in Africa and central Asia on a ubiquitous device. The more people you touch using the most intimate method of communication, the more loyalty, and brand recognition you create.

As 2010 approaches, and you’re looking back on 2009 think about this: Can your brand reach someone in Africa…? Or better yet, are you reaching 90% of the U.S. in their pockets? – Spend some time with us, we’ll show you how. Oh, to help further education on mobile and get a free lunch visit this: http://bit.ly/7AZKZM

Want to talk more about mobile and its potential reach!? Email me at: Asif[at]Textopoly[dot]com