Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I went to MobileCampSF this past weekend. Finally got to meet Dennis from WapReview, he’s got an excellent summary of the event posted already. The MegaPhone stuff was really fantastic! Their approach of making what are effectively digital signs that you can interact with using voice or the keypad on your phone, brilliant! That really lowers the bar in a significant way. However I think they’re looking at a few of the same obstacles that stand in the way of other forms of location based advertising. In this case though I really really hope they find a way to work around them.

Jordy made a bunch of good points about mobile social applications, talking about the mobile features he’s developing for Bebo in particular. The point that really stood out to me was that the right mix of features really needs to include both push and pull. That’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially with respect driving the expansion of mobile services. Providing SMS services at a global scale is really a killer. There are plenty of providers you can go to who provide local services (like 4Info Alerts or TextMarks). But nothing equivalent that works on a global scale. In that sense the Facebook application for Blackberry devices is very interesting. The application ties into the push capabilities that the device normally uses for email and Facebook updates come in the same way. Sexy, we need to figure out how to make that work generically across services and handsets.

I got a chance to fondle an N810 tablet for an extended period of time. It was very satisfying. I’m actually pretty mad at Nokia in general, cause they keep refusing to sell me devices even when I decide I want them. So mad at them that I actually gave Russell the N95 they gave to me. However, Russ pulled some kind of Jedi mind trick on me, and now I’m getting the N95 back. Bastard! However, mad at Nokia as I might be, the N810 is a lustworthy gadget. For the love of christ, put a cellular interface in the thing already! It would be a total killer in the market, please, just do it.

I would agree with Dennis that the best session was probably the session on transcoding nuances that Dave Harper and my co-worker Nigel Choi led. Nigel gathered up some great info including desktop and mobile screenshots showing how the behavior is problematic even to the big names like the Wall Street Journal. Fantastic session. If you’re working on the mobile web at all and you’re not familiar with the Novarra/VodafoneUK set of issues I recommend reading up, the Betavine thread on transcoding and user agent is a great place to start.

The one thing I was kinda disappointed with was the falloff for the event. There were a ton of people signed up on the wiki, but many of them ended up not showing up. I’m not sure what it was, maybe it was that it was a beautiful day out. Normally the mobile community in the bay area is itching for mobile specific stuff. Everyone is mad about Web 2.0 including very little mobile specific content. But then folks setup an event like MobileCamp and a ton of people sign up, but not too many show. With Mobile 2.0 recently, Web 2.0, and Nokia having a Mobile Mashup earlier that week maybe everyone was just all conferenced out? I’m actually holding off the MoMo this month for a bit because there’s been so much mobile stuff already it seems like overload. I hope we’re not seeing a general falloff in interest from the geeks however. There’s still a lot that needs to be done, and events like Barcamp are the kind of place where people can actually work on them.

I stopped by the Mobile Mash-Up event that Nokia put on down in Palo Alto yesterday. It was a great event, very happy to see Nokia doing things like that as they integrate more into the Silicon Valley community! Unfortunately I had a meeting in the morning and was only able to make it down for the afternoon.

One of the things that really stuck out to me was the commentary around mobile advertising. It doesn’t seem like many of the folks commenting on mobile advertising necessarily understand what’s going on. One conversation with one advertising agency is really all it takes by the way, they’ll lay the whole thing out for you. And the necessary response is really pretty obvious.

There’s always a lot of commentary about how mobile advertising needs to be richer, engage the consumer at a different level, enable a dialog around a particular piece of content, provide ways to share an offering among friends, etc. Yea, those things are fantastic, I do sincerely hope that at some point we end up in a place where many of those are the default behavior in advertising. In my mind the ultimate endgame really has advertising merging with other forms of service provisioning and it’s pretty much impossible to tell an advertisement from a free image, or a game, or website. Those are the same things we said about web advertising though, and web advertising is different than television advertising, sure. But it’s hardly become the completely one-to-one mass customization market that everyone predicted. Keyword advertising dominates, but banner advertising is still very much alive.

New marketing mediums seem to be driven by technologists for a while at the start. Everyone goes “Hey, now we can find out if you sing while you take a shower!! How awesome is that!?!? Think about the advertising premiums we can demand for such personal information!” Yea, very good. The part that most folks don’t consider is that no one really cares. And if someone does they’re not necessarily going to be willing to pay you enough for that service in order for you to offset your cost.

Here, let me break down the big list of things that advertising agencies care about for you. Ready, get out your pen and paper. Here it goes:

• Reach

Yep, that’s it. Do they want targeting? Do they want to be able to measure audience response? Yes, but reach comes first. They don’t care about reaching 5 people with specific goals and profiles, they need a mass audience. So yes, they want targeting, but only if after targeting they’re left with a large enough audience to make it worth their while. Do they want a cool channel they can push some interesting alternate reality game down to generate some buzz? Sure, but they’re not going to shift their entire marketing spend into alternate reality gaming if they see a campaign that works out.

So where does that leave us for mobile advertising? Currently mobile web or application advertising doesn’t have the numbers necessary to go after a lot of the big budgets. It’s starting to happen, the numbers are starting to look pretty good (which is one of the reasons we started releasing our numbers at AdMob publicly). The mobile industry is in the middle of an expansion phase. The lines are all pointing in the right direction, but the volume isn’t there yet for the deep pockets to care. Which most people point to and say “Yea, mobile advertising isn’t here yet.” Which they’re basing on the fact that most agencies aren’t yet moving significant portions of their advertising spend to mobile yet.

However the shift in mobile right now isn’t about shifting advertising dollars away from television or online. It’s about setting up services that allow developers to create applications they weren’t able to before, and make a living doing it. And that is happening right now. So to say that mobile advertising isn’t happening yet is just completely wrong. First we need to disrupt and overturn the mobile ecosystem, then we can go after traditional advertising. Please, one major market revolution at a time, lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Another slow news day, the big story seems to be Google’s ability to get the whole world to blog about a 404 page. Can’t wait to see some real info.

One of the most common questions I’ve been hearing recently is about how to record stats and count unique users on mobile devices. David Adams from Mobile Research got a lot of attention at Mobile 2.0 when he talked about the mobile analytics service they’re looking to launch as an online service. Excellent! But I think we also need some public discussion about how internet scale mobile metrics should work.

The “internet scale” there is very important. If you need to setup some monitoring for a deal with Sprint or 3 you can figure out what they do and how to properly measure. But what if your mobile traffic can be coming from any carrier anywhere in the world? What if it could also be coming from special purpose mobile devices like Nintendo DS or Playstation Portable systems? Or machines like the Wii? How do you put together a stats system that reliably figures out if a particular user or device has been seen before?

We’re very quick to say that mobile offers a unique advantage in increased ability to identify and target individual users. While that might be easily true inside the carrier umbrella, extending it out to the Wild Wild Web is what makes it actually interesting. And it’s much harder to determine the right way to track once you cross carrier boundaries. Here are some of the interesting challenges and benefits I’ve run across so far:

• Cookie support is still very non-standard, see the entry about cookies at the Wireless FAQ. There’s everything to worry about from the device not supporting them, to the gateway stripping them, to cookies getting deleted at the end of the session. That stuff can be a pain in the ass when developing an app. But in that environment it means you either have to do URL based session management or maybe the user has to login every time they hit the service. If you’re talking about delivering reliable metrics however that’s killer, you just have no idea how a mobile browser is going to behave.
• The MSISDN is anything but standard. In theory it’s a way to uniquely identify the SIM card used in GSM systems. Fantastic! Except that even across different GSM carriers the use of the MSISDN is inconsistent. My understanding of the evolution of the feature was that originally it was the phone number of the handset sent in the clear, and you can still see it used that way at times (China Mobile for example sends phone number in the clear… but not User Agent, go figure). However it was quickly realized that blasting out a users phone number with every HTTP request sent from their handset was rife with potential for abuse. So then the numbers started getting obfuscated. And put into headers with slightly different names, or jammed into different headers completely. Sometimes combined with session info so that the MSISDN isn’t actually always the same ID for the same handset on the same network. Add that together with not all carriers being cased on GSM.
• Because traffic out to the wider internet from carriers tends to come out through a relatively small set of gateway machines it’s much harder to do identification of unique user agent/IP pairs to count unique users.
• Plus carrier gateways behave weird. Sometimes they send multiple requests when I expect them to send one. Sometimes they cache stuff when I don’t really expect them to. Plus you throw transcoding engines into the mix and it gets really hard to predict what could be happening on a network.

That makes it a pretty difficult environment in general, and I haven’t really seen much that addresses the core issue of getting folks to agree on some common metrics and how they should be calculated.