dotMobi

.mobi is the first – and only – top level domain dedicated to users who access the Internet through their mobile phones. With four mobile phones purchased for every one personal computer, there’s a world of people whose main access point to the
Internet is a mobile phone. And every one of those users can trust that a web site is compatible with their mobile phone if that site's address ends in .mobi.

In an increasingly mobile society, businesses, organisations and individuals need to reach and interact with their customers via the mobile web. A .mobi address allows them to bypass the constraints of geography, operators and handsets to effectively reach their audience.
For content providers, it opens a new and more profitable revenue stream, without having to rely on operator portals.

Conversely, for operators, .mobi allows increased use of profitable data services while ensuring a good user experience and,therefore, customer loyalty. And that's because dotMobi ensures a predictable, consistent experience on a mobile phone by
encouraging site owners to use dotMobi Switch On!™ Guides, based on Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) open standards.

In short, .mobi will revolutionise the use of the Internet on mobile devices … but why now and why with .mobi?
Because dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi domain, is backed by the most prominent mobile and Internet players in the world – the same companies who have delivered the promise of today's information society: Ericsson, GSM Association,Google, Hutchison, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, Telefónica Móviles, TIM (Telecom
Italia), T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Interestingly, we might also just get a dotXXX too.

Stress - my way

Three hours of sleep per night
Misearble diets
Pathetic weather
Big headed midlevel managers
Clueless sales staff
Non commital business partners
Bouncing cheques

Its been one of those weeks.

Definations of a CEO

It's intersting the number of existing views as to what the term CEO means. To the kawaida mwananchi (read as layman), the appearance of the same on your business card means nothing whatsoever. This I experienced last week when I went to lay to rest my aunt in the "Milima Mitatu" region of Turi in the Riftvalley. After the ceremony, everyone converged at our homestead (feels like am reading from a history book..homestead???). It was time to make lunch, but as it evidenty seemed, we would have rather called it supper.

Coupla hours pass and I in my CEO mind enquire on the status of the lunch project, only to be informed that the timelines and indeed the project deliverables had been changed. Certain aspects of HR were not in place...mama so and so from across the hill had not arrived with some ingredients...tools at HR disosal were wanting (read firwood jikos)...there seemed to be no pressure to achieve results (or at least no one looked hungry). Anyway...i enaged my uncle in some chit chat and he asked me if i would stay the night, to which I replied an affirmative NO. I went on to tell him of how many projects were pending back in the city, and they needed to be sorted by weeks end (this week), and also how i thought things were moving slowly. The long and short of it is that he asked for my contacts back in the city as he gathered from the grapevine that I had since moved. I whipped out a card which he looked at and said CEO...kweli...lakini huko mambo haiendi hivi.Nipolepole.

Enough said...

Ad serving across all media

So today we tested the beta version of our wi fi adserving module, and I am over the roof at the success with which it worked. We have been working on an inteligent ad serving system that will utilize wifi, gprs ,gsm etc in its targeting.

The one min clip video ads looked descent when delivered via wifi, but gprs did not live up to its billing.

Third-Screen Marketing

Sprint, Others Finally Open to Advertisers Their Mobile-Web Home Pages

By Alice Z. Cuneo

Published: September 11, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) -- The newest players in mobile advertising are familiar names: Sprint, Verizon and Cingular.

The carriers, after years of resistance, are opening their mobile-phone services to advertising.

Ads on deck
Sprint Nextel this week is expected to announce that it will allow ads on its deck -- the landing page for customers accessing the internet from cellphones on the Sprint network. In February, Verizon Wireless Chief Marketing Officer John Stratton said he's testing a program to open up cell service to advertising using a two-tier model, offering customers one service without ads and a cheaper, ad-supported service. Cingular is considering on-deck advertising, and is likely to have some advertising on its deck as soon as the end of the year.

The ads are hardly an example of the most innovative mobile marketing taking place right now, but they do signal a willingness on behalf of carriers to work with advertisers.

It follows years of resistance by carriers to open their decks to ads for fear that customer complaints would bog down customer-service call centers and eat away at profit margins.

OK if subsidizing content
But concerns over consumer resistance to mobile ads also appear to have abated. Nearly half of consumers ages 18 to 35 indicated they would be interested in mobile ads if they subsidized their "increasing appetite for mobile data/content," said Yankee Group, which estimated U.S. carriers generated $10.7 billion, or about 9% of revenue, from non-voice bills.

Right now ads are available only on off-deck mobile websites, which are often more cumbersome for users to access. According to M:Metrics, of the 190 million mobile-phone subscribers in the U.S., some 166.9 million have phones capable of accessing the mobile web-but only 49.6 million of those subscribers used the mobile web in July.

Sprint and Cingular spokespeople declined to comment, and a Verizon spokeswoman said the carrier "continues to test and trial."

For advertisers, on-deck ads will significantly expand mobile marketing beyond text messages and short-code promos. The ads on carrier decks will boost eyeballs and mobile inventory, which in turn should lower prices, said Maria Mandel, exec director of the Digital Innovation Group, OgilvyInteractive, which recently ran a four-week test of off-deck ads for PC-marketer Lenovo. "The net is a better way to reach more consumers and to develop a more efficient media plan," she said. "It will make mobile far more attractive to our clients."

Spending to reach $150 million
Carriers are starting to smell the money. Advertising on mobile phones totaled only $45 million in 2005, but is expected to hit $150 million this year, according to research company Ovum. Once the carriers allow on-deck ads, they will get a cut of the revenue -- in contrast to off-deck sites, in which carriers don't share ad revenue. "There's money to be made," said Jeff Janer, chief operating officer, Third Screen Media. "The question is who will make it and how."

Other questions remain: Will carriers become media companies in their own right, perhaps sweetening the pie for marketers by doling out additional information about subscribers' locations, mobile habits or bill-paying habits? Will each carrier's customers be different enough to persuade a marketer to prefer one carrier as a marketing partner over another?

Regardless, Ms. Mandel said the mobile phone as a marketing medium is picking up steam much faster than the internet, which took 10 years to come into its own. In a mere two to three years, the third screen could take its place alongside the TV and PC monitor, she said.

A Hypertargeting Vision Is Becoming Reality

Consider a world where marketers could target individual TV homes with the precision of direct mail. One by one, distinct messages would be ushered to select consumers who generate most of brand or category sales. And fewer ads would be viewed by people outside the core target, drastically improving media efficacy while driving sales.


Seem like an advertiser's dream? It's not. With quiet serendipity, this very scenario is now transforming from vision into reality.

Media planning and buying remains largely wasteful, as bottled-water drinkers see ads for soft drinks, SUV buyers get messages for compacts and men are exposed to feminine hygiene commercials. These targeting miscues translate to empty media dollars and missed sales opportunities.

But marketers should pay close attention to emerging digital platforms because they provide a trail of electronic bread crumbs to help identify and track consumers' media behavior. A high degree of addressability will create greater targeting precision than ever before and holds the potential to morph standard media targeting into hypertargeting. After all, for most brands, relatively few people drive the bulk of sales. Internet is leading the charge but TV, mobile and satellite radio will follow. Consider:

• The web currently provides more critical mass opportunity for hypertargeting than any other medium. Well over 100 million people visiting Yahoo, AOL and MSN have registered on those sites or provided some kind of identifying profile information. And while it's great that those portals have this information, when combined with a marketers' client customer data it becomes a virtual lynchpin.
  
  
• We're at an inflection point in TV targeting, driven by the rapidly growing home base of digital set-top boxes and the emergence of software to handle complex instructions for serving up the right commercials to the right people. The likes of CTN, Oxygen TV and Multichoice might as well get into the game.
  
  
• Mobile phones potentially offer a wide array of targeting opportunities as subscribers are traveling, shopping, etc. But phone providers are leery of making this on-location messaging available to advertisers as they fear consumer backlash in a highly competitive environment. The Trojan horse to open up mobile potential could be video advertising on phones, because many customers will agree to take the ads in exchange for video content.
  
  
• Fueled by on-air personalities like Howard Stern and Oprah Winfrey, satellite radio is quickly gaining consumer penetration. Within the next year, XM Radio will be replacing its existing radio units with sets that provide one-to-one targeting capability and advertising opportunities on several of XM's channels, including news and sports.

Marketers should stand ready to snare the opportunity. We recommend preparing for this by:

Re-thinking targeting: Ask whether your media plans are delivering the key customers and prospects that drive the business. Clearly defining who these people are is the first step to better targeting. Then take a very close look at the relationship between targeting and advertising response, scouting for opportunities to ramp up impact.

Testing, testing, testing: You will only know if hypertargeting works by setting up studies that will isolate the impact of targeting and whether the consumers you've identified as the target are more likely to respond to a campaign or promotion.

Do some double dipping: Don't just re-think targeting, re-think advertising paradigm, as hypertargeting and addressability will go hand-in-hand with vanguard, provocative forms of creative. This is an opportunity to explore the best of both worlds. What's going to work creatively? You can't rip a 30-second spot off.

Make the future now: Encourage cable operators to speed up their roll-outs, push internet targeting to new limits and stay tuned for the mobile opportunities about to unfold. Put some money out for R&D so you're in an excellent place when these technologies become mainstream. This is not about reaching critical mass in media, it's about testing for the future.

Your Brand on Wikipedia

Like it or not, the Wikipedia open-source phenomenon looms large right where companies are increasingly spending billions of dollars to jockey for position: on search-engine results pages. A quick check of dozens of the brands on Ad Age's Top 200 Megabrands list reveals that Wikipedia often ranks high not just among Google search results but also among results from Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask.com. The same can also be said for media brands, celebrities, CEOs and other personalities.

Consider the following examples: Febreze's Wikipedia entry (No. 2 on Google) notes that the product may be harmful to household pets. The article on McDonald's (No. 4 on Google) basically summarizes the critical movie "Super Size Me." Even advertising icons Snap, Crackle and Pop aren't exempt. The trio's Wikipedia entry notes the team once had a short-lived adventure as superheroes in the U.K.

In all seriousness, as soon as brand managers learn where they stand on Wikipedia, there is a natural inclination to want to control it. Some, in fact, actively police it. After all, anyone can. But doing so is asking for trouble. Case in point: One firm offering to author Wikipedia articles for companies has been banned by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that manages the site.

The Wikipedia community prides itself on making sure all articles have a neutral point of view, and this community can and will sniff out corporate manipulation of entries. Wikipedia policy, in fact, clearly states that all articles "must represent views fairly and without bias, and conflicts of interest significantly and negatively affect Wikipedia's ability to fulfill this requirement impartially."

Nevertheless, brands should have a way to challenge inaccurate information in a way that respects the wishes of the community. Wikipedia should carve out a special area on each page where brand managers and personas can respond in an official capacity to what the community has published. But until that happens, "look but don't touch" is the best advice to heed.

Facebook to Adopt Open-Admissions Policy

Social network Facebook plans to completely ditch its admissions policy, welcoming anyone with internet access. The major change was scheduled for today, but has now been postponed until next week while the company struggles to regroup from last week's member revolt in response to new activity-tracking features.

The social networking site Facebook is opening itself to anyone. Previously it was restricted to users from certain schools and select companies.

"We're holding off on the expanded registration launch, which lets people join regional networks," a company spokeswoman said. "We learned last week we have to do a better job of keeping our community informed, and help people understand the privacy they have on Facebook."

500 regional networks
Once the exclusive domain of Harvard undergrads, 2-year-old Facebook has slowly opened its doors first to other universities, and then to high schools and select corporations such as Apple and Microsoft. Next week, people will be able to join through roughly 500 regional networks, a number that Facebook expects to grow with time.

Facebook members can still restrict their networks by adjusting their privacy settings, but, as the spokeswoman admitted, the change will likely come as a shock to existing members. "Whenever we've opened our network, our existing members have reacted negatively, even though they've always adjusted," she said. "We're sure this will be no different, but we think it's in the best interest of the community."

Unique identity
Analysts say the move might be necessary to sustain healthy growth, but question how Facebook can preserve its unique identity among a sea of competitors. "It's a risky move," said Greg Sterling, principal analyst of Sterling Marketing Intelligence. "What's Facebook without its exclusivity? What's going to set it apart from MySpace?"

Indeed, Facebook stood out early because of its inherent selectivity, the level of which is determined by each user. In some instances, members only accept messages from others enrolled in their schools. Some users only make themselves and their profile available to those who can prove they are a friend of someone on their friends list. And while the Facebook spokeswoman insists that members will still have control over their networks, last week proved how member perception -- or misperception --can be more important than reality.

On Sept. 5 Facebook added News Feed and Mini-Feed features, which keep members posted on the latest doings of their Facebook friends. For example, if members change their relationship status, all of their friends -- a term that applies loosely in social-networking circles -- will be alerted to the fact immediately.

Facebook revolt
The next day hundreds of thousands of Facebook members had e-mailed the company and formed virtual protest groups in opposition to the changes. The mission statement from the largest protest group, "Students Against Facebook Newsfeed," read, in part: "Very few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update. We want to feel just a LITTLE bit of privacy, even if it is facebook. News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go."

Yielding to the backlash, Facebook late Sept. 8 said it would modify the new features. "We have engineered new functionality that gives users additional controls in News Feed and Mini-Feed," read a statement released by the company.

The company with the most at stake is Microsoft, who just aligned itself with Facebook as the social network's exclusive provider of banner advertising and sponsored links. The partnership, which will go into effect this fall, is expected to give a huge boost to Microsoft's AdCenter Web ad platform, which has struggled to secure major distribution deals since its launch last year. But Microsoft can only benefit from the deal if Facebook can preserve its community.

In two years, Facebook has attracted more than 9 million registered users, according to ComScore's MediaMetrix, and ranks as the seventh-most trafficked site in the U.S. with 6.1 billion page views in July.

Acquisition rumors
Not long after its founding in February 2004 by Harvard University undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg, acquisition rumors surfaced and to this day have yet to abate. Earlier this year, Facebook reportedly turned down a $750 million bid, in return asking for a whopping $2 billion.

Rather than cash out, however, the founders have opted to grow independently. In April, they secured $25 million in a financing round led by Greylock Partners. Also participating in the funding round were Meritech Capital Partners, as well as current Facebook investors Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. Facebook also recently received a strategic investment from the Interpublic Group of Cos., which guarantees the ad agency holding company will buy at least $10 million of advertising on network.

The Microsoft/Facebook deal came on the heels of a similar agreement between MySpace and search giant Google. On Aug. 7, News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media and Google signed a multiyear search and advertising deal covering MySpace and other Fox properties. Google is expected to pay Fox at least $900 million in revenue share payments for that privilege. Despite being acquired by News Corp. and press reports of sexual predators on the site, MySpace has yet to suffer a major exodus of members.

Political ad spending

Despite all the media chatter about Raila's digital legacy and the rise of blogs and websites as the new powers of political marketing, local and national broadcast TV will continue to receive the overwhelming bulk of all ad spending during the upcoming parliamentary and presidential race elections.

TV Bureau of Advertising
State and national political marketing strategies remain "married to broadcast television" and that only small slices of candidates' budgets are going to other digital platforms.

'Biggest megaphone'
There's a lot of talk ... about the potential for SMS, the potential for the internet, but ultimately at the end of the day, television is the biggest megaphone that these campaigns have.

What we are thinking of doing

GPS-enabled ads and coupons piped to your mobile phone at just the right time and place. Location-based marketing is a concept that's been bandied about for years, but only now is the required technology becoming cheap enough to implement. Companies like Yahoo and Google, meanwhile, have proven inept at building quality services for wireless carriers. Though the timing is ideal for a startup to build the technical pieces, persuading customers to sign up for a steady barrage of marketing offers may prove the bigger challenge. The behavioral piece is the biggest uncertainty, but you've got to make your bets now.

Other peoples money

"The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as that exists, our old variety and freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men, who, even if their actions be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who, necessarily, by every reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. This is the greatest question of all; and to this, statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men." - president wilson 1911

CONTROLLING OTHER PEOPLE'S QUICK CAPITAL

The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else's goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. They control the people through the people's own money. If the bankers' power were commensurate only with their wealth, they would have relatively little influence on American business. Vast fortunes like those of the Astors are no doubt regrettable. They are inconsistent with democracy. They are unsocial. And they seem peculiarly unjust when they represent largely unearned increment. But the wealth of the Astors does not endanger political or industrial liberty. It is insignificant in amount as compared with the aggregate wealth of America, or even of New York City. It lacks significance largely because its owners have only the income from their own wealth. The Astor wealth is static. The wealth of the Morgan associates is dynamic. The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others. In two of the three great life insurance companies the influence of J. P. Morgan & Co. and their associates is exerted without any individual investment by them whatsoever. Even in the Equitable, where Mr. Morgan bought an actual majority of all the outstanding stock, his investment amounts to little more than one-half of one per cent. of the assets of the company. The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people's own gold.

Process process process

The legalities aretaking their sweet time, but that has not prevented us from snagging the clients. We are currently working on a demo for a leading softdrink brand, handling everything print,web and mobile. Burning the midnight oil on these one...elephant hunting vs ant stomping.