Finally, there is a study that looks at the impact of mobile Internet usage on online traffic. Not surprising to me, mobile web sites, according to Nielsen, increase the audience of many online sites on average by 13%.

I suspected that all along by examining the behavior of users of Crisp-powered sites from mLogic usage reports. For example, readers of USA TODAY Mobile, yours truly included, frequently use the Email Story option, a clipping feature of sorts, to email articles they like to themselves or to their friends. Invariably, this drives online usage and attracts new readers, mobile or otherwise.

The results of the study, however illuminating, made me think of other questions that I would love Nielsen to answer. I must add that I am yet to read the report. My questions might have been answered but I will list them nonetheless.

1. If audience begets traffic, and traffic begets advertising, and advertising begets revenue, doesn’t mobile drive more online revenue? I bet it does. That seems almost too obvious.

2. How much additional traffic is created from mobile-first visitors rather than those who have been traditionally visiting online sites? In other words, how many users started frequenting online sites after using their mobile counterparts? I bet many.

3. Is the audience increase greater for publishers that built and launched WAP sites, i.e., sites specifically optimized for mobile? I bet it is much greater. Sites that have not been optimized for mobile are simply unusable. Accessing non-optimized sites even on the iPhone is painful.

And lastly, do the findings of this report provide yet another argument that publishers derive considerable tangible benefits from mobile optimized sites?

When Crisp Wireless first started with powering mobile sites using its proprietary content management technology, I got a fair amount of surprised reactions from technologists and programmers who knew me. We weren’t only known back then to power the content for downloadables (J2ME mainly), we also found WAP significantly flawed.

Back then one would have expected mobile site software to scrape HTML from the web, and reformat it to WML, cHTML and XHTML automatically or via customizable templates.  Considering our experience with mobile and our unusual positions on mobile technology, it should be no surprise we took a different technical road.  Luckily … because as far as I’m concerned the transcoding approach doesn’t hold much value in today’s even further fragmented mobile browser landscape. The famous Russell Beattie knows what he’s talking about when he considers it difficult to derive revenue by stripping down web sites for the mobile users.

To create more compelling and well distributed sites, what is needed, is a Content Management System that is designed to ingest, manage and create XML content feeds of all shapes and formats. (Creating feeds is important for efficient on-deck distribution and integration with aggregated content sites) What’s also needed is a product that with the help of solid mobile device intelligence can render mobile sites in all shapes and formats.  It does not suffice to create mobile compatible sites; you need the ability to create a different optimized site for every type of device. These sites should have a different data flow, graphic design and information architecture depending on how and when it is used.  In other words, the mobile web is not just making PC web content into mobile compatible content. The mobile web is a more complicated and soon more sophisticated version of the world wide web that beats to a different rhythm. With a further evolution of mobile devices it might very well prove to be far more popular.  This trend is evident looking at many recently launched mobile sites. I’ve listed them below.

The idea behind many good mobile sites is not a commercial transaction, but the method of content discovery - asking the question “what’s the best way to find movie reviews?” or with Fandango - “are there tickets available at this theater for Iron Man?” These sites are focusing on how to make mobile media and information management better, which requires that content is organized and accessible in new ways. Some sites go pretty far in experimenting with this mobile behavior. For Twitter there is no shortage of mobile sites trying to perfect the way to manage status updates. When you are on a small screen you have different modes of behavior and you look at different times of day and have different goals: such as you need something right away or you want to check something before you go to bed or you are just trying to waste time.

The point is, the mode and motivation of the interaction is different from when you are sitting at your desk. Great new research shows these new modes of behavior where consumers interact with mobile websites are not cannibalistic to desktop web traffic; they actually improve overall web performance by 13%.

You’ll notice that many of the sites below are specifically designed to help iPhone users. The mLogic technology is perfectly suited for innovative iPhone sites . Our technology is also great for distributing content to 3rd party applications in modular formats on carrier decks, in applications like Yahoo OnePlace and for powering  new content  interfaces like Flashcast or other device side applications .   Our platform offers content management that is centrally managed to serve content to all other downloadable applications, browser plug-ins or mobile widgets.

As promised, some interesting mobile sites: Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile Search continues to be a hot topic as more publishers are putting up mobile websites and off-deck site discovery continues to be a challenge.  Through our Publisher Network of over 200 mobile websites, we see that off-deck traffic is growing and now represents nearly 40 percent of mobile web traffic.  Surprising to some, unlike the online world, less than 4 percent of total mobile web traffic is driven by search engine discovery. 

Perhaps the recent announcement by Yahoo! (see this article in MediaPost) that they are opening up their search APIs to third-party developers will improve these numbers.   By allowing publishers to integrate search into their applications, Yahoo! will hopefully enable more relevant search results, improving user experience and reducing the number of clicks it takes to get the information mobile users need.  Other advancements in voice-enabled search from the likes of Yahoo! and V-Enable will hopefully also improve the quality of mobile search.   Of course, as discussed in a recent panel at CTIA, most voice recognition requires a certain level of human intervention (think 411), which is what inspires companies like ChaCha.  During a panel discussion at Search Engine Strategies, Crisp’s Tom Limongello participated in a panel on mobile search, describing the realities and challenges in effective mobile search.   (Read more on MobileMarketer.)

While mobile search continues to grow, to promote site discovery publishers need to market their mobile sites through existing channels and enable visitors to easily access and bookmark their site.  For example, if you visit CNNMoney.com, and click on mobile, the site allows you to enter your phone number to receive an SMS message with a link to the site.  Other companies, such as Visa Signature, are including a short code or mobile website URL in their outdoor and event marketing to create an immediate call-to-action.  Liken mobile to the early days of the web when suddenly companies began putting their website address on all their marketing materials and advertising. 

Just like everything else you’ve been reading, Twitter saves the day, but on mobile it saves much more of the day.

Does anyone know Twitter’s mobile web traffic based on their ~1MM users? Has anyone really commented about how this is the most global platform the web has ever seen? Even Facebook has to translate into each language to become relevant and Google has to strategize about how to win in China. Twitter does not. I wouldn’t have known since it’s been 5 years since I’ve been back to China but Paul Denlinger asked on Twitter if Twitter was the US’s QQ. [The background is Chinese startup Tencent developed QQ, which is like AIM and a Twitter-like mobile site TaoTao, which has Chinese carrier SMS support.] QQ has not made Chinese users ignore Twitter - and why is that? It’s because once Twitter users anywhere figure out that they can twitter without text messaging there is an epiphany for each user as the text buzzing silences. We see Twitter as the asynchronous IM platform that only shows us what we choose to see from anywhere in the world at all times of day (sounds like the promise from web 1.0 doesn’t it?). The only difference between silicon valley and silicon alley is exactly 3 hours of twitter posts, china 12 hours (for half the year ).

Twitter is the first platform to actually address what people in mobile marketing conferences have said over and over with each successive death of mobile web: “It’s the most personal device, that people would less likely leave at home than their keys.”

If you carry your phone 18 hours a day that means that you have a much better shot at catching Robert Scoble’s updates about being on his startup tour in Israel this week on mobile. As I’m writing this I’ve just noticed that Kaiser Kuo is now following me. Kaiser blogs from Ogilvy in China, and if you follow him on Twitter (go ahead,) you might see some interesting stuff from him at 9pm as China wakes. If you get all of your information while at your desktop then you are missing out - you can catch updates as you wait for the bartender to pour your beer. I also can’t wait to see people from Cuba start twittering. I wouldn’t be able to deal with direct dialogue, but as Ian Schafer points out it’s the way to peek into our neighbor’s windows, because Twitter gets the rules of engagement just right.

Evan Neufeld from M:Metrics explained recently that mobile is about creating multi modal access in a world where mass marketing is dying.
So for now WAP, (m.twitter.com, twapper.com) iPhone Twitter sites (itweet.net, hahlo.com, twitter.thincloud.com) and whatever else you use to access Twitter is making your mobile phone a great place for mobile content discovery, especially for breaking news and even with news features and commentary. Once you land from Twitter to a blog or news site you might find a neatly placed advertisement if the site is optimized for mobile devices.

Twitter helps us find things and as Mark Cuban recently said if news is important it will find me. Michael Arrington showed us last week in his comcast/chicken example how Twitter can be used in emergencies, and Bill Thompson showed us how we can participate in conferences that we cannot attend, like SXSW during the Zuckerberg/Lacey panel. Read the rest of this entry »

If we only look at the last year, mobile web has died many deaths, if we look back to 2000 it has probably died more than Kenny from South Park. Here lies WAP (WAP is dead), and here’s mobile web killed with the iPhone, oh, and here is when mobile applications died a couple of months ago, and here’s someone writing that those deaths should make way for RIA on mobile . And here it is again,the CEO of Mowser says it’s over via ReadWriteWeb.

It’s really easy to say anything mobile is dead. Philosophically, anything that is ad-supported does not exist until you can hear the sound of more than one media buyer clicking. Jermaine from Flight of the Conchords might say “Be more constructive with your feedback.” The iPhone’s Safari browser is here, but the mobile web still exists in a better form then it did previously. For some reason bloggers see the need to mark each evolution in mobile web as a death. Looked at from a blogger’s perspective, mobile web is a cat that dies as each markup language ceases to be the bleeding edge - wml, chtml, xhtml, etc.

So do we listen to the CEO of Mowser say that the Mobile Web is a black hole that we need to escape from? Before we do that, for one moment let us honor John Wheeler today by correctly characterizing the properties of a black hole. Is it also true that there’s no value in mobile as a channel for distributing music? That’s what I’d think if I believed the following a recent study covered on MocoNews. After reading this I imagined a fake steve jobs post where Will Ferrell’s Mugatu from Zoolander is saying ‘I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!’ as he downloads ‘Relax’ onto his iPhone and browses for piano-key neckties to cool himself down. I think what’s important here is to balance the volume of opportunities when discussing mobile content and mobile marketing then just to marvel at the crashing sound when MVNOs or other mobile focused-businesses fall into the seeming black abyss. If your content cannot escape or exist outside the mobile phone, then it is not the fault of the marketing channels like the mobile web or mobile homescreen. Mobile has channels (text, email, web, homescreen) and those channels are opportunities and should not be attributed to the cause of death of a business.

Here’s the company line: in 2008 it’s still about no mobile phone left behind. Us cool cats with iPhones can lead the charge into deeper content discovery on mobile phones but we are not the only people who carry phones, and increasingly we are not the only ones who access the browser. And all this talk of no activity on the mobile web–just as the greatest mobile web revolution is beginning.