ESPN exec: Mobile is glue for all we do

ESPN's FantasyCast Football is a paid app for iPhone

BRISTOL, CT - ESPN digital media executives stressed that mobile is a key component of the sports networks overall multichannel portfolio of products and services and will only grow in importance going forward.

Given that ESPN operates in every channel one can think of ”television, print, online, radio and mobile ”the executives praised SMS in particular for connecting all of the various media and making them interactive. ESPN claims that it has the most-trafficked sports mobile Web site, the most-downloaded sports application for iPhone and the No. 1 sports SMS alerts service, as well as a growing amount of mobile video coverage.

Mobile is the glue for everything we do, said Oke Okaro, vice president of ESPN Mobile, Bristol, CT. Its an activation channel, a way to bring people into the fold, let them test the mobile waters and then bring people into more comprehensive platforms such as the mobile Web, applications and live video on the mobile phones. It's important to drive awareness and adoption of our mobile products and services, and integration with our TV programming is a great way to accomplish that, he said. The X Games had robust mobile messaging campaigns that enabled people attending the events to text information to screens and vote on outcome of events themselves, which saw really good engagement. Half a million messages were generated by fans engaging with us.

Oke Okaru, vice president of ESPN Mobile, and John Zehr, senior vice president of digital video and mobile productions at ESPN

According to a Nielsen statistic cited by Mr. Okaro, there are 55 million users in the U.S. who actively use mobile data.Thats a significant number, but its still a small percentage of the overall population, so its important to drive education in marketplace, Mr. Okaro said.College Game Day is second only to SportsCenter here at ESPN, and the on-air talent have a true/false skit they do, and in the past viewers could only vote via the PC Web, but this year the call-to-action is going to be text-message-based to give people more college football content via mobile,he said.

ESPN MVP screen shot

SportsNation is another ESPN property that is interactive in nature and uses mobile as a means of driving engagement by eliciting fans to text in their opinions on various sports topics. ESPN issues on-air calls-to-action asking fans to text various keywords to the short code 2ESPN (23776).

We want to serve all fans no matter how they want to engage with us, and SMS is a great way to get them to engage, Mr. Okaro said. ESPN has several new mobile launches on the horizon. The ESPN MVP application, previously only available via Verizon Wireless Cast service, will soon launch in BlackBerry App World on a subscription-based mobile. It provides live scores and statistics, video, fantasy sports information and local sports content based on user preferences. Smartphones drive 70 percent of our mobile Web traffic, with BlackBerry alone representing 40 percent, so it makes sense to bring this all-encompassing experience to BlackBerry devices, Mr. Okaro said. It features contextual integration of sports data with video and alerts that bring you into the app so you can then consume the latest content. There are two mobile use cases: people looking to complete a specific task such as check a score, and people looking to kill time entertainment,he said. We try to satisfy both. 

An ESPN Radio application will soon launch for both BlackBerry and iPhone. radio in your pocket, an added opportunity to keep engaged with fans while they're out and about doing things but without having to stare at the screen, Mr. Okaru said. The application features 15 live feeds from local ESPN affiliate stations nationwide and Spanish-language ESPN Deportes programming. Listeners can engage with the host of the show via SMS, download podcasts and listen to play-by-play of live games,Mr. Okaru said. The format is interactive and we're constantly soliciting feedback from our followers. In the Hispanic audience, the iPhone in particular and smartphones in general over-index in that audience, so we included the Spanish-language features to cater to that demographic, he said. ESPN recently launched the Fantasy Football Draft Kit application for iPhone, which is free and ad-supported. In time for the start of the NFL season, the company will soon roll out the pay-per-download FantasyCast Football application for iPhone. The application features live scoring for all ESPN.com fantasy teams, personalized alerts, injury reports, substitutions, scoring and editorial coverage. Viewers of ESPNs TV channels should expect to see more advertising promoting ESPNs mobile products and services. 

We're starting to promote our mobile products and services with the integration with TV, and we run commercials talking specifically about mobile, Mr. Okaru said. We want to use all different channels TV, print, online and radio and mobile is the glue that sticks everything together and drives engagement, he said. We will continue to market around text messaging, using that as a call-to-action and an engagement tool, then drive them up-market based on what handset they have.

Delta Air Lines mobile campaign takes flight

Delta's mobile site is optimized for devices

Delta Air Lines launched a mobile marketing campaign meant to promote the company's international business routes and destinations.

The airline teamed up with digital agency Digitas and mobile marketing firm Phonevalley for the promotion. This promotion comes on the heels of a text-messaging campaign Delta ran in the fourth quarter of 2008. We are enthusiastic to support Delta Air Lines in their promotional plan once again, said Alexandre Mars, CEO of Phonevalley and head of mobile at Publicis Groupe, Paris. Cell phones are very unique to marketers as they allow consumers to instantly react to an ad whilst on the move and to engage with their brand. Phonevalley is a mobile marketing firm with clients such as Hugo Boss, Kraft, Volvo and L'Oreal Paris. Delta Air Lines is the worlds No. 1 airline, serving more than 400 locations worldwide. During the months of April and June, frequent travelers were presented with a visual list of Delta many worldwide destinations and invited to text the name of select destinations (i.e. Tokyo) to shortcode 44144. In return, participants received a series of tips to improve business practices in the featured destination to help them know what to lend insight to business practices abroad. The final message of each set includes a link to the Delta mobile Web site. There consumer could research and manage flight options. The first text messaging campaign ran in Q4 2008 and demonstrated consumers were not only responsive, but willing to engage multiple times in a session.The average consumer was likely to interact with the entire set of tips per location. To examine the level of consumer engagement, Delta focused on response measures. Response metrics such as frequency and completion rate enable a brand to quantify a mobile campaign's ability to serve as a one-to-one marketing vehicle. Delta has a healthy set of mobile offerings, so the airline isnt new to the mobile space. In March, Delta partnered with the Transportation Security Administration to expand its mobile check-in with an electronic boarding pass (see story). Deltas mobile site at http://mobile.delta.com lets consumers view their itineraries, login to book a trip, check flight status and schedules, check-in and click-to-call a Delta representative. Delta isnt the only airline making use of mobile. Hawaiian Airlines ran an SMS sweepstakes to build its mobile database and activate its television sponsorship of Major League Baseball's San Diego Padres (see story). Additionally, international airline AirAsia used mobile to increase awareness of the company and its promotions throughout Asia (see story). The cell phone is a fantastic opportunity to reach and engage consumers in entertaining programs as well as useful services, Mr. Mars said.

Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Released

The highly anticipated Facebook 3.0 app has been approved and released for free in the Apple App store. Now the client is almost on par with its Web-based app on the desktop side.

I thought the update is automatically pushed, but it did not happen until I went to the app store and download it. It when on top of the previous version without problem.

New features

• See your upcoming Events and RSVP
• See your friends’ birthdays
• See Pages and post updates and photos to Pages you administer
• Write Notes and read your friends’ Notes
• Upload videos from an iPhone 3GS
• Upload photos to any album
• Complete photo management (create albums, delete albums, delete photos, delete photo tags)
• Change your Profile Picture
• Zoom into photos
• Like posts and photos
• See the same News Feed as the Facebook website
• Visit links in a built-in web browser
• See all of your friends’ friends and Pages
• See mutual friends
• Easily search for people and Pages
• Make friend requests
• Become a fan of Pages
• Quickly call or text your friends
• Create shortcuts to your favorite friends and Pages
• Friends sorted by first or last name according to your

[Source Facebook]

Best Practices for Designing Mobile Applications

How to design for non-touch screen devices?

Mobile application interfaces offer unique challenges when designing for the user experience.  Limited screen size, navigation restrictions and broad audience experience levels pose hurdles that, if not carefully considered, can derail even the most valuable applications.  With developers and carriers racing to offer customers the ability to do just about everything on their mobile phones, observing some basic usability guidelines smooth the path for both application designers and end users.

Chicago-based user experience firm User Centric, Inc. has been a frontrunner in the evaluation and design of mobile applications. Based on insights from over 125 mobile projects and 4,000 participants, they offer some best practices for mobile application design.  These guidelines include:

• Make scrollbars and selection highlighting more salient
• Increase discoverability of advanced functionality
• Use clear and consistent labels
• Icons should not save space at the expense of user understanding
• Support user expectations for personalization
• Long scrolling forms trump multiple screens on mobile devices

Although designing for both novice and expert mobile users can be a tricky process, mobile application interfaces can be easily validated through usability testing.  Conducting usability testing throughout the development life cycle helps ensure that the final application design not only satisfies customers, but saves the company from costly redevelopment efforts.

Full article with expanded guideline definitions can be found at www.UserCentric.com/mobile-applications.

Augmented Reality can be new lifeblood of mobile

I have been thrown into the world of Augmented reality in a very short period of time. Over the past

weeks we have seen companies from all over the world showcase new products and services.
But reviewing this service from Wikitude yesterday, something occurred to me. The reason Augmented Reality is making heads turn, developers smile and regaining the faith in new technology is because it plays on the fantastical.
For example, Wikitude.me. This Austrian based AR (augmented reality) player is hitting the sweet spots of Augmented reality with innovative new options such as:
1. Radar overlay displaying the direction in which the viewer is going
2. Beam Me features which tele-port the users to pre-defined geo-locations enabling them to experience different data overlays.
3. Search bar for finding relevant places of interest that have been uploaded or submitted.
Simple, yet subtle features such as these have the ability to propel AR to new dimensions. These types of offers that we see can exist on the TV are now being bought to our mobile phone. This restores faith in new technology and more importantly libertarian freedom of interest technology.
The user generated involvement in something visual inclines me to believe that this service will move mountains. The fact of the matter is that playing games, watching TV and existing mobile services replicate what we already have. AR improves it with a visual search and an experimentation element that can amuse anyone at any level.
AR reminds me of when the Wiki was launched and everyone could go on and showcase their knowledge. Now, you can showcase knowledge visually via Air Tagging, favourite restaurants, even (god forbid) family photos.
Actually thinking out loud, Wikitude (Wiki with attitude) might have been the original idea behind this. Because this is what it is. Social mobile wiki with attitude.
Anyway, populism is a huge threat to innovation and I don’t want to jump on that bandwagon. But in all honesty, I am convinced AR is what mobile has been waiting for.

Mark & Spencer trials QR codes on juice bottles in Food To Go mobile campaigns

Shoppers who buy a bottle of M&S brand orange juice are directed to scan a QR code with their phone’s camera which directs them to a Food To Go mobile site featuring a range of content and a voucher code to claim against the next bottle of juice. The retailer’s Food To Go campaign follows its first push into mobile marketing with its Back To School campaign last August. M&S is one of the first UK retailers to adopt the technology to interact with customers. The QR format has been popular in Japan, resulting in a number of high-profile attempts to repeat its success here. Last year The Sun attempted to educate millions of its readers about the format to drive traffic to its mobile site via an eight-page pull-out section in the newspaper. This was followed by campaigns from brands including the BBC, Fanta, Ford, Pepsi, Volvo and Yell. But development of the format has been hobbled by the lack of QR code readers embedded in UK phones. 

The mobile site was built by mobile agency Incentivated with technology provider Squiggly Square managing the QR codes. An M&S spokeswoman said the retailer was looking to engage more with its customers. “We’re trialling QR codes as an innovative new way to communicate with our customers,” she said. “At this stage it’s only on our Food To Go freshly squeezed juices.”

Wikipedia Introduces iPhone App

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation has rolled out the long awaited iPhone and iPod Touch application for Wikipedia.

As expected, the free app culls information from the massive (and still growing) user-generated online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which is already composed of approximately three million English-language entries. The Wikipedia app was created using Rhomobile’s Rhodes mobile application development framework. For now, users can read and review content on mobile phone formatted pages of Wikipedia but editing and adding content via the app is not yet possible at this time. So there’s room for growth. And it seems growth is on the horizon for this particular app. “It is a platform we are going to build on. The sky is the limit–we can do whatever we want,” says Wikimedia spokesperson Jay Walsh

Spotify app pulled from Android store but will come back soon

Droidify, the unofficial Spotify app that allowed owners of mobile phones running Google Android to access the online streaming site, is thought to have been pulled from the Android app store.
The app, which was made available earlier this week, was removed from Android Market as it infringes Spotify's deal with record labels. Spotify lets users create a playlist of songs for free, although it is peppered with adverts just like commercial radio. However, for 99p, Spotify users can purchase a whole day of ad-free listening time, or alternatively pay a £10 monthly subscription and never hear an advert again. The service also allows users to create 'collaborative' playlists, which are assigned their own web addresses, and can then be added to by other Spotify listeners. Spotify has already demoed an official app for Android handsets, although the music streaming service has yet to reveal when this will be made publicly available. The company has also developed an app for the iPhone, which is currently awaiting approval from Apple.

Designing useful mobile services for Africa

Last week, the Grameen Foundation, MTN Uganda and local organizations announced a suite of SMS services in Uganda, a country where someone's first experience of the Internet is far more likely to be on a mobile device rather than a PC. We are really excited about this project in part because it is the result of more than a year of true user-centered research and design. We knew we wanted to build useful mobile services tailored to the needs of people in sub-Saharan Africa, but how could we find out what people want from the Internet when they don't have access to it already? What would people who had never used search before want to search for if we gave them a mobile phone and said "Ask any question you like"?


Our research needed to be able to assess the feasibility of delivering information via mobile in Uganda as well as evaluate the content "appetites" of local people. Since no search engine existed for testing, we did the next best thing: We decided to mimic the experience of using a search engine using human experts.


First, we trained a multilingual team to act as user researchers in 17 carefully selected locations across the country. In each place, they introduced themselves to a cross section of people they met and invited them to participate in a free study that would help create useful services for Ugandans. If the person agreed, the researcher handed them a mobile phone and encouraged them to write a text message containing a question they wanted to know the answer to. (If people had their own phone, we reimbursed them with phone credit.) The text message was then routed to a control room we'd set up in Kampala where a human expert read the text message, typed a response, and sent it back via SMS to the person who asked the question. In the meantime, the interviewer observed and recorded the participant's user experience. This allowed us to record rich qualitative data from hundreds of interviews in just a few days, and to collect quantitative data from hundreds of search queries.

Trying mobile search for the first time

Last week's launch of SMS services in Uganda is the direct result of this research — it's based on listening to what people want and finding a way to get it to them. Our research enabled us to observe first-hand how people instinctively wanted to interact with a mobile phone. We let people select the language they wanted to use. We gained deep insights into the way people formulate their questions and what questions really matter to them. On top of that, we saw the excitement on people's faces when they got their first-ever search results, and we realized that some of the information we could deliver to these users, such as health information, has the power to truly change lives. These new services in Uganda are just one step on the path to providing information to people who have little or no access to the web. This research will help us as we continue to develop more services to increase access to information all around the world.

Easy Access Home Photos on iPhone with Simplify Photo

Today, Simplify Media, a developer of streaming media applications, released Simplify Photo, an app enabling anyone with a digital photo library on a home computer to view them anytime, anywhere on their iPhone, iPod touch, laptop or netbook. Share you photos anytime, anywhere with close friends and family while avoiding the hassles of synching or uploading your files with multiple devices. Users can manage one library, while remotely accessing all their photos from home, work, or on the go. For a quick look at the Simplify Photo, check out the video below: Simplify Photo is available for $0.99 HERE (iTunes Link].

Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere

Fifty years after its invention by the British Royal Navy for use by fighter pilots, the technology of layering information on top of our naked view of the world may cross over the line between science fiction and mass consumer experience as soon as next month. It's widely believed that the operating system for the iPhone 3Gs will be updated this Fall, possibly in September, to allow developers to use the phone's location awareness and internal compass to orient displays of information and imagery placed on top of the view through the camera.

"The internet smeared all over everything." An "enchanted window" that turns contextual information hidden all around us inside out. A platform that will be bigger than the Web. Those are the kinds of phrases being used to describe the future of what's called Augmented Reality (AR), by specialists developing the technology to enable it. Big questions remain unanswered, though, about the viability of what could be a radical next step in humanity's use of computers.

Let's set aside for now questions about the desirability of Augmented Reality. Some people will be wary of its consequences for social interaction - even for spiritual practices already based on engaging with other layers of the world around us. Those questions deserve exploration, but the potential of AR is exciting enough that obstacles are worth discussing aside from objections. Augmented Reality is in some ways just another version of the web; a web applied, through novel interfaces, in reference to the physical world, instead of floating documents tied only to each other as the web is today.

Early Examples

Early examples that Google Android phone owners can use now and that all iPhone 3Gs owners will probably be able to use very soon include:

• Layar, a browser for layers of information about things like restaurant reviews and Wikipedia entries and Brightkite social network entries for places you point your phone at. Here's the list so far. 

• Wikitude, an AR wiki that displays collaboratively edited information about locations when you point your phone's camera at a place.
  
• Acrossair's Nearest Subway App

Not all work in Augmented Reality is going on in mobile phones. There are webcam marker-based implementations like ARSights and projector-powered experiments as well, but AR coming to the iPhone will be a key turning point in popularizing the technology.

It's very exciting to think about, but it might not work. Here are five of the challenges faced by the small but fast-growing industry of Augmented Reality.

Spam and Security

Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling gave a keynote talk at Layar's global launch event this month. His hour-long discussion of potentials and pitfalls included in-depth warnings that security and spam will be major issues. Imagine being drowned in swarming icons for porn or pharmaceuticals! Imagine having your view of reality not just augmented but hacked and controlled by ill-intentioned people.

Sterling says it's not a matter of if, but of when. If AR companies don't prepare for this, they will be caught unaware and users will be turned off in a big way.

Social and Real-Time vs. Solitary and Cached

If AR experiences can be designed for people to experience them together, and if people in different places can touch each other's experiences in real time, then AR is going to be a whole lot stickier. That presents serious technical challenges.

So will being able to show users rich information about things they point their phones at. Visions of rich AR are tempered by imagining the buffer time whenever a widely-used AR app is launched.

UX

The User Experience (UX) of AR presents no end of challenges as well. Social conventions are one factor. Why are you pointing your phone at me while we're talking? "Because I want to see if a link to your Twitter profile will hover above your head." Maybe not.

Joe Lamantia wrote a long post about UX design considerations for the future of AR and argues that the two primary questions at hand are: what information will we turn inside out from hidden context to presented interface layer? And can we find any better interfaces for viewing that information than we have today in the models that are available so far?

Interoperability

Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s. It may not be obvious and it may not even be true that users have a right to view any layer of Augmented Reality through any Augmented Reality browser.

Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever. (A lack of data portability when it comes to Augmented Reality could cause substantial psychological distress!)

Layar, the most high-profile AR consumer company on the market, says it's in full support of interoperability. It has published its documentation publicly and co-founder Maarten Lens-FitzGerald told us the following by phone today:

"I think it's going to be very important. We're open to talking to anybody and seeing what we can make happen. Anyone who creates a service on our platform can publish elsewhere. Our reach will be in installations and content and making sure other parties are on there. We don't do negative things. The lock-ins and exclusivity won't work. Openness and interoperability are where it's going; we're going to discover how exactly with other people. I used to work with VRM and Doc Searls. That's where it's going: control to the user."

Those are encouraging words, but Lens-FitzGerald says that no legal work has been done by his company to encourage an open development standard free of legal fears for developers.

Openness

The most exciting AR programs will be platforms that encourage other people to develop layers of content they then display. That's the Layar model. Hundreds of companies are developing layers for that system on the Android mobile phone. Layar has said that content developers will be able to sell layers to users in the future - a Lonely Planet layer is something travelers might buy, for example.