PavingWays

Recently, Opera released its interesting and insightful “State of the Mobile Web” report. In this report, Opera analyzed the traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

Opera Mini: the world’s most popular mobile browser

Since its worldwide launch in 2006, Opera Mini has become the world’s most popular mobile web browser with millions of users and billions of page views:

Social Networking Services drive mobile web usage worldwide

Interestingly, almost 40% of all visited web pages with Opera Mini were social networking services. In the US, South Africa and Indonesia even more than 60% of the user were visiting these services with their mobile devices. That shows social networking services are very popular worldwide.

Top 10 Sites in the US, India, South Africa, UK and Germany

You can find more information and the whole report here: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report

I read an interesting article on us.blognation.com about mywaves, a mobile video service. mywaves was founded at the end of 2006, is led by a team that includes veterans from Yahoo, Napster, Danger, PayPal and TiVo and is financially backed by Menlo Ventures.The Sunnyvale, California based company revealed some quite impressive numbers. mywaves reported 1.25 million visitors per month. Honestly, I didn’t know that there is already such a big market for mobile video out there. According to their press release they got an average of 4 visits per month per individual. These visits lasted an average of 20 minutes.

How does it work?
First you have to sign-up for the service. Then you can discover, choose and personalize your on-the-go entertainment on their website that will be automatically delivered and updated to your mobile phone. mywaves also sends text messages alerting you about content updates in their channels. The service is free and works globally across all 3G, EDGE, BREW and EV-DO carriers as well as most video-capable mobile phones.

Marketing
In May 2007 they announced their partnership with Admob to enable click-to-video advertisements for AdMob advertisers.In July 2007 mywaves announced that Alltel Wireless will be the first North American carrier who launches mywaves service allowing Alltel customer to watch videos from their phone for 3.99 USD per month. Customers can easily download the application from their phone via the Alltel Axcess Shop and customize the content.

Sources:
http://www.mywaves.comhttp://us.blognation.com

Last week 3jam and Virgin Mobile announced their partnership. That’s really amazing news! Virgin Mobile is promoting that deal heavily, e.g. on their homepage and via messages to subscribers.

What is 3jam?
In 2005 Andy Jagoe and Enlai Chu started developing a new way of text messaging communication. Let’s name it SMS 2.0. It improves the basic text messaging by allowing friends and family to stay connected with group communication. The 3jam service is free, only SMS charges may apply. But the cool thing is that each text message you send or receive through 3jam is counted as 1 standard text message, even when your message may be received by multiple recipients in the 3jam conversation.

How does the 3jam service via Virgin Mobile works?
The Virgin Mobile customers have first to sign up on the menu of Virgin Mobile’s WAP deck or at www.3jam.com/virgin.Then they can start sending SMS to any number of friends simultaneously. The receipients of the SMS can reply to all at once.

How big is the market for SMS?
For this year Informa analysts suggest the value of global SMS traffic at 60 Billion USD; Gartner forcasts 1.8 Trillion USD by 2010.

In the US we already talked to some carriers and most of them are pretty interested in partnerships with service developers, since they can help them to attract more customers and also increase their ARPU.

Currently, 3jam is building a global service for transiting, billing and clearing multi-party SMS messages. They are also working on some new features. Rocco already met the 3jam Andy and Enlai. Way to go 3jam!

Sources:
us.blognation.com
3jam.com
virginmobile.com

I found an very interesting article about mobile social networks on mashable.com. It is about a report of M:Metrics, which indicates that mobile social networks are growing worldwide and that they actually can be seen as a driver for mobile web usage in Europe as well as in the US.

By the numbers:
M:Metrics is reporting that in June 12.3 million consumers were accessing a social network via their mobile phones in the US and Western Europe. The US had the largest number of users (7.5 million mobile subscribers), followed by Italy (1.3 million), then the UK (1.1 million) and then Spain, Germany and France.

The most visited mobile social networks:
In June the most visited mobile social networks in the US and the UK were:
- MySpace (3.7 million mobile users in the US and 440,000 in the UK)
- Facebook (2 million mobile users in the US and 307,000 in the UK)
- Bebo (288,000 mobile users in the UK)
- YouTube (901,000 mobile visits in the US)

In France, Germany, Italy and Spain the most popular mobile social network was MSN’s Live Spaces, which is only available off-portal. That means users were accessing this service through their mobile web browser and not through their operator’s site.

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The latest research from Telephia shows that around 4 % of U.K. mobile users have uploaded content created on their mobile phones to social networking sites, video and picture sharing sites, blogs and personal web pages.

Still, uploading content from mobile phones is not yet mainstream, probably because of the still expensive data plans for using the mobile web. But Telephia says it is already ranking close to watching mobile video in popularity. An interesting fact is also that users are finding ways to send their content even to sites that do not yet offer a facility to upload direct from mobile phones. That shows the strong demand mobile and should be integrated into social networking services.

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I found an interesting list of the most downloaded mobile games in the UK.

Top 10 mobile games downloaded in the UK in July:

•    1. Tetris — EA Mobile / Blue Lava Wireless
•    2. Sonic the Hedgehog: Part One — Sega/Glu Mobile
•    3. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 — EA Sports / EA Canada
•    4. Worms — THQ / Kiloo
•    5. My Dog — I-play / I-play
•    6. Street Fighter II — Capcom / Capcom Mobile
•    7. The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo — I-play / I-play
•    8. The Sims 2 — EA Mobile / Ideaworks3D
•    9. Ms Pac-Man — Namco Mobile / Namco Networks
•    10. Blockbusters — Player X / Qbranch Wireless

source: http://www.moconews.net/uk-top-10-mobile-games-july.html

Top 10 mobile games downloaded in the UK in June:

•    1. Tetris — EA
•    2. Worms — THQ
•    3. Sonic The Hedgehog — Sega/Glu Mobile
•    4. FIFA World Cup Germany — EA
•    5. The Sims 2 — EA
•    6. Who Wants to be a Millionaire 2nd Ed — Glu Mobile
•    7. Championship Manager 2006 — Eidos
•    8. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift — I-play
•    9. Block Breaker Deluxe — Gameloft
•    10. Monopoly — Glu Mobile

source: http://www.moconews.net/uk-top-10-mobile-games-june.html

What is the current level of usage and consumer interest for data services?

What is important to consumers, both for mobile and voice services?

What implications can be drawn from usage differences between segments, geographies or even between the distinct customer bases of operators and device manufacturers?

These questions were examined in the 2005 A.T.Kearney Mobinet study, which is an assessment of global consumer trends in mobile usage. By interviewing mobile users in 21 countries the company researched the degree to which consumers are adopting mobile data services.

Mobile phones - only for making phone calls?

Nearly 60% of the customers expect to use their mobile phone to make the majority of their calls over the next year. Only 4% of consumers expect to use VoIP for the majority of their calls next year. Alarmingly a significant number of consumers are not convinced that their mobile operator should offer anything more than basic voice service. The majority (80%) of the 65-year olds (or older) reject data services compared to 25% of the under 24-year olds. Probably one reason for this is, that older people are more afraid of new technologies/services.
Another important aspect is the price. 70% of mobile phone users see the price as the primary factor in choosing operator.

What is the current level of usage and consumer interest for data services?

Because the penetration of data-enabled, multimedia phones has increased to 53%, more consumers across all age groups are adopting mobile data services. Most of them (56%) use it (more…)

Today I read an interesting post on http://www.mobileburn.com. China Mobile has outranked Vodafone as the world’s largest mobile phone operator. It is really surprising, because Vodafone serves the worldwide market and China Mobile only the Chinese market. Latest figures indicate that China Mobile serves 200 million customers - Vodafone “only” 186.8 million.

This just shows us how big the Chinese market is and how many opportunities it offers. Analysts are predicting that China Mobile will expand their business overseas in the next few years.

Source:
http://www.mobileburn.com

According to Telephia MapQuest Mobile (21.9 %) was the top revenue-generating downloadable mobile application in the first quarter of 2006. In second position came The Weather Channel (5.7 %) and in third the Verizon Superpages 2.0 (5.3 %). Two music applications, Music Choice and Sirius Music, rounded out the top five with revenue shares of 5 % and 4.8 %.

“Local maps/directions and up-to-date weather are well-suited to delivery via mobile phones because they are information needs characterized by immediacy, location-specificity, and time- sensitivity,” said Kanishka Agarwal, Vice President of New Products, Telephia. “Downloadable mobile applications present a significant opportunity for higher ARPU [Average Revenue Per User], with more than 3.3 million mobile consumers downloading these applications during the first quarter of the year.”

(Data does not include revenue for mobile TV and mobile game applications which is reported separately)

Another interesting fact is, that maps/directions applications drive repeat purchase revenue, while entertainment applications claim highest revenue share for first-time purchases:

Maps/Directions and Weather applications are leading in repeat purchases. In contrary, nearly 30 % of first-time purchase revenues were driven by the Entertainment category, with streaming music mobile applications, Music Choice and Sirius Music, securing the highest new purchase revenue share at nearly 9 % and 8 %.

Sources:
http://www.cellular-news.com
http://www.telephia.com

The number of mobile phone subscriptions in Germany has increased: For the first time there are more mobile phones than residents. 82.8 million mobile phones are currently registered. Most Germans have 2 or even 3 mobile phones. And the trend continues: in Italy there are also more mobile phones than people: 120 phones per 100 Italians.

It would be interesting to know what kind of mobile phones people are using and how WAP 2.0 devices are distributed amongst the whole 83 million in Germany.

Source: http://www.rtl2.de