Mobile Marketing

One of my colleague Ani has recently attended conference on Mobile Conversations:- Bangalore Everything you wanted to know about mobile marketing'. It looks to me that whole world is moving from mobile VAS to mobile marketing arena. Is it the Google effect and everyone wants to make money through mobile advertising? Or everyone is thinking that Google is gonna acquire them one day if they build a cool solution for mobile advertising?

Whatever it is, it'll be good for the end consumers as they would get more and more free content sponsered by the advertising world on their mobile device. Would the current US financial crisis impact the mobile advertising plans in a big way? Yet to be seen the great mobile advertising world, so don't care.

-Sunil

G1 Phone Launch (Android)

It's so confusing in the media about the Android based phone story. Whose phone is this anyway? Is it T-Mobile, HTC or Google's phone? In any case Apple and Google has shown power of software in consumers phone. What differentiate these phones from already existing hundreds of models is Google or Apple software behind them.

It's like Intel inside in the PC world so now you have Google inside in the mobile world. Let' s understand why is this so interesting?
- It gives more power to the consumers but that is still a dream.
- It may open up more revenue opportunities for VAS companies, Telcos of the world, if they take it positively.

What it'll do for the emerging market devices: It really depends upon the end user pricing for these devices or how much subsidy *someone* can provide for these devices.
Can Google subsidize them for the potential advertising revenues from these devices? It's not a proven model yet in any market but Google has all power to do this else it'll become like iPhone launch in India (priced around 32000 INR = ~700 USD).

I was just thinking about the bottom 50% of the handset consumer segment. Can we provide the good user experience, flexibility in the software framework and end user specific application? Or we just want to worry about the price point for these devices? Aren't we already reached at the trashed hold in terms of the price points in these market?

I'll write more next time and try to find answers to these questions.

Regards,
Sunil