By Mobile Marketer
The Mobile Marketing Association is forecasting that the rate in which consumers utilize mobile banking services will accelerate at a rapid pace by the end of 2010. As the pervasiveness of mobile services trickle down to much smaller financial institutions than the big guns of banking first to embrace mobile technology, the MMA anticipates the present 17% of adults using mobile banking in the US will jump to nearly 22% within the next twelve months.
Aware of the increasing spread of mobile services and mobile marketing to smaller communities and the business that dwell within them, the MMA recently revealed plans to restructure into business units in its operating regions – Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Latin America and North America. As part of the restructuring effort, the “roles and responsibilities” of managing directors will expand to focus more intensely on “local needs.”
The potential of mobile banking is a hefty contributing factor to the quickened growth of mobile services and mobile familiarity in increasingly smaller, more rural areas of the world. Within twelve months, the MMA predicts that many small, private banks could be just as well-versed and mobile proficient as the world’s largest banking institutions – which, until now, have held an upper hand in the mobile realm.
“Mobile banking is a major opportunity both today and over the long term,” said the MMA’s vice president of market intelligence Peter Johnson. Last year, analysts at CGAP predicted that mobile banking services in the developing world could ultimately be worth upwards of $5 billion by the turn of 2012.
Saturday, 6 February 2010
Banking on Mobile Marketing in 2010
Thursday, 4 February 2010
Nav4All Navigation Shut Down by Nokia's Navteq?
By Robert Voogel
Nav4All is closing its doors, or so it seems. In an email sent by its CEO Hennie Groot Koerkamp (see below), Nav4All announces that operations will be suspendend as a result from the unsuccessful negociations with Navteq.
While many customers will lose their Nav4All navigation tool on their handset (according to Koerkamp over 27 million users), Nokia seems to be serious in their aggressive pursuit of a dominant market share. The release of free-for-all Ovi Maps already pointed in that direction, but cutting the line between Nav4All and Navteq demonstrates that Nokia means business.
Email from Nav4All
"Dear Customers,
It is with the deepest regret that we hereby notify you that the
global navigation of Nav4All and the Tracking & Tracing will go
offline in 3 days. The reason for the same is that the data licence
agreement with Navteq (a 100% Nokia subsidiary) was not extended, in
a totally unexpected manner. It is not possible to implement data
from another supplier in our Nav4All systems within the short term.
The Nav4All navigation system was developed for Navteq data. Nav4All
has therefore been constrained to stop.
We greatly regret the fact that we have to suspend the operation of
our service. With your help, we have developed Nav4All into a global
product with 27.5 million users in 56 languages, in 5 years. This has
made Nav4All the largest navigation supplier. This large number of
users also has to do with the fact that Nav4All works on hundreds of
different mobile telephones of many makes such as Blackberry, Sony
Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Android, HTC, Nokia, LG, Iphone, Ipod
etc.
After 5 years of testing and market development, we witnessed rapid -
in fact, exponential - growth during the last two years. That growth
was reported in the licence reports to Navteq. In mid-December 2009,
the global coverage was extended to include the Philippines, Morocco
and Kenya.
Please contact the Nav4All support desk in case you have any
questions: www.nav4all.com/support. If there is any further
information from Nav4All concerning the subject of this letter, the
same will be published on our website: www.nav4all.com. For reasons
of privacy, Nav4All does not have the email addresses of all its
customers, and we therefore request you to forward this email to the
maximum extent possible, in order to ensure that everyone is
informed.
Kind Regards,
Hennie J.M. Groot Koerkamp (CEO)"
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Big Name Retailer’s Mobile Sites Prove Unstable, Slow For Consumers
By Justin in Mobile Marketing Watch
A new consumer survey has found that large retailers’ mobile sites have been deemed slow, unresponsive and unstable by respondents- including sites from the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Foot Locker, Musician’s Friend, Sears, Target and Wal-mart.
The survey, conducted by Keynote Systems, measured the performance of ten top retailers’ mobile sites, including Best Buy, Dell and Amazon, in three key areas; homepage load time, product search and product information requests. In the end, it was determined that improvements need to be made across the board, even with those that performed better than others.
Availability and reliability of top mobile sites were areas of most concern, with Foot Locker’s mobile site earning the top mark with 97.6% availability. Out of the ten surveyed, only one other mobile site achieved availability higher than 90%, with three sites even falling below 80%. To put it in perspective, the study indicated that consumers expect around 99.5% availability overall, meaning all top ten sites fell well below consumer expectations.
Load times, in terms of homepage loading, product and site-wide search, etc. was another aspect under scrutiny, with consumers surveyed expecting a mobile site to load in around 1-2 seconds total. Of the top ten mobile sites, the fastest homepage load time belonged to Best Buy, which loaded in 8.3 seconds, while Wal-mart had the fastest search results page, taking around 4.5 seconds. Foot Locker performed the fastest product information request at 5.7 seconds, proving overall that its mobile site was the best of those surveyed.
It’s an interesting survey, though slightly skewed due to the fact that it surveyed mobile users in New York and San Francisco, and only those with Webkit-enabled mobile browsers. Still, retailers of this caliber should know and understand that their mobile Web presence is very important, and making the experience as smooth and quick as possible will only help their brand.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Sunday, 24 January 2010
FT To Launch Day Pass For Online And Mobile This Year
By Ingrid Lunden
More refining on paywalls, from one of the first to introduce them. The Financial Times is gearing up to launch a “day pass” to access its content online and by mobile this year. But for now it is ruling out charging for individual articles until the right technology is in place.
The object of the day pass is to bring in new subscribers through a gradual process: “[Day passes are] something we think will have a market. It’s reasonable to assume there are a lot of people who will quite happily pay that, but aren’t willing to commit to one year’s subscription in one go,” Rob Grimshaw, the managing director of FT.com, told Journalism.co.uk.
Grimshaw says that charging per article would be something the FT would like to consider, but the technology won’t be available until later in the year.
John Ridding, the chief executive of the FT Group, a division of Pearson, said this month that content revenues will overtake print advertising revenues by 2012.
Part of FT’s success story has been its mobile apps. The FT’s mobile app is free of charge, but like the FT.com, it follows a tiered charging model, with unpaid subscribers getting three articles per month free. The FT says it has had 200,000 downloads of its iPhone app to date, and it is planning to relaunch a new version of its app for BlackBerry devices, with an app for Android devices also in the works.
Grimshaw will be speaking more about paid content models for mobile and online at paidContent’s conference, paidContent 2010: Discussing the economics of content, taking place on February 19 in New York.
