December 2007
Monthly Archive
Telstra - out to rip off consumers
It seems Telstra is scrambling to maintain profitability in the mobile sector as increased competition cuts into their margins.
As an example I received this text message yesterday:
Find people & business u need. Call 1234 for fast& easy assistance. $1.40/call +88c connection request & standard call chgs.
This shows a significant increase in charges when we last look at Telstra directory charges in 2005.
Highest Spend Ever For Cyber Monday
MattE 11 Dec 2007 | : Marketing, Web
It seems the shopping spirit has arrived for US online shoppers according to this report
Highest Spend Ever For Cyber Monday - eMarketer
US online shoppers spent $733 million on the Monday after Thanksgiving, aka Cyber Monday, according to comScore data.comScore said that was up more than 20% over 2006, and 84% over the average daily online spending totals during the preceding four weeks.
Our brief survey of Australian online retailers and our own experience shows that increasing numbers of Australians are also going online to do their shopping.
SMS celebrates 15th birthday
Love it or loath it - SMS has changed the way we think about communications
SMS 15 years old
SMS has had such a huge impact and become so pervasive in such a short period of time that it is hard to believe that it is just 15 years since the first ever SMS was sent. The party to celebrate the event in London brought together both the sender and receiver of that historic first SMS.On 3rd December 1992 a young engineer at Airwide Solutions, Neil Papworth (pictured left), sent the world’s first ever commercial text message to Vodafone Director Richard Jarvis (right) at a staff Christmas party. Although text messaging has often been accused of causing irreparable damage to the English language, this did not start with the first message which was simply ‘Happy Christmas’.
SMS 15th birthday: Neil Papworth and Richard Jarvis
scannable bar codes - get info fast?
I was reading this article when point 9. jumped out at me (mainly because of the graphic!)
MediaPost Publications - 10 Things You Need to Know About Mobile Marketing -
9. There will be a lot of chatter in 2008 about the QR Code, the two-dimensional visual bar code made popular in Japan but years away from U.S. ubiquity. Phones scan a unique UPC-like stamp on any real world object to pull in more information or offers. Hold a phone up to a movie poster, and get a trailer, movie times or even tickets. The prospect of making the physical world this interactive (even transactive) is too delicious to ignore. But we need a standard.
This is something we have been trying to push with ad agencies for over two years here in Australia. They are excited about the prospects that scannable barcodes using mobile phones offers.
But the bit drawback, alluded to in the quote above, is that the mobile phone manufacturers have to see that tis is coming and include the scanner software as standard on mobile phones.
