Mobile Web Is Not (Yet) Ready For Business Model Innovation
Here’s Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon:
I think that we’ll continue to see more companies <…> who put us [Groupon] to shame a couple years from now with their rate of growth.
According to Andrew, Groupon grew so quickly thanks to its social features. What’s going to drive web hyper-growth in 2012? The mobile web – but it’s not ready yet.
Consider Instagr.am, the darling of early adopters this winter. It’s up to a million users, growing through Twitter and app downloads – which is awesome. However, many are lost at every stage of the acquisition funnel – clicking the AppStore link, installing, learning the native UI. What if you could start taking photos & applying filters via the mobile browser – right after clicking that very first instagr.am link? They’d probably be at 5-10 million users by now. Today, the Instagr.am website isn’t even mobile-friendly.
Universal JavaScript APIs for mobile cameras are on their way (you can use PhoneGap in the meantime) – but not today, limiting growth opportunities for mobile-centric web services.
Another good example is online advertising (search or display), where every mobile click leading to a desktop page will convert at a disastrously low rate. This inhibits a lot of mobile innovation in pay-for-performance advertising – especially in e-commerce.
Mobile web has to get more mobile in order to facilitate business models of tomorrow. Let’s do our part to make it happen!
Mashable Recognizes Mobify Studio as a Top Mobile Web Service
In case you haven’t seen it yet, Mashable posted a list of mobile web authoring tools, with Mobify getting the number one spot! Thanks Mashable!
Mobify on Mashable
Mobify Weekly – The Latest Threads in the Mobile Web
Hello everyone and welcome to a brand new edition of Mobify Weekly where we share the best stories that we’ve run across.
Google Beats Facebook On Mobile Web, Says Opera According to Opera, Facebook was dominating the mobile web traffic in 2009 but was overtaken by Google during this year.
New, Improved and Easier to Use Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo Among many improvements in speed and usability, new additions to Firefox Mobile include a new add-ons interface, better syncing and more hardware-accelerated WebGL support.
360 Panorama: iPhone 4 surfs the Web with gyroscopic support in Mobile Safari Interesting concept website allows visitors to viewa 360 photo of a public park just by gliding their iPhone through the air.
Snow reveals airlines’ poor mobile strategies Interesting article on how (some) airlines are using mobile to inform their customers about flight conditions, delays and provide them with up-to-date travel information.
That’s it for this week, folks! Wishing you Happy Holidays from all of us at Mobify! Have a good one!
Mobile Commerce – not iAds – Will Drive Growth in Mobile Advertising
Mobile commerce sales more than doubled this year, writes Bill Siwicki of Internet Retailer. Reaching 3.4 billion dollars by the end of 2010, it’s already bigger than mobile advertising, estimated to be less than a billion dollars per year.
This is great for online retailers and also means that we’re about to see a major shift in the way ad dollars on mobile are spent. There’s a good chance that pay-for-performance ads, placed by online and brick-and-mortar retailers, will dominate mobile ad spending in a few years’ time.
The beauty of e-commerce is in direct measurability of how advertising and marketing perform. As online retailers go mobile, enabling new revenue streams, they’ll have a strong incentive to figure out the best performing mobile marketing channel (whether it’s mobile SEM, display or retargeting) and spend as much as possible on customer acquisition. Their competitors will follow, driving demand for mobile inventory in a way that expensive branded iAd campaigns can’t.
Then there is the local aspect. In his interview on Charlie Rose’s show, Groupon’s Andrew Mason talked about his vision of “the holy grail of local” – bringing pay-for-performance online advertising to millions of boutique businesses around the globe. Today’s Groupon is doing just that, but in a very desktop-centric way with insufficient targeting (most of the business I get Groupons for in Vancouver are simply too far away). Not too long from now, Groupon and its clones will get into a bidding on war for highly targeted mobile inventory on behalf of their client SMEs. This will bring yet another monetization opportunity for developers & publishers.
The future is bright for mobile advertising and commerce as the market grows rapidly while geting more tech-savvy. Without a doubt, 2011 will be the most exciting year yet!
Mobile Weekly—The Latest Threads in the Mobile Web
Hello everyone and welcome to a new edition of Mobify Weekly—read the hottest stories from the world of mobile web.
2010: The Year Of Mobile Exploding consumer demand for everything mobile has been driving the industry forward to new heights. From 3 out 4 photos on Flickr being taken with an iPhone to Facebook mobile serving 200+ million mobile users, 2010 has been an dynamite year for everything mobile.
In Q3 Google searches from mobile devices grew 130% year over year According to Mobile Marketing Association research, 59% of holiday shoppers will use their phones for shopping this year. To capitalize on this explosive growth Google is adding Seller Ratings to mobile to provide a better holiday shopping experience.
European mobile operators say big sites need to pay for users’ data demands European mobile operators say that companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple should pay for the bandwidth generated by users accessing their sites. Interesting article on the state of the European telecom market.
Retail 2011: Five Action Items Last week, Verizon Retail’s Ravi Bagal put down five trends that he says will be apparent in online retail in the near future. The first item on the list was a sharp spike in mobile commerce next year.
Shake-up at the top in this week’s m-commerce site performance index Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index measures the loading times of the top 15 mobile commerce destinations. The rankings board had some interesting changes this week—see who went up and who went down!
What Shoppers Want from Retail Apps Earlier this year Adobe research has found that many consumers were unimpressed with retailers’ mobile apps and preferred to browse the mobile web instead. A recent Accenture survey has asked consumers what they would like to see on retailers’ mobile sites and here are the results!
That’s it for this week folks! Have a terrific weekend and we’ll see you all next Thursday!
