From Mike Rowehl:

Look to the under 25 year old crowd to find out how their form their adhoc collectives. Not that folks over 25 won’t be into it also, but the under 25 crowd tends to use their mobile in a different way and they have some good patterns to replicate. Allow them to share something that’s personal on your site and you might find the kind of grassroots uptake that allows your application or service to spread without carrier support. But first you have to figure out what it is that they really want to do. Not what they say when you ask them, that’s something different. Complement and support their desired mode of interaction and you won’t be able to keep from spreading.

If you look at Moore’s curve for crossing the chasm, it appears that this under 25 crowd are the crucial ‘innovators’. I’m only a decade removed from that generation, but I have no clue how they think. How to step into their minds?

Image via Syntagm.co.uk.

As of September, China had 377m cell phone users. That’s up 7.7 percent from June.

Also, 218.5 billion text messages were sent in the month of September.

These are amazing stats. Puts the US market in perspective.

Via Textually.org.

SlashGISRS reports that Locatrix has announced a server for ‘presence’ across instant messaging and mobile phones. While it’s doubtful that Australia-based Locatrix’s GSM server will have an immediate impact on the US market, it provides a glimpse of what’s to come.

Yahoo and MSN are taking the first steps toward universal presence on the PC by providing interoperability, which is scheduled to reach consumers in Q2 2006. And it would be surprising if Microsoft isn’t planning a mobile integration through the Microsoft MapPoint Location Server. Meanwhile, AOL is opening up it’s presence network through a developer program.

This will be huge. It won’t be long before anyone using Facebook or MySpace is going to want to know who’s online and where they are.

Update: MapChat at MidnightCoders achieves location presence using AJAX and Google maps.

Update: Winksite links mobile chat and location. Via Lifeblog.

Update: AOL and MSN to interoperate on IM? And what else?

Mobile advertising is still in its infancy, and therefore only makes sense as one aspect of a larger ad campaign. That’s why billboards and other public ads make such an interesting fit with the mobile experience. While Bluespotting won’t make it far in the US until there’s significant Bluetooth adoption, SMS advertising is really starting to come into its own, especially for that coveted youth demographic.

While they’re not pushing the SMS angle, the Viacom Outdoor product line is a great illustration of possible public display ad media.

Bus

Billboard

Rail/Subway

Street Furniture

Specialty

Latino

Malls

Sports Media

South Korea’s mobile industry is many years ahead of the US, largely due to the government’s active role in ensuring competitive forces don’t interfere with technical progress. Here’s an example:

The Korean government is pushing the mobile telcos in the country to open their networks with the intention of creating a wireless network as efficient and popular as the World Wide Web…

But of course there is a cost to government control:

There’s talk of punishment for carriers which don’t respond to the governments imprecations

Via MocoNews.

The AP reports today that Cingular is introducing a new service: consumer email.

Cingular Wireless is introducing a service for nonbusiness users to get BlackBerry-like mobile access to their personal e-mail accounts from AOL, Yahoo and MSN Hotmail on a cell phone.

Why so late to the game with such an obvious consumer need? Cingular has finally realized that people spend a great deal of time on the Internet communicating with others via email, and they might want to do that on their mobile phones too.

Instead Cingular, along with Verizon and Sprint, spent immense resources over the past year building and marketing sub-standard video at high prices. While I have no idea of what the subscriber counts are (not to mention the churn rate), it’s hard to imagine that they’ve justified the investment. One indicator is the placement of Cingular’s MobiTV several clicks from the home page buried among a directory of ‘Tool Providers’.

In contrast, there’s clearly some disruption in the air with the rollout of the Video iPod.

Russell Beattie captures the experience of plugging a Video iPod into a regular TV. It turns out that watching a video podcast with others is the same social experience as watching a TV show, except highly customized to the audience:

If you’re like me and the other 99% of the people out there, your living room has probably got a bunch of big chairs and a couch all focused towards a screen in the corner. That space for years has been the place where you viewed video, and normally with several others….

Suddenly, a hum-drum “video podcast” (”what the hell is that?” most people will ask…) becomes a “TV Show” you can enjoy with others. That’s huge! And that’s what really excites me.

Once again, Steve Jobs and the skilled iPod team ‘gets’ the consumer product space. And consumer products are very different from the carrier’s true area of expertise: managing highly-scalable voice and data networks.

McDonald’s joins the short code marketing fever. If you live in Southern Californaia, you will see billboards advertising the campaign. Users can send the word ‘McFlurry’ to 73260 and receive a coupon for a free McFlurry.

It’s nice to see a major advertiser invest in SMS marketing, especially in an over the top model (around the carriers). However, I do have two questions: What does 73260 spell on the keypad? What is a McFlurry?

Via SlashPhone.

SK Telecom just launched their ‘Image Call’ service, which lets users choose their own personalized image for others to see when they’re calling. Users who have the Samsung SCH-S370 can add custom text, voice and music.

This is Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash proven prophetic in the market once more. Avatars are a cool concept. They range from Comverse’s Klonies to Vidiator’s 3D Avatars. Avatars fit the same need for differentiation that ring tones provide, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see them quickly represent a sizable chunk of the mobile data market.

From Telecoms Korea.

I’m used to measuring a website’s success by tens of millions of page views, so it was nice to get validation from Mark Pincus (of tribe.net fame) that blogs operate on a different scale.

the numbers. sounds like i have 92 subscribers through bloglines and 18 through newsgator plus about 100 page views a day. what’s interesting is that i ran into so many people at web 2.0 who had read my blog. i guess i will have a lot more influence on the idea economy than the actual one:)