Yahoo! has launched a new mobile app, Mixd, that has several interesting components:
TechCrunch has a “mixed” review of the service. I haven’t yet had a chance to play with it. One thing that’s interesting is the fact that the Yahoo! brand is subordinate here.
Another thing that’s interesting/important is the PC-mobile connection. That provides more value to the user and more strategic leverage to Yahoo!
MediaPost and iMedia are reporting today on the joint efforts of Telephia and comScore in creating a new index and measurement service that combines and compares desktop Internet and mobile usage.
From the MediaPost article:
As part of the MobileWeb data, Telephia and comScore derived index scores based on a site’s reach among mobile users divided by its reach among PC-based Internet users. ESPN, which has a mobile reach of 17.9% compared to a PC reach of 9.4%, ranked second only to AccuWeather on the U.S. mobile-to-PC index with a score of 190.
Here are the top combined-reach sites:
Look at how local-related sites and mail dominate. Noteworthy is how Citysearch has an almost equivalent mobile reach (which speaks to brand). What’s also interesting is the ranking of GMail, which has greater mobile reach than it does online. That may reflect the nature of GMail users as more tech-savvy “early adopters.”
My belief is that mobile email is a strategic advantage and leverage point for other mobile services.
Local Matters has added content partners to its AreaGuides.net. Here are the details. The site is a bit cleaner since LM took over, but it needs a major redesign.
InfoSpace is making FindIt free for 60-days to encourage consumers to download and use it. Here’s the release. I used FindIt and it’s a good application (although I have some criticisms of course). The problem is that it has little visibility in the market. InfoSpace’s brand is not anywhere near as strong as Google, Yahoo! or the carriers and Sprint (one of InfoSpace’s FindIt partners) just did a big deal with MSFT.
Here’s what I would do if I were InfoSpace: roll out voice search (in full) as fast as possible on top of FindIt and market the hell out of that feature. That would be a truly differentiated product and would potentially get consumers’ attention (certainly it would get media attention). I’d also provide deep desktop-mobile integration (personalization, saved locations, etc.)
The risk otherwise is that FindIt, as good as it may be, just gets lost among the larger brands taking up shelf space.
And see Nuance Releases Mobile Speech Platform. Voice, though imperfect, helps solve some of the usability problems of keying in characters on mobile devices. See more.
USA Today Tech columnist Kevin Maney discusses what “techies” would do with a newspaper. He says that everything he’s heard is pretty basic:
But of the dozen or so people I asked, no one offered an idea that totally broke form, reinventing newspapers the way eBay reinvented garage sales. No one, for instance, proposed that newspaper websites, which generally look more crowded than a Mumbai flea market, pare down to a single, clean Google-esque local search box. No one suggested that local papers outfox Craigslist, the free classified site that the newspaper industry treats like kryptonite, by creating their own free local classified sites.
Kevin, I’m not a “techie,” but here are a few ideas:
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/11/18/why-are-newspapers-still-doing-this/
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/11/10/who-will-build-the-first-3-d-newspaper/
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/11/06/more-newspaper-thoughts/
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/03/01/newspapers-should-move-faster-part-ii/
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/newspapers-and-the-integrated-marketplace/
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/a-new-newspaper-network/
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/08/01/what-about-topix/
http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/07/12/my-times-is-here-in-beta/
And there’s a lot more where that came from . . .
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Here’s eMarketer-compiled data (small sample) from an ad agency survey re traditional media vs. “new media”:
But here’s data from a US-based American Advertising Federation survey showing that traditional media are still regarded as effective, especially as part of an integrated (online-offline) campaign:
Integrated media campaigns are the future in the fragmented world of local in particular. That’s why entities that have both online and offline assets (assuming both perform) are stronger — and one reason Google and Yahoo! are both going offline (newspapers, radio, video, etc.)
