Archive for MMS
by Imran Ali
August 7, 2008 at 5:05 am · Filed under MMS, Twitter, Video, 12seconds
Following on from last week’s coverage of 12seconds, the service’s creators have been running a ’12second Challenge’, posing questions and setting challenges each day that users must respond to or answer in twelve second bursts. A great way of building enthusiasm and publicity for a service…and creating a generation of evangelists.
12seconds have also been talking about a bunch of upcoming enhancements and improvements that’re soon coming to the service. These include…
- Video replies and an improved recorder.
- Enhanced commenting, tagging, grouping & navigation.
- URL shortnening for posting to Twitter.
- Privacy controls.
- Support for third party services - perhaps Facebook and MySpace?
- Mobile integration - this already works well with MMS…perhaps they’re looking at installed apps? Video messaging finally comes to iPhone?
12seconds look like they’re being driven by the needs of their alpha testers, a great approach that’ll ensure they deliver the user experience and product that’s really in demand…now what could the business model be…?
by Imran Ali
July 29, 2008 at 4:23 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, MMS, UK
Back in November, we reported that Brits were sending 1.2bn text messages each week. Today, just eight months later, the UK’s Mobile Data Association released figures (as reported by BBC News) covering the first half of 2008 that show in increase to 1.4bn messages per week, surprisingly including 10m photo messages.
Assuming an SMS averages 5p and MMS 10p, that’s likely to be around £60-70m of revenue each week for a product will a relatively miniscule cost base…an astonishing figure which underlines the massive consumer appeal of SMS and MMS and its value to cellcos. All the more impressive when comparing the 28bn UK messages with 80bn messages sent across the US in the same period, a country five times the size of Britain.
Conversely, the UK’s Chartered Society of Physiotherapists today published a study illustrating the physical and physiological impact of texting on teenagers and other groups. As well as a geographic and demographic breakdown of the texting habits of 177 people, the CSP goes on to suggest a five step programme for safe texting…
- Hold the phone up with the screen facing towards you so you are not having to flex your neck too much as you look down to view the screen.
- Keep your hands close to your body. The weight of a phone may not feel much, but the load on your arm is significantly increased if the arm is held out stretched and this action will put strain on your neck and shoulder muscles.
- Try to use both hands together when texting to “spread the load”. Keep messages short and use abbreviations and the predictive text messaging feature on your phone. This will help reduce the repetitive motion of pressing various keys.
- Don’t text continuously. Try to take breaks by putting the phone down between text messages.
- Carry out the following two exercises to prevent text message injury:
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- Regularly open your fingers and stretch them out.
- Stretch your arm out, rotate your wrist so it is facing upwards and with your other hand pull your palm down towards the floor to feel a stretch over the front of your forearm muscles. Hold for 15 seconds and repeat 2-3 times.
Taken together, the MDA and CSP studies provide an invaluable insight into the textual habits of Brits.You can read the CSP’s study online, here…
by Imran Ali
July 29, 2008 at 9:27 am · Filed under MMS, Twitter, Video, 12seconds
A few days ago I received a Twitter from my friend Katie, linking to a twelve-second video of her applying some lipstick. This was my first experience of 12seconds,the recently launched Santa Cruz based startup being heralded as the video of Twitter.
Though other services such as Seesmic have sought to emulate the intimacy and immediacy of Twitter in video form, Seesmic always seemed a little too rich and required too much of a user’s attention, in comparison with the simplicity, sparsity and elegance of Twitter.
As its name suggests, 12seconds limits user’s video messages to a couple dozen seconds, encouraging the same charm, inventiveness and brevity that we see in 140-character Twitters. Where Twitter’s limitation was semi-imposed by the limitations of its medium of choice - the SMS - 12seconds’ limit is an arbitrary boundary cheekily described by the service’s creators as ‘an upper boundary for boredom‘…
The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.
However, 12seconds’ limit may actually position the service ideally for mobility. Squeezing twelve seconds of video from a mobile handset’s forward-facing camera into an MMS is probably quite feasible technically, compatible with most handsets - and as a user experience - recieving a few dozen twelve second video messages is no more distracting than hundreds of Twitters!
It’ll be interesting to see if 12seconds recognises it’s mobile opportunity and whether users take to it as they took to Twitter and its rivals.
For me, receiving Katie’s message invoked a similar emotional response as when I first started to use Twitter - voyeuristic and intimate, potentially distracting, but open to many possibilities and user-created innovations.
12second’s is currently in a closed beta public alpha period…here’s hoping for an invite 
UPDATE: I just received an invitation to the public alpha and it seems that mobile users can submit videso by emailing an attached clip or emailing an MMS clip…here’s my first pixellated attempt!
by Darla Mack
July 8, 2008 at 11:52 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, MMS, mobile social networking, Messaging, Mobile Research, Social Networking
The most portable device in todays time is the cellphone. For basic everyday non-professional photography the cameraphone has been the most popular choice amongst young adults
In a survey compiled by Wirefly 45% of adult cell phone users report using their mobile cams at least once a week with many snapping shots ever day.
Young consumers ages 18-30 make up 63.8% that use their at least once a week, with 26.3% also snapping shots daily. Those figures fall to 40.7% and 13.2%, respectively, for consumers over the age of 30.
The survey also states that 73.5% adults age 18-30 assign photo IDs to people in their address book, while just 47.4% of the over-30 crowd do the same.
What message should this send out to handset manufacturers? Make better cell phone cams!! It’s clear that the demand is there.
Other interesting results from the full pool of respondents include:
96.3% of adult cell phone owners report that they have a cell phone with a camera.
19% of adults prefer to use their cell phone as their primary camera for all photography.
77.2% of photos taken remain stored in the phone, 45.4% are used as wallpaper and 38.6% are sent to friends via MMS.
20.2% of respondents say they have snapped a photo of an attractive man/woman, and 7.5% have photographed an unsuspecting stranger.
46.4% of all adults and 2/3 of adults age 18-30 say that they use their cell phone to snap self-portraits.
19.8% say they have snuck a picture while pretending to do something else.
13.9% of adults report that they have sent a flirtatious, suggestive, or nude photo - a figure that rises to 28.1% of respondents age 18-30.
via: Cellular-News
by Ewan Spence
May 20, 2008 at 10:53 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, MMS
Imran’s already highlighted the relative cost of SMS bandwidth last week, but I do want to touch on it again. The summary - that the raw cost of sending 160 characters is completely at odds with the cost that the customer actually pays - shouldn’t be that surprising. The first rule of business is to get as much money as the market can take, and the current SMS pricing is clearly something the market is happy to pay, in ever increasing numbers. But as for a higher per text price? Not going to happen.
Many years ago, the introduction of multimedia messaging (MMS) in the UK saw the priced fixed at 40p per message, four times that of an SMS. The rationale, that sending a picture or a sound clip was a lot more information dense and convenient and special than the 160 characters of a text made sense in that context, but put into the real world, the cost of an MMS, coupled with poor cross platform and cross network capability, killed it in the minds of many.
In the struggle to find a new form of messaging (and the implicit goal of being able to create another cash cow just like SMS), the networks seem to be avoiding one thing. The majority of their users are probably completely happy with the messaging options they have. The amount of education the networks would have to do is huge. Trying to spring a new system for profit is not going to happen. Any new system has to be wanted, and I don’t see an appetitive at the moment for anything new.
We have SMS for phone to phone, the business users have their push email and blackberries, and the geeks have whatever XML tools they can put together. Is there seriously space for anything that’s not based on current tech to make a showing? Or is it all about the presentation – after all Twitter is nothing more than SMS with slick presentation.
by Russell Shaw
February 13, 2008 at 5:40 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, MMS
Tomorrow, February 14, is Valentine’s Day.
While a perfect world scenario would involve lovers in love being with each other- making texting and other forms of mobile messaging unnecessary for the moment- I realize that as the old song goes, sometimes “you can’t be with the one you love.”
But you can make plans to be.
In my own situation, it is not practical for me to call my teacher girlfriend during her workday. She’s not about to interrupt her noisy middle school class to take a call from me.
Instead, we text. I visualize texting her tomorrow to talk about Valentine’s Day logistics, and other considerations (wink).
At least we are in the same metro area. Some lovers are not. There’s business travel, wars, etc.
Plainly, those predicaments would be appropriate occasions for MMS, and even cell phone photos delivered by email from mobile handsets.
And then, I suppose tomorrow will precipitate texting from and to old flames, and unrequited lovers (not that this predicament has ever happened to me personally, yea right).
Readers, are you planning on doing some texting during Valentine’s Day? Tell us your stories!
by Russell Shaw
February 1, 2008 at 9:21 pm · Filed under MMS
Yesterday I heard of an incident in a local high school that points to a less-than-dignified use of mobile messaging.
Seems that a couple of students were caught using their camera phones to take snapshots of exams. They didn’t get the answers but they did manage to capture the questions.
The photos were obtained during a morning test. Apparently, the same test was administered by the same teacher during her afternoon class.
What happened here? Apparently, at least one of the students sent an MMS, bearing the screen caps, to a couple of her friends over lunch break.
Sheesh. So not OK.
But truth be known, I am old enough to remember crib sheets.
Not that I ever…
by Imran Ali
January 29, 2008 at 11:31 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, MMS, Voicemail, Twitter, Voice, Photomessaging
Pinger’s been around a little while now, but just rolled out across the UK in recent days. The service enables users to send up to a five-minute voicemail for the price of a local call to other mobile numbers in around twenty countries.
Such a voicemail, or ‘pinger’ is created using IVR voice prompts for usernames, number entry and the message itself; the notion of a completely voice operated mobile messaging service is an appealing one and coupled with the immediacy and asynchronism of a ‘Twitter for voice’, Pinger is theoretically very appealing. It’s probably best explained by the brief How It Works video on the Pinger site.
Between Seesmic, Twitter and now Pinger - video, text and voice now collectively provide the collective capability for micro-blogging and status messaging in most of the formats that people would wnat to use (photos are missing of course and I don’t believe Seesmic is really mobile yet).
I’m not convinced that this type of asynchronous voice messaging is something that text-mad Brits will embrace or indeed whether the ethnographics of Twitter can apply to other media.
I do however find the use of voice UIs as appealing and a strong precedent. Unfortunately, the user experience of Pinger is appalling - three attempts to recognise the five letters of my name failed followed by the IVR’s inability to correctly identify the DTMF tones of the number I was trying to send to!
As such I was unable to test a service which shows promise and highlights what may come to be some emerging trends in user behaviour.
by Ewan Spence
December 31, 2007 at 10:45 am · Filed under MMS, Carriers, Instant Messaging, Communication
And so it begins.
My phone is already beeping at me with text’s from all my friends wishing me a Happy New Year – of course being Scottish Hogmanay (December the 31st) is effectively the start of a three day national holiday which is know for drinking vile drinks, eating vile animals, and generally enjoying life as much as possible.
But it also coincides with one of the busiest times for the UK mobile networks in terms of traffic not of voice calls, but in texts. The New Year message, as midnight strikes, invariably sees a significant number of subscribers on every network send an SMS wishing them all the best for 2008. And it’s not just to one person, it’s to a significant proportion, if not all, of their address book.
Now take the average address book, multiply that out by the number of people looking to send such a batch of messages, and there’s no doubt that come Jan 2nd, I’m sure the PR departments will warm-up the “written on Dec 14th minus the number†press release with “the biggest year for texts yet in the United Kingdom.†And I’m also sure we’ll hear the stories of texts taking hours to get through, network saturation at the centre of street parties, a log-jam of data and calls in networks that struggle to cope.
Make no bones, this is one of the biggest nights of the year for mobile messaging, certainly in the UK. Yes there has been localised pressure over the last months and years (case in point being the London Underground bombings) but this is both predictable, and nationwide (and I’m sure a wodge of international traffic in and out as well).
So do you design your network for the peak of the busiest night, or do you aim somewhere below that because the spare capacity isn’t needed for the other 354 days? My guess is probably the later, but knowing that the networks are constantly expanding, I suspect the capacity that is filled tonight would have easily coped with the traffic from last year, and capacity 12 months down the line would cope with tonight. This increase in bandwidth, capacity and handling goes on behind the scenes without the subscriber even realising, and for all that we complain about the big bad networks, take a moment to think just how many texts will get shuffled around tonight, even if there is a ten-fifteen minute delay on some of them.
Happy New Year!!!
Update: While coverage was spotty in Edinburgh, there were no real delays on voice - only took three rings to get through mobile to mobile at about ten past midnight. Txts seemed to flow freely, as they also did for Ewan McLeod. How did your messages get through?
by Ewan Spence
October 25, 2007 at 12:30 am · Filed under Devices, MMS, Events + Conferences, Podcasts, iPhone, Mobile Advertising, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Convergence, CTIA
The second day at CTIA IT and Entertainment 2007 in San Francisco, and Debi, Paul and I meet up at the end of the day to discuss the major issues as we see them. In this podcast, we’re talking about the resurgence of voice, but in applications; the new forms that mobile messaging could take; monetisation and making mobile payments; why aren’t we talking about MMS as the new message?; Microsoft’s $240 million dollar deal with Facebook; what that deal means for Google and their opening up of mobile; and a few points about hype.
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