Archive for Studies + Research
by Imran Ali
June 10, 2008 at 11:40 am · Filed under Studies + Research, Ethnography, Research
We last visited the emerging discipline of Reality Mining towards the end of 2007, in an examination of the work of MIT’s Nathan Eagle’s analysis of the usage patterns and movements of mobile users.
In the last few days there have been a pair of interesting developments in the field. Firstly, a report from the BBC on a large scale study by Albert-László Barabási at Boston’s Northeastern University and secondly, the launch of Sense Network’s Citysense.
Barabási’s work is notable as the author of the seminal book Linked, exploring the science of human networks. Over the course of six months Barabási’s study followed 100′000 individuals randomly selected and anonymised European mobile users. Their calling and messaging habits were logged along with their location, revealing that most people tend to move within 5-10km ranges throughout the course of their day-to-day lives, generally between the same sets of several locations.
Understanding that clusters of people behave similarly has useful implications for analysing traffic and disease control as well as enabling a new generation of commuter information services and criminal intelligence.
Separately, the launch of Citysense is interesting in that it’s perhaps the highest profile, commercial reality mining service currently available. Currently, available only in San Francisco, the service assists users in discovering social hotspots around the city, answering the question - “Where is everybody?”.
Taking in realtime reality-mined data, Citysense utilises public data from Google and Yelp to surface vanues and events and render them on ‘heat-map’ of the city.
As more mobile usage data becomes available to developers and privacy models evolve to help users control their presence, the emerging field of reality mining is set to unlock the real value of mobility and ubiquitous connectivity.
by Darla Mack
June 4, 2008 at 2:19 am · Filed under Studies + Research, Usage + Usability, mobile data statistics, Facebook, Research, Mobile Research, Social Networking, M:Metrics
In a release published by M:Metrics last month, a study shows that the American population spends over 4.5 hours browsing on their smartphones.
Looking at the trend it seems the most popular site visited by US users was Craigslist. To me, that’s surprising… then again I’m not a big Craigslist user. UK consumers favored Facebook, which was also another site visited by US consumers.
What is interesting is the time spent browsing. According to the data collected in March, US users spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes out of the month browsing Craigslist, while UK users spent an average of 1 hour and 45 minutes of their time browsing Facebook.
Not to take away from web browsing, but I hope developers are paying some attention to these trends. This would be the opportunity to create dedicated applications instead of having to rely on the browsers themselves. I know I’ve become a happy person since the Ebay application came out.
“People are becoming increasingly engaged in the mobile medium,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89 percent year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent. Consumption is quickly evolving from brief transactions, such as checking the weather or flight status, to time-intensive interaction with mobile Web sites—even without an iPhone.”
by Russell Shaw
February 19, 2008 at 7:23 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Studies + Research, Messaging
As I’ve already pointed out, today, the Mozilla Foundation announced Mozilla Messaging, a new open source initiative largely aimed at bringing greater collaborative functionality to the Firefox email counterpart known as Thunderbird.
A significantly expanded Thunderbird is pretty close to the hert of Mozilla Messaging. The newest Thunderbird will be known as Thunderbird 3.
Comments made today on the blog of Mozilla Messaging’s CEO David Ascher point to increased SMS funtionality
David writes in part (bold face is mine):
It is worthwhile considering what the right user experience could be for someone using multiple email addresses, multiple instant messaging systems, IRC, reading and writing on blogs, using VoIP, SMS, and the like. What parts of those interactions make sense to integrate, and where?
I don’t believe that stuffing all of those communication models inside of one application is the right answer. But the walled gardens that we’re faced with today aren’t the right answer either. There is room for innovation and progress here, and we need to facilitate it.
In other words, when it comes to SMS via Thunderbird- the Mozilla Foundation is thinking about it.
by Imran Ali
December 27, 2007 at 4:28 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, Studies + Research, On Blogs and Blogging, Ethnography, Communication, Convergence, Email
In the last couple of weeks, the various contributors to Mobile Messaging 2.0 have been holding an open debate on what the definition of a mobile message should be; with some insightful and thought provoking contributions from Debi, Darla, Ewan, Paul and Russell…almost the entire team!
From my own perspective as a user, cognitively, I don’t think I’ve ever made distinctions between mobile messaging or ‘fixed’ messaging. In fact the means of transmission is pretty much meaningless to me, with a focus on where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m talking about and with whom I’m communicating.
Every day I expect 100-150 incoming emails, around a 1000 blogposts at Bloglines, maybe 50-75 Twitters, an average of 5 voice calls, 5-10 Facebook messages and the odd notification from a blog comment, Facebook event, YouTube, Upcoming, Last.fm or eBay. Every now and again, I might even receive an MMS!
They’re all just messages - some land in my mailbox, others in various web application inboxes, some on my mobile phone. I might see a Facebook notification email arrive in my N95’s inbox and reply using the mobile web UI for Facebook. I may receive a direct Twitter on my phone as an SMS and reply using Twitterific on my Mac. Sometimes I wander around the house firing off replies from an iPod touch.
Conversations and communications start in one application, end in another and meander through various fixed and mobile networks…it’s all communication, driven by context and situation.
Perhaps there’s a meta-question we need to address collectively. Rather than exploring definition of mobile messaging, we perhaps need to understand why this definition is important. Are we more interested in the mobile portions of a conversation’s journey or in the multi-modal nature of that conversation?
I would argue that the latter question is perhaps more significant, simply because this is an area in which the industry lacks knowledge. Classifying messages by network or device is relatively easy to comprehend, but doesn’t reflect the reality of usage most of us now experience.
We can perhaps learn much more about the design and usage of communication by delving deep into the motivations we have when switching contexts between services, devices, location, time and relationship…
by Imran Ali
December 26, 2007 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, Studies + Research, Usage + Usability, Events + Conferences, iPhone, Twitter, Video Conferencing, Openmoko, Communication, Voice, Research
With the sad cancellation of O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conferences, it seemed that the unique melting pot of traditional telcos, cellcos and bleeding-edge disruptive innovators, hackers and entrepreneurs would dissipate.
Thanks to the efforts of one of the former ETel advisory board members, Lee Dryburgh, the unique conversation between these communities will move beyond telephony into ‘communication’ in all its forms - social media, telephony, ethnographics and - of course - mobility.
Lee is hosting the inaugural Emerging Communications 2008, conference next Spring in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. The conference wil also be accompanied by an unconference day, providing a mix of traditional conferences with the energy of a parallel BarCamp-style event.
Though the lineup isn’t finalised yet, there are some interesting speakers lined up already, including sessions on Building Twitter from Blaine Cook, Emerging & Usage Patterns from Intel’s Dawn Nafus, OpenMoko’s Michael Shiloh and thought leaders such as Norman Lewis and Sheldon Renan.
One of the underlying implicit themes from the current programme of speakers seems to be the potential in the intersection of telephony and social networks - issues which speak to the future of mobile messaging, a topic covered by MM2.0 contributors just recently.
Though not focussed exclusively on the mobile industry, eComm 2008 promises to surface some interesting directions for messaging and communication. As such it’s a community that we need to watch closely, listening for the weak signals that’ll give clues as to what happens next in the industry…
{ Disclosure: I’m a member of the voluntary eComm 2008 advisory board. }
by Russell Shaw
November 30, 2007 at 10:27 am · Filed under SMS, Studies + Research, News, mobile data statistics, Instant Messaging, Messaging
According to an M: Metrics Survey released earlier this week, 44.10% of U.S. cell users sent a text message over the three-month period ending September 30.
That three-month moving average climbed 2.20% over the previous three month calculation. That would have been June-August.
What’s even more interesting, as gleaned from the facts in the canvass (reproduced in screencap at the top of this post)
Texting is more than six times as popular as mobile IM (7.00% of users) which I take to mean using one or more of those popular IM programs on your handset. So we’d rather text than IM.
Texting is more than four times as popular as sending emails via your phone (9.50%). No surprise there, since composing an actual email message on a cell can be a kludgy process. Plus, why take the time to compose an email if all you want to do is write a few words? Isn’t that easier to do via text?
Is mobile gaming declining? Check the chart. Downloads of mobile games are the only category that’s down. Although I’d have to see more of an ongoing pattern to draw a conclusion, it does appear to me that the market could be temporarily saturated. Mobile gamers have all the games (pre-loaded and chosen) that they want for now, and not a lot of new mobile gamers are being added to the mix.
Maybe both groups are waiting for more common 3G?
by Imran Ali
November 5, 2007 at 11:27 am · Filed under SMS, Studies + Research, Ethnography, Communication, Thumbs, UK
The UK’s Mobile Data Association has just announced that Britons are sending around 1.2 billion messages a week…that’s 25% growth over the previous year! Bundling, ethnographics, B2C messaging and increased enterprise usage are noted as the underlying factors.
Let’s say at an average prices of 5p/message, UK mobile operators would be collectively hauling in just under a quarter of a billion pounds each month!
It’s a crude statistic, but also underlines the inertia in opening up mobility. Why worry about making decisions about developer programmes, open source, unlocked handsets and the like when you can essentially wait it out. Time favours the telcos…
To quote Rainier Wolfcastle…
Jay Sherman: how do you sleep at night?
Rainier: On top of a pile of money, with many beautiful women.
by Nancy Broden
August 22, 2007 at 1:55 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Studies + Research, Mobile Advertising, voice search
Scott Weiss’ Usable Products Company today released the results of their independent user experience benchmark on mobile search. Four mobile search solutions - 3 text-based and 1 voice-based - were tested with 80 participants: InfoSpace WAP, JumpTap Java (Alltel Axcess Search), Nuance Voice Control and Yahoo! Go. The results surprised Weiss and his researchers, no doubt because advertising is generally perceived as an unavoidable evil in a Web-based experience and voice-based search offerings have had mixed results in the marketplace up to date:
Researchers were surprised that 79% of participants favored advertising-supported mobile search, and 37% felt that banner ads actually enhanced the mobile search experience…
Also unexpected was that participants initially predicted voice search would be the most difficult to use but after an hour of usage gave it higher ratings than text search. [Weiss remarked], ‘Users predicted voice search would be the worst of the four search products, but in final usability, it performed much better than expected. We were surprised that participants enjoyed voice search, and how much more they liked it than search via phone keypad.’”
Despite these findings, the overall success rate in finding relevant results was a mere 53% and none of the search solutions tested proved the clear winner.
Unlike Weiss, I am not surprised by the results of his study. Voice is the logical solution for mobile search, given how clumsy most of us are on the keypad of our handsets. There are many players entering the market but Nuance’s technology has taken the lead, underpinning many mobile voice-based startups. Since it is best-of-breed in the field, it is not surprising that Weiss’ participants enjoyed using it to perform mobile searches.
As for advertising, the results do appear to fly in the face of common sense. Given the focused, task-oriented nature of mobile phone usage one would expect the presence of advertising to be more of an annoyance than in a Web-based context. But the mobile context allows for more precise targeting since much more data is available about the individual, including their location which is usually the most pertinent piece of information when on the go. Advertising becomes relevant, and when it’s relevant it isn’t a annoyance - it’s an improvement.
Weiss’ findings bode well for voice- and advertising-based offerings coming to market, such as the advertising-funded mobile virtual network operator Blyk, whose business proposition I wrote about back in May.
by Chetan Sharma
August 22, 2007 at 9:33 am · Filed under Studies + Research
Last week we released some numbers on the US wireless market from 1H07. US wireless data market continued its impressive growth reaching $5.85B in service revenues for the quarter. Data and Voice ARPU increased 8% and 1% Quarter/Quarter (Q/Q) respectively.
Overall ARPU increased by $1.05 Q/Q to $53.62 due to strong data performance and stable voice ARPU. The untold story has been the surprising resiliency of Voice ARPU over the past 3 quarters. Data ARPU grew 8% from Q107 and 19% from Q406 to $9.04. As estimated in our Q107 update, Verizon overtook Sprint in data ARPU with a 13% increase from its Q107 numbers to $9.84 while Sprint’s data ARPU increased only by 5% to $9.75. AT&T’s data ARPU increased by 11% to $8.77 and T-Mobile’s 4% jump accounted for its $7.8 data ARPU for Q207.
The strongest growth continues to come from Verizon, accounting for almost 31% of industry’s data revenue in Q207. Its data service revenues jumped by 13% Q/Q to $1.8B. Verizon was followed by AT&T at $1.65B, Sprint at $1.2B, and T-Mobile at $613M.
Non-messaging data revenues continue to be in the 50-60% range for the US carriers. T-Mobile recorded $644M or 53% of its data revenues from non-messaging applications and services during 1H07.
Verizon recorded 10B TXT messages in June setting a record of messaging volume at a single carrier. For the quarter 28.3B TXT messages were sent on its network. AT&T recorded 18B TXT messages for the quarter.
GSM Association announced the 200 millionth 3G mobile subscription. As estimated in our widely referenced 2005 paper on 3G, 2007 is proving to be the inflection year for many western nations including the US where the penetration crossed 15% in Q2.
The worldwide markets continue to grow at an explosive pace reaching 3B subscriptions by Q207 up 13% from 2006 levels. Significant growth is coming from India and China with both countries registering close to 7M net adds on average in Q2. India recorded 7.34M net adds (its highest) in June. In Q3, China will cross the amazing 500M subscriptions mark which is more than the next two big markets (US and India) combined. India will cross the 200M mark in Q3 and will cross US in 2008. US will cross 250M by Q4. Overall, the world market is almost at 50% penetration.
More here.
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