iLoop Mobile, Inc.

The author of the article Why Randall Stross and the New York Times Don’t Get Wireless raises a number of valid and good points in defense of the wireless carriers and their role with in the mobile ecosystem, including  the fact that there is infrastructure to pay for SMS messaging, spectrum costs money, etc.  Randall had written an article the previous weak, What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting,  calling out the carrier on the fact that he perceived they were charging too much for text messaging when, per his research, the cost of test is bascially zero.  I believe the key message from this piece is that everyone that plays a hand in the mobile ecosystem and uses it for personal or commercial purposes should attempt to understand the demands and drivers from each player and each industry that is leveraging the incredibly powerful and important medium that is the mobile channel.

One trade group that is helping organize a mobile industry conversation is the Mobile Marketing Association (www.mmaglobal.com).  The MMA will be holding an event January 12 (http://www.mmaglobal.com/event/2009/01/12/day), “How to Cultivate A Successful Mobile Marketing Ecosystem,” which will bring members from every sphere of the mobile marketing ecosystem (http://www.mmaglobal.com/resources/mobile-marketing-ecosystem) together to have a conversation on how to understand, respect and respond to the needs of the industry players within each of the key spheres of the mobile ecosystem.   In addition, on January 13, the MMA will be holing its Consumer Best Practices Industry Forum (http://www.mmaglobal.com/event/2009/01/13/day) to encourage an open discussion on best practices around the use of the mobile channel for marketing and related commercial purposes.

It is only through vision and collaboration that we can get the most effective use and value out of the entire mobile ecosystem.  If you value the type of discussion that this article triggers, I encourage you to join the MMA, The Direct Marketing Association (www.the-dma.org) and/or related group pertinent to your industry and lend your voice in order to keep the conversation move forward.

January 5th, 2009 | Tags: Budgets, Consumer Best Practices, Mobile Marketing Assocation, New York Times, Text Messaging | Category: Best Practices, Mobile Channel, Mobile Marketing, Standards |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) (www.mmaglobal.com) released a new version of its Consumer Best Practices (www.mmaglobal.com/bestpractices.pdf ) Guidelines for Cross-Carrier Mobile Content Services in the U.S earlier this week. Updated twice annually, the guidelines have become the de facto standard for cross-carrier mobile content services, including text messaging, multi-media messaging, short code programs, mobile web and more.   The MMA reports that this release includes a number of updates:

• The Consumer Best Practices document received updates to several topics, including the following:
• Clarification of Terms & Conditions specifically for Web Print/Video
• Clarification of each carrier’s “Standard Rates May Apply” language
• Removing triple opt-in from premium IVR program
• Clarification on Alcohol & Tobacco marketing guidelines
• Adding new section providing update on MMS interoperability

If you’re intersted contributing to how mobile marketing is conducted, you should consider attending the MMA Consumer Best Practices meeting (http://www.mmaglobal.com/CBP-2009) that will be held January 13 in Denver.  This event provides the industry with the opportunity to comment on and contribute to the best practices in the United States.

December 31st, 2008 | Tags: Consumer Best Practices, MMA, Mobile Marketing, Regulations | Category: Best Practices, Standards |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

iLoop Mobile has recently integrated the iLoop Mobile mFinity mobile marketing platform with ePrize (www.eprize.com) and its sweepstakes prize engine.  ePrize is one of the industry’s leading online promotions marketing agencies.

iLoop Mobile mFinity Platform user can now run interactive SMS campaigns and produce mobile internet sites that are fully integrated with ePrize for sweepstakes management allowing participants to enter ePrize managed programs through their phone.  The iLoop Mobile/ePrize partnership and the integration of their respective offerings makes it easy for mFinity Platform user to add fully indemnified sweepstakes to any of the campaigns that  are currently running with iLoop Mobile as well as making it easy to add mobile to any of the sweepstakes you are running with ePrize.

How this works through mFinity
By adding direct access to ePrize from the mFinity Platform, enabling ePrize prizing is a simple configuration option with the mFinity Platform campaign services templates.  Campaign managers retain full control over the messaging and the campaign logic for their mobile programs.  This is valuable because they get to take advantage of the mFinity Platform core messaging campaigns such as quiz, poll, subscription services, and others and have prize services now integral to the user interaction.  For example, as a program participant interacts with an mFinity Platfrom/ePrize powered mobile program, e.g. a poll or quiz, can be automatically be entered into program’s sweepstakes or instant win element without any additional effort on their part or on the part of the campaign manager.

Integration with ePrize and related services

To configure a campaign on the mFinity Platform and have it interface with ePrize, or similar web service enabled application, a campaign manager simply needs to complete the service templates action field within a campaign service template on the mFinity Platform.  See the poll service template action field image above as an example.   Future enhancements of the service will enable direct selection of ePrize as a prize type so that campaign managers do not need to enter as much information when configuring the prizing.

The iLoop Mobile mFinity Platform is the industry’s most robust mobile imitative management solution and is now even that much more powerful now that it is integrated with ePrize.

December 19th, 2008 | Tags: ePrize, LinkedIn, mFinity Platfrom, Mobile Sweepstake | Category: Featued Service |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

As the evolution video sites has continued one of the features that has moved from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’ is the ability to interact with the site from a mobile device.  On sites such as YouTube the emphasis started with being able to view video on the mobile device and evolved to include the ability to upload directly from a mobile device as well.  On sites that are geared toward building mobile users into a social network like Mocospace, Treemo or Zannel the ability to upload video has been stressed from day one.  In both cases the process has become as simple as sending an email with a video attachment.

When you couple this ability to easily upload video with mobile devices that can shoot video you get an explosion of user-generated content.  This explosion of content can be seen by taking a quick tour through the video section of any mobile social network and as you might guess the results would not impress Steven Spielberg.

To some extent this can’t be helped.  Mobile cameras have lower quality lenses, no source for lighting and an inability to stabilize the picture just to name a few of the challenges.  Add to that the fact that the relatively unsophisticated encoding of the device and the further ‘tweaking’ that the mobile providers do to file as it passes through their networks and you have a recipe for disaster even when the base idea is pretty good.

Of course good reasons for bad video do not make the video any more palatable.  It is for this reason that the next area of focus in user generated mobile video will be toward helping the user make better video.  Slide and RockYou are just two of many companies that have already scored big wins in helping folks make better videos on their computer.  On the mobile frontier Mogreet and Beema are helping to boost the quality of user generated mobile content.

Mogreet helps solve the quality problem by building the video for you.  On their site users can choose one of many pre-produced video clips and send it to a mobile phone with a short text message to provide customization.  This method definitely solves the quality problem because the videos are animations are professionally done, well lit and properly encoded. However the list of things one can express through this medium are limited by the videos in the Mogreet database.

Beema tries to solve the problem by letting the user focus on the idea and the audio or script portion of their content while Beema handles the actual production of the video or animation.  With Beema’s service a user simply picks the character they would like animated from Beema’s rather large database of characters and then calls an 800 number to leave the audio track.  From there Beema’s system marries the audio to the character providing all of the lip syncing and head motion and renders it out to a well lit, stable and properly encoded file that is returned to the user’s mobile device (in partnership with iLoop Mobile) in seconds after the message has been left.

The character possibilities are not limited to the models in Beema’s database.  Users can send Beema a picture of their dog, newborn, World of Warcraft Character, Spores creature or anything else they can imagine and Beema will turn it into a model that only the user can animate with their phone calls.  People can even send a picture of themselves made up to perfection which solves another problem when discussing user generated mobile video…’what if I am having a bad hair day but want to send a video message’.  With a model built from one of your best photos you never have to worry about a bad hair day.

Distributing video as easy as sending an email.  Now creating video can be as easy as making a phone call.

December 17th, 2008 | Tags: Beema, Mobile Video | Category: Featued Service |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment