More and more market trends are lately released about the mobile industry.  First Erick Schonfeld reportet that the majority of cel phone industry profits are earned by Apple and Blackberry (RIM). Blackberry is leading the pack with increasing its market share up to 35 percent in 2009. Togehter with Apple 66 percent of industry profits will go to these two companies.

Another  post over at Seekingalpha show the latest innovations of the different companies:

Apple launching the Iphone 16 GB 3Gs and cuts the Original Iphone down to $99. Reported rumors speculate about a 4G Iphone and even an Apple Ipad

Qualcoom is another winner of the mobile revolution. Alone the Mirasol display technology will be a game changer.

Google apparently comes out with another G Phone and an updated version of Android

Sybase is the last player int he mobile revolution with it’s innovative cloud computing capabilities.

After looking at the Iphone flowers app the other day, I saw another app in the NYTimes, which falls under the same theme:

The Tree identification app, which allows to find leaves by matching them:

Still a prototype and financed by the National Science Foundation is this electronic field guide. Pretty damn cool. Cannot wait until someone comes up with a survival app, which allows everybody to go through the rainforest with a simple app

Pretty cool stuff!

I haven’t really followed much the innovative side of the mobile e-commerce industry even that I  know that
a ton of innovation is happening there.

An interesting case stuff was recently published by the MMA Global:

ECI, a part of the Bertelsmann Group (Randomhouse) was trying to sell more memberships through a mobile
channel. Book clubs are a huge business, since they usually  require a monthly subscription or a minimum active order of their memebers.

ECI’s  wanted to increase orders through their channel, retention of members as well as create some buzz around their brand.

Here’s what they tried:

-Quaterly automated SMS with specialized and personalized offers
-Complete SMS ordering channel
-SMS sweepstakes / contests with coupons

Results were amazing:
40.000 members participated in the sweepstakes / several thousand orders were placed by SMS each week.

Now say what you want. Mobile marketing is still untapped.

Not really something for father’s day, but I just saw a funny Iphone App called Flower Garden.
The idea of the app is pretty funny: It’s basically a garden simulator where you
start growing flowers and depending on your seeds, it’s easy or difficult. Seems
like the old-school Tamagotchi, which made it’s rounds through the world after being a huge success in Japan.
But that’s not enough. Once you successfully grow a flower, you can share the flower with someone you love plus add a personalized card. So for the Iphone addicts this might be a fun way to send a mother’s day gift. Would be interesting to see if the mother can make the flower go bad

The other day I was buying some stuff on Ebay, which resulted in the Ebay Feedback Email, which basically asked me to log into my Ebay account and then click on the feedback tab and then leave some commenet on a recent buy.

Sounds all great, but how many people are still interested in doing that? It’s way to time intensive, complicated and annoying. It’s just one of those emails, that go right in the trash folder of my Email program.

I am not a seller on Ebay (anymore), so I literally don’t care about ratings. The seller, like most Ebay sellers, already has 100.000+ positive ratings….so why even bother with an email?

Getting a unnecessary email shows me how little big web companies, such as Ebay, think about mobiles. It’s not really in their strategy. Ok….they probably run an Iphone app, but why not use an SMS Gateway, get the permission from your users and blast out a “Feedback SMS” which can be answered within 5 seconds.

Since my BB was too quiet  and the city is just too loud, I was looking into getting some in ear headphones, which would allow me to use the BB in New York, London, Berlin or wherever I am at and kill the noise around me.

First I checked out some Bose one’s, which look pretty cool (see image below), but the quality was not right, so I decided to spend a small fortune and get some high-performance one’s for a few hundred bucks. For me it’s really not about the brand and the looks, but about getting the right quality. Especially when it comes to putting sounds on the ears. I really don’t want to mess with that.

Check out the power of the AT one’s:

• Advanced electronics cancel up to 85% (20 dB) of background noise
• Advanced electronics cancel up to 85% (20 dB) of background noise
• Two-pin airline adapter connects to in-flight entertainment

vs.

Google announced the G2 and gave it away to 4000 developers at their I/O conference. It looks pretty solid to me and I really consider getting it since the apps on the blackberry are not really exciting and an Iphone without a keyboard are not really interesting to me.

A little offtopic, but the past few days I was looking at an Iphone / Itouch charger, so I finally can get that little gadget charged again. The entire process with charging my Itouch with a USB cable is just no fun and super time intensive.

I checked out a few cellular accessories stores on the web and there is so many different variations ( Wall charger / Car charger / Sync & Charger / Charger stations  and even Solar Chargers), that i got fed up and ordered a $4.95 charger at Ebay.

The solar chargers looked nice and I am usually for the environment, but $79 to get my Itouch refueld?
Sorry…not in my book

So long story short: If you need a charger for your Itouch/Iphone you don’t need to run to Apple and spend $30 for it.

I am PC

Interesting move from my friends over at Bango.com - They’ve helped to launch m.Ringtones.com. Bango, who besides a mobile analytics solution, runs a Wap payment system,  apparently powers their payment system. For the price of $9.99 a month the ringtones clients can download more than 35000 tracks.

Sounds pretty cool for people, who are into ringtons, which I believe is pretty much everybody besides me. Like Twitter, ringtones is something I never can really warm up with.

It probably has to do that I am way to shy to let my mobile ring with a “Susan Boyle” soundtrack in front of friends or colleagues. I am more into privacy, family and all the old-school stuff than sharing my life with the planet

That said…I wish the Bango guys good luck. They are doing an outstanding job with their mobile products….which is probably the reason why they are around for quite some time now.

Quick note: This weekend I will fix the QR Code generator and the blog design. I haven’t had a chance over the past 6 weeks, bit I’m ‘happy that we got this blog fully up and running again after Dreamhost messed us up. Some stuff is still a little stlow, but bear with me……it’ll be full speed up in no time.

Thanks for hanging in there….

Viooli admin