Rant: Responsive Design vs. Mobile First

Not only are people behaving differently on mobiles than desktops, they’re also expecting different responses. eMarketer’s July 2012 Mobile Roundup notes that “the shift toward immediate ‘just in time’ information access means that marketers and content providers must meet demands for mobile-optimized content.”  Responsive design has been the answer so far to multimodal users seeking immediately relevant, actionable, utilizable content.

It’s considered by many as a great achievement in website development but if you want my take, responsive design is most often the euphemism for stretching production so that, at best, the website won’t look broken or just ugly on smartphones and other devices. I’d argue that when you don’t develop specifically for mobile, that is, when you try to take web and artifact it into mobile rather than the other way around, you fail to fully leverage the platform. In short, you fail to win. I expect a lot of TL:DR at this point, but stick with me to follow the argument.

State of Mobile Video-Research Round-Up

I’m speaking on the state of Mobile Video for marketers today on a panel at AppNation in San Francisco. I hope to have a video of the panel to share later this week and in the meantime, wanted to share some of the public sources–in addition to  custom data from syndicated research services–of information on this subject. When the only barrier to a market is speed we can have every confidence that Moore’s law will cure that issue.

Already Akamai reports Korea has the fastest Mobile internet connectivity averaging 17+mps speeds. As we heard from Jimmy Kim, CEO of Nexon in Korea, (19:19 timecode in video) “I have 70mbs dedicated to my home. When I come to the United States I go crazy looking for WiFi, dropped calls.” At these kind of speeds people know you’re lying when you say you got a dropped call. Imagine what that means to the richness of content available at that speed and higher. It means you can download an iPhone/Android screen optimized full-length movie in under 45 seconds. It means you can experience mid-core gaming with intense graphics and concurrent connectivity with others. It means a more satisfying, rich experience. And much, much more profitable as a result, btw.

Here are some the publicly available sources and if you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to invest an hour watching/listening to Mary Meeker’s overview presentation below:

• Akamai State of the Internet Quarterly Report (registration required)
• Cisco Global Mobile Video Report from February 2011 (see below)
• Jason Spero’s “Time for Mobile is Now” preso from Google’s Think Mobile event
• Rhythm New Media’s Mobile Video Advertising Report (Q2 2010)
• Bertram Gugel’s “Mobile Video” overview (2010)
• Chris Baraclough’s Telco2.0 2010 Mobile Video overview
• Amani Channel’s “State of Mobile Video” from a producer’s perspective

Embedable reports:

• Cisco Global Mobile Video Report:

• KPMG’s Mary Meeker’s report:

Watch Jason Spero, Mary Meeker and Matt Murphy share their insights and data on Mobile Video–well worth the hour to watch:

• Rhythm Newmedia’s Q2 2010 report

• Kevin Shatzkamer of Cisco’s Q&A on Mobile Video

• Chris Barraclough’s Telco2.0 Mobile Video Overview for Operators

Seen anything else that should be included? Please add your sources to the comments below.

Weekly Round-Up 10/18/10

Mobile

• The average 13- to 17-year-old sends and receives 3,339 texts a month—more than 100 per day–according to Nielsen. Also revealing: decline in mobile voice and surge in popularity of text messaging across all demos.
• Starbucks launches 1^st major LBS campaign using SMS – not just for smartphones, no app required

Social Media

• Social Media now more popular than E-mail on mobile devices – not entirely shocking news as we all want, and need at times, instant gratification
• Interesting article on a Web 1.0 metric, according to Fast Company Twitter beating Facebook’s click-through rate – report
• Involver closes $8 million Series C for its social media marketing platform
• Causes Raises Another $9 Million To Help Spread Philanthropy Online

Facebook

• The battle for the social web – Facebook enlists Bing in another round against Google

Social Gaming

• McDonald’s bets the Farm(ville) on social – a first-of-its-kind campaign for the brand

Real-Time

• Oakley scores est $14m in paid media value for real-time Chile miner pr/mktg coup

Google

• Google’s financial homerun silences fears of erosion of ad revenue to Facebook
• Google stepping up local – Marissa Mayer checks in to new location and local role within company

Quotable–tweet of the week:

“Old Spice campaign has jumped the horse. (vid)” via @danielstein

Interview: Ken Willner, Zumobi CEO

This week we caught up with Ken Willner, CEO of Zumobi, at the AppNation conference. Zumobi builds mobile apps for media companies and marketers and also have built an ad network for in-App advertising. Ken’s got a great perspective earned from 15-years agency-side then in the senior marketing role at AT&T before taking up his current role. With millions of uniques a month over a wide variety of apps, we pressed Ken for some thoughts on what they’re seeing in the space. Here’s the interview:

Highlights:

• How important Moms are in Apps category. Huge demand for creating content for that category
• Smart-phone discussion: iPhone/iOS is still winning, but Android coming up fast
• Two platform development simplicity part of what’s driving the market, but it’s been catalyzed by Apple–vertical integration of software, device, vision, etc. to create model that others can then replicate

What are you seeing out there? Either/or or And when it comes to Apps and device preferences?

Mobile OS Numbers for August 2010

In his keynote speech at the Apple fall event Steve Jobs talked about Apple iOS  adding 230,000 new installs per day–the highest of all when ignoring updates he things.  Reacting to the multiplayer game demonstrated on stage, Jobs leaned forward and said “it’s on a phone,” capturing the delight of what the combination of Appstore plus hardware features– retina scan, accelerometer, gyro, mutli-touch, wireless, etc.–and iOS advances such as multiplayer gaming, genius, ping and wifi support for monitors (via AppleTV) and printing bring to the device formerly known as your phone. It’s not one but all of these innovations and features that define why they lead. So, expect the continue march of Android and also expect the continued dominance of the mac iOS. FWIW, I’m Android by phone and iPad, iPod, OS, etc. by wifi/mifi so that I can exploit both platforms. With a host of new Android/Froyo Tablets set to launch, I’ll have the choice to park my carrier with any device while still getting the strengths of each platform. Leads to an interesting question–is the OS driving your carrier selection still? IMHO, it won’t in 6-months to 1 year unless carriers can bring some value to the table.

Dimensionalizing Mobile

Via @bradmays and created by @sparxoo

We Lose Mobile in 10-years

Had an opportunity to catch up with Michael Becker, Managing Director, MMA North America–you can find him on Twitter @Mobiledirect–during the Pepsico10 conference on July 28th. This is one of a series of post from that event. In our interview we covered a variety of marketing areas for Mobile including statistics, growth, case studies and check-ins/geo-local. In response to a question about if we’ll be talking “Mobile” in 10 years, Michael believes that the term goes away and it just becomes a core piece of marketing.

iPhone Was Just The Start: Peek at Android Device

VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra delivered an Android demonstration during his keynote at Google I/O conference today at the SF Moscone Convention Center. There’s a fair amount of flattery to the Apple iPhone/iTouch user interface and definitely signals progress for handset makers, content providers/media and perhaps carriers. My verdict’s out on the carriers as their data plans make little sense to the consumer, add little value (not much benefit over wifi) and feel short-term–lots of dislocation potential within these technologies demonstrated today.

And a quick demo of “streets” view–check out what happens when he flips it into compass mode. Location based content gets a big boost when this becomes the expected consumer outcome.

More on the Andriod platform here: