Friday: Mobile World Congress in Barcelona 2009 - Next big thing?

Next week the biggest telecom event of the year takes over Barcelona. We will be at the fair as usual networking and checking out what others are doing. If you haven't already then please contact us for a meeting.

This year we will look out for

• anything app-store related from Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, etc (big question is how they will succeed where e.g. Handango has previously failed)
• to what extent mobile content and services companies can continue to push advertisement based business model in the current climate
• what Sun has to say about the future of mobile Java (they have some kind of an announcement)
• mobile e-mail - can someone really offer a consumer e-mail service that is close to the experience of the Blackberry but without needing a special handset and mobile operator subscription. Momail is one very interesting company in this space!
  
• location based communities - Google just launched Altitude and there are about 50 other companies out there with similar services but is there anything truly disruptive? We are obviously biased as close partners to GeoMe but we think that GeoMe could be the answer!
  

See you at the fair!

Thursday: Golden Gekko launches DIY mobile applications service

Golden Gekko has just launched the alpha version of the Mobile Applications Wizard that allows anyone to create their own mobile brochure applications to respond to the growing appetite for useful and entertaining mobile applications on application stores across the globe. These iPhone-like apps, which can run on any kind of phone, are ideal for extending the reach of businesses of all sizes. The service enables the rapid, easy and cost efficient implementation of mobile applications across more than 2,000 different mobile devices including Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Linux Mobile, Android and essentially all Java enabled handsets.

Golden Gekko is now able to offer our clients the Mobile Applications Wizard, giving you the opportunity to create your own mobile applications, at minimal cost. The Wizard is used primarily to create impactful mobile brochures, which are similar in functionality to a PDF optimised for the mobile phone. Golden Gekko believes the service will be of particular interest to the SME market, owing to the relatively low costs involved. The service is easy to use and enables companies of all sizes to benefit from mobile marketing.

“We know that mobile brochures are a superior way of engaging with consumers, bringing brands to life and providing value-added services to customers that will meet their needs whilst providing entertainment,” says CEO Magnus Jern. “For time-pressured SMEs the ability to provide their customers with mobile content is a powerful differentiator in a crowded and competitive market.”

Our clients testing out the service have already generated over 1 million downloads of the brochures proving that it will become an instant success!

For more information contact our sales team for a demonstration.

Thursday: Mobile revolutionises cooking

One of the most popular mobile products developed by Golden Gekko is the mobile cookbook first launched with Arla Foods in Sweden September 2007 and several other brands and markets since. A cookbook is absolutely perfect for the mobile phone as it is always when there when you need it in the foodstore, market, kitchen or when discussing food with friends.

The New York Times has a great article demonstrating just how the mobile is penetrating the kitchen with case studies from Kraft Foods (the iFood assistant), Grocery iQ, Jott, Eggy, etc.

Read more here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/dining/21tele.html?_r=2&ref=technology

Friday: Mobile visits Hamburg

This Friday Golden Gekko attended a conference in Hamburg with them theme "Opening New Markets For Innovative Services And Technologies" organised by Living Labs Global and the City of Barcelona. The purpose was to market Barcelona as great city for businesses in Media & ICT, Helthcare and Design. A quick summary of the conference is

• Sascha Haselmeyer, Managing Director of Living Labs Global made a great presentation about the underutilised opportunities in the mobile space across the world that can be summarised in the statement "the mobile services revolution has not even begun."
• Judith Romera, Manager of International Economic Relations, Economic Promotion Barcelona talked about all the amazing opportunities for businesses and people based in Barcelona. She reminded me of why we established Golden Gekko there in the first place.
• Jordi Sacristan, Marketing & Communication Director, 22@Barcelona gave a brief overview of the business area 22@Barcelona and the opportunities for startups as well as established companies to benefit from

In addition to this there was a great panel where angel investors, interim managers, entrepreneurs and city representatives came together to talk about starting up businesses.

As usual the best was saved for last, lunch... and networking networking. I had the chance to speak to a previously unknown competitor to our new mobile data collection tool, a film festival director, a food media company (a Taste of Media), a french-german social network builder, an angel investor, a mobile event ticket company (Matrix Solutions), a medical design company, a mobile car-pooling company (iCarYou), Öresund IT, a newly started mobile marketing agency (Weisher Mobile) and many many more.

Thanks a lot to the organisers! We look forward to the next event!

Friday: Mobile Applications - The Next Big Thing In Mobile Marketing?

Jim Cook at Mobiadnews interviewed Golden Gekko CEO Magnus Jern earlier this week about the mobile application trend. Here's the full article or http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=3172

Other than giving a great overall overview of mobile applications in marketing the article also highlights the Lynx campaign as a great mobile application making it even more famous!

Brands Love Mobile Apps

Moconews has a great article about how "Brands Love Mobile Apps" but also how there is a risk that the application stores get cluttered with so many apps that it becomes a problem.

http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-Mobile-Applications-A-Hit-With-Brands

This article highlights two trends:
1. The major consumer brands already investing in mobile are now all interested in launching mobile applications, particularly on the iPhone app-stores but also in other places
2. There are already over 10.000 iPhone applications on iTunes and 30.000 applications on Getjar and it is getting more and more difficult to stand out and make your app a hit. Even driving viral video views on Youtube is easier because there are more tools to cross-promote and of course the audience is so much larger.



Over 90% of these applications are however badly designed, full of bugs, not working across most devices and not very relevant or useful which means that there is no abundance of great applications that stand out. Download 10 random applications from the iPhone app-store or Getjar and I can assure you that you will experience this yourself.

The implication is fairly simple. There is an enormous demand for great applications so deliver great applications and you will generate attention, downloads, active users and hopefully meet your objectives!

More about how you deliver great mobile applications tomorrow!

3333 Mobile Devices

Less than one year after setting up a new phone database for the mobile websites and applications delivered by Golden Gekko on behalf of clients and partners the database has reached the magical number of 3333 unique phone models (e.g. Nokia N95, Nokia N96, Blackberry 8310, Sony-Ericsson W810 and so on).


Is this a milestone? Not really but it does show the complexity of delivering mobile applications and sites compared to the web. These 3333 phones each have a unique specification including user agent, screen resolution, application size (jar size), Java JSR support, Java exceptions, browser type, image support and lots of other variables that have to be checked when a site or application is rendered on the device.

How many unique mobile internet enabled phones are there then? Across the globe people estimate at least 5000 (and growing) different phone models with mobile internet browser so we are still some way off to covering all of them. With the current growth in services using our platform we expect to be considerably closer by the end of 2009 but who knows how many it will be by then…

How Google chooses phones for development

Found this great video on Google Mobile's blog on how they choose phones for development and testing:



Fortunately for all of us I don't really think this is the method they use. If we get the time we will soon show you how we pick phones but in the meantime you are welcome to send us your best or worst guesses.

Wednesday & Happy New Year: Top 3 Challenges & Opportunities in 2009

It's the last day of 2008 and everybody is looking back at the year and making predictions for the year ahead. While others are are doing this we will look ahead and focus on the actions required to meet the challenges and opportunities in 2009. The current financial climate is the most talked about challenge with the most common advice being to buckle up and sit still until things improve. For mobile marketing and services we disagree. Even with a financial meltdown there are still great opportunities ahead and that by tackling the challenges highlighted here the mobile marketing industry and in particular Golden Gekko will continue with high two digit growth in 2009.

1. From awareness to transactions
One of the great advantages of the Internet is that there is a direct measurable path from driving awareness of a product (banners, videos, interactive websites, etc) to generating transactions whether it is for travel, physical goods on Amazon or a subscription for an online magazine. Although the mobile may not be able to compete with e-commerce it has another even greater advantage. With the mobile we can link advertising through any media (TV, Radio, Web, Print, etc) to transactions using mobile coupons and ticketing on the high-street. The technology is already available in e.g. 50.000+ retailers across the UK and over 80% of all food food retailers in Sweden but currently not being used due to lack of awareness among marketers and training. Let's quit talking about how difficult it is and just make it happen. I know we will!

Action in 2009: Join together to make mobile transactions happen on a mass market scale across Europe.

2. Stop talking about measurements and start measuring
One of the key barriers to the success of mobile advertising highlighted by the industry in 2008 has been lack of standards for measuring. To tackle this the industry has set up various committees in the IAB, MMA and GSMA with the intention of establishing common metrics and standards. We think however that the attention to this issue is vastly overstated. The MMA has done a fantastic job establishing standards for mobile display advertising although additional improvements will be required over time. The challenges with mobile advertising metrics are almost exactly the same as for the Internet including targeting, impressions, click-through-rates, fraudulent behaviour, etc. Nor is the technology something unique or complicated. So, let's stop using metrics as an excuse for major brands and agencies not investing more money in mobile advertising and focus our energy on delivering great results and proving that they will generate great value with or without perfect metrics.

Action in 2009: Get on with it and deliver the ads, metrics and reports that the clients and partners are asking for.

3. Beyond the iPhone
2008 has certainly been the year of the iPhone and Golden Gekko has received at least one request for an iPhone application every day during the last couple of months despite the fact that the iPhone has limited reach and some major drawbacks in terms of functionality and more specifically distribution. The iPhone has been great for highlighting the need and opportunity for downloadable applications and the creative freedom that applications give brands, agencies and developers. The iPhone is however not the only phone that can deliver a great customer experience. Most of the 10.000+ iPhone applications available on iTunes could just as well have been delivered on the Nokia N95, Blackberry Bold, Samsung F480, Sony-Ericsson C905 or X1, Motorola RAZR2, LG Viewty, HTC Touch and of course the G1. The user experience on the iPhone is great with flashy graphics but the enabling technology for great mobile applications is available on almost any phone which means that mass market reach is possible today.

Action in 2009: Continue to develop great iPhone applications but also show that great applications and services can be delivered to almost any mobile phone enabling mass market reach today!


More challenges will follow as soon as we have tackled the ones above so expect a new top 3 list...

We look forward to a fantastic year for mobile marketing in 2009 and until then Happy New Year!

Golden Gekko

Monday: Key opportunities for mobile marketing in 2009 according to Mobile Marketer

The Mobile Marketer has a great article about the key opportunities for mobile marketing in 2009 looking sector by sector including retailers, car brands, media publishers, etc. The article is spot on in terms of highlighting the opportunities for brands and agencies to generate real bottom-line revenue through mobile marketing today.

For the full article visit: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/editorials/2328.html

Monday: Golden Gekko News Update

In the past couple of months we have launched lots of new exciting campaigns and partnerships. As a matter of fact Bena at Gomonews managed to announce some of them before we even did.

Here's just a few of them:

iPhone Chrimbell Application
Chrimbell turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a christmas bell. The project was delivered to Ogilvy as there Christmas greeting card. You cand find it by searching for "chrimbell" on iTunes or by visiting http://tinyurl.com/6re6wa

iPhone Application Mockup Viewer
Golden Gekko has developed the iPhone Application Mockup Viewer that that enables us to deliver application mockups to clients in less than 24 hours. The service can also be used to produce customised slide shows.

Golden Gekko also provides a similar platform for all Java enabled mobile phones that has been used to produce more than 30 mockups for client demonstrations and user testing in 2008.

Contact us on sales@goldengekko.com for more information.

Disney Camp Rock
To promote the release of the movie Camp Rock II on DVD, Disney through Carat Mobile in Sweden asked Golden Gekko to produce a fun mobile application that turns almost any java enabled phone into a guitarr and music box. The application also includes wallpapers, ringtones and information about the movie. The app is available for free on http://camprock.golgek.mobi

Partnership with Tribal DDB
In September 2008 Tribal DDB partnered with Golden Gekko for mobile strategy development and production of mobile applications and sites. The partnership has already resulted in a couple
of undisclosed projects for Tribal DDB clients with a lot more to come.

Partnership with Nokia Interactive
In August 2008 Nokia Interactive (the mobile advertising unit of Nokia) partnered with Golden Gekko to support them with mobile website, application and widget development. The partnership has already resulted in over six projects including internal Nokia campaigns and external clients. More to follow about this in the new year.

Friday: Lynx campaign in the news

Mobiadnews has a great article and interview with Peter Sells at BBH about the Lynx campaign here.

http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=3061

iPhone SDK, Android and Symbian creating more fragmentation

With over 300 million iphone applications downloaded to date and 200m+ applications downloaded every month across all mobile platforms the mobile application market has never been more interesting. But it's not all good. Despite all the positive impact from the iPhone and Android in the last year this is also causing majors headaches for the mobile services industry. Fragmentation is constantly increasing with more OS (iPhone, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Moblin Linux, Blackberry, etc), mobile browsers (Opera, Safari, Chrome, etc), application standards (Java, iPhone SDK, Symbian, Android SDK, Brew, 5+ different widget standards, etc). This will increase technical complexity, time to market, costs and potentially kill the chances of the industry really taking off. Imagine having to developing different versions of every software program for Dell, HP, Lenova, Toshiba, Asus, etc.

Developing 4 different OS versions of an application is possible although costly for most mobile services companies. Mobile game developers have dealt with this issue for some time with porting and testing costs making up as much as 80% of the total budgets which is bearable but certainly not profitable. The even bigger challenge however is maintaining, upgrading and supporting 5 different OS versions of an application that is in need of constant change. Unless you are Google, Facebook, MySpace or another business with 100m+ users this is simple not an option if you want to have a profitable business.

What are the options then unless you have unlimited resources for mobile application development?

A) Browser based solution only
Stick to a browser based solution and do everything you can to optimise the service over time and leverage new functionality such as script languages on the devices where this is possible. The negative side of this is that the user experience is always a little bit slow and the design and interaction capabilities very limited. It will very seldom give the user a WOW experience.

B) Automatic porting tools to support all platforms
There are a various porting tools available for porting from Java to Brew, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android etc. These reduce the development efforts but not the optimising and Q&A work. However, they also substantially limit the use of native APIs and functionality across the platforms which means that the ported version is usually based on the most common denominator between the platforms, i.e. a bad compromise.

C) Java and iPhone versions
The only application development standard that works on a majority of handsets is Java Mobile Edition (J2ME). Java is currently available on over 90% of all devices in Europe, 80% in North America (includes packaging for Brew) and about 75% worldwide according to Strategy Analytics. The only multimedia enabled device that does not support Java today is the iPhone. Java definitely has its limitations but in terms of cost efficiency it is the only platform of choice.

In conclusion although the new platforms provide great new capabilities it is very unlikely that the development community will be able to support all of them. The decision on which platforms are used for development must be made on a case by case basis but in most instances Java is the only viable solution for downloadable applications in combination with standard XHTML for browser based services. Despite the competition from new and exciting platforms Java has a good chance to continue to be the platform of choice in the future.

We look forward to further debate on this subject!

Thursday: Best & Worse of the Mobile Web

Have you experienced a website that looks like this on your phone?

Check out the best and worst of the mobile web here by Mobithinking!

Direct link:
http://mobithinking.com/sites/mobithinking.com/files/mobiThinking_BestWorst.pdf

Monday: Almost Famous

Our Director of Business Development Michael Eriksson and Head of Sales in the UK Christine Linder presented at Digital Jam for Engine a couple of weeks ago. The presentation was captured on video and is now available on the web. The presentation provides a great introduction to mobile marketing using downloadable applications developed in Java or for the iPhone.

If you search for Golden Gekko on Youtube you'll find the videos but here are the links.

Episode 1:


Episode 2:


Episode 3:



With 25+ views so far they are not celebrities yet but please help them become famous!

Friday: Really famous

The Lynx FX campaign by BBH in partnership with Golden Gekko has now become so famous that there is even a celebrity video available on Youtube. The award winning campaign truly demonstrates what mobile marketing is all about. A must see!!!



Go to http://m.lynxeffect.com or http://www.lynxeffect.com to find out more!

Thursday: Good Ideas in Mobile

If you have a bit of time to spare on getting inspiration and some ideas on what might happen in mobile 2009 then watch the following video from the "Good Ideas" event in New York last week.

Watch here.

Url: http://www.psfk.com/2008/11/video-good-ideas-in-2009-in-mobile.html

Friday: Golden Gekko picks up three mobile marketing awards in San Diego

Mobile applications that help guys seduce women wins global award for best use of mobile marketing in mobile branding campaign 2008

14 November 2008: Golden Gekko, the leading mobile applications developer for creative marketing campaigns picked up three awards at the Mobile Marketing Awards in San Diego Thursday. The awards include Absolut Vodka in partnership with Great Works for best use of mobile marketing in a branding campaign in North America, Lynx Effect for BBH for best use of mobile marketing in a branding campaign in EMEA and Lynx Effect for best use of mobile marketing in a branding campaign globally.

- This shows that mobile marketing campaigns that go beyond text messaging and WAP-sites can have an amazing impact in terms on brand perception, said Magnus Jern. In both of the award winning campaigns it was the end-user that chose to engage with the brand rather than being pushed into it.

During the last year we’ve seen an explosive growth in downloads of mobile applications and widgets much thanks to the enhanced user experience in comparison to browser based mobile services. The trend has been boosted by the iPhone application store but also by Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry and Sony-Ericsson who all encourage developers to produce applications for their handsets and users to download “cool” applications. Golden Gekko was one of the early advocates of leveraging the application trend in branding campaigns and we now see that it’s paying off as millions of users are consuming mobile marketing applications in a similar way to watching youtube videos by major brands.

- The Lynx campaign is definitely our greatest success so far with the Absolut Drinks application as a close contender. We get calls from media agencies every week who ask if they can use them as industry best practice examples of how mobile marketing should be done, said Jimmy Nordbeck, Marketing Director and Co-founder.

Campaign: Lynx ‘get in there’ mobile tools
Agency: BBH
Client: Unilever/Lynx
Video available here: http://www.goldengekko.com/Videos/LynxEffect.mpg
Mobile site: http://m.lynxeffect.com
Launched in January 2008 for Lynx in the UK the campaign consists of a mobile website and 5 downloadable applications that help the men ‘get in there’ with the women including instruction videos. The campaign has been a massive success with hundreds of thousands of downloads, great viral distribution effect and most importantly, a massive positive response from the men who are now obviously much more successful in the mating game.


Campaign: Absolut Vodka Mobile Drinks
Agency: Great Works
Client: V&S/Absolut Vodka
Mobile site: http://m.absolut.com

The Absolut Drinks mobile campaign launched in the US October 2007 is available to download for free and includes 1000+ drink recipes, top lists of most popular drinks, random drinks, a home bar search function and videos with famous bartenders mixing drinks. The service was launched exclusively to registered members on absolutdrinks.com and had about 50.000 active users in the first 12 months.


For more information, please contact:
Jimmy Nordbeck
Marketing Director
Tel: + 46 708 20 58 00
Email: jn@goldengekko.com


About Golden Gekko
Golden Gekko is a leading international provider of mobile marketing solutions. The company develops award-winning mobile applications and services that run on billions of phones worldwide, including the iPhone. Golden Gekko has already delivered successful projects to leading global brands including Absolut Vodka, Accenture, Cadbury’s, Coca Cola, Novartis, Paramount, Perfetti, Sara Lee, Unilever and Vodafone. Golden Gekko has offices in the England, Sweden, Spain, Cambodia and US. Information about Golden Gekko and its services can be found at www.goldengekko.com

Monday: Golden Gekko in Mobile Entertainment Magazine

Here's an excerpt from the interview with Russel Buckley at Admob:

"...Some brands are already creating imaginative ad-funded mobile apps that really exploit mobile’s uniqueness across all handsets. Golden Gekko’s Lynx deodorant mobile app (part of BBH’s award winning campaign), gave its young male users a bunch of sound effects they could use to amuse women. Later, the brand launched a mobile app replicating the farting chipmunk – and an amazing 500,000 people downloaded it. See, downloads can be measured too. Golden Gekko also found that many consumers were happy to sideload these apps to their phones. This isn’t just a result of the App Store, although I suspect this factor will popularise the method even more. Having said that, I still believe it’s preferable to run ads on the mobile web: apps only have a place when you really can’t achieve the same effect from browsing. It’s still too early to say if the iPhone will be a long-term winner, or just a very important influencer of the market. But it’s certainly a major milestone in the fields of mobile advertising and search. Apple’s iPhone picks up where midinnings wristwatch ads left off... "

Our latest campaigns have further proven that we can achieve massive viral effect through community seeding. More about this to follow shortly...

Friday: Cippi gets even more famous

The Farting Chipmunk developed by Golden Gekko for Air Vigorsol on behalf of BBH is getting more and more famous. Earlier this week our Director of Marketing got interviewed by Metro, which is one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden and here's what they said.

http://www.metro.se/se/article/2008/11/04/12/1202-45/index.xml

Some of you won’t be able to read the article since it’s in Swedish but in summary the article says:
• Steve Jobs didn’t want a farting application in his iphone app store
• Golden Gekko developed a farting app for an Italian chewing gum brand anyway
• The farting chipmunk is now world famous with over half a million downloads
• Jimmy Nordbeck is now world famous for his association with farting chipmunks

More celebrity news to follow...