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Communities Dominate Brands

Business and marketing challenges for the 21st century

Mobile advergaming from Shanghai: Puma F1 Racing GameYesterday

Yeah, gotta mention this, even only for its Formula One connection, ha-ha, but this is actually a very clever and comprehensive engagement marketing campaging by Puma. It was reported at MobAd News.

Puma, the running shoes brand, set up a racing game for mobile that coincided with the Shanghai F1 race this past autumn. First cool gimmick the race track is in the shape of the puma logo - you know the jumping wild cat, with the tail extended. Better yet, it was a multiplayer game, allowing four gamers to race against each other on this track.

The advergame included rewards for success, so top 3 best scores each week would win Puma merchandise. But also those who were most active in spreading the advergame virally, were rewarded with Puma merchandise.

The game featured a good tie-in with the bricks-and-mortar stores, by creating "footfall" ie visitors to stores. There are 350 authorized Puma dealers in China. Each person who downloaded the game, received as a bonus, a coupon delivered via MMS that offered them a free item of mobile content, if they visited one of the authorized stores. And yes, of course, they included the store-finder part to the service including a map etc.

The game was called F-Wan which sounds a lot like "F1" ie Formula One, but also in Chinese it means "play". So this was Puma's "Play" campaign.

It has "communities dominate" all over it. It is gaming, it is cleverl

Cameraphone resolutions growingJanuary 5

Just a quick observation. First, obviously, just having more megapixels does not a good camera make, so please all readers, lets not get into that debate. But there is certainly the chance for better pictures as they squeeze more pixels onto the image. And I've done a survey of the new phone models in the UK each year near Christmas time, and in 2006, the most common camera type on new cameraphones had a resolution of 1 megapixel with about three out of ten new cameraphones having that type of camera. In 2007, the most common camera resolution was 2 megapixel, and in 2008, yes, the most common camera resolution in new cameraphones in Britain, was 3 megapixel. Each year roughly 3 out of 10 new cameraphones were of the most common resulution. So if this holds, probably next year around Christmas time, the most common cameraphone resolution will be 5 megapixel.

The critical mass of technologyDecember 31 2008

Wired lists 6 key technologies that have truly arrived or are indeed arriving that will be part of the continual process of transformation of our networked society

These are

Identity Management

Few things carry more value than your digital identity, and yet most web users have only a tenuous grasp of it. That's because on the social web, identity is no longer just who you are. It's who you know, how you know them and how much you want them to know about you. On the web, your identity is explicitly tied to your relationships, both with your friends and with the websites you visit.

Three great technologies came to fruition this year to help you manage these complex interdependencies: OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.

HTML 5

One of the most important technologies on this list doesn't fully exist yet — HTML 5 — but in 2008, key features started to trickle out.

Lifestreaming

Sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Digsby serve as social-network-activity aggregators. They're like virtual

First review at Amazon of my sixth book, is very positiveDecember 28 2008

My newest book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media (subtitled Cellphone, cameraphone, iPhone, smartphone) was slow to appear at Amazon but is there now and picking up rapid sales. And now it has its first review already.

The book shows how mobile is different from the legacy six media channels like print, TV and the internet; and explains how to build successful services to mobile, and dedicates half the book to various forms of media content for mobile such as music, gaming, video, etc. The book includes several chapters on understanding customers and how society is adjusting to this newest media channel, and there are 16 case studies from Flirtomatic in the UK to the Cameraphone Dictionary in Japan. Like all of my books, it is peppered with the latest statistics and the real world examples have a global reach covering over 40 countries.

I am so happy to discover that the first reader review is posted already on Amazon, by the famed industry analyst, statistician and blogger - and multiple author whose own latest book is Wireless Broadband - Chetan Sharma. This is what Chetan wrote:

Tomi is a great spokesperson for the mobile industry and this book reflects that. Building his case step-by-step, he puts forth the case for mobile as a compelling mass media channel detailing the evolution of media itself and how mobile differs, enhances, and excels. For folks looking to become familiar with the intricacies,

Digging deeper on Nokia being biggest computer maker, lets compare smartphones to older computersDecember 28 2008

So I did a lot more thinking about the computer. This is a follow-up to the story that Nokia is now legitimately considered a computer maker, not for all phones, but for its smartphones (as is Apple for the iPhone, RIM for the Blackberry etc all smartphone makers).

And I reported that when smartphones are included in the total count of all computers sold in 2008, RIM becomes the seventh largest maker, ahead of Toshiba who invented the laptop; Apple jumps ahead on the charts past several "pure PC makers" due to its iPhone and iPod Touch, to fourth biggest computer maker, but the biggest, is no longer Dell or HP, it is now Nokia, purely by the volume of how many smartphones it sells.

I've engaged in a good discussion over at Forum Oxford about how fair it is to consider a smartphone a computer today, in 2008, and there is dissent over there, but a lot of acceptance. Its hardly a "neutral" environment for such expert views, however, being a mobile related group, who are more prone to accept mobile related views..

So I put a comparison of five types of computers, by generations if you will (this is not the same classification as the computer industry has, for they have more generations in the mainframe era for example. But I think this illustrates the trends well. Here is my summary as a table.