AIRscoot.co.uk

Has mBill turnkey mobile billing stopped trading?

Originally uploaded by Podknox.

It seems that after several emails and instant messages sent to mBill.biz I’m reduced to posting stuff like this in order to provoke some sort of a response. If you have any information as to whether mBill.biz is still trading or not please post a comment here. If you have any comments you wish to make about mBill and the service they have provided, please feel free to post a comment here. You’ll need to register before you can post a comment about mBill. Alternatively send an email to the address on the contact page.

Admob soon to break the 4 billions ads served mark!

Originally uploaded by Podknox.

Great stuff! If you have a high volume traffic mobile site and you’re knocking your head wondering how to monetise it, this could certainly cover your server costs! If you want to launch your new mobile internet / WAP site or are looking to generate users quickly for a service or application that you want to target specifically to a particular device or region there is no quicker way to do this, period!

My own little infoad for something I know is a good thing for the mobile internet. Now is the time to be using it to! If you don’t even have a mobile site to advertise your services you can even create mobile pages using Admob’s system to start generating leads like you wouldn’t believe! Far better than Google and tens times cheaper to run your ad campaigns!!

Has anybody thought about how many times a mobile user would be required to push his keypad just in order to enter the .mobi bit of any  url they were thinking about directing their mobile browser to? My brother points out on one of his Braingarden blog that it’s ten, yes TEN times!

I totally agree with him,. .wap would of been a more sensible option if this is something thats necessary. A simple 1927 on a mobile keypad.

Me thinks it’s all about domaineering and giving a boost to the domain market. They want to ride the mobile wave like everybody else!

According to FT.com, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Nokia and Vodafone is promoting “dotmobi” but others in the technology industry have voiced concerns. A senior lawyer at Verizon Communications, the second-largest US telecommunications group, said there was no “particular business need” for “dotmobi” and the company had only registered verizon.mobi to prevent others taking it.

I just came across an application provided by a company in Ireland called alatto which can be used by portals to keep users wishing to surf off-portal from leaving their portal. They’re marketing it as “A new direction in mobile browsing and service discovery” yeah..

It takes off-portal publishers mobile content and places it within the mobile pages of the portal which they serve out. Is it legal to render and serve publishers copyrighted content in this way? And is it legal to place Ads such as those provided by AdMob around this mobile content? Just questions that should be asked I think. I’d say I’m in the camp that thinks it’s illegal.

If you have an opinion or are an intelectual property rights lawyer specialising in mobile content maybe you would like to comment below. I know you’re out there!

It’s clever what they’re doing and I can imagine it could be fairly lucrative as regards Ad revenue, but I think anybody doing this could be risking potential litigation in the future. Especially from the larger blue chip media companies entering the mobile space these days.

New services in the podcasting sphere that take audio content (mp3) and re-encode for mobiles then stream out to users with audio ads spliced in have had to rethink things because of this. Content creators made them aware that they knew what was going on! And that it was possibly illegal to do it!

Licensing this type of application to operators that wish to keep users off-portal browsing within their portals may provide good revenue for the application developer but it still doesn’t get around the problem of serving other people’s content within the pages served without their permission. Operators will have to manage the off-portal content they let there users access by getting permission from off-portal content providers or have off-portal content providers submit content to them that by default they are not letting users get do. When this occurs we then get back into the realms of operators creating a walled garden for users. Operators back in 1999 were taken to court over the way in which users were obstructed from going off-portal and they lost. Anybody remember a company called fonedata and Simon Luttrell? We have him to thank in many ways for the UK market in WAP mobile off-portal content over the past 6 years, although it looks like they’re back to their old tricks!

TSSSSHHHHHH!

Any comments?

When I found the new service for Pod2Mob late last year ( must of been November or December 2005 ) I thought this was quite an innovation. It’s a service that enables mobile phone users to listen to podcasts that were previously unavailable to this huge amount of users. Contrary to popular belief it’s actually quite tricky to do!

I checked it out to see what is was about and soon found that one of my favourite podcasts the Daily Source Code was not available in their directory. In order to be able to list it in my favourites for listening on my Nokia N70 with a 3G connection I added the Daily Source Code to the directory. I also thought it may help promote what Adam Curry was doing with Podcasting. I thought it would be a good way to get it popping up on Adam Curry’s radar, I was sure listenening to how receptive he seemed to be to any new ideas he would jump at this oppertunity to open up podcasts to a very large new audience…… 3 or 4 months later it gets there and it doesn’t look like he’s best pleased? I thought he was all for people promoting podcasting in new ways.

Does it not make sense to be creating a way for podcasters to reach out to potentially the largest audience out there? May be there can be a way for this to work for everybody? It would certainly be nice if podcasters could approve the advertising segment preceding their podcast or pay a yearly registration fee for delivery to mobile without the advertising. May be Pod2Mob could create a management system that enabled this. If they’re working on a business model that could give the budding podcast producer a revenue share on the advertising segment it could prove to be a fairly useful way to cover some of their costs.

Anyway, we now all know how the DSC got on Pod2Mob’s directory. OOOOPs!! Well, I suppose the issue had to be addressed sometime!

Just checked my stats for the first month of running text advertising links on my mobile site Click4WAP and out of an inventry of over 1.5 million available advert displays, just over 500,000 were taken up running 20 seperate campaigns using AdMob’s new service. A very promising start, I think!

Of these MocoSpace where able to take over 250,000 impressions to promote their great new mobile chat community. With some very canny bidding on their advertising campaign’s slots and some well thought out text for their ads they where able to achieve conversion ratios several times better than traditional web adverts currently achieve.

Interested parties just register here to manage everything online. You also have access to the whole network of mobile WAP sites using the service. You can literally being sending users to your mobile site in less than 10 minutes time from now if you want!

Started running mobile text Ads on my mobile site Click4WAP, I can say that things are looking promising. Using the very simple to setup system created by AdMob.com, advertisers are able to manage their own text link campaigns on my site and others. There are many advantages to this system for advertisers. They can target Ads to specific devices, carriers and geographical regions among other things. Also, advertisers only pay per click thru to their mobile site or advertising page that they can create online.

MobHappy have an interesting article here that compares where marketing professionals intend to be spending their advertising budgets in the next year or so.

Interesting to see how this pans out….