Mobile Marketing that Makes Sense!

New Website on the Way!

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to let all of you know that the cool guys over at Blitz Local are working on a new website design for me, and we are hoping to have it live soon. I am really excited about it because this one has been in a slight state of disrepair for some time now. Some of you have emailed to let me know that the RSS button is broken. If you would like to subscribe to the feed before the button is fixed, you can just add http://www.rank-mobile.com/blog/ to your feed reader, and it should be fine.

Thanks,

CK

Tags: Blitz Local, Mobile SEO, new website, RSS feed
Posted in Mobile SEO, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

RIM Unseats Apple in The NPD Group’s Latest Smartphone Ranking

Buy-one-get-one promotions helps RIM increase U.S. consumer market share in first quarter of 2009

PORT WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, May 4, 2009 – According to The NPD Group, a leader in wireless industry market research, an aggressive “buy-one-get-one” promotion by Verizon Wireless helped RIM’s BlackBerry Curve move past Apple’s iPhone to become the best-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S. in the first quarter (Q1) of 2009.  RIM’s consumer smartphone market share increased 15 percent to nearly 50 percent of the smartphone market in Q1 2009 versus the prior quarter, as Apple’s and Palm’s share both declined 10 percent each.

Based on U.S. consumer sales of smartphone handsets in NPD’s “Smartphone Market Update” report, the first-quarter 2009 ranking of the top-five best-selling smartphones is as follows:

1. RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models)
2. Apple iPhone 3G (all models)
3. RIM BlackBerry Storm
4. RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip)
5. T-Mobile G1

“Verizon Wireless’s aggressive marketing of the BlackBerry Storm and its buy-one-get-one BlackBerry promotion to its large customer base contributed to RIM capturing three of the top five positions,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at The NPD Group. “The more familiar, and less expensive, Curve benefited from these giveaways and was able to leapfrog the iPhone, due to its broader availability on the four major U.S. national carriers.”

Smartphones, which represented just 17 percent of handset sales volume in Q1 2008, now make up 23 percent of sales. “Even in this challenging economy, consumers are migrating toward Web-capable handsets and their supporting data plans to access more information and entertainment on the go.” Rubin said.

Tags: Black Berry Curve, BlackBerry, iPhone, RIM, US Mobile Handsets
Posted in General Mobile News & Tips, Integrated Mobile Marketing, Mobile SEO, Mobile Web Development | No Comments »

Opera Browser Turns 15

Unless you were really paying attention last week you may have missed this news, the Opera browser turned 15 years old. Most people don’t realize it, but the Norwegian company, Opera has been in the browser game for much longer than Safari, Chrome, FireFox or even Internet Exploere (just barely on that last one though). Opera now has three browsers available: Opera, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, and the PC browser actually just launched their 10.0a edition. In truth, Opera is pretty good for browsing on your traditional computer, it is most known for its mobile browsing capability.

Opera for the Traditional Computer:
Opera has yet to gain mass acceptance on the traditional computer; Only about 40 million PC have Opera installed, out of the one billion PC’s available, and even then, Opera is generally not the default browser. But even those numbers, reported by Opera may be a tad high. According to Wikipedia, as it stands in 2009, the Opera browser only takes up 0.7% of the market share, while Internet Explorer comes in at 67%, FireFox at 22%, Safari at 8% and Chrome at 1%.

The low market share is perplexing, because Opera has all the bells and whistles that FireFox, Chrome and Internet Explorer have and then some! Opera actually pioneered some features that have now become common-place in the browsing world; Things like tabbed browsing and continued sessions between browsing instances opening were actually first offered by Opera. Some of the things that make Opera stand out from the crowd include small screen rendering (SSR), geo-location, mouse gestures and voice commands.

Small Screen Rendering: The PC based version of Opera allows you to view any webpage as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone, with a simple click of the mouse. This gives webmasters the opportunity to quickly anticipate how their website will look when it is viewed on a mobile phone without additional software or excessive testing. Chasing down all the emulators and simulators that you might need to preview your site in a mobile environment can be time consuming: Most of what you need to know will be apparent when you view your site on Opera SSR.

Geo-Location: IP based geo-location is notoriously inaccurate, and can cost advertisers who are sending geo-targeted messages thousands of dollars, so Opera has found a better solution. In its most recent release, Opera offers a Geo-Location API that developers can work with to more accurately determine the location of the user based on whatever information is available including GPS location, triangulation of WiFi signals, or web services.

Opera has worked with the W3C to create a JavaScript protocol to retrieve the latitude and longitude of a browser when it retrieves a webpage. This API can be integrated with services across the web to improve the user experience and the relevance of the information that is being presented to them. Some users may balk at the potential privacy implications of this type of advancement, but believe the benefits will outweigh the risks, and web surfers and their mobile counter parts will learn to appreciate this type of browsing quickly.

Mouse Gestures: Opera helps simplify browsing by allowing you to control the experience without even having to click buttons in the browser tool bar. All you have to do is simply hold the right-click button down and make small movements and the browser will respond. If you move the mouse to the left, Opera will take you back a page, if you move the mouse to the right, Opera will take you forward a page. With mouse gestures, you can also minimize, restore and maximize windows, reload the page or open pages in new tabs.

Voice Commands: In Opera, you can talk to the browser, or it can talk to you. You can highlight text and press a button and the browser will read it to you without any additional downloads or plug ins, which is cool, but not ground breaking. The cool thing is being able to tell your browser to do things like re-load a page, go back, go forward, log-in, go to your home page or toggle between tabs.

The one real downside, which is understandable but still annoying, is that you have to press a button for Opera to begin listening, so it is not totally hands free. This voice capability is exciting, but I am really waiting for the day when I can yell at my computer from across the room, and have it do something!
Opera was actually written from the ground-up to handle poorly coded websites; With that it min, it offers developers a lot of tools to test live a websites’ elegant degradation/progressive enhancement capabilities. Without additional plugins, the browser lets you disable or enable frames, animations, JavaScript, images and cookies, and has for quite some time (like, since 1994 in some cases!)

Mobile-Only Offerings:
In the mobile world, Opera can be found on 120 million handsets worldwide and boasts faster download speed and better security than the other mobile browsers. When the iPhone launched, Opera quickly fell from the number three mobile browser to number four. Mobile Safari is now the top mobile browser in the United States, and second most common mobile browser in the world after Nokia’s browsers.

Much like Mobile Safari, Opera mini displays web pages on mobile phones, just as they would appear on a traditional computer, and it even allows you to zoom in and out of the page (without the silly pinching motions!) All of the major handset manufactures an most carriers have phones that ship with Opera Mobile or Opera Mini pre-installed. If you are shopping for phones, you might see an Opera browser on the HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Pro or the Samsung Omnia and if you are out shopping for other things, you might notice that Opera is embedded in popular gaming devices, such as the Nientendo DSi and the Nientendo Wii.
Many of the cool offerings that Opera provides on their traditional browser transfer to their mobile offerings too, though frequently not as seamlessly as you might hope. While there are definitely bugs to work out, I often believe that Opera has not been given enough credit for its innovation and creativity. Despite what some of the detractors would have you believe, I think that Opera is poised for tremendous success in the mobile browser game in the coming years, and potentially some of that may even transfer back to the traditional browser acceptance. Either way, I say with all sincerity, happy birthday Opera!

Tags: Mobile Browser, Mobile SEO, Opera
Posted in General Mobile News & Tips, Mobile SEO | 1 Comment »