Davis ThinkingOn April 3, 1973 — exactly 40 years from today — Motorola employee Marty Cooper made the first mobile phone call.
Today, companies are increasingly turning to SMS or text messaging campaigns to improve the efficiency of their marketing and CRM communications, but when considering SMS, it is important to understand how to leverage it properly in enterprise environments so that common missteps can be avoided. Below I have outlined six of the most common questions companies have when considering SMS, and the simple answers to help overcome these hurdles.
Advertising for the Sprint brand, part of Sprint Nextel, has been featuring its next-generation 4G wireless network for a while now as Sprint rolls out the service in partnership with its Clearwire affiliate. The 4G network operates faster than the current 3G network. On Wednesday night, Sprint will begin to pull out as many stops as it can to give 4G a big splash as it brings out a cellphone from HTC, known as the Evo, that Sprint calls “the first 4G phone.”
Technology bloggers were riveted over the weekend as photos of what may be a yet unannounced next generation iPhone began circulating. Pictures of the device first appeared on the technology blog Engadget. And now the product itself has fallen into the hands of Gizmodo where it has been prodded and ripped apart as if it were little green aliens from another planet. Gizmodo editors are not saying how they acquired the device.
The world's biggest retailer wants to make sure consumers know it's staking a claim in the wireless war -- and it plans to tell them this week with a national ad campaign touting Walmart's Straight Talk service as a real money-saver. In a pair of ads by Interpublic Group of Cos.' Martin Agency, the retailer claims that if cellphone users switch to Straight Talk -- the wireless brand that retails exclusively at Walmart stores -- it "can add up to over $850 in saving a year."
Ever since Yahoo introduced its "It's y!ou" campaign last September, it seems like we've been getting "you-ed" up the wazoo in advertising. Granted, technology is having a customizable moment and the use of the y-word reflects this. But there's more than one layer of irony in multiple advertisers attempting to target millions of people with messages about their individuality.
Verizon and Motorola finally lifted the curtain on their new Droid Android phone yesterday. Make no mistake, this is Android’s flagship product, and the first phone that will pose a significant threat to Apple’s iPhone. And it will be available very soon, possibly as early as the end of this month. MobileCrunch has been tracking the phone, which has also been called the Tao or Sholes, for some time. Just about anyone who has come in contact with the phone can’t stop talking about it. And from what we hear, they have good reason.
I was being interviewed as an expert by an ad agency the other day to help them with their client project and started to talk about how you would choose to text message certain pieces of information rather than make a call to say them. I’m not too sure if I gave agency the sound-bite they were looking for but it got me thinking a little about how we reserve the use of different platforms for different types of communication and it’s understanding this that might help us work out how to manage our information overload and even tackle texting while driving. In my interview I said that you’d never phone someone to say where you were going to be. You would text it because it’s a piece of information that wants to be consumed quickly and possibly referred to later. It will also definitely reach the respondent. A telephone call takes much more time to make, records nothing and there’s a good chance the person at the other end might not pick up.
I notice these days that I can spend hours at my computer, in a cloud. A swampy blur of digital activity, smeared across various activities and media and software. Emailing, writing, tweeting, designing, browsing, taking calls, Skyping, Facebooking, RSS Feeding – all blurred into a single technological trance. I seem to switch randomly from one to the other. But actually is there a subtle hierarchy in this cloud? Do I prefer some distractions over others? I think so.
Skype's new owners — Silver Lake Partners, Marc Andreessen, and company — are getting a company valued at $2.75 billion (according to former owner eBay) with 405 million users. That's $6.79 per registered user, and a little over five times Skype's 2008 revenue of $511 million. Skype grew by 44% in 2008. So did the sale — in which eBay retains a 35% stake in the company — come cheap or dear? My guess is that the buyers got a good deal because the human voice is our most fundamental communication medium.
Google last month reserved 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, signaling that it may finally be ready to roll out its long-anticipated Google Voice service. The free service, announced in March, lets users unify their phone numbers, allowing them to have a single number through Google Voice that rings a call through to all their phones.
Samsung, for the release of a new phone with a built-in high-def camera, made a YouTube video that tricked the eyes of the people who watched it and encouraged viewers to figure out how the trick was done. The video was filmed using the phone to follow the narrator around his apartment where he describes the camera’s high-def features, suggesting there will be subtle clues in the video that will be noticeable because of the picture quality.
GPS doesn't just keep us from getting lost. From practical business applications to social-networking fun, it's transforming our lives.
I read last week that Sprint is in talks to outsource its network, and it kind of got me wondering what would be left if it did. A company name. A logo. A marketing budget. Everything else would get done by someone, or some thing else.
For all the ways that the Internet has transformed shopping, we still make most of our purchases in retail stores, just out of reach of the tide of consumer advice available online. Several new pieces of mobile phone software, however, are starting to transform the way we navigate through the aisles—and with a little improvement may revolutionize both how we shop and how we manage the many things we buy.
The iPhone has everyone scrambling to come up with their own killer device, and the latest efforts are coming from Microsoft, if recent reports popping up in the blogosphere are to be believed.
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