blog.msurveys.com

From Contact Center Today, via Smart Mobs:

The VoIP software firm Skype has reached an agreement with U.S. telecom firm Motorola that should help it to increase its penetration of the wireless market.

The Luxembourg company plans to load Skype software onto some Motorola Wi-Fi or third-generation mobile phones in the future.

This would enable mobile subscribers to make free national calls and cheap international calls by using the internet to carry calls, rather than standard mobile networks.

Motorola and Skype will first of all comarket products such as Bluetooth, or wireless, equipment, before introducing handsets with preinstalled software.

A Finnish research study concludes:

PEAR-research project (Personalized Mobile Advertising Services), coordinated by the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Oulu, Finland, investigated the willingness of Finnish consumers to receive mobile marketing such as discounts coupons and information in the form of text messages (SMS). Based on over 20,000 responses recorded in the research, it can be concluded that consumers are ready to receive mobile marketing: above 80 % of the respondents expressed their acceptance towards mobile marketing.


The research was itself done through SMS, and "although the SMS questionnaires were somewhat time-consuming to answer (around 5-15 min), the accuraty of the responses surprised the researchers, as did the average age of the respondents (approx. 40 yrs)."

A great article by Justin Pearse over at TheFeature:

The UK's Channel 4, Virgin Radio and Capital FM have all separately announced ventures offering essentially the same concept: their media sales teams are now to offer advertisers and agencies the ability to have an SMS response mechanism within their standard TV or radio ads. So, for instance, an advert for a Nivea beauty product encouraged listeners to text 'nivea' to an SMS shortcode number to receive a free sample.

This functionality is of course not new. SMS has been used to respond to ads on other media for the last few years, but the formalised way in which it is now being offered is new. This formal stamp of approval is an important step, industry insiders believe, in driving uptake of mobile marketing -- and, interestingly, of mobile content, as the reward for interacting with ads is increasingly a WAP push message driving recipients to the mobile Internet.


Full article under the link above.

In the last couple of days, two separate pieces that dare speak the WAP word...

Howard Rheingold talks to LunarStorm founder Rickard Ericsson at The Feature

Russell Buckley mentions Levi's upcoming WAP campaign at The Mobile Technology Weblog

Some interesting thoughts/speculation about Skype replacing SMS by Stuart Henshall on his blog. I'll neeed to have a look at the SkypeVM beta now...

Having said this, I can't imagine SMS being replaced by anything anytime soon, and Symbian phones will remain a small minority, especially among those mobile phone users that probably make up the vast majority of SMS traffic (i.e. teenagers/ the younger demographic in general).

Yahoo! Local now lets you send your search results to your phone via SMS. (Note that Yahoo! Local is currently available in the US only).