Good news circulated amongst my team this morning – our mobile site has been ranked #1 in the UK (again) and the market for what we do is growing tremendously. Sure Google are close on our tail, but I’m hoping we can keep our competitive edge with some of the plans we’ve got up our sleeve.
This new marketing trail for our News service has just launched, hopefully raising awareness and usage of our service. I think it’s great and am hoping it will be successful.
I think the growth in usage is the most exciting part of this morning’s news though. Christmas is coming and with new devices sure to be under alot of Christmas trees, I don’t think this is the last time that we’ll see this type of growth. iPhones, G1s, Blackberry Storms, etc are out there and are finally devices that are ready to take mobile web browsing mainstream.
“Freaky” and “creepy” are two words being used to describe Bongo – a new SMS-based information service that’s been launched in the UK and being heavily promoted at the moment. I have to say I had the same initial thoughts when I heard it being advertised on the radio with a proposition along the lines of “Text us the name and town of anyone in the UK to find out what Bongo knows about them.”
Of course, I couldn’t help trying it (surrendering £1.50 in the process) and this is what I got back:
Bongo knows a Jason DaPonte who works 4 the bbc in london & he organised a fund raisin (sic) for his triathlon earlier in the summer for a charity close to his heart
All true. And nothing salacious. Not that I’d have expected that, of course.
Fortunately, this is all information which is publicly on the internet about me and nothing “creepy” or “freaky” came back. But what if it had?
At first I was nervous but after some reflection I realised this is really just a VERY expensive way of doing a search on Google mobile and putting an editorialised twist on the results. It’s really not that different to what Textperts or AQA are doing (pulling intelligence out of search, sometimes using humans) – it just has a slightly stranger marketing campaign attached to it. Not surprising when you discover that in Australia, where I think they launched, they actually promote themselves as the “The Bongo Virus“…
Strange as this all sounds, I think its another pointer towards a trend whereby mobile search via SMS will be big. Being simple, human and to the point is what all of these services are about and that’s not something you can get when scrolling through pages of search results, hoping to get to some mobile-enabled content.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Karen Groenink a user experience designer from Google Mobile where I hosted her presenting and answering questions for us at the BBC. Thanks to BBC Training and Development for organising it!
Karen has worked on a number of different products in the Google family as a mobile expert and it was great to hear the way she’s tackling problems that my team are facing as well. Some of her presentation was even spookily like one I give on mobile (coincidence, not stealing) – for example we both have slides proclaiming “Mobile is Different!”
The best thing I took away from her presentation was a catch phrase I’m going to keep in the back of my head as much as possible:
“Digital products are rude.”
Easy, simple and true. How many times have you had a warning message that won’t stop popping up that you don’t understand? That’s a rude error message – not incorrect, but actually so annoying its rude.
She also talked alot about general principals for user-centred design warning about both trying to “design a car for everyone” as well as “designing for edge cases” – both of which can bring about the death of a piece of work.
Excitingly, she alluded to the fact that Google are looking at doing something with voice-activated serach – which could be really cool if it works. I’m somewhat skeptical of voice-activated services because I’ve used them before with limited success. Voice dialling never got it quite right (and is a bit wierd socially when you have to say “Call Mom” out loud on a bus) and Spinvox, while generally good, transcribes my name as “Satan” instead of “Jason” which resulted in my old boss getting messages like “Hi, It’s Satan. Are you coming to this meeting?” All that said, mobiles started out as phones and few services take advantage of that, so its interesting to see that a bright spark I work with dug up this announcement of an iPhone app that does voice search today. It looks its the beginning of what Karen talked about: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-mobile-app-for-iphone-now-with.html .
If you get to try it, I’d love to know what you think. I used to work on the BBC’s search products and know that accuracy is everything and I’m curious to see whether or not the voice recognition can be accurate enough to make sure you get the search results you want.
This has me thinking (again) about the potential of SMS-based searching. As I mentioned in a previous post, this has been successful for Minfo in China and I think its another opportunity to take advantage of a behaviour that users are doing on mobile and find easy already.
Now THIS is what I’m talkin’ ’bout – I just found out that a photo I took a few years ago and put onto Flickr under a Creative Commons license (so that anyone else can use it as long as they attribute appropriately, etc) has been used in a GREAT Election Day video.
It’s the beauty of Creative Commons – someone, doing something creative and for good with work they never could have had access to under traditional copyright rules.
I’m not saying that I’m opposed to Copyright, just that this great creativity that doesn’t damage my intellectual property is something great that Creative Commons enables.
Now GET OUT AND VOTE (if you’re American that is)!
What a blast it was – and a great example of how mobiles can be used to capture stories from users that we’d never get to see or cover otherwise. The basic premise was that Hugh and Jo provided loads of punters, radio talent and bands at summer festivals with mobiles to film whatever they wanted and then pieced it together to document last summer’s festival scene.
Afterwards I was asked if I thought my colleagues in BBC Vision (the telly-and-video-making bit) or BBC Journalism (the news, sport, weather bit) should be doing this. And, while of course they could, I left Shoot the Summer feeling like this was the perfect thing to be coming out of one of our radio-based areas. The texture of it just felt like radio to me. Audiences voices mixed with radio talent and bands, first hand experiences and – of course – music. Sure it didn’t have all the polish that a TV production on summer festivals would have had – but it had something more intimate than what you’d capture otherwise. Having been to ALOT of the festivals in my day, I definitely felt like it capture the feel of festival going far better than the professionally-produced Glastonbury: the Movie did.
Watching it also backed up another hunch I’ve always had – that while musicians are great on stage, they’re not nearly as interesting as crowd members when you meet them. The only parts of the film that left me fidgiting and not laughing or enjoying myself were the ones where the bands were on as opposed to the punters.
I really hope I see more of this type of work coming out of the BBC in the future.
Last night I attended a sesion at NESTA about Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). The session was primarily a talk by Six To Start an agency that produces these types of games.
The speakers took us through a number of case studies where they’d done interactive storytelling in different ways – all of which were interesting – but some of which have been done before. I particularly liked The 21 Steps on We Tell Stories, a story which was written to be told using Google Maps.
Dan Hon, CEO of Six to Start, made some really insightful comments into what ARGs are and why they’re valuable/interesting. He explained simply that the platform for ARGs is ‘the whole world.’ Great. But unfortunately the examples they showed (and many of the other things I’ve seen touted as ARGs) dont’ really do this. The examples all showed work that was primarily PC based or based around activity that occured mainly in the home.
I was hoping to see examples of work that really too the user into ‘the whole world’ and moved them away from their PC to do things in physical environments, potentially interacting with each other. I think there’s great potential for mobiles to be a part of helping audiences/players do this and am hoping to get to work on some projects that do this in the coming year.
Another really good point that was made during the night was that too many companies were trying to do ‘live’ ARGs where you had to join at the start and play all the way through, making it impossible (or nearly impossible) for players to fall into the game and play if they aren’t aware of it from the start which makes it impossible to maximise audiences. I think this might be a trap that the BBC’s game around Torchwood fell into (as I talked about in my post on Beeb Camp’s ‘How Not To run an ARG’ session).
