We’ve just added a new link in a Resources Section: DMAI 2010 – Going Mobile. This is the slides for the mobile session we presented in at the DMAI 2010 conference.

Here’s Tourism Kamloops‘ press release on the apps we recently made for them:

Tourism Kamloops Launches I-Phone App and Mobile Website

Kamloops, BC: Just in time to take advantage of the new 4G I-Phone, Tourism Kamloops has launched an I-Phone App and mobile website to service a rapidly growing market niche.

Potential and arriving visitors to Kamloops will now have another way to research their trip and enhance their experience upon arrival using the new Tourism Kamloops I-Phone App and mobile website. “We’re excited to be launching our I-Phone App and mobile website.” said Tourism Kamloops’ CEO Ms. Lee Morris. “Tourism Kamloops is one of only a few destination marketing organizations in the province to have a comprehensive I-Phone App to support marketing efforts.”

Designed to provide easy and fast access to tourism-related information, the I-Phone app and mobile website connect users to a comprehensive list of accommodations, attractions, restaurants, golf courses, events, transportation, nightlife and live music venues, spas, shopping, sports and recreation, arts, culture and heritage. Each listing has the capability to connect the user directly to the supplier by telephone, email or to their website. If the mobile device being used is GPS equipped, the app will bring up the closest supplier by category, provide distances and with the augmented reality (AR) feature, use the mobile device’s camera and GPS to show in which direction the supplier is located as the user sweeps the area.

The I-Phone app is fed information from the Tourism Kamloops website so daily updates to events and other listings are automatically updated to the app every night. A slideshow on the app provides high quality images to showcase the area and each listing has the ability to display a logo and an image. Accommodations have up to 8 images that can be used to showcase their properties.

Designed to connect the user to the information they seek at between 5 – 7 seconds, the app listings contain a short description and complete contact information as provided to Tourism Kamloops by suppliers. The GPS system allows for visitors to map out routes to suppliers locations with estimated arrival times. The I-Phone App is available as a free download from the online Apple Store.

The I-Phone App is designed to be wrapped and used by most mobile devices including Blackberry and Smart Phones on a mobile site. If someone visits the Tourism Kamloops website on a mobile device, they will automatically be redirected to the new m.tourismkamloops.com mobile site. The app and mobile site are designed to provide a complete listing of suppliers that are easy to read and navigate. If mobile users still wish to visit the full website, they have a link back from the mobile site that allows them to enter www.tourismkamloops.com.

The I-Phone App also features Tourism Kamloops’ Twitter feeds, the ability to share the user’s vacation images automatically with friends, add suppliers to a favourites list and use a search function for even faster navigation on the site.

The Tourism Kamloops primary website has seen some significant improvements and enhancements recently and now features two high resolution webcams, multiple video presentations, custom downloadable Kamloops Google maps, web-based e-marketing software, flash presentations, maximum width viewing, news and weather. The events listing by category allows for locals to upload their events and once approved by Tourism Kamloops staff and depending on the nature of the event, it will appear on the City of Kamloops, Venture Kamloops and Chamber of Commerce websites as well.

For More Information:
Ms. Lee Morris CEO, Tourism Kamloops
P: 250.372.8000 C: 250.319.4247
E: lee@tourismkamloops.com

The apps can be downloaded (or seen) here:

• for iPhone / iPod Touch
• for BlackBerry – ZIP · JAD
• for .Mobi

Discover Anywhere Mobile has just launched apps for the Greater Lansing Michigan CVB. These include:

• iPhone / iPod Touch
• BlackBerry – ZIP · JAD
• .Mobi (mobile web browsers)

Features include:

• A database of over 650 places in the Greater Lansing Guide categorized into Shopping, Things To Do, Where To Eat and Where to Stay
• Over 100 places in the Calendar of Events
• Itinerary management, Search and Nearby Me
• GPS-sensitive display and Mapping
• Twitter, Facebook and Flickr integration (iPhone and iPod Touch only)
• Augmented Reality (iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 only)

As with all Discover Anywhere Mobile clients, Greater Lansing just maintains their website and we track all changes and keep the website updated.

Click on the image to see screenshots.

Discover Anywhere Mobile has done several changes to make sure all our apps work as well as possible on Apple’s new iOS4 operating system for the iPhone. We’ve resubmitted every single one of our apps and upped the version number to “2.0″. One thing not to worry about: to make sure of broad compatibility across all Apple devices, we also test every app against a 8Gb first generation iPod Touch running version 3 of the Operating System.

If you’re interested in seeing our apps, the sidebar of every window has a panel that will show you everything we’ve done (and quite a few things currently under development).

There’s an interesting report in Mobile Marketer about what domain name you should use for your mobile site.

Mobile Web publishers must deploy their sites across multiple domain standards to attract the largest audience, according to Ground Truth.

The company said that lack of standardization around mobile Web conventions presents hurdles for mobile publishers. Instead of opting for one, publishers should launch their sites across all the various mobile Web domains: “m.,” “wap.,” “.mobile” and “.mobi.”

[...] In the week ending July 4, Ground Truth measured 5.01 billion page views that included requests to 1,555,630 unique domains.

The data shows that 18,934 (1.2 percent) of those measured domains and sub-domains were mobile-centric, such as “m.,” “wap.” and “.mobi,” but 17.3 percent of total page views were served from those domains.

The remaining pages were served from domains without a mobile-specific domain, such as “www.” sites.  Some of these sites are mobile-aware, such as http://www.google.com and http://www.facebook.com.

Of the mobile-centric domains, the prefix “m.” and the “.mobi” suffix appear about equally, but sites using the “m.” prefix serve 21 times more pages than “.mobi” domains, Ground Truth reports.

Following in popularity, by number of sub-domains, are the “mobile.” prefix and legacy “wap.” prefix.

Google recommends that you use a subdomain of your current domain (e.g. m.myname.com) rather than .mobi.

Discover Anywhere Mobile recommends that you use m.myname.com, but also that you redirect all other possible domains (myname.mobi and so on) to your primary domain. This recommendation (and much more) is available on our whitepaper on .mobi Tourism as seen in our Resources section.

TORONTO, 6 July 2010 — Discover Anywhere Mobile is pleased to announce our latest major extension to our iPhone product line: Discover Anywhere Tours. Tours provide a fun and exciting way to let visitors discover your destination, via a set list of places to visit, such as the “Historical Site Tour” or “The Best Pub Crawl in the World Tour”. Discover Anywhere Tours easily enables users to track where they’ve visited and where they should go next.

Features

Discover Anywhere Tours directly integrates lists of tours into your visitor’s travel app experience.

Visitors can view lists of interesting tours and select which ones they wish to take. Tours consist of thematically grouped places to visit within a destination. Tours are defined by DMOs/CVBs and like all Discover Anywhere Mobile data sets, can be updated at any time — even on deployed apps.

When visitors approach nearby places in an active tour, they’ll receive a notification allowing them to view the place and mark it as “visited”. Further actions can also be triggered, like playing an audio file, starting a video, or even sharing the trip experience with Discover Anywhere Mobile’s Social Media features.

Discover Anywhere Tours lets visitors track the status of their tours, displaying the number of places visited, the number of places to go, the next place to visit and how far away it is. All “visited” places are marked with a checkmark so visitors can easily identify what they’ve experienced so far.

iOS4 Support

Discover Anywhere Tours will also take advantage of Apple’s new iOS4 features. Visitors using Tours on iOS4 will receive “background notifications” when approaching the next place on a tour, even if another app is running. To ensure the best experience possible, Tours will temporarily pause if the visitor’s iPhone is running low on power.

How to get Discover Anywhere Tours

Discover Anywhere Tours is available to all Discover Anywhere Mobile customers and will be debuting in our customer’s apps in August 2010. More information about Tours is available on Discover Anywhere Mobile’s website: www.discoveranywheremobile.com. A video demonstration is viewable on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/discoveranywhere. To find out more, contact us via email at sales@discoveranywheremobile.com or give us a call at 416-785-4425.

About Discover Anywhere Mobile

Discover Anywhere Mobile is a Toronto-based software and services company specializing in location-aware travel and tourism applications for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and the mobile web. Our applications will ensure that people are always connected to the information they need when they need it: events, conferences, shopping, accommodations, transportation, restaurants and more. We provide almost complete coverage across all Internet-ready smartphones and take full advantage of advanced features such as GPS-location, itinerary planning, social media tracking, “Share My Trip” with Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, event calendars, thematic listings, featured listings, search, slideshows, augmented reality and mapping to deliver a simple and compelling user experience.

Video Demonstration of Discover Anywhere Tours

Discover Anywhere Mobile now has a Resources section, featuring:

• White Papers – our first paper: .mobi Tourism: how to get your tourism site mobilized
• Presentations – our first presentation: Discover Anywhere Mobile tourism apps
• Conferences – see you at the Mobile session at  DMAI in Fort Lauderdale!

And coming very soon – videos of how to use our products and features.

In the April 22 edition of The Telegram, Discover Anywhere Mobile’s Destination St. John’s app gets a nice mention:

St. John’s app

m.destinationstjohns.com

Through Destination St. John’s, here’s a way to get more out of the city on your iPhone or BlackBerry. You’ll find restaurant listings, points of interest, where to go for a hike, where to grab a beer … it goes on. If you know someone coming for a visit, this would be a great tip to send along. If your phone is GPS-enabled, the mapping functions will become a whole lot more useful.

Tnooz / TLabs has a nice profile of our company up over on their website. Go over there and check it out. Since that’s been written we’ve launched another series of apps for Butler County and we’ve got four more in the app store approval process right now and three more in various states of development!

www.travelrants.com writes about the shock impact of mobile phone roaming rates has on International travelers:

It is all well and good owning a mobile phone with GPS, tons of travel apps, but when it costs you £3 – £5 per MB to use the internet abroad, it becomes expensive very quickly. Last week I used my phone in-flight, while jaunting around New York and I have arrived home to a £60 bill for roaming charges.

[read more]

The BBC also wrote about this earlier this year:

If you use your phone in the UK to connect to the internet, for example to check emails or go on Facebook, you don’t usually need to worry about the bill – most home tariffs include unlimited downloads.

But, if you take a smartphone, like an iPhone, on your travels, it can have expensive consequences.

One German man was reported to have been charged £41,000 after downloading a television programme onto his phone.

Julia Feuell, from north London, also got a shock after a visit to New Zealand. Her 17 year-old son racked up a bill of £590.

If you’re creating iPhone apps,  it’s critical that your app doesn’t have an expensive network dependency. If it can’t run in “Airplane Mode”, it doesn’t work for travelers (and you’re missing out on other great benefits).

Todd Lucier of Tourism Keys explores the impact of the fact that 30% of cell phone users are now browsing the web (and that’s going to massively increase over the next few years) on the tourism industry. Read more here.

Comscore reports (via AdMob):

• there’s now 45 million smartphone users in the US, up 21% in the last 3 months
• Google/Android is the big winner, having over doubled its market share to 9% over the last quarter
• RIM and Apple hold stead in terms of share, meaning their absolute numbers are still growing
• Microsoft and Palm are the big losers, and are likely to continue to do so

Discover Anywhere Mobile notes:

• the rapid adoption rate of smartphones is a sign that many people are choosing to replace their cell phones with something more modern: expect smartphones to dominate the market in the next 2 to 3 years
• we expect Apple to start growing market share again after they release a version that does not depend on the AT&T network
• Palm blew it
• Microsoft will make a recovery next year after Windows Mobile 7 becomes available, but not until its share drops to Palm-like numbers

TechCrunch reports (via Coda Research Consultancy):

As smartphones like the iPhone and Android take over the mobile Web, the amount of data traffic going over cellular networks is expected to grow 40-fold over the next five years. UK firm Coda Research Consultancy forecasts that in the U.S. alone mobile handset data traffic will grow from 8 petabytes/month this year to 327 petabytes/month in 2015. That amounts to a 117 percent compound annual growth rate.

We’d also like to draw attention to the following table:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Mobile Internet users via handsets	84M	100M	113M	128M	145M	158M
Smartphone traffic as % of handset traffic	79%	90%	95%	97%	98%	98%
Feature phone traffic as % of handset traffic	21%	10%	5%	3%	2%	2%

Next year, 90% of “data traffic” over the next year will be from smartphones. The implications:

• WAP-type protocols are effectively dead, except for legacy applications,
• everyone interested in accessing Internet services are going to replace their “normal” cell with a smartphone in the very near future.

We noticed last week at the WACVB Destination Marketing Tech Summit that there were a lot of Androids amongst DMO attendees – not as many as iPhones, but still a remarkable number.

The latest AdMob numbers tell the story:

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US.

Given the trend lines, the Android’s probably in the #1 position by now and is likely to maintain it, at least until Apple introduces a version of the iPhone that’s not dependent on the somewhat flaky AT&T cellular network.

We’ll be at the WACVB Destination Marketing Tech Summit tomorrow and Friday at the Vendor Showcase. Do drop by and visit! You can follow our show updates on Twitter on @discoverany (and WACVB’s Twitter updates here).

We were surprised yesterday to learn that TripWolf is claiming to be the “first iPhone travel guide with integrated Augmented Reality“. Surprised, because TripWolf’s claims are simply not supported by the facts. For example, Discover Anywhere Mobile has been shipping Augmented Reality in all its products since September of 2009. Here’s a select sample of our apps, all which include POI databases, events calendars, itinerary planning, search, integrating mapping and much much more.

• Finger Lakes Wine Country (released March 9, 2010)
• Ocean City, MD (released February 17, 2010)
• Central Nova Scotia (AR release Feb 16, 1010)
• Destination St. John’s (released Nov 17, 2009)

All these apps are actually available in the app store right now; many more are in the pipeline. In addition, many other app makers in the Travel sector offer Augmented Reality (and the dates given here are for their latest releases, earlier versions no doubt had these features too) :

• Wikitude (Feb 11, 2010)
• Canada Eye (March 3, 2010)
• Metro Paris Subway (Feb 1, 2010)
• Bionic Eye (Feb 5, 2010)

One application that may reasonable lay claim to being first into the AR travel market is Yelp, who cleverly snuck an Easter egg into their application before Apple officially allowed AR to be supported in August of 2009. There are also a number of Asian travel apps which offer integrated Augmented Reality.

We’re happy for TripWolf that they’ll soon be offering a feature that was available from the rest of the market 6 months ago (FYI: it takes Apple less than three days to approve an app these days). We look forward to their announcement, perhaps someday, of them being the first to offer comprehensive social media integration into their products.

Here’s Teresa from Finger Lakes Wine Country demoing the (fantastic) app we wrote for them (read more about it):

If you like what you’re seeing and are interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced solution in the market for getting CVBs/DMOs mobile.

We’re proud to announce that our latest app for the iPhone and iPod Touch for Finger Lakes Wine Country, New York is now available in the iTunes App Store. This app features:

• a database of nearly 900 accommodations, dining spots, things to do and wineries in the Finger Lakes region, and hundreds of upcoming events
• everything integrated with map views, GPS location, augmented reality, and links to email, websites and direct dialing
• “share my trip” using Discover Anywhere Mobile’s social media integration, allowing direct posting of comments and photographs to Twitter, Twitpic, Facebook and Flickr
• Twitter posts from the Finger Lakes Wine County twitterati
• itinerary management, search and nearby me functions (and more)

The great thing for the Finger Lakes Wine County folks is that all they have to do is maintain their website the way they normal do, via their CMS. Discover Anywhere Mobile monitors changes to their database and automatically updates all the apps, minimizing the need for additional staff effort.

Coming Soon: “.mobi” and BlackBerry versions of the application.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

One issue that comes up often is whether one should develop an “app” — a program built specifically for a mobile phone — or just make a mobile optimized website.

Here are the key advantages of developing an app:

• Immediacy – except for exceptionally-well developed websites, there is often a several second lag between doing an action on a mobile phone and seeing a result come back over the mobile network. Apps are immediate: when one does something, you see the results instantly. Immediacy leads to a different type of interaction between the user and the device, more playful, more experimental and fundamentally deeper.
• Offline Use – apps don’t depend on a network connection, which means they work in airplanes, in below-ground floors of buildings, in tunnels and (especially) they work on iPod Touches which comprise nearly half the iPhone device market.
• Gizmos – your app can access your device’s camera, compass, GPS, touch screen, motion sensor, and so forth. Mobile sites, not so much.
• Privileged space – people who own devices that can run apps, run apps. The first place they’re going to look for information is their apps which are given a “privileged” place on the screen of the user’s mobile phones. Your mobile app is just another website, that they may or may not get to when they use their browser.

We’ll also briefly mention here that most “mobile optimized” websites rarely are: they don’t work with the user’s location, they don’t design for limited bandwidth and high latency network connections, they’re not tested against a range of devices, and they rarely provide the right amount of information in the right way. In short, the user experience is awful.

Related reading:

• Five Reasons Mobile Apps Rule
• Mobile apps: Cemented into your business’s tech strategy?
• Mobile apps: Does your business need one?

Patricia Brusha, who we had the pleasure at meeting in Montreal in January at the Online Revealed conference, asks “Could Apps Be The New Search“:

If you are researching a trip to Italy, or want to learn about wines in the region or even just keep track of calories and new recipes while you’re away,”there’s an App for that.” It is important to acknowledge that phrase has now become common vernacular among iphone users just as “Google It” has to the entire population. With a current user base of 1.5 million iphone users and 1.2 Million Ipod Touch users in Canada alone [don't forget the iPod Touch - not all app developers really support this and it's almost half your market -- dpj] (Mobile Fringe), 2010 just may be your “app-ortunity” to launch a mobile marketing strategy.

Why now [to integrate mobile into this year’s marketing budget for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality professionals]? According to Sorge you cannot ignore the facts. “Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013”, states Sorge, “In addition Mobile marketing will grow to $19 billion by 2012 from $1.6 billion in 2008.” Add to that better data plans being offered by cellular providers making web access from you mobile affordable and the solid distribution Apple has created with the App Store following in the itunes successful footsteps. iPhone and iTouch have over 60 million users that consume over 200 million apps per month – and now there is the iPad recently launched which is the happy medium between the two.

[...] Now is the time to jump in when costs are affordable and before the market gets cluttered with too much noise. In saying that, the same principles apply to every other marketing strategy – ensure first that your marketing budget is allocated to where your customers are RIGHT NOW – don’t go building an app for your ski destination if the website can’t be found when your customers are looking to book, or if your website is not even transacting business already.

[...] The cost? You can get an app created for as little as $5000 [even a good one -- dpj] depending on who is developing your app, and what you want to do. Don’t look at mobile in isolation, it should be integrated to your overall marketing strategy and be consistent in messaging with your website, search, email newsletters, blogs and social media initiatives.

Our take: apps aren’t the new search, they’re the new domain name. If you remember way back when to the 1990’s:

• the good domain names get taken early (try and get a short, meaningful domain name now)
• it’s much easier to be a winner if you’re in early, rather than be in late (Yahoo)
• great technology still matters (Google)

If you’d like to find out more about A Couple Of Chicks e-Marketing, there’s a profile on YongeStreet magazine: Hatching an Idea. If you’d like to find out more about moving your Travel, Tourism, CVB/DMO site onto mobile, well, contact us!

The iPod Touch is an iPhone without a cell phone, cell network internet connectivity or a camera. It can, however, connect to the Internet through WiFi. In the travel means (sometimes) in a hotel, (sometimes) in a Starbuck’s and (almost always) pay-per-use. Tourists with an iPod Touch can sometimes reach the Internet but usually they cannot.

It is very important for DMOs and CVBs to realize the implications of this.

Many iPhone app companies are just traditional web developers offering what are called “wrapped apps”. A wrapped app looks – more or less – like an iPhone app, except it’s really just a shell of an application connecting to a web server over the Internet. This means that if your visitor is not connected to the Internet, they can’t use your app! And when they can connect to the Internet, there’s still very little immediacy – things take seconds to happen, rather than the instant touch-response cycle people expect from great apps.

Not only does this affect all iPod Touch users, it is also detrimental to any iPhone-using foreign visitor who will be paying very high data rates to connect to the web over the cell network. If they can’t use your app, or don’t want to use your app because it’s costing them a lot of money, they’re not going to get that great experience they’re looking for in your destination from your app.

How would using a wrapped app affect your DMO? The numbers follow…

From The Apple Blog, iPod touch Now Outselling iPhone:

At the iPad event, Steve Jobs announced 75 million iPhone OS devices had been sold to date, though whether that date was January 27 or January 1 is not known. It won’t matter either way, but let’s assume the latter. Through 2009, Apple sold 42.517 million iPhones. Subtract that number from 75 million iPhone OS devices and we get 32.483 million iPod touches.

If you’re still awake, here’s the bottom line: the rate of sales growth of the iPod touch is very likely greater than the table shows, as in double that of the iPhone. True, the period includes the holiday quarter, the best quarter for iPods, but it just doesn’t matter. The iPod touch, the stealth device for iPhone OS, will be the best-selling model for the platform in 2010, if it isn’t already, and it is.

To reiterate: there are about 32 million iPod Touches out there and a wrapped app won’t reach them when they need it most: in your destination.

From AdMob January 2010 Mobile Metrics Report:

iPod Touch users download an average of 12 apps a month, 37% more apps than iPhone and Android users.

The bottom line from the AdMob report? iPod Touch users love to use apps – but you have to make sure that they can use yours! A wrapped app – an app that depends on being connected to the Internet – does not allow them to do this.

Discover Anywhere Mobile produces native iPhone apps. All the essential data your visitors need is stored right in their iPhone / iPod Touch. This means that whether or not they’re connected to the Internet, they’re going to be able to find the things they’re looking for – and that’s why your DMO/CVB created the app in the first place, right?

All images taken from original blog posts.

From ReadWriteWeb:

Buying and selling tickets is another business that’s slowly being migrated over to our mobile devices. Whether it’s a movie ticket, concert ticket, plane ticket, or something else, there are a number of companies now offering digital alternatives to the tree-killing paper printouts of days past. In a new study by Juniper Research, analysts predict that the market for mobile ticketing will reach 15 billion delivered tickets by the year 2014. According to Juniper, a little over 2 billion tickets were sold this past year. That makes the forecast of 15 billion by 2014 a notable jump which points to consumers’ ever-increasing desire to perform business transactions like mobile ticket purchases using their mobile phones and other handheld devices.

From Tnooz:

The annual Cybersource UK Online Fraud Report, which surveys both companies and consumers, inevitably focused on website-based issues – a third of online merchants seeing an increase in business lost to fraud – but threw in the nugget of negativity on one of its last pages.Responses to the question “Would you use your mobile to purchase online?” were as follows:

• 78% – No, never.
• 8% – Yes, would consider it.
• 4% – Yes, would definitely.
• 10% – Do not own a mobile.

From EMarketer (via PhoCusWright):

Coupon usage was up in 2009 overall, and mobile coupon redemption is poised to explode over the next few years. But mobile couponing is still in the early stages of adoption, as indicated in a Honeywell survey conducted by Harris Interactive in December 2009.

Just 4% of Internet users surveyed said they had redeemed mobile coupons, compared with 86% who had clipped paper coupons and 65% who had used electronic coupons from the Internet or e-mail. Younger adults were most interested in mobile coupons, with 66% saying they were at least somewhat likely to try them.

Most Web users, however, were not yet ready to join the bandwagon. Only 10% felt comfortable storing coupons on their mobile phone rather than printing them out, and one-half that number wanted retailers to text them about deals and sales. Across the board, younger respondents and those with higher incomes had more positive attitudes toward mobile coupon use.

Go figure. Our take is here on Tnooz – we’re at the early adopter stage, when everyone starts using it, everyone will start using it! With regards to mobile coupons, I assume the issue is convenience at this point: the coupons aren’t where we need them to be when we’re at the point-of-sale.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

An FYI post for what’s happening outside the tourism industry. DAM believes the first place visitors who own smartphones – in a few short years, e.g. “everybody” – will look there first for information about places they’re visiting. As a DMO/CVB, it’s imperative that you stake your claim here ASAP.

When will location-based services stop being fads and start getting real?

Sponsored by Wired, the talk featured panelists who all work on projects where users share information online, whether it be their location or answers posed by online users. And while gaming and social aspects have driven user rates to date, wider adoption dependson utility.

Chris Dixon, CEO and cofouner of Hunch, thinks it all comes down to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma:

“One of the key characteristic of new disruptive technology is that it starts out looking like a toy. That’s so often why big companies ignore and dismiss it.”

But the big hurdle for start-ups is to get users play with and use their tools on a daily basis. Dixon divides people into two groups for these purposes: “techies” and “normals.” Many new digital tools are quickly adopted by techies, but “when it becomes critical infrastructure is when it crosses over to the normals,” he says.

With adoption of location-based tools, things are just getting started. The tipping point will be when people start depending on the store of information they provide on a daily basis.

Tony Jebara, associate professor of Computer Science at Columbia University & Chief Scientist at Sense Networks, puts it this way:

“When you’re in a new city, you have to start from scratch. And you realize how much better off you are with these tools.“

It’s exactly then, when services become personally useful, that people start saying “maybe my phone should be tracking me,” says Dennis Crowley, co-founder of mobile check-in service Foursquare.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

IDC is reporting that smartphone sales is 4Q09 are up almost 40% from the previous year, and for the full year, almost 175 million smartphones (about 15% of the entire mobile phone market) were sold worldwide.  The iPhone showed a healthy (!) 100% growth year to year and RIM brought in an additional 40%.

Top Five Converged Mobile Device Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, Q4 2009 (Units in Millions)

Vendor	4Q09 Unit Shipments	4Q09 Market Share	4Q08 Unit Shipments	4Q08 Market Share	4Q09/4Q08 Growth
1. Nokia	20.8	38.2%	15.1	38.5%	37.7%
2. Research In Motion	10.7	19.6%	7.6	19.4%	40.8%
3. Apple	8.7	16.0%	4.4	11.2%	97.7%
4. Motorola	2.5	4.6%	1.6	4.1%	56.3%
5. HTC	2.4	4.4%	2.2	5.6%	9.1%
Others	9.4	17.2%	8.3	21.2%	13.3%
Total	54.5	100.0%	39.2	100.0%	39.0

Top Five Converged Mobile Device Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, 2009 (Units in Millions)

Vendor	2009 Unit Shipments	2009 Market Share	2008 Unit Shipments	2008 Market Share	2009/2008 Change
1. Nokia	67.7	38.9%	60.5	40.0%	11.9%
2. Research In Motion	34.5	19.8%	23.6	15.6%	46.2%
3. Apple	25.1	14.4%	13.8	9.1%	81.9%
4. HTC	8.1	4.6%	7.5	5.0%	8.0%
5. Samsung	5.7	3.3%	5.4	3.6%	5.6%
Others	33.1	19.0%	40.6	26.8%	-18.5%
Total	174.2	100.0%	151.4	100.0%	15.1%

Via MacRumors.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

Discover Anywhere Mobile was in Montreal last week at the Online Revealed Canada and Canada-e-Connect conferences. We’d like to say “hi” to all the people we met, especially the event organizers and Canadian DMO folks from coast-to-coast-to-coast. We’re excited that you’re excited about what we’re doing, and we’ll be in touch soon. And as Phillip Wolf of PhoCusWright says “don’t miss mobile opportunity“.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.