From Mobile Manifesto – we’ve quoted almost all of this article and highlighted the key phrases – although this is about the retail space, almost everything you’re reading here is applicable to the travel / tourism / hospitality sector also.

At eTail in Baltimore today, Abhi Dhar, CTO Walgreens provoked the crowd saying, “Consumers have changed because of mobile. Deal with it.”

[...]Retailer after retailer asked the question, “Should I do mobile web or native apps?” It was deja vu all over again. It’s the same debate mobile bankers had early last year. Abhi Dahl said “BOTH are very important.” I agree.

In mobile banking, we’ve found that banks must offer all three technologies: Mobile web, SMS, and native applications. Many retailers are still resisting hoping to avoid the fragmentation bankers have resigned themselves to.

David Siegel of 1-800-FLOWERS said, “Don’t try to change customer behavior, market to where they are.”

Customers look for brands using their mobile browser. Retailers should have a mobile site. Customers look for brands in their phone’s app store. Brands should have an app.

Companies resisting building a strategy addressing channel fragmentation are just wasting time and ceding market share to their competitors. Many retailers, including 1-800-FLOWERS said that mobile web accounted for over half their mobile sales. The many mobile web proponents I spoke with seemed to consider this evidence that mobile web is the “right” way to do mobile.

My opinion on this stat is that companies only offering mobile web are potentially missing out on 50% of mobile sales. Maybe these users would buy on mobile web if the native app weren’t available. Maybe. Remember, Apple had to create the App Store in response to overwhelming jailbreaking of the iPhone because Apple insisted mobile web was all we needed.

[...]As Jeff Dennes of USAA said, “If you don’t have enough [mobile] budget, get a bigger budget.”

Now is the time for companies to aggressively commit to mobile and emerge the market leader.

Customers are making decisions using their mobile phone. It’s up to retailers to decide to serve their customers.

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).

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 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.

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!

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.

The Globe and Mail reports:

Demonstrating the intense fluctuations coming to Canada’s wireless industry in 2010, new research suggests the next six months will see 55 per cent of Canadians buying a new handset, likely a smart phone.

[...]

Of those who said they would buy a handset, 28 per cent wanted a touch-screen smart phone and 19 per cent wanted a Qwerty-keyboard, likely for easy texting, the study showed. Both of these growing habits – texting and data use – have gradually eroded the time spent talking on phones, analysts said, in part to the detriment of large wireless carriers.

Canadians are increasingly using smart phones and laptop data sticks to connect to the Web, according to data collected by Toronto’s Convergence Consulting Inc., which estimates 30 per cent of wireless subscribers will be using such devices by the end of 2010 and around 50 per cent by the start of 2014.

Emphasis by me. We believe they’re massively underestimating smartphone penetration by the start of 2014, as that’s 4 years away – forever in an industry where things get cheaper and better every quarter.

Via Alec Saunders.

Just to tip our hand on where our long term thinking is, wouldn’t it be great if people could buy tours, book hotels, plays or theatres, and make reservations within a single app as a single basket transaction.

Here’s an interesting report – Smartphone Owners Now Spending More from Handset, but Poor Site Functionality Is a Turn-off (all emphasis added by us):

Key findings from Compete’s Q3 2009 Smartphone Intelligence survey include:

• 37 percent of smartphone owners have purchased something non-mobile with their handset in the past 6 months.
• 19 percent of total smartphone owners have purchased music from their device, 14 percent have purchased books, DVDs, or video games and 12 percent have purchased movie tickets.
• The most popular mobile shopping-related activities are still research related – 41 percent of iPhone users and 43 percent of Android users are most likely to check sale prices at alternative locations from their mobile phones while they are shopping.
• The second most likely activity is accessing consumer reviews, with 39 percent of iPhone owners and 31 percent of Android owners investigating reviews from their handset before they purchase.

While m-commerce is poised for explosive growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment in the early days of e-commerce. Compete’s Q3 Smartphone Intelligence survey found that eight percent of smartphone owners that tried to purchase a product on their device were unable to do so. 45 percent of those that abandoned the process reported that they did so because the site would not load, and an additional 38 percent left the site because it was not developed specifically for smartphone users.

That is grim and probably totally unnecessary – purchasing products from your mobile tourism product should be as simple as buying music in iTunes. If you’re doing something interesting in this space, we’d like to hear from you.

Link via David Eads.

I actually don’t believe this is true, at least within the context of Western world. 5 years is a long ways away and the combination of Moore’s Law and the fact that smartphones are also pretty damned good game machines makes me believe they will be market dominate in less than 3 years. From Mobile Tech Today:

Smartphones will overtake regular handsets in terms of sales by 2015, according to a report, “Global Smartphone Market,” published by Telecom Trends International. The report says that sales of smartphones will constitute 2/3rd of total mobile handset sales by 2016.We are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way people use the mobile phone, said Naqi Jaffery, the report author. The smartphone is becoming the primary mobile device, he said.

Smartphones sales will show a robust growth of over 28 percent through 2016 the report said. This is in contrast to regular handsets whose sales will continue to decline, it said.

Smartphones will no longer be confined to a niche market, Mr. Jaffery said. Their falling prices and attractive features are contributing their transformation into a mass market device, he said.

Via Mobile Crunch.

Time Magazine lists the iPod Touch as one of the best travel gadgets of 2009. May I interject here that perhaps its time you put your destination’s content on it. (As The Unofficial Apple Weblog notes, some of the inclusions and exclusions are a little odd though).

A couple of recent articles on iPhone apps that we think are worth sharing.

Pizza Hut’s app has generated $1m in sales:

After being live in the App Store for three months, the Pizza Hut application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch has surpassed $1 million in sales.

[…] Rather than consumers simply migrating from calling in or visiting the PC Web site, Pizza Hut believes that the iPhone application is driving sales it may not have closed otherwise.

“We see it as being highly incremental, as much for the reason that people have a genuine need to order pizza and they want to engage with a really cool app that says something about them,” Mr. Acoca said.

Avoiding a Mobile House of Cards:

Well, building a successful mobile marketing channel for your brand requires careful thought and patience.   Too often there’s a failure to appreciate the opportunity to nurture extended or ongoing participation or an expectation that mobile is some sort of silver bullet.

[…] The second mistake was getting swept up in the iPhone hysteria. I won’t call anyone out, but I can think of several brands that launched apps that were either so gimmicky that they were likely deleted or forgotten after a single use or the customer base was clearly not well represented among the iPhone user base.  Flurry, a mobile analytics firm, has some very revealing stats about application loyalty. Unless you have a strong core user base on the device and an application that genuinely adds value, save your money.  While launching an app can open up a new audience for your brand, it also creates tremendous pressure to offer something compelling and useful.[…] Consumers aren’t going to give you a share of mobile without getting something in return. There has to be a value exchange that’s weighted in their favour. Contest prizing certainly fits the bill, as do coupons and other discounts or exclusive opportunities. But the value can also take the form of something that offers genuine and repeatable utility [see our post on custom iPhone Development].

All emphasis add by us. It’s not enough just to do an iPhone app — you have to have an app that provides real utility and a real experience to your visitors.

Beth Kormanik in Hotel Interactive writes:

You may be right if you think the apps for smartphones like the iPhone or Android are passing phases. But that doesn’t mean you can afford to sit this one out.

PhoCusWright’s senior corporate and technology analyst, Norm Rose, said the market is only growing for consumers who use smartphones, and they want to use them to make travel decisions. Rose presented his conclusions in a Webinar this week called “The iPhone and the Future of Mobile Travel Applications.” He also is co-author of PhoCusWright’s Mobile: The Next Platform for Travel.

Rose predicted that the craze over apps may last only four or five years, but they will be crucial. Hotels and other hospitality-related industries need to plan a smart mobile strategy that will bridge the near- and long-term. Part of that is cementing your mobile brand in the minds of consumers so they stay loyal to your brand in the future.

…

PhoCusWright found a direct correlation between smartphone owners and frequent travelers. Its most recent consumer technology survey, released in May, showed that people who take more than four leisure trips annually are more likely to have a smartphone. Similarly, people who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter also tend to be on the cutting edge of mobile technology and take an average of 4.7 trips a year.

Meeting these travelers on their own technology terms can be the key to capturing their business.

All emphasis added. Note that we don’t think apps are a passing phase – we’ll just get to the point where we don’t think about them anymore. Originally from HotelMarketing.com.

Forrester has released a new report Western European Mobile Forecast, 2009 To 2014 (which can be yours for the low low price of 1749 bones):

As mobile phones are now ubiquitous across Western Europe, the industry’s attention has turned to the mobile Internet arena. Despite the recession, mobile Internet adoption will continue to grow significantly, with audiences tripling from 13% of Western European mobile users in 2008 to 39% in 2014. The current economic climate will lengthen handset renewal cycles, foster the development of low-cost offerings, and boost the uptake of SIM-only contracts. However, it will only slightly reduce the pace of growth for those elements that stimulate mobile Internet usage: 3.5G and Internet-centric mobile phones as well as all-you-can-eat data plans will be widely available in the next five years. In the next decade, the mobile Internet will replicate the success story of the PC-based Internet. As Europe is one of the most diverse and saturated mobile landscapes in the world, the challenge will be to adapt to local conditions to increase the usage of new services.

Emphasis added by us. Hat tip: Travolution.

Interesting post from the Banjo Payment blog (all emphasis added by me):

The research firm NPD Group have just announced a new survey that shows smartphone sales in the USA grew by 47% in Q2 and accounted for 28% of all handset sales. That’s a number big enough to make anyone selling to mobile take note – it’s more than a quarter of all your customers. And it’s not all Apple iPhones either – the report goes on to reveal that 35% of handsets shipped with keyboards rather than touch screens [e.g. 65% shipped with touch screens -- dpj] pointing to Blackberry, Google Android and Windows Mobile phones. Samsung and LG are highlighted as top selling manufacturers in the report.

Interestingly, feature phones made up a massive 72% of phone sales during Q2. These devices may be more traditional in design but they deliver a great web browsing experience and many of the features found in the more expensive smartphones, such as Wifi and GPS. So while Apple is doing a great job building excitement and consumer demand, many of those consumers are simply getting the features they need through their favorite phone manufacturer…

Catch that? Almost three quarters of mobile phones sold last quarter in the US can browse the web!

Gartner reports:

Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Declined 6 Per Cent and Smartphones Grew 27 Per Cent in Second Quarter of 2009

Worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 286.1 million units in the second quarter of 2009, a 6.1 per cent decrease from the second quarter of 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone sales surpassed 40 million units, a 27 per cent increase from the same period last year, representing the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market [...]

Company	2Q09 Sales	2Q09 Market Share (%)	2Q08 Sales	2Q08 Market Share (%)
Nokia	18,441.0	45.0	15,297.9	47.4
Research In Motion	7,678.9	18.7	5,594.2	17.3
Apple	5,434.7	13.3	892.5	2.8
HTC	2,471.0	6.0	1,330.8	4.1
Fujitsu	1,249.0	3.0	1,071.5	3.3
Others	5,688.2	13.9	8,085.8	25.1
Total	40,962.8	100.0	32,272.7	100.0

That’s well on target to exceed 25 million BlackBerrys and iPhones to be sold in 2009.

Introduction

This is the second post inspired by a comment I left on Todd Lucier’s website. This post is about how to create a website specifically created and optimized for people using the Internet from mobile phones.

To make sure this is perfectly clear, we’ll be talking about two different sites: your “normal” website (e.g. www.example.com) and your “mobi” site (e.g. m.example.com). Your website is what one would normally see on the Internet, your mobi site is something that you’re explicitly using for mobile devices.

The points in this post are fairly high level and should be readable by any professional using the web. Your IT staff and web designers should know how to fill in the technical details.

Why am I doing a mobi site?

Because there’s a lot of travelers using smartphones, there’s going to be a lot more in the future, and they’re visiting to spend money:

• Nearly 70 percent of frequent business travelers have a smartphone somewhere on their person (link)
• 1 in 7 computer owners currently own a smartphone (link)
• over 40% percent of consumers will make their next mobile phone a smartphone (link)
• more than three quarters of smartphone owners said that they will either be planning or taking a trip in the next 6 months (link)
• smartphone owners demographically skew wealthy (link)
• as of January 2009, there are about 18m iPhones and about 13.6 iPod Touches in use (link)
• iPhone and BlackBerry sales are expected to increase 25% this year (link)

What is the emphasis of your mobi site?

In-destination, the emphasis of a mobile site should not be marketing: the user is sold, they’re there. Instead, it should be to rapidly allow users to navigate to information they’re interested in consuming in the most convenient possible way.

This means:

• allow users to quickly see navigation items in the most obvious way possible
• present location information based on proximity (if GPS is available)
• present event information based on date.

IMHO concepts such as “the entertainment district” may have to become de-emphasized as this is an organizational unit more suitable to the printed page than mobile devices.

Page size and features

Page load speed is as critical as possible. This is true in the web browser world too, but in mobile:

• minimize JavaScript, as there’s probably not a lot of value in clever browser tricks or the CPU cycles to do it.
• minimize page size, as that corresponds to time-to-download and also cost to the user. In any case, do not exceed 25K for a page (why)
• put CSS and JS in separate files to optimize caching
• minimize images. 0 is a good number; 1 is OK; 2 is too many. It goes without saying that any images should be small both in dimensions and bytes.

Since the traveler is likely not to be using their normal carrier, they’ll appreciate the effort.

Which devices?

Test your mobi site on a BlackBerry and on an iPhone (here’s why). If it looks decent on those, it’s probably at least tolerable on lesser devices.

The relationship between your Mobi site and your website.

When a mobile browser reaches your normal website, you have several options:

• use CSS to make your normal website look good a mobile browser
• automatically redirect users to your mobile site
• prominently display a link to your mobile site

You should probably do the first option anyway, but this is not sufficient for creating a compelling mobile experience, as you really want travelers to see your mobile optimized site. Either of the other two options are good, with my preference being the “display a link” option, as users may still want to reach content that is only available on your normal website.

Detection of whether the user is reaching your site via mobile browser can be done “server side” (in the website code) or “client side” (using Javascript). My preference is the first.

If a user reaches your mobile site from a non-mobile web browser (i.e. from their computer) there’s no need to do anything special. You probably should have a link from your normal website to your mobi site somewhere anyway.

Domain Names

You have two good options for a domain name for your mobi website:

• m.example.com
• example.mobi

My preference is the first. Note that you should always register your .mobi name so that someone else doesn’t. You should redirect the user’s browser from the unused one to the correct one.

iPhone and BlackBerry Applications

Places with large event calendars, many properties or listings, or many visitors should consider developing custom iPhone and BlackBerry applications. This will:

• provide a superior experience to what is achievable in a mobile web browser
• reduce dependence on having an Internet connection in order to be able to achieve tasks
• provide “wow” factor
• enhance loyalty, the chances of repeat visits, and create word of mouth

I am not a neutral party in this recommendation, see the next section.

Discover Anywhere Mobile

My company, Discover Anywhere Mobile creates iPhone, BlackBerry and mobi websites for DMOs, CVBs, festivals, events, conferences, etc.. Our website explains the ins and outs in detail but briefly:

• we’re committed to creating great traveler-centric applications that will be second to none
• we do this very cost effectively for destinations; with various features we offer this can almost be cost neutral for DMOs
• beyond the initial setup, we can create and maintain the applications with no change to workflow at destinations (&c) and no additional management work
• we ensure that even downloaded apps are kept up to date with your data and your message

Conclusions

• every travel website should strongly considering having a mobi website companion
• that mobi website should be developer especially for the needs and limitations of mobile devices
• the emphasis of mobi website should be user experience in-destination, not marketing
• larger organizations should consider apps

Please feel free to leave comments below, or follow me on Twitter at @dpjanes.

Introduction

This post was inspired by a comment I left on Todd Lucier’s website regarding best-practices for mobile websites. The travel / tourism industry is not particularly advanced when it comes to use of web technologies (obviously excepting that some sites are much better than others). Many booking sites for hotels, airlines and so forth have very backwards – almost 1990’s style – interfaces; many destination websites allow for minimal user interaction with the site beyond clicking on links; those that do more often place high barriers to usage – account creation & verification, etc..

This post is about how travel / tourism sites – especially hotels, DMOs, CVBs, conventions, conferences, event holders – can easily improve at least one aspect of their site. It’s about how to allow sharing and distribution of information with others, particularly travelers!

This post should be readable by any professional who has content on the web. The technical bits are “high level” and my goal is that you should be able to point your IT/Web team to these recommendations and say “do this”.

The Webs

The phrase “Web 2.0″ has been popular for the last few years to describe certain trends in the web industry: incorporating user-generated content, social media, APIs,  the “read/write web”, using rounded corners and images with reflections, and so forth. Though a blurry concept, it’s a reasonable stake in the ground to differentiate what came before in the early days of the Internet: the web as a method for delivering relatively static or source-driven content on pages. Of course, once there was a Web 2.0 immediately people started to define what Web 3.0 should be: the semantic web, linked-data, and so forth. These terms are almost (but not quite) meaningless to the end user, but what they’re getting at is that Web 3.0 should also somehow incorporate information in well defined, usable ways so that data available in one place can be cleverly reused, repurposed or redistributed in surprising ways in other places.

To summarize to the point of absurdity:

• Web 1.0 is about pages
• Web 2.0 is about people
• Web 3.0 is about information

All these concepts, of course, have been in the web since the beginning. “Web #.0″ is a convenient shorthand about how much weight we’re putting on various concepts.

The Why – TripIt as an example

TripIt is a popular travel itinerary management website (and iPhone application). The “clever bit” about TripIt is that you can mail it your travel confirmations from your airline, hotel and so forth and it figures out what the message really means and builds a travel plan for you. However, there are several rather basic shortcomings:

• if you want to consume the information outside the context of TripIt, you’ll have to rebuild all the infrastructure yourself
• if TripIt doesn’t understand a message, data will have to be entered manually. Since you’re not Air Canada or Starwood Hotels, TripIt doesn’t understand your message (or your website)
• if message formats change – for any reason, including stylistic ones – TripIt will no longer understand the data until they catch up and write a new parser to understand the changes

There is an alternative that overcomes these issues. What if everyone agreed on common ways of expressing information so that custom parsers, etc. don’t have to be developed? Then anyone could potentially read and use the data in travel messages and on websites, and anyone (i.e. you) could create data that can be reused by those “anyones”.

Sounds hard or perhaps even obscure? It isn’t – some of technologies for doing this have been around as long as the Web, and you’re almost certainly using tools today that can take advantage of information shared in the proper formats.

iCalendar

iCalendar (also sometimes called vCalendar) is the standard for transferring information between calendars. Do you use Outlook, Outlook Express, Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, or iCal? Then any time you send a calendar entry to another person you’re also using iCalendar; if you sync two calendars, you’re using iCalendar. If you download an event on Eventful, Upcoming or Meetup – you’re using iCalendar.

Every event on your events calendar – individually, collectively and grouped by topic – should be available for download as iCalendar on your site. Your website is not the center of the traveler’s experience. By making the event transferable to their calendar – and other applications which can consume iCalendar – you’ve giving the traveler a little piece of your website that they can take away use the way that they prefer.

It’s also worth noting that if you’re using some sort of event management software or content management system, this should be near-trivial for your web team to implement correctly.

vCard

vCard is the standard for transferring information about people and organizational contacts. If you use Outlook, Outlook Express, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, (Macintosh) Mail, Lotus Notes and so forth, you’ve probably used vCard – especially if you’ve ever mailed a contact to another person.

You should create and place on your website vCards for your organization / destination, and for every person that you’re listing on your site. Why supply only an e-mail address when you can give a complete downloadable contact file with photos, maps, phone numbers, website addresses, etc.?

Like vCalendar, vCard is trivial to implement correctly.

Microformats

(This is the only paragraph that’s really explicitly Web 3.0, sorry).

Microformats provide another way for delivering information about your destination, hotel, event, etc. to applications that may want to consume it. The advantage of microformats over vCalendar and vCard is that the data is built directly into your web page , doesn’t have to be independently downloaded and that there are more types of data encodable using microformats. Furthermore and of special interest, search engines are starting to look for microformatted information in webpages and are displaying results in-line with search queries (Yahoo, Microsoft, Google).

This is more technically difficult to accomplish than vCard/iCalendar, but it certainly worth considering for larger websites – and probably essential for very large websites with many property listings.

Conclusions

I hope you’ve found this an interesting introduction to how you can use web technologies and formats today to share your information “Web 3.0″-style. There is nothing particularly esoteric about these recommendations – they are all well known and often used in the tech industry. Your management team should give direction to the web design and IT staff that these are the types of features you want to see in the next iteration of your website.

Please feel free to leave comments below, or follow me on Twitter at @dpjanes.

IntoMobile – quoting IDC – provides a top 10 list of smartphone sales in the 2nd quarter of 2009:

1. BlackBerry Curve (83xx series and 8900)
2. Apple iPhone 3GS (both 16GB and 32GB versions)
3. BlackBerry Pearl (81xx series but not the Pearl Flip)
4. Apple iPhone 3G (8GB and 16GB versions)
5. BlackBerry Bold
6. BlackBerry Storm
7. T-Mobile G1
8. Palm Pre
9. HTC Touch Pro
10. HTC Touch Diamond

The fact that the BlackBerry & iPhone fill out the top-5 positions gives some indication of where we think development effort should be allocated.

Discover Anywhere Mobile got a write-up today in the Halifax Chronicle about our Central Nova Scotia iPhone app:

TOURISM INFORMATION ABOUT CENTRAL NOVA is now as close as your iPhone. The local tourism association has signed on to provide information to Discover Anywhere Mobile, an iPhone destination application aimed at North American travellers. Central Nova Tourism Association marketing manager Devin Trefry said the application provides travellers with direct access to visitor information on Central Nova Scotia that can be downloaded directly to their mobile phone.

“We recognized the trend and opportunity of using mobile phones to help visitors to access information, and make travel within our region easier. We were fortunate enough to strike up an innovative partnership with Discover Anywhere Mobile to become the first destination in North America,” he said. “The use of technology with travel is definitely the way of the future and we’re excited to be on the forefront of this trend.”

Discover Anywhere Mobile Inc. is a Toronto-based software development company focused on mobile solutions for the travel industry. Applications created by Discover Anywhere Mobile include traveller-centered listings with photographs and text for popular sites and attractions, hotels, restaurants, businesses and tourism offices within a destination.

Some interesting news today from Fierce Mobile Content.

One-fifth of Americans accessing mobile web each day

Nineteen percent of Americans now access the mobile web on a typical day according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, representing 73 percent growth over from the 11 percent level recorded in December 2007. In addition, the Pew study reports that 32 percent of Americans have now used a mobile device to access the Internet for email, IM or information seeking, up from 24 percent in late 2007. In all, 56 percent of Americans have now accessed the web via wireless means, whether laptop, mobile device, game console or MP3 player–laptops are the most prevalent alternative, accounting for 39 percent of wireless Internet access.

Report: iPhone accounts for two thirds of all mobile web traffic

Apple’s iPhone now represents 66.61 percent of all mobile web traffic according to a new study issued by web solutions provider NetApplications. The Java ME platform follows a distant second at 9.06 percent, trailed by Windows Mobile at 6.91 percent. NetApplications notes that despite the iPhone’s commanding lead in mobile browsing share, both Android (6.15 percent, tied with Symbian) and BlackBerry (2.24 percent) are rapidly gaining market share–however, the report notes increases by Apple’s rivals does not mean that iPhone web browsing is shrinking, as the overall market continues to grow rapidly.

Half of iPhone users rely more on mobile web than newspapers

Five in 10 iPhone and iPod touch users say they use the mobile web more frequently than they read newspapers according to a new consumer survey released by mobile advertising platform AdMob. In addition, more than 40 percent of respondents report accessing the mobile web more often than browsing the Internet from their computers or listening to the radio.