Foursquare are moving things to a higher level with the introduction of a new tool called “Location Layers”. Location layers will effectively tag information onto geographical locations.
To give a clearer picture, say you are near a location that was used in a famous film; you would receive an alert giving you information on that location and its connection with the film! The possibilities are endless for the type information that could integrated, such a live news needs, historical facts and more importantly commercial brand information!
The idea that brands can feed consumers information based on their current location sounds very promising, however foursquare would have to try and prevent it from descending into location information overload…
Posted by jen | Comments (2)
Check out this made-for-mobile video we produced for Valentine's Day. Click the picture to play it.
It works as a Valentine's card too: you can send it from our site direct to someone's phone (delivered by MMS). Try it out
here.
We'll be posting up some more examples of our work in mobile video soon!
Posted by colm | Comments (0)
David McQueen, Screen Digest mobile analyst, predicts, massive growth in Mobile TV, Music and gaming with mobile TV consumption forecast to be worth €.7 Billion by 2010. This is huge growth and with many more advanced markets like Italy signing up close to a million subscribers to mobile TV in a matter of months it seems completely possible. This would mean that mobile TV would have 140 million subscribers within 3 years! Thats massive and will more than likely bring up all sorts of licensing and copyright issues for content providers.
Further to this, if you remember my post last week on the market for mobile music set to be worth 1.47Billion by 2011, it seems that the market for mobile content is due to experience a surgence of growth. Watch this space.
The news is not as overwhelming for mobile gaming however as it is predicted to achieve a much lower level of growth due to a shift in operator focus to Mobile TV and music. It is expected that the gaming market will increase its worth from €1.6 Billion in 2006 to €2 Billion in 2011.
Posted by lisa | Comments (0)
Media analysts Screen Digest forecasts that the over the air mobile music market is likely to grow to €1.6 Billion by the end of 2012 it was reported today. This would mean the market would be worth 10 times today's value within the next 5 years. In 2006 the market for mobile music was valued at €166 Million and the majority of this was generated by single track downloads by U.S consumers.
Dan Cyan, digital media specialist with Screen Digest says that it is a very exciting time for mobile music right now as consumption habits and attitudes to music are changing rapidly. People are developing different habits for when downloading music to their phone as opposed to their pc and for use on digital devices.
Posted by lisa | Comments (0)
3 Ireland are adding another show to it's already existing mobile TV - TV3's new entertainment show Exposé.
The show that has been billed as part of TV3's change in positioning from current affairs channel to more of an entertainment channel features Lorraine Keane amongst the five ladies who intend to bring all the juiciest news and gossip from the world of enterainment to TV3 viewers, and now 3 customers, daily.
Three will offer the show to it's Planet 3 customers to download free together alongside Tom Dunne's TV music magazine "The Hive" and Eamonn Dunphy's soccer show "The Last Word".
Posted by lisa | Comments (0)
This month I have been experiencing flat rate or unlimited mobile internet access through my snazzy new Sony Ericsson k610i. I should say that I moved over to the 3 network specifically to start using their Planet 3 service. Planet 3 is the network's own portal for browsing. It's absolutely jam packed with stuff to do and all of it for free!!
I pay an extra €5.99 a month to browse the 3 portal as often as I like. Its great. So far the premium content I have downloaded (and have to pay extra for) includes four or five full tracks, a ringtune (song snipped into a ringtone), a music video, subscribed to heat!, a wallpaper and father ted clips! Definitely feels like Christmas. The total cost has been about €25 but I like to think that I'm buildiing up an entertainment library of sorts! With 3 though, every individual piece of entertainment is priced clearly. So I knew that my Heat! subscription would cost €3 monthly because it said so before I clicked to download it! No Excuse. There is even an area where I can view my account details - how many voice calls I have left, video and text messages etc..
I reckon though that you could easily and happily stay entertained cheaply by browsing the 3 portal and downloading free clips like Tom Dunne's music magazine "The Hive", Eamonn Dunphy's Football show or even by choosing one of the many movie trailers on offer.
My only criticisms of the whole experience at this stage is that I have had one or two issues porting my number and so I have been unable to go "Off - Portal" and browse the mobile internet or do a Yahoo! search . In fairness though I have been in touch with customer services and they have been incredibly nice and even credited my account with €10 for inconveniences caused! The other issue is the speed of the connection for downloads - sometimes I am on 3G (all 3 phones are 3G) and other times I connect to 2.5G and GPRS - All of which are slow and at times wear my battery down. These problems are only going to decline as time goes on and 3G becomes more developed.
Other services on the network are all great too such as MMS, Videocalling, bluetooth and there are no problems with coverage. In fact my coverage is better now than it was with my previous network! Which brings me to my final comment - I've been surprised that I genuinely don't miss any of my old services from my old network at all.
Anyway, 3 is definitely getting my seal of approval and I say to seriously watch them gain their share of the market steadily over the coming years.
Posted by lisa | Comments (0)