February 10, 2007

Mobile Advertising

MEX writes:

The introduction of advertising on mobile devices does have the potential to change the way in which services are paid for and, by implication, the way they are consumed. However, our research note on this topic reflected our belief that there are fundamental differences between advertising in the mobile environment and existing forms of digital marketing.

Our view, highlighted in the title of the note, is that the linear nature of a users interactions with their mobile device will require advertising to be focused on helping a user complete their mission rather than trying to distract them into exploring tangentially related content.

Tellme’s Mike McCue Interview

Knowledge@Wharton has an interview with McCue of Tellme on the convergence of the phone and the web:

Tellme is really geared around the phone and always has been. So the way that we think about this is going to be different than the way Google thinks about it. They think of it more as a web company and we think of it more from a phone perspective intuitively. We believe that speech recognition is critical, for example.

We’ve made it work really well with speech recognition, so that I can just say “pizza” and I don’t have to type it. I think that this is critical to making any kind of phone “form factor” work well, because my mom isn’t going to [enter text commands into a phone]. Kids will, but not when they are driving. Or at least they shouldn’t be. So we think that voice is a really critical part of building up the service for the phone.

The other thing is that the ad models will be radically different than what they are on the web. They’ll be more transaction oriented — [based on] a percentage of the transactions people actually close with small- to medium-sized businesses on the phone. So the web ad model that Google has done so well doesn’t really hold true as readily on the phone.

Numenta’s Computer

[via Srinivas] Business 2.0 writes about jeff Hawkins’ new venture:

Computers running Numenta software will not be programmed like regular computers. Rather, algorithms that Numenta has come up with allow machines to learn from observation, just as a child learns by observing the world around her.

Numenta is developing a new computer memory system that it says can remember the patterns of the world presented to it and use them, the way a human does, to make analogies and draw conclusions. If it works as Hawkins expects, the applications and business opportunities will be stunning. They could range from the mundane – helping radiologists or airport security officers to read X-ray images, predicting machine failures in factories, improving manufacturing yields at chip plants – to the mind-boggling: predicting tornadoes and stock prices, making smart cars, unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos. “I know this has to work because this is how the brain does it,” Hawkins says.