MRM

Yes, MRM – Mobile Relationship Marketing.  That is a new acronym for me, but an important one.  Here is a rather thoughtful summation from a press release I received recently:

“Mobile marketing, while still in its early stages, represents a powerful and rapidly evolving medium of customer engagement,” said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council.  “The mobile phone is now the single most pervasive channel of communications and targeted market interaction in the world.  Users are rapidly migrating to smarter devices and new mobile social applications that offer even greater opportunities for building and sustaining customer relationships.  Our partnership with Planet Oi’ offers the CMO Council and leading brands a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate and benchmark the power of Mobile Relationship Marketing in both developed and emerging markets.”

Here’s the thing, I work with teenagers in a volunteer role and it has been eye-opening for me.  These teens look at email – email – as antiquated.  If you don’t text, you are dismissed.  This fact has also taught me to learn a new language – text.  It is a communication platform unto itself.

The reason I bring this up is because these are the future consumers and employees.  Their cell phone is their electronic connection point.  Mobile marketing is certainly the next major shift in messaging that we will see.  In fact, it is underway now.

Nasty Solar Storms

The sun follows an 11 year pattern of activity/(relative) dormancy.  You may not care except for this point – the sun is starting an active cycle as explained in this Fast Company article.

The sun is about to get a lot more active, which could have ill effects on Earth. So to prepare, top sun scientists met Tuesday to discuss the best ways to protect Earth’s satellites and other vital systems from the coming solar storms.

Solar storms occur when sunspots on our star erupt and spew out flumes of charged particles that can damage power systems. The sun’s activity typically follows an 11-year cycle, and it looks to be coming out of a slump and gearing up for an active period.

…

People of the 21st century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. But smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity.

This may put a damper on the new iPhone…and all other cell phones for that matter.

The iPad Killer

From Inc.com:

The CEO of Verizon, Lowell McAdam, is making no secret of it. They are officially in cahoots with Google developing what they hope will be the iPad killer.

Interesting, but I am always loathe to bet against Apple.  Here is the one mitigating factor that gives me pause:

4. For all the same reasons the Droid is shaking up the iPhone; touch screen tablets will wage the same war just on another battlefield. Google’s Android is making headway because its available on multiple brands of devices and with multiple carriers. Apple let’s you use AT&T, AT&T or AT&T on their hardware. Period.

That is one important point.

4G Means Speed

The latest cell phone speed craze is 4G which is available only from Sprint right now.  However, all carriers will be rolling out their 4G networks over the next year or so.  This article from Inc.com provides an in-depth description of 4G and why it matters.  It basically comes down to the speed:

“If I’m getting mail from my server, with 4G it takes micro-seconds. With 3G, it could take 5 to 10 seconds to download the same email,” Abramson says. In general, he adds, though service providers may claim faster speeds, most 3G transmissions are in the 1 megabyte per second range. “With 4G, I’m getting speeds that are three to four times faster, he reports.

As some people have migrated away from land lines for their telephone, some companies will migrate away from a land-based Internet connection and switch to a 4G network.

“It can replace broadband for a very small shop,” Ganguly says. For some small businesses it might make sense to have every laptop enabled with 4G, or to use a card that broadcasts wireless Internet to up to five devices, such as the MiFi or Overdrive, he adds.

I am still stuck on 3G which has mediocre speeds.  4G does seem like it will be a real game changer and well worth considering an upgrade.

It’s an iPhone-Blackberry World

Some of these sales numbers are staggering when you consider the shape of the economy:

To be precise, RIM reported it had shipped 10.5 million BlackBerrys in the three months ending in February 2010, representing a personal best for RIM. Among these 10 million phones, around half–actually 4.9 million–were new subscribers, demonstrating what a powerful ally RIM is to its cell-phone network partners. Over roughly the same period, Apple, with its super-hot-ticket iPhone still riding high in the public and media’s eyes, sold 8.7 million units…meaning RIM is firming up its position as forgotten king of smartphoneland.

I’m a Samsung Instinct user so I am really on the outside looking in.

Dot Com is 25

I didn’t know this, but “.com” turned 25 recently.  The history behind it (my bold):

It was on this date in 1985 that a now-defunct artificial intelligence company out of MIT registered something called symbolics.com. It was an unheralded event, and at least a decade passed before the public really began to catch on.

Remember trying to “surf the Web” in the early 1990s? If so, you were well ahead of the curve. Once you got there, you might have wondered if all the waiting and listening to dial-up modem screech and whine was worth it. “Maybe this thing will go the way of CB radios,” you might have thought. Luckily, it didn’t.

Today, there are a quarter billion Web sites, 80 million of which are dot-coms.

Yeah, I guess you could say that was successful.  Isn’t that number staggering?  I remember when I first used the web in the mid ‘90s at a previous employer.  I thought it was cool, but I wasn’t sure how to use it.  3.5” floppies seemed like the better path…to me…at the time.