Each partner will be allocated a MobDis Partner Consultant who is qualified to provide in-depth training and support in the following areas; pre-sales, creative execution and technical integration support priority support. The partnership combines priority support, deep domain experience and a unique HTML5 based tool to ensure that agencies will be able to smoothly conceptualise, design and publish mobile sites and rich media mobile advertisements for their demanding clients.

In addition to having access to a MobDis Partner Consultant, MobDis Partners will get a markdown on the list price of MobDis credits, co-marketing opportunities, and personalised MobDis widgets. With more than 85% smartphones around the globe enabled for mobile browsing, most businesses recognise that they have to optimize their website to the limited screen space.

Commenting on the partnership the co-founder of MobDis, Mr Zhou Wenhan, said “I am thrilled introduce this program as it helps our clients to increase the quality of creative and innovative mobile advertisements. I have confidence that by sharing out our core expertise with our MobDis Partner Consultant, we will help our partners push the boundaries of mobile advertising and ensure that their clients will be enthralled by the quality of mobile sites or rich media mobile advertisments created.”

For more information, please contact Nicole Tay at +65 96897652 or nicole.tay@2359media.com.

MobDis empowers designers and advertisers to design, launch and share engaging rich media mobile ads and sites. Designers use a visual drag and drop interface to design the microsite allowing them to design a mobile microsite up to 5 times faster and with no development knowledge.

2359 Media is Asia’s leading mobile consultancy and the preferred choice for cross platform mobile engagement strategies. 2359 Media helps its clients better understand, leverage and profit from the rapidly evolving mobile marketing landscape by providing a full suite of mobile solutions from strategizing mobile objectives, producing intelligent mobile applications and advertisements, to distribution and measurement.

The Asia Pacific region is a market of more than 2 Billion people and there are many countries within the region. The size and differences means that agencies do not have an easy time targeting and creating ads for this region. Therefore agencies typically deal with the fragmented region by having local offices in each country with some countries as the headquarters for certain regions. Different creatives and media strategy have to be crafted for different markets.

The AP region is of great interest to mobile advertisers because of the fast rising affluence of consumers and how widespread mobile devices are helping to bring the masses online. However agencies have to deal with the reality of fragmentation in the Asian market due to economic, technological and cultural differences. The countries are so different in nature that the same media strategy and creative execution will rarely work cross markets. Thus this article looks into how marketeers can understand and recognize mobile device penetration in AP countries and modify their mobile media and creation campaign strategy.

There is a easy way to segment the current OS penetration in the Asia region which can be divided into two main segments of the “Haves” and “Have Nots”.

In the “Have” segment, countries have high smartphone penetration and good 3G access networks. In the “Have Nots” regions, the countries have low smartphone penetration with low 3G access and the data typically looks like that of a “Have” country from 3 years ago before 3G data plans became affordable and smartphones with good internet browsers came onto the market.

Mobile OS market share derived browsing data

One can approximate smartphone penetration by the extent of economic development in country. This chart shows what mobile OSes are used to access the internet and it clearly shows the distinction between the countries that use smartphones and the countries that do not.

Currently in AP, there are 3 main OSes and they are

1. iOS in light blue,
2. Android in dark blue and
3. Symbian and others in Green.

Because mobile marketing is highly dependent on how consumers use their phones and what technology is available on their phone, understanding this chart will help you shape the media and creative that you will recommend to the client.

In the “Have” countries a brand can make apps and expect good downloads and reception. These are usually iOS and Android apps given the high penetration of these 2 mobile OS among the smartphone segment. Games and sponsored utilities apps are the most popular choices for apps as advertising/marketing vehicles. Good mobile browsers and In-app advertising also means that you can buy display advertising in volume with the expectation that your ads will reach most of the population and at high enough frequency. A brand can also take advantage of the latest rich media ad formats that are generally supported by smartphones which means that branding campaigns can be executed on mobile devices.

In the “Have Not” countries, mobile marketing is more limited in media and creative. They are usually simple text messaging and WAP sites. Because of the difficulty in supporting WAP site creation among the fragmentation of feature phones and inferior browser technology , site creation is more complicated. This means most mobile advertising is text messaging. Reach and cost is also an issue as SMS campaigns are much more expensive to implement than mobile display advertising. Therefore SMS is usually used as a activation medium to elicit direct response from consumers compared to being a branding channel. Some brands might even decide that mobile does not meet their objectives and therefore allocate the budget to TV where the reach and frequency is the highest as most consumers’ time is spent watching TV content.

Projecting the future

Mobile has made a phase change with the introduction of smartphones around end 2008 in the AP region. Looking at Singapore’s data from 3 years ago, we can try to project what is the most likely outcome in the next 12-18 months in the “Have Nots” countries.

Singapore’s Mobile OS share of web page impression after the iPhone was released for about 6 months in Dec 2008.

After the launch of iPhone, we can immediately see Symbian’s share being eroded as iOS quickly rides to the top. The iPhone made it much more user friendly to browse the web and use apps. It led to a huge increase in the iPhone browsing traffic. For 18 months, there wasn’t much competition for the iPhone as it took more market share. Around mid 2010, operators started to push Android devices to consumers as the iPhone Alternative. The Galaxy S, launched as the spearhead of Android Phones, quickly became popularly with consumers.From then Android takes a huge leap and into its current second place position. As it stands, iOS and Android commands more than 50% of mobile traffic in Singapore.

The historical data has shown that it takes 18 months from the introduction of smartphones for a country to transition from a “Have Not” to a “Have” country. Thus the question is then given that smarpthone prices are constantly dropping and data networks are becoming more affordable in the “Have not’ countries, will the country make the leap into “Have” group in the next 18 months?

One can make a prediction by looking at smartphone adoption rate over the past year as Android devices make their way into the “Have Not” countries. In the case of Singapore, Smartphones marketshare increased from 0% to 15% in 6 months ad iOS overtook Symbian’s marketshare 6 months after launch. We will use these 2 indicators as guidelines for our projection.

Predictons

Linear projection showing which mobile smartphone OS will likely be the dominant OS in the country in the next 18 months.

Prediction of which countries will have more than 50% smartphone penetration in the next 18 months

From the guidelines above, one can predict that China(iOS), Philippines(Android), Vietnam(iOS) & Malaysia(Android) will cross over to the “Have” group soon. However two out of the three largest markets in AP (India and Indonesia) have shown small smartphone growth and are predicted to have little smartphone growth due to backward data networks and the lack of purchasing power among the masses.

Conclusion and recommendations

This article has laid out the current mobile landscape around us. Asia is a complicated place but the overall trends are that

1. Leading Mobile OSes are Symbian, iPhone and Android = Apps and websites should be built for these platforms
2. iPhone & Android are the handsets of the future = Marketers should be run experimental campaigns in the Have countries which can be extended the the general AP region when the “Have Not” countries move into the “Have” group.
3. Large markets like India and Indonesia are unlikely to be smartphone friendly = Feature phone marketing skills is still necessary
4. Apps and Rich Media Ads work well in Have regions, text messaging pretty much the only medium of mobile marketing in Have Not regions.

we have just put out a update with several new features and this post is for you to easily get an idea of what new features this update brings to your MobDis site.

We have included user scenarios to demonstrate the usefulness of the widget and a sample site for each of the widget.

Keep the URLs entry point short.

As the keypads and screen sizes on mobile phones are small, input is often troublesome, avoid lengthy URLs.

Keeping an entry point short might be obvious to you, but it is important. Instead of:

http://mobile.yourdomain.com

http://yourdomain.com/mobile

http://yourdomain.com/mobile.html

You can consider popular formats like:

http://m.yourdomain.com

http://yourdomain.mobi

http://yrdmain.co (abbreviated domains)

You can automatically redirect mobile users through your main website. However and whenever you can, you should include QRcodes to your URL for quick entry to your mobile site and/or their specific pages. QR codes are a type of specific matrix barcode and the name is abbreviated from Quick Response Codes. These barcodes are designed specifically to be read by smartphones.

Keep to recommended size for your buttons and links.

According to Apple Inc, the average finger tap is 44 x 44 pixel. Which is why, when designing a mobile website it is recommended to design your button with the height of at least 44px. It is common for icons to appear 32×32, but have padding to make the touchable area 44×44.

For other mobile devices, a study for one-handed thumb use on small touchscreen devices showed that there were no significant differences in error rate between target sizes =9.6 mm in discrete tasks and targets =7.7 mm in serial tasks. You should consider your navigation, forms and buttons to be designed to that height when creating them.

Call-to-action buttons

Any call for action buttons should follow the standard suggestions for web design. For instance, buttons should draw user attention with size, however make sure that the button is not too large to bury your main content, navigation bar or other important information. Put it in a prominent positioning and use highly contrasting colors. Do note to tell your users what to expect before they press your button. Mobile browsers loads slower that web browsers, so it costs more for them to click to an unwanted page.

Five reasons mobile advertising is the best way to monetize apps

If you consider yourself even remotely geeky, chances are you, or some of your friends, have considered the idea of developing a mobile app. All the wild success stories we are fed daily about developers like Rovio (Angry Birds), Zeptolab (Cut the Rope), and Outfit7 (Talking Pets), have us dreaming of achieving similar success.

Research

comScore: Android Keeps Gobbling Up Smartphone Share, Now 40 Percent

When it comes to smartphones in the U.S., Android and Apple keep growing at the expense of other mobile platforms like RIM, Windows Phone, and Nokia’s Symbian.   The latest mobile subscriber numbers are out from comScore.  Android leads the pack with 40 percent market share of U.S. smartphone subscribers as of June, 2011, up 5.4 percent from March, 2011.

Lookout Report: Android Malware Has Increased Significantly Over Past 6 Months

Lookout, a company that offers security services for a number of smartphones, is releasing the results of its Mobile Threat Report. The report is based on threat and security data from Lookout’s Mobile Threat Network, which includes data collected from more than 700 thousand apps and 10 million devices worldwide. You can access the full report here.

Technology

Prepare to be spammed on a new level with push notification advertising

Over the past four years, mobile application support has grown from a mere handful of games and applications to just short of one million applications, accumulatively. A large portion of said applications are paid, meaning the end user must make a one-time payment and the application is theirs for life. The remaining applications are free – some are entirely free (no ads) and others are ad-supported. With the immense growth of the availability of applications, the advertising, too, has evolved.

Brands

HTML5 Ad Builder Sprout Acquired By InMobi

Sprout, a company that offers an easy-to-use platform for building HTML5-based ads, has been acquired by mobile ad network operator InMobi. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Sprout had raised a total of $10 million from Global Venture Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, Global Venture Capital, and Mitch Kapor.

More Mobile Ad Deals: Augme Acquires Hipcricket for $44.5 Million

Mobile marketing service, Augme Technologies, today announced that it will be acquiring Hipcricket, a mobile marketing and advertising platform for $44.5 million — $6 million of which is in cash and $38.5 million in common stock. Hipcricket’s shareholders must approve the acquisition before it can be finalized, yet with the transaction also calling for a 12-month earn-out payment of an additional $27.5 million, it seems likely that the deal will be approved. Augme will take on all of Hipcricket’s 50-plus employees, but the mobile ad firm will continue to operate out of its offices in Kirkland, Washington.

How “create your own mobile social network” tool Motribe grew to 1.5 million users in 10 months

South African mobile social networking platform Motribe launched about a year ago but already it has more than 1.5 million users. Founded by Nic Haralambous and Vincent Maher, the platform is like Ning for mobile and aims to empower brands to set up mobile web communities. In regions such as Africa, South East Asia and South America where the mobile web is a big part of how people interact with the Internet, sites like Motribe are bound to thrive. We caught up with the platform’s co-founders to learn more about the service’s relatively fast growth.

Tell us about yourself and your company

The great folks at TransMediaCreativeMy name is Shannon Streuly-Patterson I have been a web designer for the past 10 years. I work for a wonderful advertising production firm Transmedia Creative. We are a small business located in Gulfport, MS.

What phone do you use and what you love about it

I have an iPhone 4 and I love it so much! It does everything, I can edit websites on the fly, take great photos, watch movies, listen to music, the list goes on and on. I definitely couldn’t function without my smartphone.

What brought your to MobDis?

A co-worker of mine was doing some research on app creation and turned me on to MobDis.

Why does MobDis work for you?

MobDis is so easy to use and has a really intuitive user interface. It has pretty much every option I need to create a great user friendly app. I especially love the animation options and the widgets.

You did a great job in making this site: (http://creative.mobdis.me/projects/1524). What does it do and who is it for?

The Stop My Stroke App was created to work with the Stop My Stroke&nbsp;web site. Our client, a local hospital and Certified Primary Stroke Center, was recently awarded a government grant to promote recognizing the symptoms of stroke and acting immediately in order to save brain function and lives.</p> <p>The app gives the user information about recognizing the symptoms of stroke and identifying risk factors for stroke. It also supplies helpful information about what to do during an emergency.</p> <p>Stop My Stroke has a YouTube channel and we reference video testimonials of local people in the app as well.

The app gives the user information about recognizing the symptoms of stroke and identifying risk factors for stroke. It also supplies helpful information about what to do during an emergency.

Stop My Stroke has a YouTube channel and we reference video testimonials of local people in the app as well.

Where did you find the inspiration for making this site?

In creating this campaign, we wanted to use simple graphics and easy to understand visuals. So keeping it simple and easy to use was definitely a priority.

What do you like about MobDis?

I don’t think I can stress enough how easy this service is to use! It’s wonderful! MobDis has helped me tremendously. I really didn’t have much time to put together a mobile app and MobDis let me create one from scratch without any problems. This is amazing since I’ve never created a mobile app before.

What’s next for you?

Next I’ll be designing more websites and a mobile app for our local hospital. I will definitely be using MobDis in the future. I can’t wait to create my next mobile app!

Where can we find you online and more examples of your creative work?

You can find the company I work for at: www.transmediacreative.com

The campaign I created the mobile app for can be found here: www.stopmystroke.com

And the local hospital we work with here: www.gulfportmemorial.com

Thanks for taking time with us for the interview. We wish you all the best in having fun and passion in your work!

MobDis has a lot of great, creative users and MobDis Showcase is a somewhat regular session of show and tell of the work that MobDis users have crafted. We aim to share the work with everyone so that you can learn from what your peers are doing and be inspired. If you would like your work to be highlighted, just drop us an email! http://mobdis.com/contact-us/