Last week, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs showed off the new iPhone 3G, the long awaited successor of the first Apple mobile phone. It doesn’t matter if you love Apple’s style, or haven’t been sleeping for months just waiting for the new phone to be announced; or if you hate all those bunch of black silhouettes with white headset cables sticking out their ears.

Since it was first unleashed on June 29th 2007, the iPhone has revolutionized the mobile phone market, creating a new way to access online services. Despite some minor missing features, the real breakthrough of the iPhone was the relevance given to browsing; together with e-mail client; the browser being the foremost door of reaching Internet content. The iPhone has a full built-in browser, and now, thanks to the new 3G connectivity, the surfing experience will be faster and smoother than ever.

Obviously, this new online experience will provide a brand new way for advertisers to reach their potential customers. Regardless the immense number of phones sold everyday, up to now mobile advertising has struggled to take off, basically because mobile phones have not quite represented an actual medium to transmit promotional messages good enough to reach a wide audience efficiently. Unfortunately, the development of mobile advertising strategies have been dilatory up until today.

As suggested by Adage, from now on, no more delay: with the iPhone (and every iPhone-like device) things are going to be different.

Firstly, the new browsing experience is being widespread all over the smart-phone customers interested in having this new Internet experience right in the tip of their fingers.

This tendency is evidenced by the relevant number of web apps (online applications downloaded from a browser but more similar to a native application rather than a classical web page), already developed for iPhone. The official page counts over 1700 web apps for the Apple device.

These applications could be used to host an advertising platform indirectly, or just promotional messages, advertisers could potentially use as “online showcases” to display its offered products.

Secondly, we do need to remember that Apple has opened another door, a door that leads straight to the iPhone core. With just a few simple steps, everyone can join the iPhone “road map”, get the software development kit and compile their own iPhone application; not just a web app, but a native software. Consequentially, advertisers could begin to evaluate opportunities to develop native applications made for both promotional and functional purposes.

Let’s think about – for example – a hotel brand, like Accor or Best Western: could both be great ideas to develop ideal hotel-maps that take advantage of GPS technology (embedded in the last iPhone 3G and in other devices), for showing the geographical distance between your current position and the nearest hotel while you’re on-the-go.

The decisive point here is that in order to plunge into the mobile advertising market, advertisers should not limit themselves by just trying to catch an existing ad space; they have to create that space, by trying to satisfy user demands by offering something useful, that’s readily available on the mobile, thus reaching their promotional goals.

When will Yahoo! give in and introduce equal sitemap format?

Google introduced the use of sitemaps for video today. It allows webmasters to let Google know the location and description of their videos, which is undeniably good for video SEO. If you are featuring videos on your site, you can attract a decent amount of traffic if these videos pop up in search results on Google Video. And Google Universal Search which also shows videos.

But the service has received some critique on its own blog, and rightly so. The most important questionable point is that this service is – for now – only useful for Google search. Google representatives say that they hope that other search engines will follow, but this means that we will still have to work with two video sitemaps to upload. Three for the sites that also have a mobile version. And since we work with Yahoo! as well, which demands its own sitemap formats, that means that the total amount of sitemaps we will have to upload is between four and six. We think that it is time for a universal sitemap format, and we suppose Yahoo! will have to come up with it; they have more to gain as Yahoo! is often the second advertising platform after Google, and it is hardly ever the other way around.

We expect Yahoo! to introduce the same format as Google for their sitemaps soon, and think that in the end also video sitemaps will be included into the general sitemaps, making the lives of us SEO specialists a lot easier.

Andrea Casalini of Buongiorno! gave us his opinion on the current market for mobile advertising.

Quote:

‘In mobile marketing there is a fine line between the innovative use of a new medium and invasion of privacy. If you are able to target well, the advertising will be appreciated.’

The research was conducted in the USA and select European countries. To no surprise, USA users generally seemed less forward in their use of mobile content than their European counterparts, specifically when it comes to user generated content.

Numbers like these show that early adopters are en masse moving many of their activities to their mobiles. And it is absolutely crucial that marketers adapt to this. Many platforms are opening their mobile content to advertising (most recently MSN Mobile) and it’s time to jump on the band wagon. If you’re not developing mobile advertisements yet, get to it.

We did a video interview with Stefano at the Everything but Advertising Forum in Milan 2007. Stefano is an expert on mobile advertising and told us what to expect in the near future.

‘People want to be reached through different marketing channels. Also brands have the habit to use all the tools available. With the new techniques brands will have the possibility to reach the users one-on-one. There are very interesting niches that brands can reach through the many marketing channels.’

What we can gather from developer Affle’s site is that SMS2.0 does not deliver a lot of content except for some Emoticons that one can send and a possible review of establishments that are, without a doubt, sponsors of the program. It basically seems like you install a free program on your phone in order to receive a lot of advertising. This will not work for advertisers, and the content that is offered is simply not enough – yet? – to make it interesting for the customers.

We will keep an eye on this as it might be introduced in Europe in the near future as well, but we expect nothing but trouble for advertisers here.

At 77 we think of this as a good combination of product and advertiser, even to the extent that Textango’s increased recognition online might turn into a viral explosion through MySpace. Giving away content like an entire CD will certainly give you a lot of goodwill with the alternative kids – who are exactly the target group for Textango.

The popularity of MySpace is paying off combined with the focus on music that it has had for a long time now. We think social networks will play an even larger roll in the distribution of legal music in the future, especially when combined with social advertising as demonstrated in this case.

Other interesting news is the appearance of Facebook on the Blackberry, from WebProNews. Facebook for Blackberry was introduced yesterday and is yet another step into mobile social networking.

UPDATE: Facebook has collected $500 million more from investors in the rest of what appears to be (in hindsight) a major investing round. The investors seem to get little more than a small part ownership in the social network, which has, rightly, led to doubts about this investment and the value of Facebook in the blogosphere.

From the 3 point of view, they are simply the first mobile network provider to cave in to the VoIP service, which was bound to happen some time. Being first in, we can assume they hope to expand their clientèle taking over competitors’ customers. They will certainly have less revenue from the new Skype customers that will only use the service for calling landlines, but probably hope to make up for it with their regular mobile services, which will, of course, be available too on the Skype mobile.

We further expect mobile network providers to now push each other aside to be next in on the mobile to VoIP service.

The 3D map was helped being put together with Photosynth technology, for which you can find a demo here. Photosynth is able to take shared photos of a certain subject (in the demo the Notre Dame church is used) from all over the Internet, and merge these into one 3D model. For further details, take a look at the Windows Live blog.

The marketing possibilities are groundbreaking, especially when this type of map will be used from a mobile phone – related 77Article – Potential customers will never get lost trying to reach your business, and can get a look and feel from their mobile phones. The 3D model could even be extended with a view of the interior of a business (think hotels, restaurants, etc) to give a potential customer really a good idea of how you do what you do.