Tweeted this before, but it is so interesting that I have to make a note of it here. According to EIAA browsing the mobile web is more popular than reading newspapers or magazines.
MobiAD » Mobile Advertising News » Mobile Web More Popular Than Reading.
Though it may come as no surprise, a new study out of Europe proves the mobile Web is indeed more popular than reading newspapers, magazines and just about anything else.
The study, sponsored by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), studied mobile Web usage across 15 European markets to see how consumers are “extending the ways in which they enjoy and engage with the internet and its growing influence on everyday lives.”
The study found that on average, 71 million Europeans use the internet on their mobile each week – for an average time of almost one hour every day – averaging 6.4 hours per week of total browsing. This compares with an average of just 4.8 hours reading a newspaper or 4.1 hours reading magazines. This increase is largely being driven by the younger generations with 24% of 16-24 year olds and 21% of 25-34 year olds already using the mobile Web and spending on average 7.2 and 6.6 hours respectively each week.
Though the study focused on Europe, it no doubt mirrors a worldwide appetite for mobile Web usage, acting as a key driver in the decline of printed publications, for good reason.
“Better devices and connectivity as well as enhanced consumer motivation all started coming together in 2009 to improve and extend the overall Online experience, explained Alison Fennah, Executive Director of the EIAA. ”As a result, the internet is now being consumed across PC, laptop, mobile and gaming devices, providing 24-7 access to digital information and entertainment. This presents a compelling case for brands to explore and incorporate a growing number of complementary interactive platforms into the marketing mix.”
Though it may come as no surprise, a new study out of Europe proves the mobile Web is indeed more popular than reading newspapers, magazines and just about anything else.
The study, sponsored by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), studied mobile Web usage across 15 European markets to see how consumers are “extending the ways in which they enjoy and engage with the internet and its growing influence on everyday lives.”
The study found that on average, 71 million Europeans use the internet on their mobile each week – for an average time of almost one hour every day – averaging 6.4 hours per week of total browsing. This compares with an average of just 4.8 hours reading a newspaper or 4.1 hours reading magazines. This increase is largely being driven by the younger generations with 24% of 16-24 year olds and 21% of 25-34 year olds already using the mobile Web and spending on average 7.2 and 6.6 hours respectively each week.
Though the study focused on Europe, it no doubt mirrors a worldwide appetite for mobile Web usage, acting as a key driver in the decline of printed publications, for good reason.
“Better devices and connectivity as well as enhanced consumer motivation all started coming together in 2009 to improve and extend the overall Online experience, explained Alison Fennah, Executive Director of the EIAA. ”As a result, the internet is now being consumed across PC, laptop, mobile and gaming devices, providing 24-7 access to digital information and entertainment. This presents a compelling case for brands to explore and incorporate a growing number of complementary interactive platforms into the marketing mix.”
If you are developing a mobile Web app and want to test it out in the Windows Phone emulator running IE Mobile, you don't need to launch the Windows Phone developer tools with a dummy project each time and hit F5 just to click on the IE icon in order to get the browser running.
Create a shortcut icon, right-click it and choose Properties, and set the Target field to:
"{Install Drive}:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0\XDE.exe" "{Install Drive}:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\WindowsPhone\v7.0\Emulation\Images\WM70C1.bin"
Then you can just use this shortcut to launch the Emulator as a standalone image each time and start the browser.
Enjoy!
Joe Marini
Principal Program Manager
@joemarini
If you are developing a mobile Web app and want to test it out in the Windows Phone emulator running IE Mobile, you don't need to launch the Windows Phone developer tools with a dummy project each time and hit F5 just to click on the IE icon in order to get the browser running.
Create a shortcut icon, right-click it and choose Properties, and set the Target field to:
"{Install Drive}:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0\XDE.exe" "{Install Drive}:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\WindowsPhone\v7.0\Emulation\Images\WM70C1.bin"
Then you can just use this shortcut to launch the Emulator as a standalone image each time and start the browser.
Enjoy!
Joe Marini
Principal Program Manager
@joemarini
Shared by jonarnes
…and a new industry is born
 ZDNet (blog) | Apple iPad: accessorize your iPad with the modulR system ZDNet (blog) With more than a decade of mobile, Internet and wireless experience, Joel specializes in taking existing brands and technologies into the mobile and … and more » |
Shared by jonarnes
…and a new industry is born
ZDNet (blog) | Apple iPad: accessorize your iPad with the modulR system ZDNet (blog) With more than a decade of mobile, Internet and wireless experience, Joel specializes in taking existing brands and technologies into the mobile and … and more » |
I have been been working on an ereader project lately,* and thinking about it a lot therefore. This has been soaking for a week now, it isn’t coming together with a common theme as I like all my posts to do so; so I give up and am just gonna push it as a list of semi-random rants.
For a narrowly focused by very spot-on analysis of formats for eBooks (and how html is going to be the way forward) read Joe Clark’s article Web Standards for E-books at ALA.
And I’ll start by quoting, because he says it better than I could:
The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.
I’ll also say that eReaders have essentially no penetration compared to anything else. any pronouncements are gonna look like Cliff Stoll’s oft derided article on the lack of future of the internet. Much like the Information Superhighway and other early internet-related pronouncements, we don’t know what will happen, but I suspect Joe is right, and eBooks are going to be yet another form of media, and paper mills are safe for a while.
My first list of random thoughts is things I keep hearing, and which I think are dumb. Having worked on an eBook directly for six months now, I’ve seen this all along about the Kindle and almost every new device, but “iPad will save the world” hype has increased it exponentially.
“This changes everything.” See all the points above. It might change something, but seriously? Even those who get no paper publications now still read a lot of traditionally print media, and watch TV. Broadcast from a small group to a large group.
“The page-by-page reading paradigm is old and will be pushed aside.” Then why is it generally true on that published content I mentioned on the web? And why did we move from scrolls way back when? Actually, scrolls mostly have page breaks in the same way current interactive products do, as convenient blocks on content, then you move to the next (look it up… history is useful). This is therefore serious as can be; pages work for some fundamental reason, and sizes of books are driven by reader preference and innate usability (market driven, not explicit tests, and over centuries, but it’s still true) not industrial design and manufacturing so much. Why haven’t ebook designers noticed this?
“It can all be delightfully interactive, with photo spreads and blah, blah…” Again, why is this not true on the web, with /much/ more horsepower, screen space, and well-understood tools? I am regularly disappointed in what my web news experience is like; each page has the same thumbnail photo? I know the print edition has several, so show me. And slideshows, and movies? Really? Multimedia does not mean video or animation or any one thing, but the interplay between different types of display content. Please make /true/ multi-media experiences on the web, and I’ll start believing that eBooks can do something more than formatted text and click-to-view-the-photo.
The n magazine app has sold 140mm copies in the first week.” I do not care about trends today. So an app for a magazine (which has other issues) sells well on iPhone? So? Maybe it’s because there is no common magazine reader? And how well compared to even their dwindling print sales? And how sticky? The magazines I subscribe to I have been getting for decades. When trying to save traditional media, forget ongoing costs; if every publisher now has to figure CPGA and churn as non-trivial values every quarter, they need a whole new way to run their business. That might happen, but it doesn’t make “just publish your magazine on an eReader” a likely model. A method is needed with paper-subscription-like customer loyalty, and comparable price. Wishing for people to pay at newsstand rates will not make it so. (There’s more to say about payment schemes.
And now, a different but equally un-ordered list of random thoughts. These are more like design objectives, and business objectives for making a useful eReader:
Books are not designed for annotation, bookmarking, etc. These are behaviors people created because they innately wanted them, and books support the methods. You have to support the /root need/ in your new device. How? I say starting with copying the existing methods, but new ones seem possible as well. Maybe someday I’ll show examples of what I think.
How much would you read if every book was laid out differently? Some are right spine, some left, some fold up like a roadmap, etc.? Apps, with custom interfaces, for each publication are a clear non-starter. Not to mention issues with cross-referencing, or searching for bookmarks and notes, and social synching, and… all the other issues that trip up any number of services. Interoperability will be key.
Battery life better START at days, not hours. If I had my way, the wall-plug would be hidden because you never use it; these need to be solar-charged, or similar. Minimal power consumption (ePaper types of technology, with NO consumption when static) seem required at least for now. There are color screens like this right beyond the next door. So we might be almost there.
Cheap, cheap, cheap. Who wants to carry their ONE eBook around with them, and the people I know with one mostly carry it only sometimes. Why do waiting rooms have magazines? Because you have enough to do without carrying your own. Even in mobile-ubiquity days, a LOT of folks read those waiting room magazines. Need cheap enough everyone has several, and eventually they are given away.
Rugged, approaching indestructable. A ruggedized device can be life chaging but this will only really happen when they are small enough to carry around we well. Alternatively, if the reader is dirt cheap, this makes up for some. But it’s not just disposal; how annoyed are you if you bring one reader with you on a trip and ruin it? It’s hard to ruin paper so completely you cannot read it later on. Who has not dried out an accidentally-soaked magazine to finish an article?
My wife has a rugged phone, and it’s been very helpful to be able to carry gardening, talk when cooking, have it by the tub, etc. But it’s sort of an awful, featureless phone. We need small, rugged and full-featured to compete with paper seriously.
Portable content. I don’t even want to talk about how the DRM works, but the end state has to be that I, as a person, can /always/ see my content on any device. E.g., I smash it and buy another, content is there seamlessly. If we want to get to a social scene, you better add a way to share that doesn’t involve me handing the device over. I had my phone off all the time, and it seems to make people nervous; it’s hard to get a phone out of most folk’s hands. When photos are shared, half the time it’s held up for others to see, not passed around. How will a reader get past this personal-device bias?
Make it social and connected. Once you get past the table stakes of making it not uncomfortably un-book-like, work on where digital devices can be better, and that’s not the BS about carry a library in your pocket, it’s that it’s connected to the world. Better make a social media tie in, and better not be a unique one. Clearly, we’re not there in both vision and for business reasons; These silos of protected competitive space need to go away… but that’s a whole other blog entry I am working on.
And be sure that data is handled in an information-processing-device sort of manner. Don’t be single session just because it’s easy; allow switching between books rapidly. Be sure search is easy to find and use, and is comprehensive. Display in multiple formats, and visualizations, and allow processing of content. I start thinking, why can’t the functions in math books be able to have actual values plugged in, and work?
Be accessible, and not just for legal or regulatory reasons, not just for the stereotype blind user, but because if we’re going to use this everywhere, for all users we need it to work in all lighting, when you are tired, when you are driving and cannot read at all, and so on. Build true multi-media experience from the ground up. Again, no need to dream this up; there are rather good systems that exist, and just need to be implemented robustly, and universally.
Much of this discussion reminds me of every other technology that has come about while I have been a conscious, technically aware human. BD-Live just for one example, is wildly disappointing compared to the promise of interactivity . Since grade school I have been waiting for an experience half as clever and innovative as the Aspen Movie Map.
Despite all my griping, notice that I don’t say eBooks are a dead end. Or even that they must not be innovative. I say they have to be /usefully/ innovative, and to misquote what we say about mobile here “be a good book first.” It’s worth going back to first principles when a new technology comes about, and I think eBooks will be silly and niche until they are really, really designed to some useful principles.
* It’s not a secret project, so is a publicized devices, but my involvement is secret, so that’s all I can say about it.
Little Springs Design is a user experience design consultancy focused exclusively on mobile. For information on contracting our design, strategy, training, and testing services, please contact us today.
See our scheduled training on mobile design, including convenient webinars
Copyright ©2009 Little Springs Design, Inc.
I have been been working on an ereader project lately,* and thinking about it a lot therefore. This has been soaking for a week now, it isn’t coming together with a common theme as I like all my posts to do so; so I give up and am just gonna push it as a list of semi-random rants.
For a narrowly focused by very spot-on analysis of formats for eBooks (and how html is going to be the way forward) read Joe Clark’s article Web Standards for E-books at ALA.
And I’ll start by quoting, because he says it better than I could:
The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.
I’ll also say that eReaders have essentially no penetration compared to anything else. any pronouncements are gonna look like Cliff Stoll’s oft derided article on the lack of future of the internet. Much like the Information Superhighway and other early internet-related pronouncements, we don’t know what will happen, but I suspect Joe is right, and eBooks are going to be yet another form of media, and paper mills are safe for a while.
My first list of random thoughts is things I keep hearing, and which I think are dumb. Having worked on an eBook directly for six months now, I’ve seen this all along about the Kindle and almost every new device, but “iPad will save the world” hype has increased it exponentially.
“This changes everything.” See all the points above. It might change something, but seriously? Even those who get no paper publications now still read a lot of traditionally print media, and watch TV. Broadcast from a small group to a large group.
“The page-by-page reading paradigm is old and will be pushed aside.” Then why is it generally true on that published content I mentioned on the web? And why did we move from scrolls way back when? Actually, scrolls mostly have page breaks in the same way current interactive products do, as convenient blocks on content, then you move to the next (look it up… history is useful). This is therefore serious as can be; pages work for some fundamental reason, and sizes of books are driven by reader preference and innate usability (market driven, not explicit tests, and over centuries, but it’s still true) not industrial design and manufacturing so much. Why haven’t ebook designers noticed this?
“It can all be delightfully interactive, with photo spreads and blah, blah…” Again, why is this not true on the web, with /much/ more horsepower, screen space, and well-understood tools? I am regularly disappointed in what my web news experience is like; each page has the same thumbnail photo? I know the print edition has several, so show me. And slideshows, and movies? Really? Multimedia does not mean video or animation or any one thing, but the interplay between different types of display content. Please make /true/ multi-media experiences on the web, and I’ll start believing that eBooks can do something more than formatted text and click-to-view-the-photo.
The n magazine app has sold 140mm copies in the first week.” I do not care about trends today. So an app for a magazine (which has other issues) sells well on iPhone? So? Maybe it’s because there is no common magazine reader? And how well compared to even their dwindling print sales? And how sticky? The magazines I subscribe to I have been getting for decades. When trying to save traditional media, forget ongoing costs; if every publisher now has to figure CPGA and churn as non-trivial values every quarter, they need a whole new way to run their business. That might happen, but it doesn’t make “just publish your magazine on an eReader” a likely model. A method is needed with paper-subscription-like customer loyalty, and comparable price. Wishing for people to pay at newsstand rates will not make it so. (There’s more to say about payment schemes.
And now, a different but equally un-ordered list of random thoughts. These are more like design objectives, and business objectives for making a useful eReader:
Books are not designed for annotation, bookmarking, etc. These are behaviors people created because they innately wanted them, and books support the methods. You have to support the /root need/ in your new device. How? I say starting with copying the existing methods, but new ones seem possible as well. Maybe someday I’ll show examples of what I think.
How much would you read if every book was laid out differently? Some are right spine, some left, some fold up like a roadmap, etc.? Apps, with custom interfaces, for each publication are a clear non-starter. Not to mention issues with cross-referencing, or searching for bookmarks and notes, and social synching, and… all the other issues that trip up any number of services. Interoperability will be key.
Battery life better START at days, not hours. If I had my way, the wall-plug would be hidden because you never use it; these need to be solar-charged, or similar. Minimal power consumption (ePaper types of technology, with NO consumption when static) seem required at least for now. There are color screens like this right beyond the next door. So we might be almost there.
Cheap, cheap, cheap. Who wants to carry their ONE eBook around with them, and the people I know with one mostly carry it only sometimes. Why do waiting rooms have magazines? Because you have enough to do without carrying your own. Even in mobile-ubiquity days, a LOT of folks read those waiting room magazines. Need cheap enough everyone has several, and eventually they are given away.
Rugged, approaching indestructable. A ruggedized device can be life chaging but this will only really happen when they are small enough to carry around we well. Alternatively, if the reader is dirt cheap, this makes up for some. But it’s not just disposal; how annoyed are you if you bring one reader with you on a trip and ruin it? It’s hard to ruin paper so completely you cannot read it later on. Who has not dried out an accidentally-soaked magazine to finish an article?
My wife has a rugged phone, and it’s been very helpful to be able to carry gardening, talk when cooking, have it by the tub, etc. But it’s sort of an awful, featureless phone. We need small, rugged and full-featured to compete with paper seriously.
Portable content. I don’t even want to talk about how the DRM works, but the end state has to be that I, as a person, can /always/ see my content on any device. E.g., I smash it and buy another, content is there seamlessly. If we want to get to a social scene, you better add a way to share that doesn’t involve me handing the device over. I had my phone off all the time, and it seems to make people nervous; it’s hard to get a phone out of most folk’s hands. When photos are shared, half the time it’s held up for others to see, not passed around. How will a reader get past this personal-device bias?
Make it social and connected. Once you get past the table stakes of making it not uncomfortably un-book-like, work on where digital devices can be better, and that’s not the BS about carry a library in your pocket, it’s that it’s connected to the world. Better make a social media tie in, and better not be a unique one. Clearly, we’re not there in both vision and for business reasons; These silos of protected competitive space need to go away… but that’s a whole other blog entry I am working on.
And be sure that data is handled in an information-processing-device sort of manner. Don’t be single session just because it’s easy; allow switching between books rapidly. Be sure search is easy to find and use, and is comprehensive. Display in multiple formats, and visualizations, and allow processing of content. I start thinking, why can’t the functions in math books be able to have actual values plugged in, and work?
Be accessible, and not just for legal or regulatory reasons, not just for the stereotype blind user, but because if we’re going to use this everywhere, for all users we need it to work in all lighting, when you are tired, when you are driving and cannot read at all, and so on. Build true multi-media experience from the ground up. Again, no need to dream this up; there are rather good systems that exist, and just need to be implemented robustly, and universally.
Much of this discussion reminds me of every other technology that has come about while I have been a conscious, technically aware human. BD-Live just for one example, is wildly disappointing compared to the promise of interactivity . Since grade school I have been waiting for an experience half as clever and innovative as the Aspen Movie Map.
Despite all my griping, notice that I don’t say eBooks are a dead end. Or even that they must not be innovative. I say they have to be /usefully/ innovative, and to misquote what we say about mobile here “be a good book first.” It’s worth going back to first principles when a new technology comes about, and I think eBooks will be silly and niche until they are really, really designed to some useful principles.
* It’s not a secret project, so is a publicized devices, but my involvement is secret, so that’s all I can say about it.
Little Springs Design is a user experience design consultancy focused exclusively on mobile. For information on contracting our design, strategy, training, and testing services, please contact us today.
See our scheduled training on mobile design, including convenient webinars
Copyright ©2009 Little Springs Design, Inc.
Shared by jonarnes
have been waiting for this
Geocoding – finding the geographical location of a given address – is one of the most popular features of the Google Maps API. Both the JavaScript Maps APIs and the Maps API for Flash include classes that enable applications to perform geocoding, and there is also a RESTful web service that offers the option of making geocoding requests from server side applications with output in both XML and JSON.
The Google Maps JavaScript API v3 introduced a new format for geocoding responses that offers a number of improvements over the format used in the v2 API:
We’re happy to now announce a new Geocoding Web Service that adopts these improvements.
The Geocoding Web Service is intended to enable precaching of geocoder results that you know your application will need in future. For example, if your application displays property listings, you can geocode the address of each property, cache the results on your server, and serve these locations to your API application. This ensures that your application does not need to geocode the address of a property every time it is viewed by a user. However we do ask that you regularly refresh your cache of geocoder results.
Note however that it is a requirement of the Maps API Terms of Service that you use the Geocoding Web Service in conjunction with a Google map. This means that when it comes time to use cached geocoder results in an application, the application must display the results or any data derived from them on a map generated using one of the Google Maps APIs or Google Earth API.
If your application needs to geocode arbitrary addresses that are entered by your users while they wait we recommend that you use the classes in the appropriate client API. This ensures that the requests your application generates reach Google directly from your users, which will improve the performance of your application and ensure it is resilient to unexpected spikes in use. For more details, I highly recommend this excellent blog post by our very own Mano Marks.
In addition to an improved response format you will notice some other changes in the new Geocoding Web Service. Requests no longer require a Maps API key, and Maps API Premier customers must sign their requests. In addition CSV output is not supported because we found that the minimal amount of data in a CSV response makes it is difficult to identify false positive results.
2,500 requests may be sent to the Geocoding Web Service per day from a single IP address. This is independent of any geocoding activity generated by applications using one of the client Maps APIs for geocoding. Maps API Premier quotas remain unchanged.
A forward geocoding request to the new Geocoding Web Service with XML output looks like:
http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=sydney&sensor=false
A reverse geocoding request with JSON output looks like:
http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=-33.873038,151.20563&sensor=false
Check out the Geocoding Web Service documentation for more details on the options available for language and biasing of results.
In conjunction with the launch of the new Geocoding Web Service we are also announcing the deprecation of the current service, now retroactively named the “Geocoding V2 Web Service”. Existing applications using the V2 Web Service need not worry though. Deprecation indicates that we no longer intend to pursue any further feature development, but we will continue to maintain and support the service in accordance with the deprecation policy set out in the Maps API Terms of Service.
We hope that you find the new Geocoding Web Service easier to use and useful. As always we encourage you to check out the Google Maps API Google Group if you have any questions or comments relating to the APIs. We look forward to adding more great features to the Geocoding Web Service in future.
Posted by Thor Mitchell, Maps API Product Manager
