Mobile on my mind

As regular readers will know, I have flushes of enthusiasm for mobile and what it might mean for B2B media and information in Asia. With 650+ million phones in China and India alone and over 3 billion around the world, it remains an under-utilised platform.

Yesterday, I attended a lunch organised by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong where a panel talked about mobile advertising. Marketing covers it here. A key focus of the three panelists was that, in order to be effective, advertisers should make use of the capacity to target messages. This is, in my view, central to any value which can be developed for the B2B markets where targeting is everything.

They were perhaps not quite as defensive as they should have been about the damage already done to the medium by blanket SMS spam campaigns although some questions from the floor were pretty pointed in bringing this up.

This is obviously all taking off in India as well as I came across three interesting pieces on this just yesterday:

1. WATblog.com does a round-up of mobile advertising channels already active in India. Some of them sound pretty intrusive and unappealing to me, but there's clearly good mileage in others.
2. Linking Hong Kong and India, contentrasutra.com reports on Buongiorno's launch of its mobile advertising solution into that market. Buongiorno is a Hong Kong-based value-added service provider focusing on mobile marketing solutions in which Japanese trading giant Mitsui is an investor. Unfortunately, their web site appears to have keeled over this morning amid all the excitement of expanding in the Indian market.
3. Getting closer to my interest in market-specific, B2B applications is the announcement that "People Group’s real estate property, Makaan.com, has launched an SMS based mobile application, developed by sister concern, Mauj Mobile". Interestingly, the product eschews GPRS/3G mobile internet functions and is entirely SMS based.
   

SMS frenzy and turning worms

It's been a very busy week with various deadlines but I have been keeping an eye on the news. My two favourite China media-related stories this week:

1. The Baidu Europe saga: Many companies have been surprised to discover their brands ( or something very close to their brands) being used by somebody else in China. No doubt the boys at Baidu will be interested in the announcement of baidu.eu with which it seems they are not connected. Fons Tuinstra has been following this closely (see here and here for more). Maybe this is just a repeat of Web 1.0 'hijacking' of URLs. But, as Fons says, "when Baidu China decides to take legal action, it seems that they have a fair chance of winning."
   
2. SMS frenzy: We have written regularly about the mobile opportunity in China and possible business applications of SMS on a massive scale. The size of this potential was underlined by the news reported by PanAsianBiz that in Beijing alone, some 400 million text messages were sent on the Chinese New Year's Eve!! Business Week's New Tech in Asia blog suggested that the number for the whole holiday could be as high as 14 billion.

Still focusing on Baidu, we were interested to see as well the Seeking Alpha piece titled "Can Baidu Survive Google's Ferocious Uppercut?" Analayst Roger Ehrenberg suggests "it appears that Google's persistence, ability to listen and learn and long-term focus has caused it to rapidly close the gap, posing a real threat to Baidu in its home market. Further, some Baidu missteps are hampering its own efforts to continue its meteoric growth in China and to maintain its hometown advantage".