Wireless Advertising Hassim Mohamed Yunos, Jerry Gao, Ph.D. Department of Computer Engineering San Jose State University San Jose, CA 95192-0180 Contacting email:
[email protected]
Abstract Wireless advertising is becoming a hot topic due to the fast development of wireless networking and technology and significant increase of mobile device users. Recently, eTForecasts1 and Global Mobile2 quoted that in year 2000 Mobile voice use, which has 468 million users, is surpassing 365 million wired Internet users. This makes wireless advertising a new and hot marketing channel to reach the potential customers for marketing. Company research like Windwire5 and SkyGo6 indicate that permission-based alerts delivered to wireless phones capture consumer attention, drive action and build brand awareness. This paper provides a tutorial of wireless advertising by discussing the different perspectives of wireless advertising, including its needs, characteristics, presentation formats, business issues and technical problems. Moreover, it presents an overview of the existing business models, vendors and their products in wireless advertising. In addition, the paper reports our survey results about the perspective users’ view on wireless advertising. Finally, the remarks of future challenges and solution are given. 1.
Introduction
Wireless advertising is becoming a hot topic in the advertising and marketing community due to the fast development of wireless networking technology and the significant increase of mobile device users. According to eTForecasts1 and Global Mobile2, in the year of 2000, there are 468 million mobile users. This number is much higher than the number, 365 million, of Internet users in 2000. The Kelsey Group estimated that the U.S. wireless advertising market would be $35 million in 20003. However, Jupiter Media Metrix predicted that the market would be 600 million by 20034 while worldwide
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wireless advertising market will be 6.5 billion. Company research like Windwire5 and SkyGo6 indicated that permission-based alerts delivered to wireless phones capture the attention of consumers, drive responding actions, and build brand awareness. Large companies, such as Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, have created a subsidiary to focus on this market. What is wireless advertising? Intuitively, wireless advertising refers to advertising and marketing activities that deliver advertisements to mobile devices using wireless network and mobile advertising solutions to promote the sales of goods and services, or build brand awareness. Wireless advertising creates a new media channel to conduct product and business advertising and marketing through mobile devices, such as mobile phone, PDA and pocket PC. Besides promoting the sale of goods or service, wireless advertising also increases product awareness and disseminating information. As shown in Figure 16, currently United State has only 0.9% of the world’s wireless Internet users while Asia has close to 94% of the world’s wireless Internet users. Part of the reason is because the Internet infrastructure is well established in U.S., and the Internet-based web access has been widely accepted by American. Source: http://www.eurotechnology.com/imode/faq-wap.html
Figure 1: The World’s Wireless Internet Users
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As outlined in Wireless Commerce: Marketing Issues and Possibilities8, wireless devices, the platform behind wireless marketing, have three main characteristics over PC’s and other conventional platforms. •
Accessible – since a wireless device is becoming a personal device because it is handy and portable, and available for use at all time.
•
Personal – it carries the user’s identity that can be used to track down to an individual, unlike PC computers that only carry a household's identity.
•
“Location Aware” – it is easy to track down where a user's physical location is as long as the device is on and connected. This is very critical for conducting a useroriented marketing and advertising.
The three characteristics provide unique features that do not exist in traditional and current advertising media. Wireless advertisements can be highly targeted, flexible and dynamic. The targeted audiences are vast, and they can search information, issue inquiries, and make purchases at any mobile location. Some early applications of wireless advertising in mobile commerce are local entertainment information, stock quote, dining and restaurant reservation, and wireless coupon. Since wireless advertising is one of hot topics in mobile commerce, people want to know more about wireless advertising, including business models, advertisement formats and presentation styles, technical issues and solutions, infrastructure systems, and standards. Hence, we need a) tutorial papers discussing its basic concepts, issues and general methods, b) research projects addressing technical problems and solutions, and c) wireless advertising systems providing wireless advertising services. This paper provides a tutorial of wireless advertising by discussing the different perspectives of wireless advertising, including its needs, characteristics, presentation formats, business and technical problems. Moreover, it presents an overview of the existing business models, vendors and their products in wireless advertising. Furthermore, this paper reports our survey results about the perspective users’ view on wireless advertising.
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Our paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses different types of wireless advertisements. Section 3 presents the five different types of business models in wireless advertising. In Section 4, existing wireless advertising approaches and techniques are discussed. Section 5 addresses business and technical issues in wireless advertising. Section 6 discusses four major vendors. In Section 7, we report our case study results on user perceptions on wireless advertising based on a conducted survey. Finally, our conclusion and remarks about future direction are given. Table 1. Vindigo's Wireless Advertisements
For Media Company - Vindigo offers a fully hosted solution that enables publishers to extend their brands and content to mobile users with ease.
For Wireless Carries - Vindigo gives wireless carriers a perfect solution for generating user demand and encouraging frequent use of wireless internet.
For Directory Publishers - Vindigo For Hospital Providers - Vindigo allows enables directory publishers to parlay their hotels to provide their guests with valuebrands and advertising relationships into added service by offering branded ads. the wireless arena.
For Real Estate Firms - The Vindigo's platform can support the entire home search phase of the real estate sales process by integrating location-based services with contact management, process tracking, and open house scheduling.
For Field Technicians - Vindigo's dynamically generated maps and directions will help field service engineers identify the precise location of service needs and expedite the repair process.
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2. Wireless Advertisement Various kinds of wireless advertisements can be delivered to different types of mobile devices, such as a mobile phone, PDA, or Pocket PC. Unlike traditional and Internet advertisements, wireless ads have the limited screen size for display. In this section, we present current existing wireless ads from a number of major business vendors in wireless advertising. •
Vindigo's location-based application advertisements Table 1 summaries different kinds of wireless ads provided by Vindigo. Vindigo is an award-winning location-based service, available to anyone with a Palm OS, Pocket PC device, or an Internet-enabled cell phone. Vindigo enables individuals on the street to find the best and closest places to eat, shop, and play. In essence, Vindigo software equips people with radar for the world around them. Table 1 displays wireless ads on a mobile device for media companies, directory publishers, travel agencies, real estate firms, wireless carries, as well as field supporters.
•
SkyGo's advertisements SkyGo delivers wireless ads to any mobile phone, PDA or pager. It supports a wide range of operating systems and protocols for delivering phone ads (including WAP, SMS, and iMode) and PDA ads (including Palm and Windows CE). Figure 2 shows two SkeyGo's wireless ad examples on a phone and PDA. They demonstrated that wireless advertising could be a very effective channel for brand building ads.
Wireless Ads build brand effectively by compelling concise messages within content.
Palm Ads build brand effectively with compelling concise messages
Figure 2. SkeyGo's Wireless Ad Samples
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•
Avantgo's channel-based advertisements AvantGo's wireless users can access more than 1,000 premium channels from wireless-enabled handhelds and smart phones. These channels provide an effective mean to deliver wireless ads for various businesses, such as bank and finance, entertainment, health care, publishers & media, retail shopping, sports, computer technology, and travel. AvantGo provide two types of wireless advertising services. •
Wireless home page ads: Advertisers can place wireless ads on the AvantGo's wireless home page to achieve unsurpassed visibility with premier placement header and anchor ads. They can easily achieve a high level of awareness, because this is the first page for users to see when they access AvantGo's wireless service. Unlike typical web pages with a multitude of ads, your message is showcased in a clean, uncluttered environment. Figure 3 shows a wireless home page ad sample. Source: http://www.avantgo.com/products/businesses/marketing_commerce/pdf/wireless_ad.pdf Wireless Category Ad: Use high–visibility placement to boost click–through to ads for branding, lead generation, promotions, and more!
Figure 3: Wireless Home Page Ad Sample Source: http://www.avantgo.com/products/businesses/marketing_commerce/pdf/wireless_ad.pdf Wireless Category Ad: Deliver your targeted message based on users’ interests and geographical location.
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Figure 4: Wireless Category Ad Samples •
Wireless category ads Advertisers may choose AvantGo's wireless category pages to place ads that easily reach to the desired demographics using messages focused on consumers who are browsing the channels within a specific interest category. Figure 4 shows several Wireless Category AD samples. AvantGo's wireless categories provide customers with well-classified advertisements that can be found easily AvantGo's wireless categorized channels. Moreover, an AvantGo's wireless category ad enables advertisers to target consumers who registered in a particular geographical location.
3.
Business Models In Wireless Advertising
A business model is a blueprint for a business that highlights the business strategy about how to make revenue by specifying markets, products, customers, and where it is positioned in the value chain. In this section, we summarized five different business models for wireless advertising. Table 2 shows the comparisons. •
Voice-subsidized This business model has an objective to provide competitive offerings and has no intention to generate additional revenue. It allows wireless service providers to support wireless Internet services (WSP??) and content using subscriber fees and WSP resources only. This business model does not require any wireless ad technology.
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•
Safe income & no upside revenue model The objective of this business model is to subsidize acquisition of premier content to elevate quality of wireless Internet offering. As for voice-subsidized business models, this business model does not require any wireless ad technology. This business model derives revenue not only from the subscriber fees, but also from the content providers’ placement fees. These placement fees are charged to content providers desiring “top deck” placement or general distribution via the WSP’s network. It also refrains from taking a share of any revenue generated by the content providers as a result of their ad distribution over the WSP network.
•
Diversified revenue The objective of this business model is to subsidize quality content and subscriber fees to increase content quality and create a compelling offering that draws and retains subscribers. This model has two ways to generate the revenue. The first is from placement fees. The other is by receiving a share of advertising revenues and Mcommerce fees, which are realized by the content and service providers directly using the WSP’s distribution channel in addition to subsidize subscriptions or the cost of acquiring content fees. This business model has the added benefit of increasing profitability, with minimal effort by the WSP as media sales. Another advantage of this model is that it can subsidize either the cost of acquiring content or the discount consumer services fees. The drawback of this model is that it requires WSP to have its own wireless ad server or a sanctioned ad server for use by publishers. This server has to be able to accurately track the ads served to the WSP subscribers based on subscriber profiles or WSP restrictions.
•
Media-dependent, outsource media sales revenue The objective of this business model is to subsidize quality content and subscriber fees to grow and retain the subscriber base, while generating significant revenue. This model generates revenue wholly from a share of all advertising and M-commerce revenue generated over the WSP distribution channel. Hence, it requires a greater commitment to wireless advertising from WSPs. Media sales for a publisher’s content is an outsource task, and is largely the responsibility of the publisher. In this scenario, WSPs must not only be able to track the ads served over their network to ensure
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proper revenue sharing, but also may opt to control the number and frequency of ads served to their wireless consumers based on subscriber profiles or WSP restrictions. •
Media-dependent, in-house media sales revenue The objective of this model is to expand the carrier’s business function to include media sales, controlling and drawing revenue from the wireless Internet property. This model is similar to the media-dependent, outsource media sales model. The only difference is that it requires a WSP to create in-house media sales team devoted to media sales, processing and services of wireless ads. The business model is fully dependent on wireless advertising and m-commerce fees for wireless content acquisition and subscriber access. It also requires a complete technology solution to support wireless advertising in advertisement creation, management, services, such as deliver, and measurement.
Business Model
Subscriber
M-Commerce
Content
Advertising
Fees
Fees
Placement Fees
Revenue
Partner Technology Requirement
Majority
None
None
None
None
Majority
None
Majority
None
None
Voice-subsidized Wireless Internet Safe income, No-upside revenue
Diversified revenue
Share of
Share of
Share of
•
WSP
•
Sanctioned
Share of •
Media-dependent Outsource media
None
Share of
None
Share of
Sales revenue
Media-dependent In-house media
None
Majority
None
Majority
publisher
Ad
Serving
Solution Outsource Media sales
•
Measurement Capability
•
WSP- sanctioned publisher
•
Ad Serving Solution
•
Outsource Media sales
•
- Measurement Capability
-
Carrier Ad Serving Solution
-
Extensive In-house Media Sales
-
Campaign Management Interface
Sales revenue
Table 2. Business Models for Wireless Advertising
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4.
Existing Approaches and Techniques
Wireless advertising needs wireless networks, mobile technology and infrastructure, systematic marketing and advertising solutions. Here, we discuss the existing approaches and technologies supporting wireless advertising. 4.1. Wireless Data Access Delivering wireless advertisements needs wireless data access methods, environments, and platforms. Data Accessibility - There are two different data access methods push and pull. They are different because they use different approaches to delivery data to the end users. Push data refers to a data access approach in which wireless data are delivered a user's mobile device without the user requests. In push data approach, the wireless data is sent to mobile devices as a short burst of text. These short text messages, sometimes called alerts, are frequently generated and delivered based on a user's profile or current location. Pull data refers to a data access approach in which wireless data are delivered to users upon their requests. A typical example of pull data is that a user accesses the wireless Internet, and receives wireless ads when the user browses a specific page with ads. Figure 5 (a) and 5(b) shows the available technology for data accessibility. Table 3 displays the visual and audio data access technologies in both pull and push approaches. Data Environment - Wireless advertising currently supports visual and audio data access. Visual data access is frequently used and most popular, it includes text and sometime graphic images. Audio data access is the conversion of a text message to an audio format. Ideally, wireless advertising could be supported with both visual and audio data in the near future. Data Platform - Mobile phones and PDAs are the most commonly used mobile devices. They have some drawbacks compared to the traditional PCs, such as smaller user interface and screen size, less memory, limited graphic formats and power, and slower data transfer rates. These limitations increase the difficulty of wireless marketing and advertising in placing advertisements on a wireless platform. Unlike
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online advertising, wireless advertising uses mobile devices as a new advertising platform to deliver, display, and track wireless ads whenever they are displayed anywhere anytime. Source: http://www.avesair.com/flash/solutions/mobile_marketing/push.html Source: http://www.avesair.com/flash/solutions/mobile_marketing/pull.html
Figure 5(a): Push Technique Overview
Figure 5(b): Pull Technique Overview
Audio Access
Visual Access
Push
N/A
WAP Alerts
Pull
VXML
WAP
SMS Syncing I-Mode
Table 3: Data Access Overview
4.2. Enabling Wireless Technologies Standard and cost-effective wireless technology is the key to the success of wireless advertising. Today, three major wireless technologies are being used worldwide. In Japan, I-mode, based on C-HTML, is the most popular wireless technology. In Europe, SMS is the popular protocol in the wireless community. In America, up to this time, WAP is the popular choice and standard for wireless vendors and service businesses. These technologies focused on special groups of users, and require particular mobile devices and wireless environments.
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•
WAP - Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open, global specification that empowers mobile users with wireless devices to easily access and interact with information and services instantly. WAP technology utilizes the WAP gateway and WML/HDML language to translate a mobile web request into a traditional HTML/HTTP request that the web server understands and vice versa. WAP plays as a bridge between wireless network and Internet. It can be used as an information channel between wireless devices and the Internet.
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SMS - Short Messaging Service (SMS) is a digital cellular network feature. It allows users to send short text and numeric messages to and from digital cell phones using cell phones and e-mail addresses based on public SMS messaging gateways over the Internet. SMS is silent and discreet. This is become important when a silent environment is required. Today, SMS applications include stock quotes, sports scores, and news that can be delivered to mobile phones at regularly scheduled intervals. Currently, there are approximately 16 billion SMS messages sent globally each month. The majority of that traffic occurred in Western Europe and Asia. In North America, most major cellular phone providers offer either one-way or two-way SMS services to their subscribers. With one-way service, a user can receive messages; while with two-way service, the user can receive and send messages with a cellular phone.
•
I-mode - I-mode provides a predominant wireless Internet service that offers wireless web access and e-mail services through mobile phones. It was first introduced in Japan by NTT DoCoMo and was patented. As of November 2000, I-mode had an estimate of 10 million users roughly represent 60% of world’s wireless Internet users10. It uses C-HTML-based language and protocol to link wireless devices to Internet. In Japan, I-mode users are not charged for the user connection time to a web site or service, but they are charged according to the transmitted data volume. This is different from typical western web services.
Besides the described technology, there are other technologies that are useful for wireless advertising. The first is synching technology, which is a simple and popular method that allows PDA users to store or cache the content on their PDA devices. Synching
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technology does not require any wireless service because it only uses a computer system and its Internet access to updated the stored information during synchronization time. With this technology, wireless advertising service providers can offer downloadable wireless ads, such as discount promotions, and coupons using a PDA device. Vindigo currently allows its users to obtain up to date information on movies, dining and places to visit for most major cities within the United State. The other technology is Web clipping, which allows users to access the updated contents dynamically through applications stored on mobile devices as well as wireless modems. Web clipping supports PDA users to access the information content from web sites in a tailored format on a palm platform. The displayed content on a PDA is a replica of the content from a regular web site with fewer graphics. Unlike a regular web page, a tailored page fits well in the limited PDA screen size. 5.
Issues and Challenges in Wireless Advertising
Since wireless advertising is still in its early stage, there is a wide range of issues and challenges that need to be look upon before it is widely accepted and used. We categorize these issues into two groups: technical and business issues. In this section, we discuss the identified issues and challenges in wireless advertising. 5.1. Business Issues There are many business issues relating to wireless advertising. Understanding these issues helps business people in setting up successful wireless advertising businesses and services. In addition, acknowledging these issues at the forefront becomes critical in business planning and solution delivery. Learning the business problems, pioneers in this industry may be able to keep a good position in the wireless advertising market. Here we summarize some of basic business issues below. •
Cost – Wireless customers, advertisers, and wireless marketing vendors, and advertising service agencies are faced with the cost issue. For customers, the current cost of wireless devices and wireless Internet subscription are considered high. IDC analyst Kevin Burden said that current wireless access for handholds is “too
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expensive for what you are getting back”. For advertising agents, the issue of cost is apparent in the high financial requirements of industrial research and technology placement. •
Push vs. pull – As we known, wireless advertisements are delivered the mobile users using the Push or Pull approaches. For example, if a consumer’s profile shows that he (or she) enjoys watching movies, then current movie theater advertisements could be pushed to the consumer’s mobile device. But, the push ad delivery could be intrusive to this customer, and causes an unfavorable effect on the buying habits of the consumer. If however, the consumer pulls the information of all the movie theater within certain radius from where he (or she) is. Hence, the pull ads are less intrusive to the customer than the push ads, but it does carry a higher functional cost, and requires more complicated systematic solutions because it is simple to broadcast wireless ads without tracking their receptions.
•
High business risk - Wireless marketing is still at the beginning of its growth cycle. With a new market comes high uncertainty, which means high business risk and low advertising revenue. This financial issue will create low investment research and development that will make pioneer of this market to make the required progress to success. Without research, company will be faced by a though choice between which marketing model should be taken.
•
Ad reception - Another business challenge of wireless advertising is determining whether or not a pushed ad was ever received. Questions that arise include, whether the mobile devices are on and connected? And whether the pushed ad is delivered to the customer side? On the upside, pushed wireless ads may be less expensive than delivered pulled ads. Unlike traditional TV and radio ads that have become socially accepted forms of intrusion, wireless ads delivered to personal mobile devices is still thought as a form of intrusion.Privacy - When discussing consumer profiling, the issue of privacy must be addressed. A law must be made to govern to what ad agencies are allowed to request and share. The data, presented by The Yankee group9 during the WAA meeting, indicated that more than 50% of consumers have privacy concerns over carrier’s use of their personal profile and location information. Additionally, wireless communication is still a very non-secure form of
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communications.Ad pitch - There are several methods that advertising agencies will attempt to sell to consumers. One is ad pitch based on wants and needs; this method has been there for ages. It has been there in paper coupon, and wired online advertising. In wireless advertising, we can also do ad pitch based on consumer location. For example, delivery and display a list of all French restaurants within a certain range from the current location of a consumer. 5.2.
Technical Issues and Challenges
Except business issues, the pioneers in wireless advertising encountered a number of technical problems. Here, they are summarized below. •
Smaller Screen Size - Given the constraint of the size of mobile devices, the user interface of wireless devices is quite limited, and it cannot display information-rich content in a useful way. Wireless advertising companies must figure out how to create effective advertisements in small screen size. Another problem is the inconsistent screen sizes among different types of mobile devices. For example, the screen size of mobile phone is much smaller than the size of PDA screens. Advertising agents are confronted with this dilemma when they generate and deliver wireless ads. This problem cannot be solved easily until some standards are enforced on mobile device manufactures, and defined in the wireless advertising community.
•
Inconsistent Formatting - When deciding upon the presentation formats of wireless advertisements, vendors must consider what kinds of formats are easily accepted on the receiving end. For example, special fonts, colors, picture formats might not be displayable on some wireless devices.
•
Slow Download Speeds - As what faced by the wired Internet several years ago, wireless Internet is facing the slow download speed due to the limitation of current wireless backbone. This issue not only affects the users' acceptance of wireless ads, but also reduces advertising performance because users might cancel, delete, or ignore a wireless access page due to it’s slow download of wireless ads. Several technologies, such as 2.5G and 3G, are trying to address this issue, but unfortunately until today these technologies are not available yet. Some analysts believe that they will become available as early as 2003.
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•
Broad Spectrum of Technologies - Powerful players, such as Microsoft, Nokia, and Phone.com are lining up to push wireless technologies and solutions in different directions. As a result, wireless advertising agents are confronted with the dilemma on deciding upon what technology to use. The industry is just now trying to develop the means for pushing ads to mobile devices, and to create organizations to regulate and standardize the industry.
•
Standardization - Without standardization the industry will become too convoluted and cutthroat to sustain itself. For time being, wireless advertising is lack of welldefined standards and regulations of advertising format, content, payment, and transmission protocol. Without well-defined standards and regulations, it is very difficult for major players, such as wireless advertising businesses, service providers, and solutions vendors, to be successful.
6.
Major Players in Wireless Advertising
As shown in Table 5, there are a number of businesses and vendors focusing on the wireless advertising market. In this section, we introduce several important major players in wireless advertising. They are Vindigo, Skygo, Avantgo and Avesair. Vendor Avantgo Vindigo
Business Type Wireless Advertising Portal Wireless Advertising Portal
URL http://www.avantgo.com http://www.vindigo.com
I3Mobile
Wireless Advertising Portal
http://www.i3mobile.com
Infiniq SkyGo
Wireless Advertising Portal Marketing Solution Provider
http://www.infiniq.com http://www.skygo.com
Avesair
Marketing Solution Provider
http://www.avesair.com
Advertising.com
Marketing Solution Provider
Doubleclick
Marketing Solution Provider
http://www.advertising.co m http://www.doubleclick.co m/us
Profilium
Marketing Solution Provider
http://www.profilium.com
Description Among the largest mobile advertising portals. Enables companies to deliver compelling, comprehensive location-based information and services to consumers, corporate customers, and employees. Pronto integrates the power of leading-edge voice recognition technology and the concierge service of a fine hotel, and turns any mobile phone into a mobile personal assistant. Do mobile surveys using handheld devices. SkyGo provides everything for marketers; advertising agencies and wireless carriers need to make marketing effective on mobile devices. Avesair is the premier provider of carrier-class mobile application software enabling mobile operators and wireless networks to deliver a full- range of decision-based services to subscribers. On-line promotions including wireless advertising DoubleClick is in the business of making your marketing work better by providing a broad range of technology, media, direct marketing, email, and research solutions. Develop wireless infrastructure solutions for a range of location-based services that enhance the mobile lifestyle and generate substantial new non-telecom revenues for wireless carriers.
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Windwire Inc.
Marketing Solution Provider
http://www.windwire.com
GlobalDining
Interactive Mobile Provider
Sonata.com
Interactive Mobile Provider
http://wap.globaldining.co m http://www.sonata.com
Upoc
Mobile Market Service
http://www.upoc.com
Wireless Opinion
Wireless Market Research
http://www.wirelessopinio n.com
Mobile Advertiser Services bringing agencies and advertisers together Offers location-specific mobile restaurant directory and reservation network. Provides interactive mobile solutions that connect corporations and customer to the relevant data, content and advertising over voice or any web enabled device. A free service that enables you to exchange text and voice messages with your friends and receive up-to-the-minute info -- all on your mobile phone or text pager. Allows opinion research by wireless and handheld devices.
Table 5. A List of Major Players in Wireless Marketing and Advertising
Vindigo According to http://www.vindigo.com, Vindigo is focused on creating the industry's leading technology platform for delivering location-based information and services widely considered to be the 'killer apps' of the mobile sector. Vindigo uses the Diversified Revenue Model. Its objective is to subsidize quality contents and subscriber fees to increase content quality and create a compelling offering that draws and retains subscribers. Vindigo is the only mobile content and marketing platform available today that has a track record of successful deploying robust location-based services with a working advertising model for handheld devices. According to the global consultancy Ovum, location based services will deliver $19.5 billion of revenue by 2006. Vindigo is at the forefront of this industry. Vindigo's applications for Palm OS® and Pocket PC® computers and for BREW® and WAP phones now have over half a million registered users. Optimized for both wireless and mobile (i.e. portable but not 'connected') handheld devices, Vindigo can help you to find out where to go and what to do in 20 major cities. Vindigo’s technology has been carefully designed to offer sophisticated functionality along with an intuitive and pleasing user-interface. Vindigo proprietary client application allows users to easily identify their locations within seconds. This method has the added benefit of allowing users to search information based on where they will be - in addition to their current location - and it avoids the most serious privacy concerns because users give the location information. Since many users want to access their favorite features and services even when they're not connected, current wireless devices are increasingly equipped with caching and built-in memory. The Vindigo client software for PDAs, for example, contains a complete mapping database, navigation algorithms, and an intelligent
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ad server. Future successful mobile applications need to offer useful functionality offline, understand how users have interacted with the application offline, and reconcile this information immediately once users regain their connectivity. Vindigo's next-generation client-server architecture has the attempt to meet this challenge by functioning well in both real-time wireless and intermittently synchronized environments. SkyGo According to http://www.skygo.com, SkyGo is the wireless marketing pioneer, enabling carriers, publishers and advertisers to enhance consumer relationships and generate new revenue through wireless marketing and m-commerce. Skygo uses the Media-Dependent, outsourced media sales, revenue model. Its objective is to subsidize content and subscriber fees to grow and retains the subscriber base, while generating significant revenue. SkyGo was founded to cultivate rewarding relationships between marketers and mobile consumers via the wireless Internet. To shape the future of wireless marketing, SkyGo provides technology, media and consulting to help companies effectively communicate with mobile consumers. Today, SkyGo offers the technology platform and services to deliver targeted marketing to mobile devices. This opens a new revenue channel for advertisers to deliver the subsidized mobile content and services to consumers in an interactive manner. SkyGo makes marketing more effective on mobile devices by providing a broad range of technology solutions and services. The SkyGo Mobile Advertising Platform™(SkyGo MAP™) is a family of mobile marketing tools to help marketers and wireless carriers cultivate rewarding relationships with mobile consumers while deepening brand awareness, generating response and fostering customer loyalty. The SkyGo Mobile Advertising Platform™ provides defines useful standards for wireless marketing. AvantGo AvantGo, Inc. (http://www.avantgo.com) was founded in 1996 to address the growing need of companies of all sizes to mobilize their workforce. AvantGo’s business model complies with the Media-dependent, in-house media sales revenue model. Its objective is
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to expand the carrier's business function to include media sales, controlling and drawing revenue from the wireless Internet property. Its solutions is developed based on its Dynamic Mobility Model™ designed to provide individuals with the most compelling mobile user experience. This model supports the transitions between on-line and off-line use sync, surf and push regardless of the challenges presented by multiple device operating systems, wireless services and data access modes, while leveraging existing open standards. The objective of AvantGo’s solutions is to automate business processes and improve the exchange of information between companies and their employees and customers, resulting in improved business efficiencies and more effective customer interactions. AvantGo end-to-end mobile solutions enable mobile device users to operate with web content on their mobile devices in an interactive manner while in an off-line mode. AvantGo’s solution includes a new mobile software platform for creating and deploying enterprise applications, supporting customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and personal information management (PIM) using mobile accesses. The core technology of AvantGo has patented for the technology used in synchronizing information between a handheld device and a central computer. The technology has a unique ability to support both the wireless and off-line synchronization of content and applications to mobile devices, including those based on the Pocket PC, Palm OS and RIM BlackBerry Wireless Handheld operating systems. Similar to Vindigo, AvantGo is also a portal that provides up-to-date information upon hot syncing with its website on the Palm PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). The difference between Vindigo and AvantGo is simply a matter of scale. While AvantGo concentrates on generalities, Vindigo focuses on specifics. AvantGo is best for newspaper/magazine sources such as CNN, while Vindigo is a guidebook for specific places such as Frontline. Avantgo is great for commutes on public transportation or waiting for someone to finish shopping. Vindigo is great for doing something after the shopping trip.
Avesair
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Avesair, Inc. (http://www.avesair.com), is one of leading provides for mobile marketing and commerce. Its products enable operators, marketers and content providers to deliver and magnetize a range of targeting and decision-based services based on subscriber preferences and contextual targeting. The business model of Avesair complies with the Media-dependent, in-house media sales revenue model. In the past years, Avesair has developed relationships with many of the industry's leading companies, including Nokia, 12snap, Enpocket, Profilium, and SignalSoft. Recently, Avesair acquired WindWire, one of the industry's foremost suppliers of wireless media services, enhancing the company's ability to service both North American and international customers. This adds the WindWire's customers into its customer list, including AT&T Wireless, Go2Systems, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Boston.com. In addition, Avesair holds a global board member seat on the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). Avesair MATCH (Messaging And Targeting for Carriers and Handsets) is the premier mobile marketing and commerce platform that enables mobile operators and distribution channels to deliver and magnetize a full range of targeting and decision-based services. MATCH brings together operators and marketers, and enables them to leverage the unique aspects and network resources of the mobile market to effectively target and deliver personalized customer programs. MATCH's platform is built around a core decision engine that enables mobile operators and distribution channels to target, schedule, deliver, track and report on highly targeted messages and promotions of any media type to mobile devices. According to Avesair’s posting information, the platform has an open, scalable, and modular architecture integrating directly with the operator's infrastructure. It obtains demographic and geographic data from subscriber databases, such as declared and observed interests, and mined information from billing, such as call history, and location. MATCH utilizes this data to target and deliver relevant messages provided by a marketer, independently, or in content provided by a publisher.
7. Survey of Wireless Advertising
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According to the market research, the largest user groups of wireless devices are business people, young adults and teenagers. To find out the user interest and acceptance of wireless advertising, we conduct a survey on wireless advertising on the campus of San Jose State University. A formal survey sheet is handout to students to collect their responses to our pre-defined questions regarding to wireless advertising.
60
(G e n d e r)
43
50
( P r o fe s s i o n )
54
40
40
27
30 20
14
10
10
12 1 ke tin g M ar
er in g En gi ne
t
Fe m
al
St ud en
e
al e M
31 -4 0
