All Canto-Pop Week on the WLOGLOBAL YouTube Channel

This week I'm featuring the best of Canto-Pop and Hong Kong music videos on the wloglobal YouTube channel. I'm finding some really great clips as well. Over forty so far, including some classic Faye Wong, as well as some videos from Hong Kong indy bands like My Little Airport, The Marshmallow Kisses, The Pancakes, and at17. Please enjoy and let me know what you think.

Visit the WLOGLOBAL YouTube Channel now!

Blogger 2.0, where are you?

Why has the Blogger.com service become such a laggard when it comes to innovation? Other services like Tumblr.com make it so easy to post and manage content from your phone. Also, since the mobile device has made it so easy to access the Internet, it's more important than ever that blogs be easily accessible via mobile. However, Blogger continues to offer mobile devices the regular desktop version of blogs. Yet many other blog platforms, like Wordpress, make it really easy to offer up a great mobile experience, especially on the iPhone.

You would think that parent company, Google would show a bit more love to this service, rather then let it wither on the vine.

Larry King Interviews Ashton Kutcher & Sean Combs About Twitter Win

Twitter is revolutionizing communications, and is already having a big impact on mobile marketing. This very mobile service which currently costs nothing to use and is already attracting roughly fifteen million regular users and seeing over 1000% growth. Now that Oprah, Larry King, and many others are integrating Twitter into their broadcasts, it is only a matter of time before we see Twitter integrated into print, packaging, out-of-home and the other media mobile marketers have seen as the big opportunities for short codes. Also, because so much of the activity on Twitter is mobile, it is becoming excellent channel for driving consumers to mobile versions of websites.

刺猬乐队 - Hedgehog Music Video

Hedgehog is my new favorite band.

Sprint / Nokia Location Based Ad Trial

Sprint and Nokia are launching the first US trial of mobile ads and landing pages that will be dynamically served based on the users location. Phase One of this trial will launch in just a few weeks, and will feature brands in the retail and automotive categories.

Sprint subscribers who browse the mobile web AND are near on of the retail locations that will be participating in the trial may see banners related to a nearby offer. If they click on the banner, the landing page will display the contact details and a map along with information about the offer.

This trial is being powered by KnowledgeWhere of Canada.

New York Times Becomes Battleground for Mobile Advertising

After over six months of being sponsored by Windows Mobile, the New York Times mobile site (m.nytimes.com) recently shifted to a new advertiser, and one that is certainly already generating controversy within the nascent mobile advertising industry.



As of June 18th, "the new" AT&T has suddenly taken over every page of the Times mobile site in what amounts to a full frontal assault to gain the mindshare of wireless users, no matter what carrier they happen to use currently. The effectiveness of advertising wireless services to the readers of New York Times mobile is obvious. AT&T is sure to get their message to a significant number of heavy users of mobile data. However, by going “off-deck”, i.e. outside of their mobile offering to their own subscribers, they are firing a mobile shot, not just at their competitors, but also at the fledgling mobile adverting departments within Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. AT&T is now the first U.S. wireless operator to have a mobile site that is outside of its own walled garden, even if it is only a single page clearly hosted by the mobile agency Starcut.





This aggressive media buy by AT&T, which also includes the Fandango mobile site (and probably others, may trigger a counter attach and further escalation of hostilities, perhaps even competing off-deck ad campaigns from the other operators. However, these carriers actually have the ability to block sites from their subscribers; much like the Chinese government blocks the New York Times website (sometimes). Technically, they also have the ability to selectively remove just the advertising content which they don’t want their subscribers to see. They can eve be so bold as to replace those stripped out ads with paid advertising of their own. This has actually been done by the world’s largest wireless operator, China Mobile (a model for many within the U.S. wireless industry).

Carriers have already been pressuring the large off-deck publishers to share a portion of their ad revenue based on the premise that they, not the publisher, own the wireless subscriber, and they bear all of the cost of building the wireless infrastructure which enables visits to a publisher’s mobile web offering. The more of a carrier’s subscribers that visit a publisher’s mobile site, the more valuable it becomes for advertisers. Carriers feel that they should be compensated their role in carrying the publisher’s ad-supported mobile content to the consumer. Also, there are some within the carrier world who believe that blocking a mobile site, such as The New York Times, would have no negative impact on their bottom line, or ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), and that they would not lose a single subscriber as a result.

Currently, about 20 percent (over 40 million) of all wireless subscribers are using the mobile web on their phones. The question is whether subscribers who signed up for data plans with the promise of having the internet on their phone will feel cheated when they learn that they have subscribed to a tightly controlled internet-like experience. This issue is in fact one the core reasons why the wireless industry and their voice in Washington, the CTIA, continue to spend millions trying to end net neutrality in favor of a potentially more profitable internet of tiered services.


Could it be that The New York Times, by running these ads from the newly converged AT&T, is engaging in deliberate brinksmanship? If one of the other wireless operators does block their site, or alter the content in any way, they would have a sensational and timely story on their hands which could play out in the media and in the courts over an extended period of time. Such a story would no-doubt become a global technology headline with The New York times serving as the poster child of net neutrality and the carriers as the villains.

The carrier’s stake in this, as they see it, is to avoid becoming a “dumb pipe”. However, their networks are built on public radio spectrum that is licensed to them by the FCC. If carriers begin blocking mobile sites it could result in additional government regulation. The end result would be stifling future innovation in mobile content and services, which would in turn slow consumer use and adoption of mobile.

To drive faster adoption of the mobile lifestyle, it would seem that the real value proposition for wireless operators should be in the seamless integration of mobile into a holistic internet experience for consumers. That approach in Japan has resulted in the most advanced mobile market on the planet. Around the world, the mobile phone is becoming the device of choice (or convenience) for many internet users. The U.S may have been slower to adopt the mobile lifestyle, but we are not an exception. We are catching up quickly. Just ask the growing number of those reading the New York Times on their BlackBerrys.