Mobiya generates leads for sellers

Last week I’ve published the above classified advertisement in different free-sheets without disclosing contact details. Buyers could only contact me after sending an sms with the code adamdw to 4050. Mobiya then reveals the mobile phone numbers to both parties, buyer and seller. You won’t believe it, but only 3 days after publication last Wednesday, Mobiya generated 14 leads for me. One message after the other was popping into my mobile phone inbox, clever and efficient, without a slow computer in the middle of my communication with buyers. After only 5 days, on Sunday, the apartment was contractually sold, without discount! The founder has eaten his own dog-food, and I can tell you, it tastes marvelous!

Mobiya announces Mobiya Application Suite

Mobiya, the mobile enablement company for the global classified advertising industry today announced the introduction of Mobiya Application Suite, the industry’s first innovative and integrated solution that seamlessly manages the complete life-cycle of mobile classifieds in cross-media environments.

An industry first: Mobiya Application Suite’s integrated capabilities include:

• Posting Listing Responding System with integrated micro-payment aggregation
• Dynamic Classification System for user generated content indexing and tagging
• Social Valuation System enabling mobile social media and interactivity over mobile

Availability: The Mobiya Application Suite will be generally available in the first quarter of calendar 2007 and is currently in beta testing with two customers.

Download the product brief: Mobiya Application Suite.pdf

SMS now stands for Send My Story

Different announcement hit me last week about user-generated content services, mainly around news and journalism. News International publication The Sun has launched a user-generated content initiative in the UK which allows mobile users to submit content to the Newspaper via a short code (more). Belgium’s commercial broadcaster VTM has been building a brand around the news short code 4040 for over a year now, with great success. A shame that these initiatives do not re-purpose the content to the public.

Other examples of citizen journalism are Korea’s OhMyNews, online generated news via citizens (not over mobile tough) and South-Africa’s Reporter, news for the people, by the people. To finish off the update, let’s throw in an sms-classified service for the Zimbabwe Financial Gazette and we covered a broad spectrum of services and geographies.

Classifieds booming in China

Chinese media company Han Rong Media Group’s classified ad website Sosoko.com received 120M Yuan (note: $15M or €12M) from D&H Capital and Asian Groove HK’s subsidiary, Powerway. Sosoko can best be described as a commercial Craig’s List, although it only covers Shanghai at this point. According to Pacific Epoch the investment will be used to construct and develop Sosoko’s online platform, as well as integrating Han Rong Media Group’s subsidiaries. Han Rong Media Group accounts for 70% of the classified ad market in Shangai. Source: alarm:clock.

Google testing newspaper print ads again

Google’s Adwords product management team has again started free tests with a limited number of advertisers to push online ads into print publications. The initial tests were reported by Business Week as not very successful.

In my opinion it was more about a personality clash between a very arrogant and progressive Google versus a traditional and established newspaper group. Google says it as follows  "offline print advertising hasn’t taken off as fast as we would like." Their complete ecosystem needed to be re-set and re-started.

According to the Chicago Business News, Google is now running classified-like ads in the pages of the Sun-Times, which so far is the only newspaper participating in the tests. The deal allows Google to fill what’s known as "remnant space"  or unsold space where the newspaper normally run in-house ads. Google could seek newspaper partners in other cities to bolster sales of locally oriented classifieds. Advertiser participating in the tests claim to be very happy with the increased response.

The open invitation to a number of advertisers to participate in the test has drawn a lot of attention in international press. It seems that Google is serious about getting control of the channel and about increasing its share-of-wallet of its advertisers base by running advertising dollars through its own books first, before newspapers, television and other offline media get a cut of the cake.

Mobiles frame cops

Funny article today in the Belgian newspapers. Civilians more often use their mobile camera phone to record voice or video from a police intervention. These recordings are then send to the Comité P, i.e. Internal Affairs, the controlling body of the police force. This has resulted in an enormous increase of claims, even from simple identity verification of people in the street. The power of user-generated content that might even create a better democracy. For the Dutch native readers, click here.