Coca-Cola Bites Into Olympic Marketing With Bluetooth [Online Media Daily]
Coca-Cola is capitalizing on Olympic dreams by pairing technology-friendly Chinese patrons with a special Bluetooth messaging and advertising pushed through their phones.
Mobile Map Use Grows Worldwide [Research Brief]
8% of US mobile users are turning to their mobile’s map in times of misdirection, up 82% from last year.
Jajah Launches Instant Chinese/English Voice Translation [TechCrunch]
Right in time for English-speaking travelers embarking toward China for the Olympic games, Jajah releases its instant English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English phone translation. While the translation is not perfect, it gets your point across which is definitely better than funny-looking hand gestures.
Google launches free music service in China [Reuters]
Google is hoping to monetize the piracy-ridden music market in China with a new free music downloading service. Users can search songs on its website and download them from Top100.cn, a Chinese music website co-founded by basketball star Yao Ming.
Will Twitter Ever Have a Business Model? [MobileContentToday]
Now that little Twitter.com is all grown up and used by everyone from your mom to Zappos.com, are they cashing in? Not yet, say the founders. They’ve got “money in da bank” and probably need to work on those daily service outages first.
Urban Gaming [PSFK]
Xbox is calling urban gaming–using a projector to play on walls outside–”a new way of life.” To prove it, they’ve set up a myspace page called “Urban Xbox 360 Gaming,” where they are requesting photos of the various locations where people are playing video games
Potential and pitfalls seen from mobile phone ads [Reuters via MocoNews]
According to research, over a third of 16 to 34 year-olds who own a mobile phone are happy to receive mobile advertising in return for free music, games, and video. More than half said they would be happy to receive targeted local info, and about half who’s seen ads said they’d be up for getting them again (if they got free content). Still, industry players are (rightly) scared of the privacy issue, so they believe that ads must be “creative, relevant and non-intrusive” to be successful (e.g. coupons from local stores or bars pushed as you pass them.) Uh, coupons are “creative”? Perhaps what mobile advertising really needs is some out-of-the-box thinkers.
