IDEASMARKIT

Mosh, Ovi, Nokia Music store,Maps the intentions are pretty clear services are the prime agenda for Nokia .However the road ahead is not going to be easy all the Internet services areas Nokia has selected, barring navigation, are crowded with several major Internet brands already.That means the new venture isn’t likely to be a money spinner right away. Analysts calculate that mobile services will add just about 10 per cent to Nokia India’s revenues over the next two to three years.Business Standard reports on Nokia's transformation from a mobile phone manufacturer to becoming an internet services firm.

Last year, Nokia India’s Finnish parent decided to set itself up in competition with Internet giants like MySpace, iTunes and Google. But even the world’s largest mobile vendor couldn’t do this on its own. So it started off by buying Loudeye, a digital music platform and distribution company for $60 million.
This year, Nokia added on Twango, a company that developed a platform to let people share content online and on their phones. And then it shelled out $8.1 billion for a navigation and mapping company, Navteq.
The results of the shopping spree are already evident. A few months ago, Nokia launched Mosh, an online community for developers to develop applications that can be downloaded by users.
Now, it has unveiled Ovi, a platform for the company’s Internet services that will initially include a music store and games.Ovi will be launched in India in Q1 2008. It will allow access to Nokia’s social network, communities, on-demand music and games besides other entertainment content.
Already, Nokia N95 devices have started shipping with maps that enable users to find their way to people and places. The maps services will also have a route finder (with optional voice navigation) and the ability to “share your favourite places
Services like the Nokia Music Store and N-Gage, parts of Ovi, aim to make it easy for Indian mobile enthusiasts to search, try and buy music and games from a range of publishers, including exclusive content only available through Nokia.

It also provides insight into Nokia's segmentation based marketing strategy and how initially the high-end lifestyle users are its best options for the services strategy.

Earlier this year, Nokia also rejigged its retail strategy based on a two-year-long segmentation study. The survey covered 42,000 consumers from 16 countries to understand the impact of lifestyle choices and attitudes on the mobile devices consumers buy and how they use them. The survey classified consumers in four groups based on their income level, lifestyle and usage.

Accordingly, Nokia now has separate marketing strategies — customised products and advertising — to address the needs of each segment. Live, for instance, offers basic handsets low on features and price. It is aimed at first-time users whose basic need is to stay in touch with voice as the main driver.

The second segment, Connect, focuses on more evolved users who seek functionality, features and connectivity. Accordingly, phones in this segment offer GPRS, camera and music capabilities. The next two categories, Achieve and Explore, are aimed at high-end users and include top-end handsets like Nseries and Eseries.

Read the full Business Standard article here

Apple has recently released a web-only advertisement that has appeared on a number of sites, including News.com, Engadget.com, and PCMag.com. The new ad is an extension of Apple's classic Mac vs PC ads and is a cheesy take that calls upon users to give up on vista.
The Apple advertisement features "Mac" and "PC" as played by Justin Long and John Hodgman in a web ad composed of two separate components. The first is a traditional 720x90 pixel horizontal leaderboard at the top of the page as well as a large vertical rectangle on the right side of the page featuring the actors. via Macrumour

For the uninitiated Webdunia is one of the pioneers in Hindi language portal in India and has grown to nine language portals, now after being around for a while and acting as content providers to bigger networks like yahoo they have realized the value of brand building and so they have launched their new campaign.Now knowing that Internet is frequented by mostly English speaking Indians they have segmented the market and decided to target those Indians who are more comfortable in Indian languages like Hindi even though they know English well. This campaign has been launched on Aaj Tak which is a good idea if you are looking at core Hindi speaking audience which looks out for mostly news. The company says that it will invest around $ 6-7 million in brand building over the next three years here is the advertisement of Webdunia

A great ad if you are looking for Amir Khan's versatility he really touches perfection in everything he does in this ad he showcases many roles in just 1 minute 49 seconds but the product Toyota Innova it seems to be overshadowed by Amir khan in this ad

This 80-second clip has been viewed a record-breaking ten million times and has prompted a fierce debate about whether or not it is real.Sites that hosted the video were overwhelmed with comments, with some fans even claiming to have tried to copy the astonishing feat and has turned into one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns ever.
The grainy footage, apparently captured on a mobile phone camera, shows a group of youngsters seemingly playing with a bundle of dynamite by a lake while one of them paddles into the centre on a surfboard.One of the youths runs on to a bridge, lights a stick of the explosive and throws it into the lake.After a moment's pause, it explodes, sending a huge flume shooting into the air and creating a massive wave.The surfer waits, paddles like mad, then coolly catches the wave and rides it to the water's edge - all to the beat of a pounding rap track.

The film was in reality shot on high-definition cameras and digitally altered later to look as if it had come from a mobile phone camera.The explosion was created separately and so was the wave ridden by the surfer which actually was a natural sea wave and it was all a fake with the aim being to subconsciously showcase the brand quicksilver.
The debate became loud all over the Net with regard to how real this is, how could they get permission, how many fish were killed by the explosion, what camera phone can do all that, etc. This is again part of the beauty of viral marketing - you want to drive debate, you want people to talk about your brand, you want people to send this around to their friends and talk about it.
via dailymail

Well there have been lot of videos about what is Web2.0 but here is a viral funny video from Nokia about web2.0 .The theme is Web 2.0, let's keep it simple It's all about connecting people. Nokia's own tagline is Connecting people so this commercial fits there. Quite a funny video thanks to go2web for the link enjoy

This is how Google promotes its products using Youtube they have made a video highlighting demo applications developed on Android .In this video Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discuss the availability of the SDK, that it will be open source in the future, and demo applications on the Android platform. They have also announced a 10 million prizes for application developed on Android good marketing I would say

Google's decision to launch its new platform for mobile Android has left mobile companies shaken and people debating over what exactly are Google's plans Wall Street Journal provides a detailed analysis and points out how it is an effort by Google to create an ecosystem on mobile which is similar to that of web.

Google won't make money on Android itself, but the company believes it will create new opportunities for Google to sell ads on mobile phones, something executives have characterized as the company's biggest business opportunity. Google is betting that easier access to the Internet from mobile phones will lead people to use its services more, as has been the case with Web access on the personal computer. Google's Mr. Rubin said ads will appear on the phones as they normally do when a user surfs the Web. The company may also sell ads for some developers of applications that run on the phones. (The name of the new platform stems from Google's 2005 purchase of Android Inc., a Silicon Valley startup)

It points out how Google has struggled in mobile field and how Android will change all that

Android is a bid to change how the wireless industry operates. Carriers traditionally have decided what applications most consumers see on their cellphones, setting rules and negotiating fees for software developers to gain access. Google has struggled at times in recent years to get its products -- including Google Maps, Gmail email and its search engine -- onto mobile phones in a way that's easy for people to use. With Android, software makers can theoretically write applications that run on any user's phone -- and consumers can freely browse the Web

Google is expected to target a broader slice of the cellphone market, which could spur developers to come up with more features here is a list of expected features which might come up if Android takes off you can read complete article here

After wondering for ages how the social networks will monetize their huge population Facebook and Myspace have finally launched their targeted advertising platforms making use of these platforms as a big means for viral marketing. However there are some critical issues users cannot opt out of these advertising so it can be irritating and turnoffs for many users who join these networks to see ads on top of their profiles an example was how recently Orkut ran into problems with ads in Brazil.
Most advertising online today allows advertisers to target people based on location, age and gender but social networks promise to deliver much more focused results as a result of the wealth of personal data users post. It's one of the reasons why Microsoft Corp. paid $240-million (U.S.) for a 1.6-per-cent stake in Facebook in October and why MySpace, which News Corp. bought for $580-million in 2005, is now worth upward of $11.6-billion, more than 20 times its sale price, according to chairman Rupert Murdoch.
Facebook

Facebook is announcing three things: Social Ads (ads targeted based on member profile data and spread virally), Beacon (a way for Facebook members to declare themselves fans of a brand on other sites and send those endorsements to their feeds), and Insight (marketing data that goes deep into social demographics and pyschographics which Facebook will provide to advertisers in an aggregated, anonymous way). These three things together make up Facebook Ads.

Myspace

MySpace launched its HyperTargeting platform in July with a select group of 50 advertisers. The service broke down users into 10 broad "enthusiast" categories - such as music, movies and sports - and allowed advertisers to cater their banner ads specifically to those groups. Now MySpace has expanded those 10 enthusiast categories to more than 100 interest-specific groups and has made the targeting technology available to all its U.S. advertisers. The advantage is even more precise marketing. MySpace expects to deploy HyperTargeting internationally in 2008.

These are interesting developments for marketeers and not so good for the users but lets see how they playout. Via Techcrunch and news.com

Despite all the rumours going around Google is not launching a single Gphone but rather an open source platform called Android for phones. Google has announced the Open Handset Alliance to create an open platform (to be called Android) for a Linux phone that can run mobile Google apps and others. Official Google Blog: Where's my Gphone?
Google says

Android will deliver a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications.With devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to fully tailor the phone to their interests. They can swap out the phone's homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos.

The 34 partners include T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel, NTT Docomo, China Mobile, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Qualcomm, Intel, and Google itself no sign of Airtel as some rumours had said. This is a second open source platform for google after opensocial platform for social networks .Here is a video introducing Android

This might be off topic but is an incident that cannot be ignored.Dec 2005 Pratibha Murthy HP call centre employee raped and killed by driver, Earlier this year, a 20-year-old girl, working in a Gurgaon based call centre was picked up from outside a roadside eatery in New Delhi and raped by a driver hired by call center and now Jyoti Chowdhury of Wipro BPO picked by driver and then brutally raped and killed in Pune.
Why is this happening and why are companies so lax about it, they keep outsourcing the transportation work and faced with heavy growth are lax about checking the profiles of the drivers and results are incidents like this.Most amazing are the responses by companies like Wipro BPO head who distanced himself from the incident by saying that Jyoti didn't followed security norms by going into an empty cab without a male employee and that is it isn't the company as much responsible for hiring such a driver or ensuring that such norms are followed? In case you move in the evening in Bangalore you can see these Drivers of call centers going around picking and dropping people and working like a taxi en route to picking an employee are you going to trust these drivers, many of these drivers are drunk while driving the cabs do these companies notice ?? there are many questions that need to be answered.
According to police and Wipro staffers in Pune, the accused were aware that the male employee who was to accompany Jyoti, had taken a leave. ‘‘Taking advantage of the situation, they picked her up,’’ .Jyoti had assumed that the driver’s accomplice was the male employee and had got into the cab. Jyoti was a BSC graduate from Gorakhpur and was staying with her married sister in Pune IBNLive reports more on the murder

The incident took place hours after Jyoti Chowdhury, the 22-year-old employee at a Wipro call centre in Pune, left Panchavati Apartment Complex for office on Thursday night.The office pickup vehicle, an Indica, had picked her up at around 10:30 pm, but the driver, instead of going straight to office, took Jyoti somewhere else, saying there was another person who need to pick up. Jyoti wasn't surprised. She was talking to a friend on her phone when the phone suddenly went dead.
"While she was speaking, the phone went dead. And her boyfriend alerted her sister in Delhi. The case was registered by Jyoti's family on Friday morning.Police subsequently picked up the two men, who later confessed to the dreadful act. The car driver said he picked up an accomplice on the way and then took the vehicle to an isolated village, called Gehungi, off the Mumbai-Pune highway. The two raped the girl there and then killed her with a blunt object.

We all think about creating an ad for our customer but How about an Ad that is built by your customer now that is called think different and that is what Apple is doing. NYT reports how a television commercial for the new iPod Touch from Apple is based on a commercial that an 18-year-old English student — an Apple devotee named Nick Haley, who says he got his first Macintosh when he was 3 — created on his own one day last month.His spot offers a fast-paced tour of the abilities of the iPod Touch, set to a song titled “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by a Brazilian band, CSS.He based the visual elements on video clips about the iPod Touch and other new products. Here is the original ad followed by the company produced version

Here is the same ad but company produced and shown on TV

Where Infosys is can Wipro be far behind well for some time infosys had developed its own world is flat blog and was using it to market itself to Corporate Clients .Now Wipro decides to take a plunge and develop a Campus blog at wipro-campusarena.com/ however the target for Wipro is not clients but campus students amongst whom there is a growing realization is that working for indian software factories is just another average job and if you really want to make a career in IT then you should avoid them.This trend is very common in IITs and is spreading to some of the NITs and other top tier T-schools also and even amongst the Indian outsourcers the worst hit is Wipro whose last year attrition was amongst the worst and hence the need to connect to the campus audience.
Developed by India's leading viral marketing agency Webchutney the blog is just a means to highlight Wipro Culture with most of the bloggers going nostalgic on the blog and telling how great is Wipro and thus try to influence the freshers who will most likely fall for this. Interesting marketing technique by Wipro which illustrates the power of Blogging however there is an element of manipulation involved in this since it will only highlight the best part of working at Wipro and not the various pitfalls associated with working in Indian IT outsourcing industry