SMX Melbourne 2010 : All About Mobile Search

mobileapps2This is an excerpt from my live blogging of a SMX Melbourne presentation by Gillian Muessig, President of SEOmoz.

Mobile is here to stay. If you haven’t already investigated how to use mobile marketing, you are already way behind.

Why do you want a community platform? Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce. Gillian mentioned LivingSocial.com – already in Sydney, very big in the US. It’s a way to get deals / coupons for things in your community. Also Groupon.com is a similar thing. These ideas are similar to @square, which is a way to pay for things using your cell phone, popular in the US and hopefully coming to Australia and New Zealand soon.

You can make your own QR code at www.qrcode.kaywa.com – download the QR code to your mobile for coupon / discount / offer / invitations / news. Mobile coupons are about levels of offers therefore all about social status.

You can also play games with QR codes. Send hints / clues / instructions etc. Data has come full circle and now gone offline. You can get your codes offline now, from billboards, physical stores etc.

Should you or shouldn’t you jump on the .mobi bandwagon? Gillian says no. It was always a stop gap measure. But DO create mobile-friendly pages. Search engines will use transcoding to auto show your page on mobile devices. Make sure your pages provide value and are designed for mobile and put them in folders on your site.

Cindy Krum is a mobile marketing evangelist and the world’s foremost authority on the subject. Gillian suggests looking at Cindy’s mobile directory list.

If you can blog, you can build an app. You don’t need a huge audience, you can make a mobile app just for your biz or your few customers.

For application building, try AppBreeder. Also, Hunch.com launches tonight – it’s a mobile community builder that allows you to build your own mobile local app on the fly. It’s a brand new service that Gillian thinks will take off after launch.

Mobile is easy, it’s out there and now is your chance to grab the opportunities in mobile marketing before your competitors do.

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Nexus One Smart Phone Makes Google a Retailer

largest nexus phoneGoogle is no longer a search company.

That’s right – the launch of an online mobile store yesterday to sell their new smart phone means Google has crossed the threshold from search company to consumer electronics retailer.

The Nexus One was officially revealed at a press conference at Google headquarters in Mountain View yesterday, but details about the handset had already been leaked and available on the web for weeks. Referred to by Google staff as a *Super Phone*, the Nexus One is being touted as an iPhone killer and has been designed specifically for Google’s Open Source Android operating system.

While the Nexus One does look very much like an iPhone, the first difference that strikes me is the trackball. How very IBM ThinkPad. It also features a thinner profile at 11.5mm, a 5 megapixel camera, 2 microphones (one for noise cancellation), a 3.7″ OLED touchscreen display and the handset weighs in at a tiny 130 grams. Comparisons to the HTC Droid Eris phone are no coincidence – HTC manufactured the Nexus One.

Another gloatworthy, geek-pleasing feature that the Nexus has over the iPhone is the voice-activated keyboard, which I noticed a few launch attendees testing today on Twitter, with amusing results. For more details about the launch I recommend Danny Sullivan’s live blog coverage.

To coincide with the launch, Google installed the world’s largest Nexus One in their foyer (see photo). While it’s not an actual working phone, it’s still pretty impressive.

US customers can now buy the Nexus One directly from Google’s web store with a two-year contract with T-Mobile USA for US $179 or the unlocked handset for $529. Vodafone will supply Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore with the Nexus soon.

Google expects it to roll out to other countries and carriers within the coming months.

*Photo courtesy of Search Engine Land

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