
Next Stop at the Symbian Show is the Handmark stand, where Founder and Chief Marketing Officer Douglas Edwards reveals that that companys excellent Pocket Express application will be ported to the Symbian platform before the end of the year.
Pocket Express launched in the US and Canada in March 2004, and as a Java app in Europe at 3GSM in February. It offers a wealth of information on your handset on categories ranging from News, Sport and Weather to Reference, Maps and Money. Users can localise service to their own location by entering their postal or ZIP code.
The service has different content partners for different sections. The news, for example, comes from the BBC. Theres also a Hotels section, which enables the user to perform a detailed search for hotels across the world. When the search is complete, the user can make a phone call a remarkable facility on a mobile phone jokes Edwards and complete the reservation via a partnership with Hotels.com.
This is one of the ways the company makes money, via a revenue share agreement. It also offers paid search advertising, with searches for any topic returned in two categories: Recommended (i.e. Paid) and All, in which the results are sorted in closest proximity order, the closest first.
Edwards believes firmly that what he calls marketing as content could be the key to unlocking data usage on the mobile phone. He says:
One of the largest obstacles the mobile market faces is the adoption of data on the handset. You see these adoption graphs with the nice hockey stick curve, but the problem with this is that if the services are not SMS-based, they depend on the data service being available on the handset. But the slope of data service adoption is almost flat, so the ad revenue model is a fiction unless something else happens.
On the PC internet, Edwards argues, it was the widespread adoption of broadband access in the home that drove up online advertising revenues.
You have to ask, what will it be in mobile do drive the adoption of data to realise this revenue, he says. We believe it may be mobile marketing, especially when it is delivered in a form that is relevant, timely, and also relevant in terms of the uses location. The availability of services where marketing is disguised as content may prove to be one of the key drivers to the adoption of data services on the handset.
Pocket Express is available on multiple platforms in the US and Canada, and on Java in Europe, with the Symbian version set to launch by the end of the year. You can download the application for free from: www.pocketexpress.eu