Beyond the clickthru – report on display ad effectiveness

An interesting report from Comscore attempts to demonstrate the effectiveness of display advertising on user behaviour.

On the Silicon Alley Insider, Blodget weighs in on the presentation.

Why I’ll be keeping my Blackberry for now.

After this weekend, I’ll be relinquishing the new 3G iPhone to the rest of the Shiftworkers, for it’s actual purpose: development testing for mobile web sites and apps.

So now that I’ve declared myself a fan of the iPhone, why will I be keeping my Blackberry Pearl?

Because the Blackberry is a better phone and mobile email appliance.

The iPhone is the most amazing convergent device I’ve ever used. It’s much more of a UMPC than most of the awful devices that have that moniker. It’s software ecosystem is exciting, varied, and of high quality. It’s the best mobile web browsing device in the market. I could go on.

But day to day? I need a phone, and I need access to my email.

And for me, that means a keypad.

I’ve owned touchscreen phones before, and they just suck for extended typing of messages. Apple have set a new benchmark for typeability on the iPhone, but it’s still, frankly, very average.

The Blackberry Pearl manages to approach the efficiency of a full QWERTY keypad, but with a smaller footprint. It is super fast.

And when I’m checking my voicemail, I can press the keys to perform actions using my thumb — rather than looking at the screen and pecking away at it with my enormous digits.

From speed-dial to composing emails, the keypad just kicks ass. And that’s what I’ve got a phone for.

Finally, on the “welcome to New Zealand” tip; we suffer from some genuinely outrageous mobile data charges. So the compression that RIM applies to my mobile traffic is a godsend. With the amount of email I get, I really couldn’t afford to pay for it to all actually be pushed to my phone.

The iPhone 3G really is that good.

I was the first in line at Auckland’s Queen St Vodafone store on Friday morning. I know the hardcore were there for the 12:01 opening, but I was happier to queue in double-digit temperatures.

The new iPhone is bloody good.

While it’s wider and taller than my Blackberry Pearl, it’s slightly slimmer. I know it’s technically as fat as the older iPhone, but the Mac Air-like cheat that they use, making the phone convex around the back, really does make it feel smaller in the pocket — indeed, smaller than my Pearl. Fantastic physical design.

But the real killer is the App Store. It is so effortless to add applications to your iPhone, it’s almost scary. And because of the power of the SDK, even the pointless apps look and feel great.

Integrated GPS is just that: genuinely integrated, with a host of the new apps making use of geo-location to enhance their functionality. Most phones with GPS are lucky to have a couple of applications for the technology. I already have seven on the iPhone.

As for the speed of the 3G connection: I really try to avoid giving Vodafone any more of my money, so it’s seldom off Wifi.

It won’t be for everyone, and it’ll still have a huge audience of haters. But I’m a fan.

SMS – most expensive data plan on earth?

I was just talking to Ross about the connection plans he saw in his recent trip to Japan; things like USD49/month for unlimited mobile voice and data at 7.2 Mbps. And they’ll throw in free ADSL too.

I pointed out that I’d happily use my Vodem for the majority of my surfing, if the charges for traffic beyond 3Gb/month weren’t so punative. You know: when you go from paying $25/Gb to $500/Gb.

Then it occured to us: imagine if you calculated the cost of SMS messages as if they were data?

Assuming that a 160 character message was about 200 bytes of traffic, and has a RRP of $.20, you’re looking at $1,000,000 per gigabyte of traffic.

That’s right. One million dollars per gig.

Multi-touch precedents

With Microsoft’s demonstrations of Windows 7’s multi-touch support, the battle is joined with Apple to define the standard for multi-touch gestural interfaces. Apple is already patenting specific multi-touch gestures, as enabled on the iPhone and newest MacBooks.

All of this reminds me of some demos I tried over 10 years ago at a OzCHI conference in Hamiltron, at which Bill Buxton spoke. Buxton has had many previous lives, as an researcher at Xerox PARC, then at Alias\Wavefront and now Microsoft. He’s well known for researching dual-mouse input as early as 1986 (when Apple introduced the Apple Desktop Bus for the Mac).

He showed me some of his demos from the 80’s – even giving me a copy of the XCMD extention that enabled multi-mouse input within Hypercard. What struck me from my experience of the demos was how overwhelmingly natural they felt. After 30 seconds, it just felt completely normal.

At Alias\Wavefront, he introduced awesome dual-input interfaces to their high end painting products. Now at Microsoft, I suspect he has a central role in the development of their new input paradigms. After all, he’s got over 20 years of experience in precisely this space.

Buxton has written a great overview of his history in the field: Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known and Loved.

Things like this remind me that there’s little new under the sun in terms of interaction design — just dirt-cheap hardware that brings yesterday’s esoteric experiments into the mainstream.

Opera on Blackberry: disappointment

I’ve been using Opera Mini 4.1 on my Blackberry for a couple of weeks now, and it’s a great browser, with support for plenty of advanced browser features, fantastic mobile-enhanced page rendering and a transparent proxy solution that makes 2.5G browsing bearable.

But the browser suffers from its lack of integration with its host operating system. In short, it doesn’t integrate with the Blackberry:

• It doesn’t support Blackberry page navigation shortcut conventions.
• It doesn’t allow Cut-and-Paste operations from the Blackberry’s clipboard.
• It doesn’t use the Blackberry’s text input conventions.
• It can’t be set as the Blackberry’s defautl browser.

In short, it feels like a foreigner within the fairly consistent software ecosystem that is the Blackberry’s strength.

Burglary and online security

So we got burgled, while we slept.

They took our wallets, a phone, a camera. And of course our home laptop. They even remembered to take the power cord too, bless.

So not only do we have to cancel a bunch of cards, we also have to change a bunch of passwords on popular sites. A bit too much use of the “Remember Me” credential caching function on sites like Facebook, Netvibes and Gmail.

At least our photos and movies are safe; we have everything backing up to a 2 TB SAN configured for RAID 5. Safe as houses… hey wait! Guess I need to start looking at backing it up to the cloud.

Projector squared

An interesting projection-based advertising concept from Projector, the Japanese agency responsible for the wonderful Uniqlock screensaver.

Uniqlock – when screensavers win Best In Show

Uniqlock, the strange, entrancing clock/screensaver featuring lithe japanese dancers performing in five second jags, won Best In Show at this year’s One Show Interactive Awards. Projector created the piece, as covered in Creative Review.

I loved the screensaver, but must admit it liked it better before I learned it was promoting brand awarenes of a clothing label. Somehow it was more quirky — more Japanese — when its motives were inscrutable and unknown to me.

Anyway, I thoroughly recommend downloadage and installage.

And you can explore more of uniqlo’s online advertising here.

Sky TV moves to a download model

The Herald Business section this week noted Sky TV’s new download model for movies and television shows.

For $5 per month, existing Sky subscribers can download “all you can eat” from their site, though only after those shows have played on Sky’s network. There’s talk of getting the downloads zero-rated through deals with specific ISPs like TelstraClear and iHug. Of course, if you’re paying for the traffic, you might find it cheaper to pop around to the local video rental store. It’ll be interesting to see what formats and bitrates they’re hawking.

With this addition, Sky TV has a full suite of offerings: terrestrial, satelite, integrated PVR, postal DVD rentals and online.

As an alternative to using the MySky PVR (or the investment of running a Media PC solution on your home machine), the online option could make sense for many subscribers. If future versions of the MySky PVR integrate recording with downloading to fill in gaps… well, we have a pretty compelling box.

Key for me will be the breadth of content. It’ll be interesting to compare the offering with TVNZ’s onDemand service, that is great to use, but has almost no foreign material.

Of course, once you’ve trained people to browse, download and consume movies and television shows on their PC, what’s the likelihood that they’ll start going straight to BitTorrent and start getting those same movies and shows within hours of their release in the US, rather than months or years later?