musings of a social architect

Those Teens, they Love to Text

Not surprisings, a recent study of U.S. teens by cellphone retailer Let's Talk listed texting as the most-wanted, must-have cellphone feature. Yet another reminder of how central this activity is in teenagers' lives. (Reposted from textually.org, my favorite mobile-centric blog)

The aggregate responses for teens in terms of their most important cell phone feature:

* Texting -- 49%
* Camera -- 25%
* Games -- 12%
* Music player -- 5%
* IM -- 5%
* E-mail -- 2%
* Video -- 2%

In a related survey by cellphone retailer Carphone Warehouse, British teens reported that their social life and feelings of safety were enhanced by having a mobile phone. The survey stats also showed heavy use of texting, even during classes @ school. Those teens, they sure love to text.

The Mobile Life Survey, commissioned by Carphone Warehouse, quizzed 1,250 people aged 11 to 17. 80% of the young people who took part in the research said they felt safer having a mobile and that they had a better social life as a result. The survey added that texting was the preferred method for youngsters to contact each other, rather than phone calls. On average, they send or receive up to 10 text messages a day - three times more than their parents.

78% of 11 to 17-year-olds believe having a mobile has given them a better social life as it meant it was easier to keep in touch with their friends... many young people - especially teenage girls - admit they would feel unwanted if the day passed without their mobile ringing. Among those quizzed 26% said they would feel left out, compared with just 11% of parents.

Our Changing Media Habits: Surfing the Web vs Watching TV

A recent study found that college students are more likely to spend time on the Net than traditional media like TV and radio. Furthermore, these students are likely to be multi-tasking (i.e. surfing the Net) while watching TV or listening to the radio.

This definately mimics the changes that are happening in our house. We rarely watch TV without a Net-connected laptop handy. Sometimes it's a multi-tasking situation - I'll be reading email and catching up on Blogs while watching a show with my family. But even more often, I'll find that we want to lookup background info on whatever we're watching, to enrich the experience. For example, this weekend for Family Movie Night (our Sunday evening ritual) we watched The Secret Garden, an exquisite and moving version of the beloved children's book. As the opening credits were rolling, Gabe asked me "Who were the Warner Brothers?" -- so I looked them up on Wikipedia, and read a few excerpts from the article to my family while we were waiting for the movie to start. During the movie, I checked my email occasionally, and then I read reviews of the movie on Amazon and RottonTomatoes during the closing credits. While reading reviews, I stumbled upon a prolific reviewer named MovieMom who's reviewed a lot of family films -- and based on her recommendations, made some notes on what to rent for our next Family Movie Night.

So that's how Net-surfing enriches the TV viewing experience in our house. Here's some stats from the college study.

The study found that about 34 percent of college students recently reported spending more than 10 hours a week online, while only around 19 percent say they devote at least the same amount of time to watching television or listening to the radio. For the report, Burst last month surveyed 800 college students between the ages of 18 and 24.

The findings confirm other recent reports concluding that college students are heavy online users. For instance, earlier this month Alloy Media   Marketing reported that students spend 3.5 hours a day e-mailing, instant messaging and Web surfing, and 6.5 hours a week on social networking sites...

...many college students who watch TV or listen to the radio are multi-tasking at the time. Around 64 percent of respondents report using the computer when viewing TV, while around 60 percent use a computer while the radio is on.

In the same study, Burst also examined what factors persuade students to change brands. Better price was the single most important consideration, cited by almost 61 percent of respondents. Friends' recommendations also were influential, with almost 49 percent of respondents saying such recommendations influenced decisions to change brands.

Learning about the Nintendo Wii

Here at ShuffleBrain, we're starting to get into Wii game development. Over the next few weeks, we'll be learning more about the interface, features and processing capabilities of this exciting, innovative new platform. Today's project was to review some recent Wii videos that showcase various games and channels. Here's a few good ones we found - well worth watching if you're interested in the Wii. Happy viewing!

Wii Gameplay Footage

Wii Bowl Demo

Wii Channels Demo

Wii Interface (avatars and photos)

Wii Mii channel

Wii Photo channel

Wii Weather channel

Sportingo mixes UGC with professional editing and content

Boy, this really IS the age of UGC (user-generated content). Techcrunch reports on Sportingo, a new Sports-oriented site that blends UGC with professional editing and licensed stats and photos. What's interesting to me about this model is the blend of UGC, professional editing, Digg-like game mechanics, and an advertising revenue model.  Definately a development to keep an eye on.

...The company’s editors write headlines, fix grammar, approve tags for consistency, apply search engine optimizing metadata to each article, attach relevant statistics and photos licensed from outside vendors and determine placement of the stories on the Sportingo site....Reader interaction with each story will also impact the placement of stories...The revenue model is entirely based on advertisements...

User contributors develop reputation through reader ratings of their stories, with status levels starting at Rookie and moving up to being in the Sportingo Hall of Fame. High status contributors will gain privileges like private meetings with athletes and editorial control over their own sections of the site. Unlike many similar sites, there’s no revenue sharing plan for contributors.

...From sports to personal finance and investing, there are a number of startups right now trying to bring structure to topical and prolific segments of the blogosphere, but Sportingo’s investment in editorial control and outside resources that require professional development could really offer users a chance to participate in a very compelling sports journalism community. We all know about the many shortcomings of mainstream media, but the pitfalls of pure user generated content are becoming more evident as well. This kind of hybrid is quite intriguing.

LINK

In search of phone ideas, Korean firms turn to amateurs

Via textually.org, I ran across this report about Korean handset makers turning to amateur designers to spice up their new mobile phone lines. Korea has an advanced mobile phone and Internet culture that gives us Stateside folks a glimpse into the future. It's especially intriguing that LG is using mobile-centric Net communities to recruit "prosumers" for future cellphone design work - kinda like American Idol for cellphone designers :-)

Pantech Group, Korea's No. 2 handset maker, turns to its "designer community" for new ideas.
Since 2004, the cell phone maker has selected a couple of dozen students every year to fill this group, which works as a pseudo in-house research unit. The students not only receive hands-on training from actual designers, but also get to develop their own ideas and make proposals to the company. Pantech provides students with office space and funds to conduct research on design-related issues.

So far, 55 students from 20 universities have been involved in this group, of whom 10 went on to work as designers for the company. The IM-U140, a digital multimedia broadcasting phone slated for release later this week, was designed by a member of the designer community.

... LG Electronics also has plans to create a team that can brainstorm about cell phones, in conjunction with Cetizen, the largest Internet community site for mobile phone users, it will recruit what it calls "Cyon Prosumers.

Mobile Phone Ads taking off in Japan

Accordingly to this report, 54% of Japanese mobile phone users consume advertising on a mobile phone at least once per week. This is a heartening statistic; although Japan is a far more advanced mobile phone market than the US, it's also a harbinger of things to come. As advertising becomes a viable revenue model for mobile entertainment services, I think we'll see an explosion of interesting services emerge.

Right now, the US mobile industry's ability to launch compelling, profitable services is hampered by consumers' reluctance to pay for services up front. The Internet has taught us to expect free services; why should we pay for something on mobile that we can get for free on the Net? Furthermore, it's often difficult to cancel a subscription  you no longer want - and that makes people reluctant to sign up for subscriptions in the first place. I'm speaking from direct experience here - I've spent FAR too many hours on the phone with Cingular, trying to get them to remove subscriptions from my mobile bill that I couldn't get rid of. I  sometimes see services that I'd like to check out - such as Limlife's Daily Dose - but there's no way that I would subscribe (especially at $9.99 per month) because I have no confidence that I'll be able to cancel my subscription without a major hassle.

Google has done a great job integrating relevant, unobtrusive ads into their search products (less so with their site-based AdSense program).  I don't want my mobile services littered with intrusive, annoying ads - but I would welcome a free service that was monetized with integrated, relevant, perhaps even personalized ads (if the privacy issues can get worked out). If I decided to follow some of those ads, and found that I could actually buy stuff using my mobile phone... that would be super-convenient. For a busy working Mom like me, convenience, utility and trust are key factors in getting me to become loyal to any service, mobile or otherwise.

Top Fastest Growing Web Brands are User-Generated Content

Via Wonderland, a report from KenRadio showing that the fastest-growing Web brands are based around UGC (user-generated content). Finally, after so many years of almost-but-not-quite-getting-there, the long-cherished idea of the Web as a democratic medium that enables everyday people to entertain each other by expressing their creativity is happening, in a big way.

User-generated content sites, platforms for photo sharing, video sharing and blogging, comprised five out of the top 10 fastest growing Web brands according Nielsen//NetRatings. Image hosting site ImageShack ranked No. 4 among July’s fastest growing Web brands, increasing 233%, from a unique audience of 2.3 million to 7.7 million. Heavy.com, a video sharing site, took the No. 5 spot, increasing 213%, from 965,000 to 3.0 million unique visitors. Photo sharing site Flickr followed at No. 6, growing 201% from 2.1 million to 6.3 million unique visitors. Other user-generated content sites that made it into the top 10 fastest growing Web brands were MySpace, with a 183% year-over-year increase, and Wikipedia, with a 181 percent year-over-year increase.

LINK

First impressions matter... a LOT...

It's back-to-school time - and consequently, I'm seeing a lot of people (specifically, the kids and parents at my son's school) that I haven't seen much of all summer. I've been noticing how off-putting I find some of the people - and how drawn I am to others - even when we don't exchange any words. I'm sure that people feel the same way about me too (there's a scary thought, since I'm so often pre-occupied with work when I dropoff Gabe @ school). Here's a fascinating study that explains what this is all about.

LINK: You're judged by your facial expression

Princeton University psychologist Alex Todorov has found that people respond intuitively to faces and come up with a snap judgment about a person's trustworthiness, likeability and character in a few milliseconds, far faster than our reasoning minds can come to a conclusion.

Since 2005, Todorov has conducted a number of studies on first impressions and found that individuals draw conclusions about another person's character within milliseconds. In one study, Todorov found that a politician's winning margin in an election correlated to how competent they tended to look.

In a recent study, 200 individuals were asked to look at 66 different faces for one of three time durations--100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds or a full second--and then asked to judge the person's character. The study found that people didn't change their mind if given more time to observe. Instead, the longer viewing period just reconfirmed the snap judgment. Granted, first impressions can be overcome, but it takes work.

Location-based Blogging in a Virtual World

One of the most interesting applications I've run across lately is BlogHud, a Second Life add-on that allows people to mark and comment on a particular location in Second Life, and then have that info (geo-location plus comments) sent to an RSS-enabled website. I've seen cellphone-based services that offer a similar functionality in the physical world, but this is the first time I've seen this done for a virtual world. Very cool!

Social Sim: Two thumbs up for the BlogHUD.

As the population of SL has exploded at a rate of 15% per month, so have the incredible number of things to see and do. I never got a handle on most of the places when I joined in 2005, and now a year on I feel like every time I go into the world I'm faced with the same paralysis I get when staring at the ridiculous number of shampoo products available on the pharmacy shelf. I just don't know where to start, so often I just give up and leave.

Enter BlogHUD. Doctoe Schnook recently gave me a copy. It is an inspired application.

Users wear it in the virtual world and when they come across something they think people might find interesting, they type /9 and a description. Each entry can be categorised into five channels (e.g., shop, event). This text goes to BlogHUD.com, where other people can browse without needing to enter the application. If they fancy something they see, they can click on the post and shazam, they're in the world, at the place...

LINK

In Japan, entertainment moves beyond games

Courtesty of Gamasutra, I recenty ran across a survey conducted in Japan showing that people are spending more time on the Internet,  less time playing games, and have an increased interest in mobile phones. Given that many people in Japan access the Internet primarily through their mobile phones (more so than in the US, certainly) this cluster of findings is not surprising.

What's striking to me is how the Internet has broadened our notion of what's considered "entertainment." More and more people are spending time on MySpace, Facebook, podcasts, youtube, videochats, picture messaging etc. All these services leverage user-generated content to entertain people -- without the support of "authored" games. Note that many of these services have game-like elements such as groups, leaderboards, and social rating systems. So are these social-networking, user-driven systems a new type of game? Hmmm...

Japanese Internet Users Gaming Less.

new cross-media survey of 1,176 Japanese internet users from the ages of 10 to 65 has been conducted by Japanese marketing research firm service Nikkei Research, and questioned participants regarding their usage of various media formats such as television, newspapers, magazines, free papers, radio, internet, mobile phones (excluding phone calls and e-mail) and gaming platforms.

The survey results, which were translated by consumer website GameSpot, found that of those surveyed, 42.4 percent indicated that they are spending more time using the internet, mostly at the expense of other media use. By comparison, a nearly equal amount – 42.6 percent – noted less time playing games. This is particularly interesting given recent news that found that the Nintendo DS has become the fastest console or handheld ever to sell 10 million units in Japan, taking just 20 months to reach the milestone.

In addition, those who reported a declining interest in gaming also indicated an increased interest in mobile phones, a move which the research firm noted was due mainly to the wide array of functionality that is built into modern mobile phones.

The report also found that other forms of media, including television, radio, and magazines saw a decline in usage of 20 percent or more, especially among those who reported increased use of the internet. Finally, survey participants were questioned what media they expect to use more of in the future, to which the top four answers were podcasts, the internet, portable digital audio devices, and digital TV broadcasts made available for portable devices.