I actually wanted to introduce a new section at my blog here, it would have been called ‘mobile ideas’. But sometimes your idea is just too simple and you realize you can’t be the only one thinking about it. My idea was Oyster Mobile. For non-Londoners: an Oyster Card is a card used for payments in public transport, used when entering and exiting the tube stations of London. You pay by touching an ‘oyster’, which is shown in the picture, with your card. The technology behind this is called Near Field Communication, which basically means that there are two chips and a wireless signal which is received when the chips are near each other. This technology can also be used for payments with your mobile phone. You can simply provide a phone with an NFC chip and connect it to an application on your phone to make payments. This was my initial idea, a bad one Continue reading…
The last two weeks of August I was on holiday in my home town Amsterdam. As I can’t sit still for a minute, never mind two weeks, I helped Edial Dekker, a friend, with a business plan for his mobile startup MapTheGap. He is currently participating in a startup competition by Vodafone and just today, he made it to the last six startups in the race to win 100,000 euro of investment money! Hopefully partially thanks to my mobile marketing advice. It inspired me to write this post.
I think one of the most common mistakes startups make is choosing the sell out strategy. They hope to make their service so appealing that a big player has no choice but to acquire them. What if that’s not happening? Well, then you run out of money sooner or later, go bankrupt, and your startup has stayed a startup forever. In these times of economic slowdown it seems a pretty risky strategy. Continue reading…
Wow, the last couple of weeks were pretty impressive. Working in London can be really tiring and working in mobile can result in absolute exhaustion if you’re careful. Ok, it’s not that hard, but I need to come up with some kind of excuse for not having posted anything for six weeks. It’s absolutely terrible, I know. But I was too busy getting used to my London life and job, and on top of that I’ve also been two weeks off the job.
But now I’m back, better and stronger than ever before and dedicated to bring you compelling mobile stories. A new one every week (good ones, no boring newsflashes or too personal stories) and maybe some tiny snacks in between. Although I didn’t write anything for a while, I can say that I learned a lot about mobile marketing recently. And I only just started.
Right now I’m working on a story about monetizing mobile services, it is going to be a good one, so stay tuned!
This is the third episode of London Calling, a series of posts about my experiences in London accompanied with a short soundtrack. Press play and start reading.
Last week I started with my job as a mobile executive at Unanimis. It was a dive into the deep end, as the mobile advertising business is booming. I am forced the learn everything in the quickest possible way. And I think that’s the best way. My colleagues are great too, they are really helpful and patient when it comes to employees from abroad. I also have a fellow colleague from abroad, he’s from France. It’s funny how much things you have in common when you’re both working abroad for the first time. So after seven working days and a company party I really feel in the right place. Although every now and then I still need to get used to some British things. Like having beer during lunch, that would probably get you fired in the Netherlands, but here in the UK it seems a common thing. Continue reading…
This is the second episode of London Calling, a series of posts about my experiences in London accompanied with a short soundtrack. Press play and start reading.
“Are you mad, kid?” asked the taxi driver when I told him I moved away from Amsterdam and I was on my way to my new home in London. “You’ll probably want to go back there in two days” he said. Continue reading…
And of course I’ll show you my findings. In the presentation below you can see a magnificent collection of eight pie charts which tell you more than a thousand words. The main purpose of my research project was to link marketing goals to certain forms of mobile advertising and make the outcome of this question as concrete as possible. The outcome is in the second half of the presentation and consists of a sales funnel with marketing goals. The marketing goals (i.e. attention, interest, desire, action) are accompanied by different forms of mobile advertising. Every form of mobile advertising is clickable and links to a couple of cases in which the particular form is used. Unfortunately, Slideshare.net doesn’t allow links in presentations, so you should either download the desktop version or just click through the presentation without clicking any links.
Welcome at London Calling, a new feature of my weblog. In this section I will tell you about my adventures and experiences in London. So, if you care, you can read about the things I’m doing here. As I felt like I had to do something extra to make this section really cool, I made a logo (thanks to Piero Serra for the great picture) and I will also include a UK soundtrack in every episode. While reading my stories you can listen to the soundtrack by simply pressing the big play button on the MixWit tape below. Ok, all set? Let’s start with Volume 1, press play and start reading. Continue reading…
My internship at WebAds is almost finished now. Within a couple of weeks I will start with a big new challenge. In July I will move to London and start my international career at Unanimis, one of Europe’s biggest interactive advertising sales houses. At WebAds I experienced that a cool thing about being in mobile advertising, is that once in a while you’re able to try out some really new and fancy stuff. One of these things is my interactive business card. I think interactive business cards have a big future, we really have to get rid of all those paper cards and the endless stacks they result in. So I invite all of you to text “bc peter” to 5566 and enjoy the experience!
