Good mobile insights and statistics are hard to find unless you pay for them … that’s why I’ve just updated my Key Trends and Usage Insights to include data for the UK.

UK Mobile Trends and Insights

UK total mobile users 80m  (penetration is over 100% of the population)

UK smartphone penetration 46%

UK smartphone app usage 50%

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Check out my other presentations or contact me for more information.

Damien Saunders

Just in time for Christmas – after 6 years of being harangued at Passport Control, questioned a million times and having to cough up around a £1000 a year for the past 3 years, I can now say I’m a whinging Pom.

And on my first day of being a Citizen of the United Kingdom — I was stumped by this piece of poor user experience design when applying for my British Passport.

To be honest – I thought this had to be a joke, to test how much I could remember from the Life in the UK test.

So pop quizz — Do I live in a Country called the United Kingdom? or a country called England?

Lets see …

• The United Kingdom has a Monarch as Ruler – England has the same Monarch living and reigning here.
• The United Kingdom doesn’t have United Kingdom Day quite like Australia Day but England has St Georges Day and we still don’t get a day off for that.
• Within the United Kingdom is England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and a few Principalities — England has England
• The United Kingdom has a Prime Minister — England has none
• The United Kingdom has Westminster Parliament – England has the London Assembly (everywhere outside of London doesn’t matter)
• England is not a member state of the EU – nor is Wales or Scotland, etc
• England is not a member of the UN
• Even the French call ‘it’ Great Britain

Like seriously — I live in England, but its not a country. The Country is the United Kingdom.

Unless of course you consider yourself to be a separatist or nationalist from those independent countries of Scotland, Wales or … Jersey.

Damien Saunders

This news from Hutchison 3G UK shows that using social media is more important on their mobile network is interesting …. Keeping up to date with friends or regular gameplay on the move is now more important than checking emails or reading the news.

In my opinion, Social Networking continues to dominate growth in internet usage – however, you shouldn’t assume that its all fun on the go. Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are all used for b2b leads and d2c customer service. What is unclear but should be assumed is that the majority of Three’s customers have unlimited mobile broadband and are probably consumer users not business users.

With nearly 2,500 terabytes of data flowing over the Three mobile broadband network in June 2010 alone, the browsing figures are based on a massive volume of mobile broadband data usage information.

Source … http://www.cellular-news.com/story/46136.php

Damien Saunders

Are you looking for work? Need to know what Recruiters and Agencies in London, UK are looking after Social Media Marketing? Then why not try my new Twitter List

@damiensaunders/agencies-work-recruitment

http://damiens.ws/davWzi

Currently the list includes:

Ecom Recruitment – recruitment agency

Propel London – recruitment agency

Stopgap – recruitment agency

theSkein – freelance digital media jobs list

October Recruitment London – recruitment agency

Tanya @ October – Great Recruiter

Want to get yourself added to the list – then just contact me.

Damien Saunders

Finally some proof that Mobile Internet usage is profoundly shaking up the way consumers shop, according to new research from PriceGrabber.co.uk.

Of the 908 online shoppers that were asked about their mobile shopping habits, 66 percent owned a Smartphone or another Web-enabled phone. Of the consumers who shop from their mobile, nearly half (48 percent) claim that the convenience of having the Internet with them wherever they go is their number one reason for smart shopping. PriceGrabber.co.uk’s research found that of the consumers that own a Web-enabled mobile phone:

• 24 percent compare or check prices from their mobile phone
• 22 percent research product details and specifications from their mobile phone
• 16 percent purchase online from their mobile phone
• 9 percent check product availability
• 5 percent access online discount vouchers

When it comes to most popular mobile purchases, research revealed that of the consumers who purchase online from their mobile phone…
• 59 percent purchase digital content for mobiles (ringtones, Apps and music/video clips)
• 52 percent purchase consumer electronics, such as GPS, MP3 players and digital cameras
• 45 percent purchase computers, laptops and peripherals
• 45 percent purchase books
• 33 percent purchase clothing

Source: NeonDrum

Damien Saunders

Foursquare is still the UK’s most popular location based check-in game to play on your mobile. I’ve said it before that Foursquare would come out on tops over Gowalla and Brightkite.

These maps (thanks to Checkin Mania) indicate the difference in the number of locations that users have submitted to each service. The growth from crowd sourced locations and points of interest reflects in the growth of that services usage (ie the most popular service gets the most contributions from users) The point of reference is London Borough Market – one of the more famous places in London to visit.

Aside from this, a fairly random survey of people using these ‘games’ showed a considerable higher interest in Foursquare then Gowalla. Gowalla was growing in awareness, but people I’ve asked complained it was slower than they expected.

Finally … if you’re getting started in social media marketing – don’t spend your money on a campaign only for one social network – spread it around so that everyone can join the game.

Foursquare on Checkin Mania

Gowalla on Checkin Mania

Brightkite on Checkin Mania

Damien Saunders

Recent indepth report from New Media Age in the UK focused on the internet usage habits of kids.

Kids research is hard – the age group is from 7 – 13. They are already exposed to a lot of marketing, aware of trends and ‘peer pressure’, but still very much aware of having to please their parents all of the time. It’s also very difficult to ask questions about anything anti-social, illegal due to the young age and formative, questioning minds.

It also provides some great insights into what kids say they are doing with their mobiles, about a fifth or 21% say they are already going online with their mobile phones.

[via new media age]

Damien Saunders

With the boom in the number of apps in the App Store (over 100,000) and total downloads in excess of 2bn … someone has got to be making money … right?

In part, the iPhone does offer a better platform for apps – it’s about to overtake RIM as the leading consumer smartphone, sold more than 34 million units and got some of the highest mobile internet usage rates we’ve seen so far.

It’s not fair to say that Developers, Ad agencies or Brands are making money out of the app store.

The problem is discovery – you have to do a lot to get your app to the Featured or Popular lists and that has got to start with spending money on good PR and a Viral / Word of Mouth campaign. For small time developers and startups, who might not account for these costs – they do expect GOOD PR and WoM to equal GREAT results.

Whatever you spend on building the app and promoting the app is not going to be made back in app revenue, consider that the majority of apps are given away for ‘free’. How does anyone make money?

I attended the NMAlive workshop in London last week which looked at Why You Need an App … I agree with all the presenters, which is you have to do something mobile … but expecting it to be a new revenue stream from Day 0 is misleading.

Damien Saunders

From today 3 UK will reward customers with cashback for referrals.

Join 3’s Free Agent team and get paid for promoting our free SIMs online. You get £5 cash when each friend first tops up their SIM by a minimum of £10, and they get an extra £2 credit. There’s no limit to the amount of money you can make.

see also: http://freeagent.three.co.uk/

Damien Saunders

Giffgaff will reward subscribers with cash rebates when they distribute its SIMs, help other members via its forums and suggest ideas which are then implemented by the company.

source: http://www.nma.co.uk/

Damien Saunders

The UK for along time has been a country full of honours and award systems — the most CCTV cameras comes to mind and from today it seems that the UK Government believes that for your safety,  they will need to record details and the contents of every SMS, email, voicemails and phone calls.

How afraid are we all becoming?

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/27/surveillance-data-protection

Damien Saunders

Comment: Datz music lounge has come out for Xmas in the UK with a £99.99 unlimited music DRM free offer. So whats the hooks … plenty even before you get going.

So Datz announced unlimited DRM Free music downloads (legally) this week … the service has an upfront fee of £99.99 – probably too steep for most people to consider – but maybe Sainsburys thinks it will be a last minute stocking stuffer.

The service currently has content from Warner, EMI, Beggars and the Orchard – around 2million tracks says the annoucement. The website makes it impossible to search and when we checked Madonna there were 16 versions of her single 4 Minutes. So no filtering of duplicate tracks. We found 6 versions of Katy Perrys first single of 12 tracks from that artist.

Finally the T&C’s would indicate the DRM free tracks are watermarked … if you are caught sharing content your account will be cancelled. Worse still, while the tracks might be DRM Free the download software isn’t. The software can only be used on 2 PC’s; which makes sense (Apple limits to a maximum of 5 PCs in its DRM domain management), but users have to have a USB ‘security dongle’ which seems to me to be more like a secure login RSA key — why the complexity for a consumer product?

I hope I get one for Christmas!

Source: Music Week and Datz.com

Damien Saunders