Mobile Telephony

Sydney.
Rachel de Sain is the next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; she is Strategy and Commercial Manager for Mobile at Sensis. Her focus is on mobile advertising and marketing. Sensis operates brands such as Yellow Pages, WhereIs, TradingPost and Citysearch, and has recently come around to placing this content in Google and Google Maps as well - in this, mobile has become one of the most fundamental parts of the business.

Sensis gets around 2.5 million searches from mobile devices per month, and this doubles around every four months. Mobiles now have a 101% penetration rate in Australia, but over 49% of Australians have owned a phone for over 7 years, so it's not a new technology any more, even though technological features keep changing. Benefits for consumers are that mobiles are always on, that they choose whom to communicate with, that communication is personalised, and that it is relevant on the fly - if therefore provides confidence for consumers. For advertisers, the always-on nature is also attractive, and customers using mobile phones to connect are genuine customers, not windowshoppers. Also, the return on investment is measurable. Overall, though, the mobile is about building bridges, it takes users from one platform to another, and this is crucial.

Sydney.
Up next here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Michael Smith, Corporate and Consumer Group Marketing Director at Optus, who shifts our focus to mobile media. He notes that some 75% of the Optus Zoo mobile portal is user-generated - "stuff that's interesting to me". Users want to access content on their own terms, and so Optus is connecting with a number of media industry partners - this is different from the completely integrated Telstra Bigpond approach, or the handset-as-portal approach of the iPhone, for example.

Tartu
In this post-lunch session on the final day at CATaC 2006 we're focussing on mobile technologies, and Andra Siibak is the first presenter. She notes the increased scale and magnitude of social interaction through computer-mediated interaction; this also involves youngsters forming their identities and creating favourable impressions of themselves. Despite the wide range of identity portrayals available to them, women still appear to present themselves in what are thought to be the most favourable formats, as Andra found for the Estonian social networking site Rate (and we're focussing here especially on the site's dating aspects) - here people are able to view photos of others and rate them.

Dresden
ICA2006 day four has started with a session on mobile telephony. The first paper is by Scott Campbell and deals with cross-cultural perceptions of mobile technologies. The theoretical framework here is something called Apparatgeist, which explains multi-national trends in how people think about and use personal communication technologies (PCTs). There are tensions between autonomy and privacy, around how these technologies are used, etc., and Apparatgeist (literally the spirit in the machine) helps explain how people are oriented towards these technologies. There is a socio-logic of perpetual contact by which humans are naturally driven towards social connection, and essentially the concept draws attention to some apparent universals in how we think about and use PCTs.