Who are the smartphone users?

According to Admob, there is a fifty-fifty split between male and females who use the iPhone, iPod Touch and WebOS. However, 73% of Android users are male. The iPod touch has the youngest demographic and is mostly popular with those 17 years old or younger.

Age by platform

The report also shows the differences and similarities between the Android and iPhone platforms. Despite the fact that Android and iPhone users download a similar number of apps every month and spend a similar amount of time using the apps, there is a difference in the purchasing patterns between the two smartphones.

As the table below illustrates, only 21% of Android users buy at least 1 paid app per month. The fact that are larger percentage of the Android apps are free (57%) compared to Apple (25%) affects this percentage.

Average App Downloads per Month

In terms of recommendations, more people with iPhones would recommend their handset (91%) compared with 84% of Android users. Perhaps this may be due to the fact the iPhone entered the market in 2007 and Android still has some catching up to do, launching its first handset in 2008.

Find out more about the January 2010 mobile metrics report from Admob

Mobile site vs Mobile app debate

E consultancy wrote an interesting article this week about mobile commerce and whether retailers should have a mobile app or a mobile site. Graham Charlton who wrote the article came up with arguments for having a mobile site or mobile app.

I think the mobile app market is going to become very saturated soon. Companies develop a mobile app, without really thinking what they want from a mobile app. One very good example highlighting this issue is Zara. They built the app, but there was no useful information on it and customers were unable to buy through it. Both Next and Net-A-Porter have the app, but not the mobile site. As I mentioned in my previous post, you can either build a mobile app or a mobile site.

Reasons to have a mobile app

1. Graham said that as smartphones and iPhone dominate the mobile internet, then an app is more likely to appear to users.

2. Graham said that smartphone users are more affluent. Therefore, apps will appeal to an audience with more disposable income. I disagree with this. Smartphone users are not more affluent. There are a high proportion of young people who use Blackberry and iPhones.

3. Better functionality on smartphones means retailers can offer a richer experience and therefore choose to build an app which will deliver this service.

4. The fourth point is that your app will get more visibility due to the popularity of the App store.

5. Customers have smartphones and therefore if a large number of mobile visitors are using Android and iPhones, an app may be better than a mobile site.

Reasons to have a mobile site.

1. A mobile site allows you to target a larger number of people as not everyone has a smartphone or has downloaded your app.

2. Those using their phone to search as they do on a desktop can easily find your site. The app store has thousands of apps, it is hard to find and if you do not have one, they cannot download it.

3. Unlike apps, you will not need approval of your site before it is released. It can also be updated as you update your website.

4. If you want an iPhone app, you will have to design one for the iPhone and a separate one for the Android. The mobile site can be seen on many handsets.

5. According to recent Taptu research, the browser-based mobile web market will grow much faster than the app market, so a mobile site will be necessary long term.

I agree with Graham on these issue for a mobile site. I believe companies should at least have a site optimised for all mobiles. Then if they want to and have extra budget, they can build a mobile app.

Oliver Newton at i-level wrote an article about the 7 deadly sins of marketing which I thought summed up well the mistakes companies have when trying to jump of the mobile bandwagon.

Nexus one with Vodafone

According to the Telegraph , The Nexus one will be sold in the Vodafone shops in April, soon after TMobile get their hands on it.

Changing the mobile landscape

To get hold of one for yourself, you will need to go directly to Google, google.com/phone.

What’s so good about this smartphone?

1. The Nexus One was the first phone to come with Google’s Android 2.1 and comes powerful features like a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor and a 800×480 multi touch screen.
2. The Nexus one is the company’s first own-brand mobile phone. There is not yet any information about tariffs, but people expect it to be about the same as the iPhone.
3. This is Google’s attempt to push through Android as one of the best smart phones to have in the market place.

The Nexus One has already launched in the US in January this year. Vodafone are not giving much away as to when exactly the phone will be available. I just went onto their blog and they still say it will be available “early spring”.

The photo is PhotosEcosse’s on flickr.

Google Caffeine – When is it coming?

Well according to Google, it may not happen for months. But Matt Cutts said it would happen after the holidays. Maybe he was talking about after Easter?

Waiting for the caffeine to kick in

Last August Google first announced Caffeine. And they also set up a developer sandbox for user feedback
www2.sandbox.google.com but now it seems as though they don’t want people to know which IP points to the Caffeine data centre.

There has been talk of caffeine since August 2009. For those of you unaware of caffeine, it is an upgraded and new version of the Google search engine.

Matt Cutts described caffeine as:
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

So after all the hype what is going on?
Google seems to be doing a lot of tests, perhaps they have found more issues than they are happy with before they want to announce caffeine is live.

According to Search Engine Land they get emails from people saying they think Caffeine is live. But Google says Caffeine isn’t live on Google.com — it’s still only at one data center, not much seems to have changed from last November when Matt Cutts said Caffeine was available at this IP address: 209.85.225.103.

Maybe Google have seen how many faults they have had with Google Buzz and are really trying not to let out a new product without fully testing it. If they wait any longer I am sure the other search engines will be releasing their own version of caffeine, they may call it coffee.

Photo is from flickr

Google in more trouble with Buzz

Buzz is less than a month old and has already got itself into trouble regarding privacy issues. The controversial “auto-follow” which Google called “auto-suggest” means that Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. This is great if you email people who are your friends, but you don’t want to follow work colleagues or your boss, who you also have to email on a regular basis.

However, Google are now serving its ads with other people’s content. This means that Buzz republishes the content, the full article, not just parts of it, in Gmail without asking permission. Apparently it also strips advertising from that content serving Google ads so this means people are losing money. There was an interesting post on Econsultancy’s website which goes into greater detail according to one blogger’s experience.

So it seems that Google’s attempt to try and spread itself into social media has not got off to a good start. On the plus side though, the location-based features in Google Buzz for mobile seems great. Buzz updates is not limited to 140 characters like Twitter.

I will be monitoring Google Buzz over the coming months and will update this post to reflect the news.

SES London

I went to SES London on Thursday and attended the seminar on duplicate content.

It was very interesting, so I thought I would share a few points on this topic. The easiest way to avoid having any duplicate content on the site is to not put any on the site.

1. The URL should not be accessed through more than one domain. If you have a test domain, make sure you exclude it in the robots.txt file.

2. www vs non www
Major search engines can deal with this, but if you have both versions available then make sure there is a redirect from one to the other. The same applies to secure and non secure page. http vs https.

3. Breadcrumb navigation that reflects in the URL is another area that can cause duplicate content issues

4. Session IDs
IDs are tabbed at the end of the URL for users who don’t support cookies. This is a big problem because every time the spider comes back to the site, it gets a different URL and then indexes a lot of pages. Google apparently have an answer on how to exclude session IDs for spiders. When I find this information, I will post it here.

Love your website

It is Valentine’s day, the day you are supposed to tell people how much you love and care for them.

Those that want to increase traffic to their website, must love their site. I do not mean this in some weird way. You must simply spend time on your site, making sure that you add fresh content, optimising the title tags and the images.

Valentine's Day cupcakes

I am guilty of not spending enough time on my website. I would like to update it daily, but I simply do not have time with a full time job that eats into my evenings. And then if I am out networking, I cannot update the blog that day. There are many people in this situation, working long hours and busy social/networking lives.

You can come up with all the excuses for not working on your site, but you just have to make time. Here are a few tips on how to get the most time to work on your website.

1. Spend just 30 minutes a day during the working week researching ideas, writing posts for your site. If you do not have time to publish the post, just save it as a draft and come back to it the next day.

2. Check the analytics
It is really important to see where your traffic is coming from. See what keywords people have used to find your site, this can give you ideas for new posts on your blog or new pages on your website.

3. Images
A picture paints a thousand words. Add images and optimse them with relevant alt tags on your website. Pictures catch the eye of people looking at your site and will encourage them to stay and read on.

4. Write interesting articles
Do not just write for the sake of it. Make sure you have something of value to add. I write about my experiences with seo and some of my posts are therefore written from a subjective perspective, such as the post about 301 and 302 redirects.

5. Spell check and edit
If you do not have time to add to the site, make sure you are regularly going back to read your older pages/posts. Make sure you do not have any spelling mistakes. Many sites have spelling mistakes on their site, often because they rush the editing.

6. Fun
Remember, having a website should be fun. It should not be a chore to update and change the website. If this is the case, then you should get rid of it.

The photo is gabby’s cupcakes from flickr.

Google Buzz

On Wednesday, Google announced their new social media product “Google Buzz”

Google Buzz

According to the guardian, Buzz has been rolled out to all of Gmail’s 150 million users worldwide, though not yet to those using Gmail inside organisations, where it is expected to arrive next month.

When it was being tested internally, it was called Taco Town, and proved popular for sharing high-definition videos, said Hugo Barra, a product manager. “Google is really good at sorting information,” he said. “That’s what we intend to do with social information as well.” Some critics say this is Google’s attempt at twitter and it is not really offering anything new and exciting. However, if Buzz were to be used by all Gmail users, then it would have more users than MySpace. Facebook is currently the number 1 social networking site with 400 million users.

But what about mobiles? Well it does not work on all mobile phones yet, just the iPhone and the Google Nexus. I am sure Google is working on making sure Buzz is available on more handsets.

So how will Google compete in an already saturated market place? Apparently, Google already tried to build social networking systems before. In 2004, it launched a Facebook like site called Orkut and successful in Brazil. Google bought Jaiku in 2007, a Twitter-like system but was abandoned by the company in January 2009.

According to techradar , Yahoo and Microsoft already offered similar services. Yahoo launched http://buzz.yahoo.com/ two years ago. And Microsoft say their Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.

It seems like Google have copied the name from Yahoo and the idea from facebook and twitter without offering anything new. It will be interesting to see if Google can make Buzz work.

301 redirects vs 302

What is a 301 redirect and when do you need to use it?

This post will address the question and explain the difference between 301 and 302 redirects.

A 301 redirect is a permanent move from the old domain. It is the search engine friendly way to for redirecting your webpage. It should also preserve your search engine ranking for that page. It is the most efficient way of moving domains especially if you have to change file names.

As Matt Cutts explains, a 302 refers to the HTTP status code that you get in your browser when you request a page. A 302 status code means the page has moved temporarily to a new location.

Matt Cutts say that the 302 redirect can be on-domain or off-domain.

- On-domain 302 Redirect – the 302 temporary redirection is implemented in the same domain. The disadvantage it that it is simple and not prone to hijacking.
For example www.example.com/ecard.asp is redirected to www.example.com/ecard/new-year-2010.asp
- Off-domain 302 redirect – a redirect from one domain to another domain that are claimed to be temporary. When a search engine receives an off-domain 302 redirect, it should crawl, index and return the destination page.

A client asked me for advice when changing their content on the page. They were changing their page titles and the content and they wanted to know if they should implement a 301 redirect. You did not to use a 301 redirect unless you are changing the URL. This brings me to another point that was raised. The difference between underscore and hyphens in URLs.

Are hyphens and underscores seen as different by the search engine? The answer is yes, they are. Google does not treat underscores and hyphens the same – underscores are not counted as spaces.

So the URL:
“www.working-in-london.co.uk” is seen as different to “www.working_in_london.co.uk”
The search engine reads the later as “www.workinginlondon.co.uk”

However, from a user point of view, it probably isn’t a good idea to have both URLs as they look the same. Read more at Search Engine Journal

T Mobile’s handsets for Q1 2010

T-Mobile will launch 15 new mobile phones in Q1 this year with 8 on contract and 8 on pay as you go. LG Pop will be on both contract and pay as you go.

Below are the phones launched q1 2010
Pay monthly mobile phones
BlackBerry Storm 2 (9520)
LG POP (GD510)
Sony Ericsson Vivaz
Nokia E72
Nokia X6
Sony Ericsson X10 (Android)
Samsung Galaxy Portal (Android)
LG In Touch Max GW620 (Android)

Blackberry Storm 2 -9520

Pay as you go mobile phones
BlackBerry 8520
LG POP (GD510)
T-Mobile Vairy Text
T-Mobile Vairy Touch 2
Nokia 2220
Nokia 1616
Sony Ericsson W205
T-Mobile Pulse (Android)

LG Pop

According to Mobile news , T-mobile has big plans for BlackBerry smartphones, following the success in 2009 when they shipped 10,000 Blackberry handsets every week in q4. The BlackBerry Storm 2 9550 will be released in February, and the Curve 8520 with be on pay as you go. The original BlackBerry Storm 9530 was only available on Vodafone until end of January.

Apparently, more than 2,900 BlackBerry handsets were activated on the T-Mobile network on Christmas day alone. 50% of those were with the BlackBerry Curve 8520 handset – so you can guess which Christmas presents were popular for 2009. T-Mobile also said that the number of customers using Blackberry devices increased by 125% during 2009, most of these were on pay monthly contracts.

T-Mobile are offering the Curve 8520 on pay as you go for £150. Customers will also get 30 days of free text messages and 6 months free email and internet usage when purchased between 1st – 31st of March. This will look set to increase the popularity of the Blackberry Curve 8520 which according to GfK (the retail analyst) was the best selling pay monthly mobile phone in the UK in Q 4 2009.The Blackberry Curve 8900 was the best selling contract handset over the summer.

Phil Lander, T-Mobile account director at BlackBerry-maker RIM said “It was a phenomenal year for BlackBerry and T-Mobile. We have seen significant growth. We have established the BlackBerry brand with huge investment. There was a lot of focus on the consumer market, but we are in no way turning our back on business. The entry-level Curve 8520 is a really strong prepay proposition. We are anticipating big things for this, not just because of the product, but also because of the T-Mobile brand and the propositions that will help drive its success.”

Looks like T-mobile are onto a winner here, the other mobile operators better make sure they are working on their own USP.