Stopping Piracy – buy a CD – what rubbish!

A recent advertisement I heard on radio was informing people to buy CDs and stop “downloading” over the Internet in an effort to stop piracy.

It seemed innocuous enough. A well intentioned community announcement followed by the eloquent words of an international artiste who offered that downloading over the Internet was killing creativity and instead we should buy a CD, ostensibly so we could “read the cover and really feel it”.

What a load of rubbish! Well the sentiment was there. But just a little lacking in educational benefit for a community announcement. The PR guys writing the script for the artists need to step up to the plate before they get whacked out the park themselves.

The CD is a dated storage device and a very poor strategy against which to fight piracy. It’s big, it breaks, it gets scratched and becomes unplayable, but mostly, it just gets copied easily.

If we really wanted to stop piracy we could. For a start we’d stop making CDs and only allow music to be distributed via digitally rights managed (DRM) downloads for specific devices.

What better way to ensure that a piece of originally produced music was never copied again? When a buyer downloads DRM protected music, that music is usually set for specific platforms or devices (such as a mobile phone, music player or laptop), ensuring it can’t be copied.

Now I’m not saying that the CD should be killed off, although there are better storage methods. What I am saying is that the well intentioned community better get educated, and that downloading from legal sources, especially if you can do it direct from your mobile phone, is a far superior way to fight piracy that buy CDs.

You want to experience it for yourself. Come shop on your mobile or cell phone. Key http://www.THEcellcity.com/ into your phone (or on the web browser) and download the music for your phone today. 100% DRM protected. And if you want the wallpaper of the artist so you can “feel it”, we have them too.

The Mobile Internet – Coming your way

I have to admit that I don’t have the facts and figures available to back this up from a third party perspective, but, I can tell you that 35% of our customers in August are doing their surfing and downloading direct from the mobile phone. That’s an 13% increase over July 2006.

Maybe that’s just a result of our recent media activity and the education getting to the masses.
What I mean by “surfing and downloading direct from a mobile phone” is that these customers are keying in our web address http://www.thecellcity.com/ into the browser on their cell phone, and selecting the product of their choice, downloading and paying for it – all on their cell phone.

And of those who are still browsing the http://www.thecellcity.com/ from their PC, over 50% are now choosing to send the application direct to their phone once they have made their purchase. That’s an increase of over 23% of customers from last month.

There may be a few reasons why Cellcity fairs better than other mobile shopping sites; notably because we decrease the size of many applications so that our customers benefit greatly with faster transfer speed and lower costs to download direct from the cell phone.

But many other reasons bode well for the future. Continued reductions in GPRS charges by mobile telcos will help. The sooner we get these charges lower the better for everyone.
Pervasive WiFi will be another boon to the industry and the convergence of music players with phones, camera phones etc. This will take place as mobile phone and PDA users become more reliant on using one device for a multitude of tasks.

Of course there are problems and we need to deal with these. Website producers have to respect the need for speed and immediate gratification by the end user. No-one wants to wait 10 seconds or worse for a page to load. Mobile websites can’t show all the features you can fit on a 15 inch desktop, so designers need to be a little smarter in how they present information.
Also, manufacturers and chip makers must and will keep improving memory and speed.

My prediction: Mobile internet users will overtake desk-based internet users in 12 months.
Who leads the way? Asia. But I’ll leave that for a later blog.

Shang-haing the Mobile Future

It probably happens to many visitors from western countries who hit places like Shanghai – with population estimates of between 12 and 20 million, this place is capital B I G big. And with a daily visitor population of 4 million – it’s just a good old smack in the face. WOW!

Whichever way you look at it, that’s a whole lot of fried eggs for breakfast on a daily basis. And every other conceivable commodity required in keeping that many people going. Walking the streets, the percentage of mobile users (SMS or calling while walking) is relatively low compared to Singapore or Hong Kong. But in sheer volume terms and growth potential, it dwarfs its fellow Asian cities.

While the Shanghainese definitely still have growing pains (a lot of outages on the Internet and GPRS network while I was there last week), they’re obviously determined to win in no matter what area we talk about.

The mobile opportunity is enormous. The people are turned on, and the Government’s proactive stance to educate and ensure that its citizens benefit from being the world leaders in using and deploying mobile technology, will go a long way to helping them achieve their potential.

There’s an incredible rich vein of talent in all the necessary areas, technological prowess, marketing intelligence and entrepreneurial vision and spirit to succeed.

The Cellcity opens its Chinese language sites and content portals in September at http://www.thecellcity.com/ and http://www.cellcity-china.com/. And Shanghai will be providing a host of content from music, games, information, services, sports and business. We’re looking forward to the partnership, and I’ll keep providing updates as to market information and statistics as we get them.

Shop from the Department Store

If I asked you where you could go online today and buy movie tickets, mobile games, the latest hits by Beyonce, a comic, a movie, a school text book, a travelers guide, a sales management application, a PDA solution, a mobile wallet… what would you say? I bet you’d name half a dozen sites that might be relevant, and then send me off to spend endless hours meandering around the Internet.

What if I told you could find it all in one place and that place could be either the Internet or the mobile phone?

I believe the key to online and mobile shopping success giving customers the products they want, and delivering it to them in the right packaging, just the way the customer wants them - High quality, low cost, great service, fast and pretty packaging.

Some think today’s mobile market to be the new dotcom. We’re already seeing some mobile service provider companies going down, mobile telcos having a hard time, specialist ring tone folding, and games stores going the same way. But is this a sign mirroring the dotcom experience or an historical reflection of bricks and mortar world?

I’d argue the latter. Sure, lots of companies thought they’d cash in on the Ringtones. But lots of problems to success are in the way; extensive competition, an incredible amount of free stuff, poor quality, the accessibility and popularity of P2P and the crappy amount of standard memory in vendor supplied phones.

But another major reason is specialization. That’s where the mobile world can mirror lessons learnt in the real world. It makes sense that online shoppers want the convenience of being able to buy all their needs from one website. Why should I go through the agony of logging in to several different sites when I can go to one and get all the information, product or service I want?

Department stores and malls have replaced the local corner store in the real world, and in the same way stores such as http://www.walmart.com/ and http://www.thecellcity.com/ are replacing the specialist stores on the internet. Why go to a specialist music store if I can get the same content at sites where I can also download games, travel, sport, business products? It makes sense to go for more convenience and less time wastage.

And it will be the same in the mobile world. According to a slew of industry experts, the number of people accessing the web via the mobile phone will outnumber those who access from the desktop within 2 years. If that is so, can we expect those users to have the same behavior as the internet users of today? We think so. At least there will be a lot of similarities.

People will want the convenience of being able to access information when they want it. They want to buy tickets, book flights, send email, all the common stuff that is currently done on the Internet today.

What gets in the way of doing this today is a lack of user education. But as soon as the kids master the mobile platform (and the telco drop their data transfer charges), the rest will be history.

Given the accessibility of GPRS, the capability and pre-configuration for web access of most new phones regardless of whether they are 3G smartphones or not, it’s not hard to imagine that the mobile phone could be the new way to shop.

And if that’s the case, mobile department stores will become the premier shopping sites of the future. Of course before that happens, there’s lots that need to be done. Come visit us at www.thecellcity.com (just type it into the browser on your mobile phone), if want a glimpse of the future of shopping online.

Products, applications, services, 17 departments, over 100 sections and over a million applications for any kind of mobile phone or PDA device… and we’re accessible over the browser on your mobile phone. How cool is that!