Optus jump on Mobile Advertising wagon

Emily — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:23:56 +0000

Optus has announced the launch of a new media division that will sell Mobile Advertising.

Today’s article in the Australian gives us the usual launch and press release stuff but is pretty light on details. B&T have managed to dig out a bit more information, including a name (Dawn Goh) to head up this new division and a URL from the Optus site www.optus.com.au/advertise (a search for Mobile Advertising on the Optus Home page still draws a blank).

We heard last week from Brad over at Digital Ministry that Optus will be using MIA’s AdFactory solution to serve and manage their mobile ad campaigns.

Although we’ve seen releases before from Optus talking about mobile advertising, with the appointment of a solution provider, it looks like it might finally be happening. There is also a bona fide rate card up on their site, with CPM rates for banners and M-Site Builds.

No surprises there – rates are generally comparable to the other players in the market, if a big high (untargeted banners are $30-$40 CPM) and there’s not much info about targeting capability.

With Optus servicing a large portion of Australia’s iPhone customers it would be quite a coup if they could offer iPhone targeting early on.

Speaking of which, I recently heard of another local carrier offering iPhone targeting, even though it’s not an advertised service. Anyone got any light to shed on this? I regularly target iPhone users via AdMob for my clients and I am not yet aware of any other Aus business offering this – would love to know more if you know otherwise?

The Google Phone is here!

Emily — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:57:00 +0000

OK, that was a little bit of sensationalist headlining to grab the uninitiated. Sorry.

If you’re not familiar with Google’s Android, it’s probably worth a quick recap. Firstly Android is NOT a phone. Secondly, Google hasn’t built a phone.

Android is a software platform and an operating system (O/S). On the PC we are all familiar with the Microsoft and Apple operating systems. In recent years we have seen the emergence of ‘open source’ operating systems like Linux as well.

To date there have been a variety of operating systems for mobile handsets, usually proprietary to a particular handset manufacturer. eg. Symbian is Nokia’s O/S, Palm has their own O/S and of course Microsoft handsets use Windows for Mobile.

Android is a (mostly) open source Operating System, which means that any handset manufacturer can theoretically build a phone that uses the Android operating system. Google therefore doesn’t need to build handsets – they just need to convince handset manufacturers to use their O/S.

Just like the iPhone (which uses its own iPhone O/S), Android enables touchscreen technology and (in completely non-technical terms!!) is quite similar to the iPhone O/S. For this reason, Android is being touted as the competition to the iPhone, even though you will see it rolled out on a whole lot of different handsets.

Android was launched in late 2007 but it wasn’t until October 08 that the world’s first ‘Google phone’ was launched. The handset manufacturer was HTC and the HTC Dream was marketed as the ‘G1′.

There’s been a fair bit of speculation recently about which handset manufacturer will be the first to launch an Android phone in Australia and whether they will do an exclusive deal with one of the Australian Telcos.

This week HTC and Optus announced they will launch the HTC Dream in Australia on February 16th via the Optus network. Check out these recent stories on ZDNet and The Australian IT for more information about the handset, the plans and all the fun and speculation!

Late addition – CNET has done an analysis of the cost of plans on Optus for the iPhone 3G vs the HTC Dream.

Mobilista» iphone Archives – Mobilista

Optus jump on Mobile Advertising wagon

The Google Phone is here!