Future of Mobile Media – It’s The IPhone and Podcasting

I’ve been seeing a massive awareness around Mobile Media. The obvious example driving this is the iPhone. Apple saw the iPhone’s market share triple over the past year, capturing 12.9 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, according to a new Gartner analysis.  For the quarter ending September 30, iPhones accounted for 3.4 percent of the market in 2007. That figure was more than 3x higher on the same day in 2008. The future of Mobile Media is now upon us.

Nokia is the leader worldwide in smartphone sales, with 42.4 percent of the market. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion comes in second with 15.9 percent. In North America, Apple is in second place behind RIM, with iPhones accounting for over a quarter of all smartphones.  Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza also noted that this quarter marked the first time iPhone sales exceeded those of Windows Mobile devices; that’s pretty astonishing when you consider how many flavors of WM handsets are out there.

I recently sat down with the core management team at Volomedia to talk about to the Apple revolution, online media and advertising – mobile media. Brian Steel and Murgesh Navar shed some light on what’s going on. There are a slew of interviews here (enjoy).

I do want to highlight my talk with the Founder of Volomedia Murgesh Navar who talks about the current situation and the vision of how all of this plays out.

Click Here To Play Podcast with Murgesh Navar Founder of Volomedia

Blogging 2.0 – Blogging, Podcasting Growing UP -Yes They Are Mainstream

The economist has a great story about blogging and how it has gone mainstream. I would add podcasting to that list as well.  I was there when blogging started and podcasting and yes it is true both are mainstream leaving many of the pioneers like me and Jason trying to figure out the roles in the new order.  The fact is most pioneers can’t compete with mainstream professionals. The economist talks about Jason Calacannis as the example of blogging pioneer.  Jason is a great blogger and has shown the way for many.

Jason is a pioneer in blogging, but the real reason (my opinion) that Jason stopped blogging was because he had a company to build and run – Mahalo which is in big trouble.  Email makes sense for Jason because it is more controlled, and it keeps his social graph and influence in place verses the treadmill we call full time blogging.

When I started PodTech in the early days of 2005 had a huge audience and my show was very popular – millions of people were exposed to my podcast (thanks to blogging and itunes).  I gave that up to try to run the company that was venture backed.  Now I’m considering doing it again.  See poll on the side bar.

Back to Pioneering or Blogging and Podcasting 2.0

I see blogging changing so called Blogging 2.0.  It will more about real time collaboration.  More about experts not generalists.   In fact other blogger agree at web 2.0 summit I spoke with Toni Schnieder CEO of WordPress and he agrees.  They are seeing massive uptake on expert or specialism blogs.  Also this reaches deep into the web.  Toni mentioned that wordpress has over 200 million unique users – that’s massive.

I have launched a new blog in June called Broadband Developments www.BroadDev.com which is a prototype for a collaborative blogging hub.  So far the results are working.  We’ll see if that can be a model for Blogging 2.0 – experts working together.

Techcrunch Reporting Innovation from 2005 – Blip.TV Finally Gets With Video Ad Insertion

I love Blip.tv, but the latest Techcrunch post should be titled – Blip.tv catches up with the rest of the pack in video insertion.

This isn’t innovation but a necessity for Blip.tv who has been behind the curve in innovation on the adverstising side. This is a me-too announcement. One thing that is true about the story is that iTunes throws off tons of traffic. ITunes and podcasts are mainstream – call it portable media or downloadable media (whatever) – it’s big numbers. Blip.tv isn’t the only solution and it is far from the best.

This isn’t a big story because others have this technology like Castfire, Wizzard.TV, and Volomedia. In fact Volomedia has the most advanced solution in that it can insert and track ads from when you’re not connected. For that most sought after and most advanced solution it does require a plug-in.

Blip.tv isn’t really doing anything new here but it does give them a needed revenue stream. Blip.tv has done a great job in hosting videos for the “long tail” sector of online video of independent video bloggers. Now they can make money for their long tail providers.

What is interesting is that you have companies, like Volomedia, Wizzard, and now Blip, who can provide reach for advertisers.

Metrics: Lets hope the metrics can be there. That is the biggest challenge from Blip is the metrics. The ad insertion is trivial.

I will ask around to get a feel for the reaction among Blip content creators and update this post…

Update: Peter Kafka was looking for the Cypus video of Mike Hudack (it was taken down) but I found this version and remix that was no doubt posted on Techcrunch using Blip.tv – remixed to music by Internet star, comedian, and celebrity Loren Feldman of 1938media.com. He changed the music to Highway to Hell – very fitting.

Update: NewTeeVee has a story and clarifies that the solution only works on the computer version of iTunes. There is no portable or mobile metric. That makes sense now.

Update: In the comments below a virtual discussion is going on between me and Mike Hudack who is being very transparent (like they always have been in the past – kudos to Mike).  I would like to turn this into a ‘virual panel discussion’ on the topic because of the quality of the comments.  I will ping Volomedia and Kiptronic to respond.

Downloadable media or portable media is a very small group of companies so maybe we could get some collaboration and information – we need metrics because it’s clear that the market for downloadable media, podcasts, portable media is mainstream (no one debates that just look at iTunes and overall web video performance lately).  We do need to get a solution that works for users and advertisers so that the funding for more content can be realized.  Thanks Mike for commenting.