What's Square mean to you?

Image Attribute: Square

In the past few days there's been a lot of buzz about Square, the new mobile-phone credit card swiping solution. Point of Sale to the people, so-to-speak. Few peeps asked me of my thoughts, and how does it affect Adva Mobile, so here it is.
I think Square is a terrific little gadget that, more than it's own independent value to the world, the buzz it brings with it drives more awareness to the things one could do using their mobile phone. The more we can see from that, the better, IMO.
I admire their approach: I think that of the mobile payment solutions, they win on simplicity (to the end user) and reach. (almost) all other mobile payment solutions require pre-registration, which is a killer for the ad-hoc shoppers.
On it's own, I have my healthy skepticism how many people will end up owning and using the device. Requiring extra hardware? We've seen what happened to Zeemote. It will be interesting to find the payout rates, the installation process and other factors. Of those long-tail merchants, you need to find people with the right phone and plan, willing to pay for the gadget, and share their revenues with another party. For those people, Square complements the cash-only sales with cash and credit. I'm trying to think who those people are: Street artist selling paintings? Active musician next to the merch table? Do they really need this? time will tell.
Now if you contrast paying using Square and on a mobile website (with, say, PayPal), then I'd say it's hard to determine how many of the fans would rather use one or the other. Square wins in the consumer side, Paypal (I think) wins on the merchant side.

As far as Adva Mobile is concerned, again, the buzz that Square brings is a blessing. We'd like to see less and less "I didn't know I could do that". As mentioned, Square complements well the financial processing for products that entertainers would like to sell, say, on their merch table. It is important to note, Adva Mobile is a Mobile Marketing Service for entertainers. There are mobile sales tools that come with it, that entertainers can leverage, but our focus has always been helping entertainers acquire new fans and keep them engaged, coming to shows and participating in the "community" you're building.

Overall, Square is certainly an interesting solution that will stir things up for a while. It certainly brings a lot of buzz with it, which is great. I'm looking forward to see what will happen with it as time goes by.

our first partnership: ArtistData

I'm more than excited to announce our first partnership, with ArtistData. Not only because it's big news for Adva Mobile, but also because ArtistData's service is so spot-on: giving musicians a service that enables them to enter shows, news, blogs and other assets once, and automatically aggregate that information to other sites. It's the right approach for musicians, who are already sufferring from lack of time to deal with self-promotion on multiple sites.

This integration will allow musicians to bring their assets from ArtistData automatically to their mobile fan club on Adva Mobile. It will happen automatically daily (you need to set it up on both sites). 

I think it's very cool and hope a lot of musicians will benefit from it. Certainly a step in the right direction, for everyone.

You can read more details here.

Mobile Shopping Taking Off In US

Mobile Shopping Taking Off In US: A survey of 3,305 online consumers in the US by Pricegrabber.com has found that nearly 58 percent of them own a mobile phone capable of connecting to the web (8 percent own an iPhone). "One in 10 online consumers said they purchase online from their mobile device, 16 percent compare prices and another 16 percent research product details/specifications," writes FierceWireless. Of those in the survey who did makes purchases from their mobile phoens, 58 percent have purchased digital content for their phone, 51 percent have purchased consumer electronics, 37 percent have purchased computers, 36 percent have purchased books, and 31 percent have purchased clothing.

Source: MocoNews

It's coming, finally.

Adva Mobile's 1st Newsletter

Our first newsletter just came out, lot's of advice and insight on how to promote your band in these days where your fans are bombarded with electronic information they can't handle.


A highlight of this newsletter is an insightful interview conducted by Ariel Hyatt (founder of Ariel Publicity) of Helen Keegan on new mobile promotion tools for musicians.

We're featuring McAlister Drive as a leading band this month, who sold 10 tickets to their fans on their mobile phones this week (there's more here).

During March and April we are promoting tickets sales by paying the musicians $1 for every ticket sold through us...read more here.

Thanks to Ariel, Helen, Christoph and John for their help on this newsletter...we better start working on the next one :-)

Adva Mobile Coverage on Mobile Marketer and Mass High Tech

We got some nice coverage today with Mobile marketer and with Mass High Tech, check it out:

Music artists tap Adva Mobile’s mobile fan club service

Adva Mobile salutes independent artists with social network app

Adva Mobile Launched

I'm excited to announce that earlier today Adva Mobile opened the service for musicians to sign up and start creating their mobile fan clubs. In the past two months we had the fan experience working: sending text messages, viewing mobile internet pages, downloading songs to fans' phones, sharing on twitter etc. Now we enable artists to control their messaging, mobile pages, content and more. For those interested, here's the press release.

The beta period was rewarding in that it taught us a lot about what's important to the bands and to the fans. We good great feedback and enthusiasm although we had no marketing budget. It was the power of the promoters, bands and fans to spread the word. THANK YOU FOR THAT!

Now we need to concentrate on the next challenge, and we could use your help: get the word out to as many bands as possible. We could use your help: if you know a band, or your neighbor's kid plays in a band, tell them about us: Adva Mobile, the mobile fan club service: http://www.advamobile.com.

On another note, Adva Mobile now has it's own blog: http://www.advamobile.com/blog. There is also a Twitter account: Twitter.com/advamobile.

Look for Adva Mobile stuff over there. In the mean time, I'll debate where each of my ramblings go, here or there :-)

NYC Mobile Barcamp3 quick notes

This weekend we attended mobileCampNYC3. A bit of a drive from Boston but boy was it worth it. about 200 peeps showed up. Mind u, these are peeps with real life, jobs and plenty of stuff to do in the w/e. Still they were there. Great to see Dave Harper (taking QR codes the next step), Raul from QTrax, Keith from PadPaw and many other great peeps.

for the most part, geeks are geeks. stick together and feed each other with ideas. So the outstanding session which made my day was by Mike Young and Ted Roden from "The New York Times Company" (what a name eh?).
Simply put, they presented NYT mobile strategy, composed of mobile web pages rendered in 5 different formats, mobile resident application strategy and mobile alerts. It was fascinating to finally listen to someone "from the outside" lay out how they see mobile. For example, I asked about their alerts. They totally see mobile, and alerts specifically, as a valuable service to keep subs happy and grab new ones, despite the cost, which they agree, is high. (BTW, they use mBlox).
Their conversion from a link inside an SMS 'Alert' to a mobile page view is above 40% !!!
In a few months they achieved a couple hundred mobile subs and millions of impressions a month. Not bad.
I'm still waiting to get the ppt from Mike and learn more from it.

Then they presented SHIFD. Shift content between your PC and your device. Read something on your PC, mark where you left off, continue reading on the subway. Not only is it a cool idea, they get to work on it in the NYT lab!

Alexander Besher also brought some 'outsider' spirit to the game. He's an author and he discovered Dave Harpers' QR linking technology, using it in his book "Mangaman". Interesting again.

Perhaps the other session to mention was the moaning in the US about SMS costs and who controls the market as a result (being, the operators, not the services or the marketers). We were examining new methods to deliver SMS-like alert experience without having the operators in the middle of it (cost & control). One idea is to be embedded inside an application. Perhaps unrealistic if you want to have your own (distribution, development,...) but what if you used Facebook alerts for that?? Right, not everyone has Facebook on their phone, but most of those who have mobile internet phones are anyway in the teens or are geeks, and they'd have Facebook installed?. Similarly, a comment was made by Nick Clarey (brilliant brit from Airsource) about using RIM's Blackberry messaging technology (mind you that presents a slight reach problem, now that RIM aren't even 1st in US shipments). It completely works around the carriers and operated by RIM. The interesting comment was: "if the operators can control SMS, could they not have the same control over application messages or RIM's solution?".
I suppose the answer is 'Yes they could'. But there you really go into a power game. No one would shut down RIM, as no one would shut down Facebook. But they could twist Facebook to better control services using their messages to connect to their audience.

Anyway, great day in the big apple. Boston should have one of those too!

Adva Mobile on Facebook & YouTube

Check out Adva Mobile's Facebook page as well as our YouTube shout videos. Twitter feed coming :-)

Why Selling Music Still Matters... and Free Means Paid (Reblogged from Digital Music News)

Go read this great article by Paul Resnikoff...here's a couple of great snippets:

"...(traditional music revenue channels plummet) This raises the question of whether artists are smarter to give away their recordings, and focus on more lucrative areas of the value chain. Instead of charging 99-cents for an MP3, why not charge $9 for a t-shirt, and $29 for a concert ticket from a stronger flow of fans?"

"Of course, from the non-diversified label perspective, the recording is an all-important component of the business model."

"... (new ways to approach music and music-related "products") Those are ingredients for a deeper, more engaged connection with fans, a critical aspect of successful marketing strategies. Some artists like Radiohead enjoy massively-connected fan relationships, while others are just starting the process. Either way, panelists agreed that artists carrying a strong connection with their fans gain more in the marketplace."

That's exactly what Adva Mobile is all about.

Text McAlister to 70734 and try it yourself.

Adva Mobile tonight @ Church Hear Now Live show

Tonight on stage...Old Jack, Someday Rome, DPR, Tony Macsata band & Hot Knives...looking fwd to it! Another great HeaNowLive event!

Now on MySpace

Adva Mobile now has a MySpace page. Feel free to connect to us, and if you're a band, why don't you try our free mobile marketing service...we'll set you up in seconds.


We're looking for Facebook developers to develop a kick-ass Feacebook presence...drop me a line if interested!

Promo for Sep 27th show

Wow...I didn't even have time to post this. Great show last night, and great turnout from fans requests

Tonight, McAlister Drive's Video show + Lagoon, Club Felt Boston

They'll be providing unique mobile experience to their fans, with Adva Mobile:

Send to your phone, OR text McAlister to 70734



Send to your phone, OR text mybandLagoon to 70734



stay tuned for Saturday HearNowLive show!!!

New Report on Teens, Cellphones and Music

It's becoming a habbit to quote Marc Cohen, who voices the 2 key points from this interesting research by Harris Interactive:

• Cellphones are an ideal device for ad-supported music
• Teens and tweens are the ideal target market for ad-supported music
• 6/10 teens will provide personal details

Yes yes yes and yes. He's correct. I just hope more people will realize that, soon.

Sincerely, the Management

Sincerely, the Management were on stage last week, fun band and fun show. They used our mobile service and a few fans checked it out.
Here's their shoutout, sorry it's a bit blurry:





We're on tonight with OldJack, Gardner and Michael Bernier at FestEvolve. Thanks to HearNowLive, we'll be next week at Copperfields and the following week at Church.

Last Weekend for Adva Mobile

So between crazy weeks and weekends I'll try to make the occasional post about how we're doing at Adva Mobile. I think though that soon I'll start looking for a proper blog for us...recommendations welcome.

So anyway, last Friday we were at another HearNowLive show, at Church, which was a lot of fun and a great show. HearNowLive have a great cover of the show.

We got great feedback from all the artists, they were interested and did the shoutout really well (Someday Rome took it to another level :-))

We estimated a crowd of 120 fans at the peak, and so a collection of close to 15% phone numbers in total, and higher numbers of messages from fans requesting content, that's not a bad stat (for the very limited set of features we already have live).

We're working on the next gigs, and new feautures. Check out McAlister Drive's MySpace page with our new widget, and this Thursday Club d'Elf is at the Lizard Lounge using trying our service.

much more to come...

Tonight @ The Church with HearNowLive!

I'll let you know how it went :-)

Finally, some results

One of the best things about getting out there with a product launch, as minor as it may be (feature and exposure-wise), is that you start getting data and learn from it.
And we gained a LOT of knowledge about how to work with the bands, promote the keyword/shortcode to the fans, and much more. It's not to say though that we're clever now about it: we've got lots more learning and homework to do.

Still, between Aug 16th with McAlister Drive and Aug 23rd with the 5-bands HearNowLive Hard Rock Cafe show, over 10% of the fans engaged at the venue with our service, got to the mobile web pages, some downloaded content and browsed more than one page. more fans visited the site after the gig. We're making some progress on promotions etc.
Again, disclaimer language here, but I think this is great news. It is a first evidence that there that relationship between the artists and fans at and after the gig, and that advertisers are interested in that exposure. I'm really happy with it, for this initial stage (we're shooting for higher numbers, but that would come with many more features).

We're going to be hopefully back on stage with the bands this Friday at the Church Boston. And I'm looking for bands to try this out, if you like, write us.

For your enjoyment, here's McAlister Drive's Shoutout:



I'll get back to work now!

For Gen Y, Music is Oxygen

Great post on YPulse from Larry Weintraub, the CEO of Fanscape, following an interesting survey on Music behavior of Gen Y, both are must-reads.
Due to lack of time, I'll reblog some of the key points from Lirix CEO (and add):

• Youth Still Aren't Paying For Music...
• Youth Discover New Music Through Social Media
• Artwork is important
• Concerts Are Cool, When They're Cheap
• Music Isn't Mobile...Yet
• But understand this, they love music. They consume more music than previous generations.
• The takeaway is that these young people have grown up in a generation where recorded music is traded, downloaded, and consumed with very little monetary exchange...

Young people today may not be exchanging much of their money for recorded music but they are giving their time.

This is exactly what Adva Mobile is all about: Figure out this ecosystem where:

• There is plenty of creativity (artists)
  
• There is plenty of demand (fans)
  
• Traditional revenue channels need to be replaced
  

Another Promo