Tag Archives: Mobile

I can hear clearly now the train has gone

By January 31 2013, 11:01 am 1 Comment

A young man gets on the train and I can see his ineffective white earphones from my seat.  I glance at the empty space beside me and, as I inaudibly sigh, the inevitable happens.  Yes, the music was loud but something intrigued me that I have not experienced in this situation before.  He was listening to the radio on his smartphone over his 3G connection on the train.  More precisely, he was one of the 6.7m listeners tuning in to Nick Grimshaw’s new Radio 1 breakfast show that week.  Now this is progress for digital radio and keeping younger listeners engaged with the medium. Read more »

I’m reading Bleak Expectations

By January 25 2013, 4:53 pm Comments Off

What is going on with the news?  Royal soldier kills enemy soldier shock!  Phone manufacturer’s performance slightly below inflated industry expectation shock!  Ball boy wastes time in football match shock! Snow in January shock!  Jock loses sock shock!  OK, I made that last one up.  Anyway, a social media frenzy, a news channel press review, a front page headline and then, just like a mayfly, the story is dead within 24 hours. Read more »

The Winner Takes it All

By June 6 2012, 12:39 pm Comments Off

No, watching Eurovision isn’t making me nostalgic for ABBA (but by the way how great was the Twitter conversation on the night!).

No. The title for this blog is inspired by some data we have from our mobile passive measurement panel.
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Smart phone: dumb nation?

By May 10 2012, 6:39 pm Comments Off
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Yesterday evening I was walking down a lane near my house and a man was coming towards me staring down into his mobile phone. I thought, “He will see me, he will see me.” Then I thought, “He won’t see me, he won’t see me.” I stopped and he didn’t. A quick “sorry” and he walked off resuming his downward gazing. Smart phones don’t make smart people it seems.

This got me thinking, which is always a worry. Around two in five adults in this country have a smartphone (Ipsos Technology Tracker) and the figure continues to grow; last year the devices started to outsell PCs (IDC). Three in five teenagers admit they are “highly addicted” to using smartphones, compared with 37% for adults (Ofcom). We cannot ignore the mobile generation, even if they do ignore other people on the pavement.

Internet access through mobile phones will eventually be the default setting for everyone. Mobile will be the one-stop shop for social interactions, finding, buying, selling, playing, watching and reading, and who knows even the odd phone call. Smart devices are not just about communication, they are our identity. They will even select music for you based on your pulse rate or location (not sure I want ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’ when I’m in the bath).

We, as human beings and consumers, are changing with this technology. We don’t store information, we access it. We used to know a lot about a little, but now we know a little about a lot. That doesn’t necessarily make us smart though.

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Reading between the lines

By April 23 2012, 2:01 pm Comments Off
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The packed commuter train is such an anti-social environment.  Putting the avoidance of eye contact to one side, one used to be able to get a crude, stereotypical take on what other people in the carriage were like by the newspaper, magazine or book they were reading.  But with the anonymous array of mobile devices to hand, individuals just morph into a colourless crowd.

Based on a very biased sample of train carriage commuters travelling in to London from the Home Counties, there is an awful lot of electronic reading on mobile devices.  I would say 40% on my journey today were reading books, newspapers or magazines on their e-readers or tablets, others (let’s say 25%) were either playing games or catching up on e-mail or social media on their phones.  Another 30% or so were reading a printed newspaper, magazine or book.  The rest were asleep.  No one was talking. Read more »

2012 – The Year of Mobility

By January 3 2012, 3:11 pm 4 Comments

Consumer media consumption is already mobile. The media business needs to look at the right indicators.

If You Ask A Stupid Question…

By October 27 2011, 11:25 am 7 Comments

I almost expect new research on our media usage to be misleading these days. You know the sort of thing; like asking an online panel how many hours a day/days per week do they claim to do this or that and then concluding that people spend more time online than doing anything else. We’ve had a steady flow of that kind of research from the digital specialists for so long now that I’ve become inured to it, but when the industry regulator – OFCOM – engages in similarly dodgy research, the hackles begin to rise again.

In their latest study of young people’s media use, OFCOM asked a sample of 1700 children (aged 5-15) and their parents a number of questions about how much time they spend with different media channels and how important each one is to them. In particular, they ask a question about which piece of technology they would most miss if it was taken away from them; television, the internet, or their mobile phone. Read more »

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