SnapTell Blog

Associated Press Story On Mobile Marketing

The Associated Press newswire has just published an interesting story about mobile marketing, which included a nice mention of SnapTell.

Advertisers have been spending a little money here, a little there trying to gauge what works on mobile phones. The efforts so far are best described as trials and pilots, lacking in comprehensive strategy.

"It's the Wild, Wild West right now," said Rick Sizemore, chief strategy officer for the tech consultancy Multimedia Intelligence. "This is an interesting and compelling vehicle, but they don't necessarily know who to work with. There are so many options out there — a lot of hype with no substance, and then a couple of gems."

 SnapTell is among Sizemore's favorites.

Gautam Bhargava, SnapTell's co-founder and chief executive, said the company considered the phone's unique qualities — its lack of regular keyboards in most cases, and the ubiquity of built-in cameras. Rather than require someone to punch in a brand name using a clunky keypad, the company decided to accept picture messages.

"We wanted to make it simple for the end user," Bhargava said. "There's nothing to install on your phone. You don't need to pre-register. We do not have to worry about whether you are with Carrier A, B or C."

 The article also gave a quick overview of issues that may need to be addressed before mobile advertising can truly take off: nonstandardized screen sizes and features on mobile handsets, and individual users' comfort with and knowledge of their phone's features. These are non-issues with SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get solution, which was designed to be easy for consumers to use no matter what sort of handset they have (as long as the handset has a camera).

Anick J Jesdanun, the AP reporter, cited a third potential problem: the cost of data transfer. This is something that everyone in the mobile marketing industry is eager to address. Following the trail of the earliest adopters of smart phone services, we believe consumers will be increasingly inclined to sign up for unlimited data plans.

Wireless providers are also experimenting with ways that consumers can earn free airtime – such as, as the AP article pointed out, Virgin Mobile USA "Sugar Mama," a program that lets customers earn up to 75 minutes of free airtime each month by watching ads or responding to mobile surveys. PepsiCo Inc., the U.S. Navy and Nintendo Co. have been among the brands participating. More than 10 percent of Virgin Mobile USA's 5 million customers have signed up for the program so far.

 

Snap.Send.Get A Happy New Year

Here's our holiday gift to you -- click on the ad below and print it, then -- using your camera phone -- snap a picture of the ad. Or click on the ad and simply snap a picture of the image as it appears on your screen.

Send the image, via email, to [email protected].

Within seconds, you'll receive a coupon good for 15% percent off your purchase of $100 or more at Wine Enthusiast.

Good only until December 31, 2007 so start snapping!

PS: Here's how it works: The image that you send via MMS is delivered to SnapTell's server where it is processed by SnapTell's image matching solution. Our innovative patent-pending solution provides amazing accuracy even with low-quality camera phone images and can accurately process images that contain standard flaws such as

o lighting artifacts

o fuzzy focus and blur

o perspective distortion

o incomplete overlap with the database image.

 When you send us an image, SnapTell's image recognition solution matches the received image to a database of stored images. Within seconds, the image is matched to the relevant campaign and the associated deliverable is sent to the consumer. Find out more at our website.

The New York Times On Silicon Valley Clusters

We got a mention in the New York Times' recent piece on Silicon Valley and the area's very local microclusters of industry/innovation/interests.

As the NYT pointed out, Palo Alto "the wellspring of the digital technologies fueling globalization, is itself a collection of remarkably local clusters based on industry niches, skills, school ties, traffic patterns, ethnic groups and even weekend sports teams."

"“These microclusters turn out to be a very efficient way to innovate, to see what works and what fails, and do it extremely rapidly,” said AnnaLee Saxenian, an expert in regional economies and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley."

The article went on to say that Stanford, just outside Palo Alto, is probably the strongest cluster-generator in the Valley.

"Stanford students and staff have been behind countless companies in the Valley, from established ones like Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and Sun Microsystems to more recent success stories like Google and VMware. And for decades, Stanford has been a source of ideas and talent for the Valley’s venture capitalists, bunched around the Menlo Park thoroughfare Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital (and another Valley cluster)...

"SnapTell, a start-up that seeks to marry image-recognition technology, cellphones and marketing, was founded last year by G. D. Ramkumar and Gautam Bhargava, Indian computer scientists and Valley veterans. The company has 10 employees, six of whom have Ph.D.’s and three of whom are from Stanford."

All in all, an interesting article on a topic that's rarely discussed.

It's That Time of Year

'Tis the season … to start worrying about how you're going to get it all done in time.

Analysts who study the holiday shopping habits of consumers are saying that never before have so many people procrastinated for as long as they did this year. Apparently most of us have neglected to complete our holiday shopping as early as retailers had hoped, after we viciously lured them into a false sense of security by buying with abandon over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Those same analysts are also saying that its too late to order gifts online, which is obviously nonsense, there's still a week to go! Haven't these people ever heard of next day delivery?

But as we head into what is undeniably the homestretch, it's time to settle down and wrap up the shopping so that you can get gifts in time to wrap them. If you're totally stumped on what to get a client, coworker, parent or friend – think wine and things to enhance a wine lover's appreciation or his or her favorite vintage.

We really do think wine is one of the nicest gifts you can give, but we have to admit we do have an bit of an ulterior motive in pushing the grape on you. If you grab a copy of the Wall Street Journal this week, and turn to the ad from Wine Enthusiast, you'll be able to see our Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing solution in action. Just

1. Snap a picture of the ad with your camera phone.
2. Send the picture to SnapTell.
3. Within seconds you'll Get a great special offer from the Wine Enthusiast via your mobile phone.

You have until 1PM EST on December 21 to order and receive your gifts from the Wine Enthusiast in time for Xmas.

Snap.Send.Get In The News

We've gotten some great press regarding the Wine Enthusiast's use of SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing solution in its Wall Street Journal ads.

Ryan Kim, who writes the Tech Chronicles blog for SFGate (the San Francisco's Chronicle's web site) wrote:

What's nice about SnapTell's approach to mobile marketing is it doesn't involve any bar codes or special images. And you don't have to download an application for your phone. You just take a picture of the advertisement and picture message it to SnapTell.

This could help really extend mobile coupons to people in a non-intrusive way. You don't have to carry coupons around to take advantage of them. And since you'll be opting in for the coupon, there should be no worries about being inundated with offers.

 Rick Mathieson, author of Branding Unbound, the #1 best selling book on mobile marketing,  posted on his blog:

 Wine Enthusiast magazine is aiming for ads so compelling you'll want to take a picture of it...In what's billed as a first-of-its-kind national promotion from a major retailer, the pub is using new "Snap.Send.Get" technology from image-recognition-based mobile marketing firm SnapTell.

“We are always looking for unique technologies that enhance the shopping experience of our customers,” says Francis M. Juliano, CIO/CMO, Wine Enthusiast, in a statement. “Wine Enthusiast customers tend to be technology savvy and SnapTell’s image recognition-based mobile marketing solution enables Wine Enthusiast to create a long term, interactive brand relationship with our customers.”

And Mobile Marketer.com published an overview of Snap.Send.Get and the Wine Spectator campaign:

The Wine Enthusiast ads prompt the business newspaper’s readers to take a picture of the ad with their camera phone to receive promotional offers from Wine Enthusiast on their mobile phone.

“We are finding that mobile is a new way to market to an older audience,” said Gautam Bhargava, co-founder/CEO of SnapTell. “Consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with receiving information on their phones, as long as it’s relevant.

Since the users are opting in by snapping a picture on their mobile phone, the ads are more relevant, Mr. Bhargava said.

Thanks all, we really appreciate the good words!

For more information about the Wine Enthusiast's Snap.Send.Get campaign click here.

 

A Little Holiday Cheer For You

Whether you braved the stores this weekend, clicked your way through friends and family's exhaustive wish lists online or are still stressing about getting your shopping done, right about now you're probably ready for a little holiday cheer.

Well, here's your chance to get a treat and see our Snap.Send.Get solution in action.

Look for the Wine Enthusiast ad this week in the Wall Street Journal— the ad will be running in the December 8th, 10^th, 11^th, 12^th and 15^th issues.

1. Snap a picture of the ad with your camera phone.
2. Send the picture to SnapTell.
3. Within seconds you'll Get a great special offer from the Wine Enthusiast via your mobile phone.

(Don't like surprises? Here's what you get when you send a picture of the ad to SnapTell.)

 You can do this with any camera phone, on any carrier's network. You don't need to download any software first, register on a website, promise away your first-born in exchange for the gift or do anything at all beyond Snap.Send.Get  ... and enjoy!

 

 

 

 

Cameras That Also Happen to Be Phones

Interesting story in the Boston Globe  about a photographer who went on a trip and left his camera's at home, opting only to shoot pictures with his smart phone. The piece includes a lot of good cell camera photo tips for folks who might want to do the same.

Back home, I opened the photos in Photoshop and resized the images. The originals were 3.75 megabytes at 72 dpi (dots per inch). That would have been the norm for 35mm digital cameras 10 years ago. I resized the images to 254 dpi, which gave me 8-by-10-inch photos at 14 megabytes. This technical stuff is good to know if you do your own printing.

The photos can also be burned to a CD and printed at a camera store.

The photos looked good on the computer screen. I did a little work on them in Photoshop, adding a bit of saturation and adjusting the color balance. Considering the BlackBerry Pearl has a 1.3-megapixel camera, and most point-and-shoot cameras average 6-to-7 megapixels, the results were quite good. The photos were sharp, and it wasn't until I enlarged them on the screen that the pixels began to show.

The ultimate test was making a print. Using my Epson printer, I made some full-frame, 8-by-10 prints. Some looked as if they were taken with my work cameras.

And if you're in the market for a new camera phone, check out the latest reviews here and here

Web 2.0 and Advertising -- Marriage Made in Heaven?

O'Reilly Radar has a great piece on the pleasures and perils of advertising in a Web 2.0 world. Below are some snippets from the piece:

"Nearly every Web 2.0 business model depends upon the promise of delivering more targeted advertising. The ability to make advertising more relevant will determine whether Web 2.0 succeeds in the market.

Ad agencies will admit to the limits of traditional media, saying, okay, maybe we don't know consumers the way we ought to but this new technology is going to give us all that. With social networking and viral videos, we will learn more and more about consumers, and produce advertising that is more relevant to them.

The Web companies expect to become rich as advertisers pay more to reach an audience that can be sorted and selected on any set of attributes. Advertisers and their agencies are drooling that they will deliver highly targeted advertising messages that audiences will find more relevant, producing better results than they've seen in the mass media. The big question is what does the consumer, the commoner, think of this proposed royal wedding?

Advertising trades in simplifications that are true enough -- I am male, 35-55, etc. But like the woman in the video above, I don't think that information tells you very much about me or what is truly relevant to me. Will my online profiles and detailed behavioral tracking draw a truer picture of me? Will I like that picture? Who do I want to see it?

I wonder how ad companies will interpret the rich set of self-identifying attributes that FaceBook or MySpace offers them. What messages might they trigger? How sophisticated and how flexible will the technology become to target messages to you and me? Will this be truly useful or simply annoying? Past attempts at serving up content based on detailed profiles have not proven useful (my.yahoo.com and others). (If you say you're interested in news on "banking", you'd get every possible article with the word "banking" in it.) On the other hand, Amazon's product recommendations seem moderately useful, although it can't distinguish a short-term interest from a long-term one, or a category of book I buy as gift for another person from one I buy for myself."

That's only a bit of the piece, which is well worth a read in its entirety (also check out the Microsoft advertising video included in the post).

We feel that the only way to really "target" consumers is to simply give consumers what they ask for -- and only what they ask for -- via 100% opt in advertising. That's what our Snap.Send.Get solution does, puts consumers in control and delivers exactly what they want, when and where they want it which allows marketers to target their messages like no automated system ever could.