Safeway Supermarkets To Offer Mobile Coupons

MediaPost's MediaDailyNews reports that Safeway has jumped into the mobile couponing game:

Two more supermarket chains are introducing mobile coupon services for shoppers, marking another advance for this increasingly popular marketing channel.

Tom Thumb and Randall's -- both owned by Safeway -- are currently cooperating with packaged-goods manufacturers General Mills, Unilever and Kimberly-Clark to offer shoppers 21 coupons for goods like pre-packaged tossed salad and children's cereal.

Read the entire article @ MediaPost.

Head over to Club Texting to learn more about mobile coupons, or read our white paper, the Club Texting Guide To Mobile Couponing.

To The Skeptics: A Persuasive Case For Mobile Marketing

Mickey Alam Khan has written an editorial @ Mobile Marketer titled 'How to answer skeptics of mobile marketing.' You should read the whole column, but here's an excerpt:

One way to persuade marketers who aren’t convinced about the merits of mobile marketing is by holding other channels to the same light.
...
Mobile, for some strange reason, encourages armchair gurus of all persuasions to pass judgments on the channel, sometimes without the immediate benefit of facts at hand. So let’s make a case for mobile by asking the same question of other channels that is asked of mobile.

You'll have to find Mickey's analysis by clicking here, but suffice to say, the man makes a strong argument, coming at the skeptics from a novel angle.

Hyatt Launches A Very Useful Mobile Website

Hyatt jumps on to the mobile web in a big way:

According to the official announcement from the hotel giant, Hyatt guests can now visit the mobile site to take advantage of the following features and more:

· Find and book a hotel by location
· Hyatt special offers
· View or cancel a reservation
· Web check in and check out
· Access Hyatt’s Yatt’it travel tips by country
Hyatt and its affiliates own, operate or manage hotels in 45 countries worldwide.

You can visit the Hyatt mobile site on a regular browser to get an idea of what they are doing.

Read more @ Mobile Marketing Watch

Depeche Mode Launches Very Cool iPhone App

Mobile marketing watch has the details on a very cool iPhone app courtesy of Depeche Mode:

Available for the iPhone and iPod touch. iZotope’s iDrum apps let users “create music by tapping the touch screen and rearranging simple shapes and color combinations.”
...

iDrum: Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe is available for $4.99 on the Apple App Store (eat your heart out Nine Inch Nails) and includes “ten customizable kits” with sounds from songs on the album.

For those who love something to literally play with, you’re in luck. iDrum: Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe also allows users to manipulate album sounds to create music by:

* Tapping the touch screen to play and record musical patterns
* Taking control of the rhythm of every drum sound and sample
* Remixing rhythmic patterns from the album or starting from scratch to make new musical creations
* Bringing sounds in and out of the mix to change the music
* Customizing patterns to create unique new beats

Read the entire story @ mobile marketing watch.

Pandora Sells 1 Million Songs A Month; 20% Through Their iPhone App

The Pandora iPhone app is a must have for every iPhone user. It's one of our favorite websites to listen to and discover music at our desks. And when we're on the street their iPhone app supplies an unlimited playlist. So it makes us happy to hear this:

Pandora is a company that mainly makes its money through advertising deals on its streaming Internet radio service. But a growing portion of the business is also affiliate downloads of songs that users hear on Pandora and want to buy on either iTunes or Amazon’s MP3 service. And the biggest mover accelerating growth in that regard are downloads taking place on the iPhone.

Users are buying about a million songs a month now from these affiliate links on Pandora, CTO Tom Conrad tells me. Of those, a solid 20% are coming directly from Pandora’s iPhone app, which includes an easy link to open the iPhone’s iTunes app, and buy a track. That’s really impressive considering that it’s just one phone that a relatively small percentage of their users use.

Read the entire article @ TechCrunch, which includes some out of this world revenue projections.

Improved Threaded SMS Chatting On Windows Mobile Phones

To those Windows Mobile powered smartphone users wanting a better threaded SMS chatting experience look no further:

VITO Technology has recently released an updated version of its popular threaded messaging client for Windows Mobile - SMS-Chat. Version 1.2 of the application now has 3 skins (dark, clear and light), SM backup function, and is more stable than ever thanks to Vito’s efforts to fix some of the known bugs. Moreover, the updated app sports an “enhanced look and functionality,” ensuring great experience when using the app.

Read more @ IntoMobile

BlackBerry Recovers The Smartphone Throne

The BlackBerry Storm hasn't exactly been the iPhone killer that RIMM was hoping for. Nevertheless, they managed to climb back to the top of the smartphone heap in Q1 2009. How? Discounts:

An aggressive “buy-one-get-one” promotion by Verizon Wireless helped Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Curve move past Apple’s iPhone to become the best-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2009, according to a market research report Monday.

RIM’s consumer smartphone market share increased 15 percent to nearly 50 percent of the smartphone market in the first quarter versus the prior quarter, as Apple Inc.’s (Nasdaq:AAPL) and Palm Inc.’s (Nasdaq:PALM) share both declined 10 percent each.

Sounds like an excellent recession strategy.

Read more @ Biz Journals.

Text Blasting - What Are We Talking About...

Some Friday thoughts: Yesterday, while reading a mobile marketing white paper, we came across the phrase 'text blasting software.' It was pretty obvious that they were talking about bulk text messaging software. Still, it was interesting to see some phraseological development in action...email blast to text blast. Our linguistic knowledge is a bit rusty, but perhaps it's time for a text messaging entry in the WordNet database?

More info about text blasting software from our sister.