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MobileMarketingWatch (@MobileMW) reports on the findings of a new Greystripe (@Greystripe) study that says better than 66% of moms are plugged into their mobile devices while engaged in the act of shopping:

• 57% search for mobile coupons via their mobile device.
• 45% of connected moms use their smartphone to locate stores.
• 36% utilize some form of price comparison app or service.
• 31% use their smartphones to research products, read reviews, and check product availability.
• 91% prefer free apps with ads over paid apps without ads.

Read the MMW report.

Also see our April 14 blog post, “Motherhood Sends Moms to Smartphones.”

And see Marketing Charts' "1 in 3 Smartphone Shoppers Often Accesses In-store Coupons."

What are you doing to publish content that will reach these moms? Let Somersault help.

Writing at iMedia Connection (@iMediaTweet), Brian Monahan (@brionic), EVP, managing partner, at IPG Media Lab (@IPGLAB), succinctly describes and analyzes 5 trends converging at the “crossroads of technology, consumer behavior, and marketing effectiveness:”

·         The identity of things: The proliferation of smart mobile devices are allowing consumers to access information and content tied to objects via various means like bar code scanning, 2D tags, near field communication, or visual search. The digital industry has already seen two waves of content development. The first was anchored to URLs. The second was anchored to social profiles. We are about to witness the third wave of digital content development anchored to objects.

·         Mobile is infused: Mobile has become so critical to consumer behavior that it has progressed beyond being a “feature;” it’s now a necessity for all hardware devices and services.

·         Life is a game: Game design principles are clearly being woven into all we do. As mobile devices are built with location and context aware technology, the world is being turned into an arena in which consumers enjoy playing. For retailers and brands, this means creating advertising that recognizes users and knows their preferences, delivering messages of value and experiences in the form of rewards, rankings and other game-derived forms of incentives and virtual currency.

·         The rise of content marketplaces: To serve the propagation of tablets (which now number 82) and other popular hardware, brands are focusing attention on creating recurring, billable, and easily accessible content. (For example, see Warc’s (@WarcEditors) article, “Tablets lure media owners.”)

·         Continuous partial attention: The continued fragmentation of consumer attention is being driven by changes in the device, media, and distribution landscapes. To compete for consumer attention in this complex media environment, brands must develop immersive, empathetic communications to fully engage their audience.

Read this in full.

Do you agree with this summary and analysis?

While at Apple, Mike Matas (@mike_matas) helped write the user interface for the iPhone and iPad. Now, co-founder of Push Pop Press (@pushpoppress), he's helping to rewrite the electronic book. In the above video he demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad – with clever, swipeable video and graphics, and some cool data visualizations to play with. The book is Our Choice, Al Gore’s sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.

See the video at TED.

Be sure to read the discussion started by David Wees (@davidwees) titled “What is this ‘ebook’ missing?”

I'd have to argue that this ebook is missing some of the most important features of the interactive Web.... [W]hat I see is interactivity with static content, which in my mind is a dead concept.

...Most importantly, how is this book integrated with social media? How can we comment on the book, annotate it, share passages of the book with other people? If I want to share the book, like we can do easily and all the time with print text, do I need to share my entire iPad? How do we tag content? How do we set multiple bookmarks, so we can go back and reread our favourite sections? Can I read the same book on my laptop? Is it possible to make edits to the book when I see errors or omissions, or just want to play with the text?

In today’s digital age, we should be very suspicious of any ebook which doesn't offer all of the features listed above.

Read this discussion in full.

Let Somersault help you publish meaningful enhanced ebooks.

According to Sympatico.ca News (@Sympatico), a plastic smartphone as thin and flexible as a credit card has been invented by researchers from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University, first came up with the idea of using “bend gestures” as a new way of interacting with computers. He envisioned a device that would feel and behave like a sheet of interactive paper, so he named it the PaperPhone.

He expects consumer devices similar to the PaperPhone to hit the market in 5 to 10 years.

Vertegaal will demonstrate the prototype - and the bend gestures used to control it - at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver May 10 (#chi2011).

Read this in full.

Read the BBC News story.

Read the news release at Human Media Lab.

What are you doing today to prepare for the continuous changes in publishing so that you’ll be ready for the new book formats of the future?

The above presentation by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project (@Pew_Internet) explores 9 commonly held assumptions about how teens and young adults use technology:

1.    Everyone uses the Internet.

2.    Every teen has a cell phone.

3.    All teens text unimaginably large numbers of messages a day.

4.    Teens no longer call anyone on the phone.

5.    Parents and K-12 schools struggle with management of teens’ phones.

6.    Teens have been supplanted by older adults on social networks.

7.    Teens love Twitter.

8.    Young adults don’t care about privacy, particularly online.

9.    Teens are active creators of content online.

See this presentation in full.

Four in 10 US consumers interact with retailers through social networking sites, according to a new survey from Deloitte (@DeloitteBA). Data from the 2011 Spring Consumer Pulse Survey (pdf) also indicate out of this consumer subset, 63% interact to find out about promotions and 56% browse products on retailer social networking pages. In addition, 38% of shoppers who interact with retailers through social networking sites review recommendations. And 43% of smartphone owners surveyed say they've used devices in stores to assist in their shopping.

Read the article in full.

These statistics reinforce the strategy of using QR codes on product packaging or in-store merchandising to communicate with consumers. But how you do it makes all the difference. In his MobileInsider column, Steve Smith critiques brands’ mobile marketing from a real-world perspective in the article Down the QR Code Rabbit Hole.

[I pull out my phone] in the aisles of Barnes and Noble [to click a QR code:] a Microsoft Tag was on back of an historical thriller Stardust that looked intriguing. Again, it kicked me over to a very attractive trailer — that wanted to go on for 7 minutes. Seven minutes! “Stop that,” my fiancée said. “Would you bring a TV to watch in the middle of a bookstore?” Worse, am I really going to sit in a bookstore and watch a 7-minute video in order to find out what the book is about?

Read this article in full.

You’ll also want to read The New York Times article, “Retailers Retool Sites to Ease Mobile Shopping.”

Let Somersault help you create an effective mobile strategy for your brand.

Chief Marketer (@chief_marketer) reports that “more than half of the moms responding to a study on parenting and mobile use say they first bought a smartphone as a result of having a child. Fifty-one percent admit they’re ‘addicted’ to their smartphone. And their favorite feature is the phone camera.”

Those are some of the findings of the 21st Century Mobile Mom Report compiled by BabyCenter.com (@BabyCenter). The report, built from a behavior study of more than 5,000 moms and a deep-dive study of a subset of 23 specific moms, finds that overall adoption of smartphones among mothers has risen 64% in the last 2 years. At 59% ownership, moms are currently 18% more likely to own a phone that can download apps than the general population.

Here are the study’s highlights:

• 78% admit they “love” their smartphone.

• 51% of Moms are addicted to their smartphone.

• 53% say the purchase was directly related to becoming a mom.

• Mom’s #1 feature is the camera.

• #2 feature is video capabilities.

• #3 feature is apps with more half having 10 or more apps.

• 25% of the apps on a mom’s phone are for her children.

• 68% say of Moms know how to use most of the features.

• 75% of Moms claim to troubleshoot their own phone.

• 33% use it for health and wellness (tracking family health & research).

• Moms top social activities are: newsfeeds, status updates, and reading answers to posted questions.

• 68% use their smartphone while shopping.

• 62% of moms use shopping apps to research or compare prices.

• Moms are 248% more likely than the average adult to text friends then call them.

• 46% claim to have taken an action after seeing a mobile ad on their phone.

• 29% say they like to scan bar codes and QR codes for further information on a topic.

Read the article in full.

Also read our blogpost "25% of Toddlers Have Used a Smartphone."

How will knowing this about today’s mothers influence how you publish content for them? Let Somersault help. And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Click to enlarge this Infographic by Column Five (@Columnfive) to view statistics regarding the mobilization of today’s digital native and his/her comfort level with consuming content (news, but by implication & extrapolation, also books) electronically.

The percentage of Americans age 12 and older who have a smartphone has more than doubled in the past year, from 14% to 31% of the population according to the new national survey from Arbitron Inc. (@ArbitronInc) and Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2011: Navigating Digital Platforms. Among the many other findings:

• Facebook is now being used by a majority of all Americans age 12 and over (51%); this number was only 8% in 2008.
• A majority of American households now have two or more computers (51%); as compared to 24% of households in 2002.
• Usage of online radio is up significantly, with weekly usage of all forms of online radio having doubled in the last 5 years; self-reported weekly time spent with online radio is now nearly 10 hours (9 hours 47 minutes).
• Daily time spent with TV, Radio, and the Internet combined has increased by 20% in the last 10 years, with self-reported daily usage now at 8 hours 11 minutes compared to 6 hours 50 minutes in 2001.
• Just under 1/3 of all Americans (31%) have plugged an MP3 player such as an Apple iPod into their car stereo systems.
• One in 10 Americans report listening to Pandora Internet Radio in the week before they were surveyed.
• Among the 81% of American households with Internet access, 2/3 now have a Wi-Fi network installed.
• More than 1/10 of all cellphone owners have listened to online radio streamed in their cars by connecting their phones to their car stereo system.

Read the research findings in full.

Also see Warc coverage of the research in the article "Digital change hits US."

What are the implications of this research for digital audiobook publishing and how should your brand take advantage of it?

Remember when? Reminisce about a time (the 1980s) when cell phones, weighing “only” 30 ounces, ushered in the era when “seeing people using cellular phones may seem as commonplace as someone checking time on an electronic watch, figuring on an electronic calculator, or programming on an electronic computer.” Also watch this brief BBC interview with Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first cell phone Apr. 3, 1973.

How will people in 2041 look back at our technology today? What technology will you embrace today to advance your brand? Let Somersault help you. And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.