Dinard Da Mata designed this smartphone for Philips. If you think it looks like mash-up between an iPhone and a slap-on bracelet, you would be correct.

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The Rollphone was designed to be the world’s smallest phone running on an AA battery. Designed by Tao Ma, this phone resembles a film roll and even features a touchscreen that you can roll in and out. I’m not really sold on it though so I’m going to mark it as uncool. What do you think?

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David Bulfin designed this phone for LG. It’s supposed to be a perfect hybrid between a mobile phone and a camera. The idea’s cool and the design isn’t bad, and hell, I’m not even a brand diva, but LG just has an “air of suck” so I’m putting it in uncool territory. Your take?

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This post is inspired by a presentation by Adobe’s Anup Murarka at South by South West. He talked about the future of Adobe Flash for the mobile platform. I’ll cover some of the highlights from Anup’s presentation but will put the topic in a different perspective, namely that of the mobile network operators.

Currently, 98% of desktop computers support Flash, but not even a tenth of mobile phones has Flash support. This is expected to change dramatically over the next couple of years though.

Smartphones are getting better, not only in capabilities, but also in hardware quality. Similar to desktops, notebooks and netbooks, a growing number of smartphones will also boast multi-core processors and graphics processors that can serve up rich media.

Adobe’s new version of Flash—version 10.1—will be cross-platform. Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, you name it—all will be supported by Flash 10.1.

Adobe expects to get around 10% of mobile penetration for Flash this year, but expect to grow that number to over 50% by the end of 2012.

This outlook is great for web development as it becomes possible to create and distribute rich media consistently across multiple operating systems on both mobile and desktop platforms.

Hardware manufacturers and consumers are looking to warm up to a richer mobile experience, but are network providers? With cable and telephony providers, there are many content providers (like Hulu and Netflix) that piggy-back on the infrastructure and services that are delivered by the network providers (ISPs).

Once these and other content providers expand to the mobile arena, mobile network operators will be in a similar situation. The traditional business model is already being disrupted by VoIP (applications) and WiMAX. Rich media and its content/service providers pose a threat to mobile network operators in the sense that (1) they cut into the mobile network operators’ value proposition and (2) widespread consumption of rich media could overload the network.

At the same time, the rise of rich media also presents opportunities for mobile network operators to add value to their service offering. On the one hand, mobile network operators can learn a lot from what is happening to the television landscape. On the other hand, I’d also like to see them proactively seek out partnerships that eventually add value to customers.

What do you say?

Last Wednesday, I visited a Geomarketing congress organized by my alma mater and Geodan. In this post, I’ll discuss how geomarketing on both a macro-level and a micro-level gives you more pieces to the customer puzzle.

Geomarketing focuses on the relationship between spatial awareness and marketing. Here are some of the real-life cases that were presented:

• Understanding customer motives for visiting certain car dealerships
• Determining the location of a new store
• Plotting and targeting households for effective direct mail campaigns

These are all very good and relevant examples of how location affects the marketing process and how proper geomarketing can improve the rate of success. However, they’re all examples of how to perform geomarketing on a macro-level.

Even modern mobile applications like Foursquare operate mostly on a macro-level. People check into a drug store, a restaurant, a train station, et cetera. It can be good information for your business, but it doesn’t tell you how they move about while they’re at your store for example. This is where geomarketing on a micro-level comes in.

The presentation I found most interesting was by Prof. Dr. Jaap Boter who was also my thesis supervisor back when I was graduating. Prof. Boter performed research at a bookstore where customers were asked to wear RFID tags while they were shopping for books. When leaving the store, these customers filled in a questionnaire, and—if they had made a purchase—the receipt was included as well.

Using this information, it became possible to track customer movements inside the store, which revealed interesting insights such as:

• The behaviors of various customer segments
• The differences in customer behavior on different days (e.g. Saturday versus Monday)
• The effectiveness of the store’s layout

These are all very interesting and important bits of data that help you understand the consumption process. Loyalty programs, CRM systems and macro-level geomarketing can help you understand (some of) the causes and effects of a purchase, for example:

• A cause like someone lives near the store so s/he was inclined to visit it
• An effect like someone makes large or frequent purchases
• A cause and effect like a man making a purchase because it’s his son’s birthday

This is also very valuable information, but it doesn’t reveal much about the process. Was this man looking very long for his son’s birthday gift or was he helped out quickly by a store clerk? The combination of customer data, both on a macro-level and a micro-level, help you understand your customer better.

How closely are you stalking your customers?