BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: High Definition Voice Is Finally Coming To Mobile

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HD Voice Will Make Our Calls Sound Drastically Better (Wired)
Broken-up conversations, muffled voices and dropped calls will become a thing of the past if HD Voice lives up to its expectations. The major carriers have been teasing us with this vision of the future for years, and it looks like HD Voice is finally coming, for real. AT&T announced that its HD Voice will roll out later this year. But how exactly does HD Voice work? HD Voice is essentially wide-band audio technology, something that long has been used for conference calling and VoIP apps. Instead of limiting a call frequency to between 300 Hz and 3.4 kHz, a wideband audio call transmits at a range of 50 Hz to 7 kHz, or higher. That’s much more in line with the human voice, which transmits audio between 75 Hz and 14 kHz. HD Voice also takes in more audio samples per second than a standard call. Read >>

Nuance Creates Mobile Advertisements That Talk Back (Marketing Pilgrim)
Conversations, word-of-mouth, chat — it’s amazing how many auditory words we use to describe text-based actions. Replying to comments on Facebook is a conversation, sharing a product review in a blog is word-of-mouth and chatrooms have functioned for years without any chatter at all. Nuance is going to change that. They’re using voice recognition technology to create ads that actually converse with the consumer. As in “talk” with sound, not just words scrolling across the width of a box. Read >>

Forrester CEO Thinks Apple Needs To Build A Foldable iPhone (readwrite mobile)
Forrester CEO George Colony posted an entry on his "Counterintuitive CEO Blog" at Forrester titled, "Apple's Foldable Future." The post talks about how Apple must go big with the iPhone 6 (not the iPhone "5S" expected later this year, but the version after that) and he suggests the "foldable smartphone." Yes, foldable. Like, you know, a towel or a piece of paper. Colony’s view on foldable computing is pie-in-the-sky thinking at best. Delusional at worst. Read >>

MLB’s Big Bet On Mobile Apps Pays Off On Opening Day (GigaOM)
MLB’s At Bat app was accessed 6 million times on Monday, the first day of baseball’s 2013 season. That’s more than double the app’s audience on Opening Day last year. The league has offered mobile apps for several years and has continued to attract new app users each season by experimenting with pricing structures, adding new features and most importantly, giving fans ways to access its live and archived content on a phone or tablet. The audience has historically been made up of mostly iOS users, who account for 70 percent of the free At Bat app downloads and 85 percent of the paid app downloads. But MLB’s Advanced Media office, which develops those apps, says Android use has been growing recently. Read >>

ESPN Mobile Growth Shows Explosion In Usage (VentureBeat)
The growth of ESPN Mobile shows how fast the mobile landscape is gathering momentum. The sports broadcast network has more than 45 million monthly unique users, and 14.5 million of those use mobile content exclusively. Michael Bayle, senior vice president and general manager of ESPN Mobile, said that mobile usage is growing rapidly as mobile devices take over our lives. He said that 8 million people filled out their March Madness brackets, compared to 6 million last year. This year, 30 percent of those people used mobile to fill out the bracket, compared to 10 percent last year. Read >>

Baidu Needs To Figure Out Mobile (The Motley Fool)
There’s no question that Baidu has been a broken stock over the past twelve months. Shares of the Chinese search leader have plunged 40 percent, hit by bad news on the macro and micro levels at every leg down. But after the fall, Baidu’s fundamentals are looking very attractive, despite the difficult headwinds it faces. Should investors buy this broken beast? Baidu must boost its mobile advertising business, where it leads the market with a smaller market share of 35 percent. Yet less than 10 percent of Baidu’s revenue last quarter came from mobile ads. The Chinese mobile advertising market is also fragmented, with its primary competitors being Tencent Holdings, which has 23 percent of the market, and Easou, which has a 22 percent share. Read >>

The Biggest Mistakes In Mobile App Marketing (KISSMetrics)
Since mobile is such a personal medium, it is the easiest place for marketers to make massive mistakes that will turn off a customer forever. Here’s what you should be looking out for and what you can learn from those who have come before you:

Treating the mobile experience like the desktop
Building an app without a marketing plan
Building a mobile site and passing it off as an app
Assuming that people will come back to your app
Ignoring your app's customer base

Mobile apps are an incredibly powerful way to connect with your customers and drive your entire company’s marketing efforts forward. In order to be successful, it’s important to spend time upfront planning your marketing efforts so that you can take advantage of the unique qualities of mobile devices. Read >>

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