New features for iPhone OS 3.0 look good.

The preview of the iPhone 3.0 looks good. With over 100 new features, there is a lot to look forward to. It is good to see thaey have addressed what has been a fairly fundamental functional ommission til now – being able to send photos, contacts, audio files, and location via MMS. It’s worth holding of getting your Iphone just for that alone.

However,  probably the most notable update is the new ability to be able to purchase items within an application. This means that now iPhone applications can sell products or application upgrades wiht the actual application. The further opportunities that this functionality offers for the monetization of your iPhone application other than paying for the inital download could be massive. For more infotmation on the impact of this feature have a read of this very good article on Mashable on how the iPhone 3.0 will create a new mobile economy.

Apple have announced that the iPhone OS 3.0 will be out in June. I’d be on the lookout for a decent iPhone application developer if I were you.

The future of advertising just called – on your iPhone

I remember 8 years ago when I was in London that mobile advertising was being touted as the next big thing – well that and iTV. Haven’t really seen much of mobile advertising since then. But I just read this article in which Google CEO Eric Schmidt states “The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet”.

Schmidt predicts that, although it may take some time, mobile business will be a larger business than the PC-Web. I can see the logic in this. After all, your phone is mobile and is almost always on you. The iPhone with it’s real web browser is providing new mobile advertising opportunities – with the likes of Nokia, Blackberry and Motorola all soon to follow. Soon advertisers will be able to deliver new and exciting targeted messages right into your… pocket!

“The advertising has to be more entertaining, more interesting, more immersive compared to what we have today” – Eric Schmidt

Soon you will be receiving advanced targeted advertisments straight to your phone (better than this one i hope!)

For anyone who is unsure what mobile web even is, it is where a phone or PDA has WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) capabillities, and this is used facilitate access to the Internet from your mobile. To date it’s been fairly lousy and not really worth bothering with despite what some pundits might say. But it seems it’s all about to change.

I’ll be interested to see what form mobile advertising starts to take. I guess it will be the likes of redeemable mobile coupons, opt-in competitions, a new mobile form of advanced banner advertising, campaigns based on video and so on. The only advertising I have had delivered to my phone so far was from my provider and it was some lame little animated gif. As it matures advertising campaigns will obviously become even more personal and hopefully more effective. In this article on AOL Working With iPhone on Mobile Advertising, Time Warner’s Internet business Platform A already boast being able to “…deliver banners optimized for display on the iPhone.”

Hand in hand with some kick arse content development, I would hope to see some best practices for the mobile Web advertising. I am already constantly moaning about the amount of web browsers – imagine designing ads for the gazillion of different sized handsets that are going out be out there. And as for how to book a mobile campaign, well I haven’t even considered that until just now…