Next Great Thing

Bandsintown is a new social networking site that helps you find, well, bands in town - your town.

The idea is this: You create a profile, noting your city and favorite bands (last.fm users can also access their account to pull musical taste). Once in, you can view shows by date range, price range and distance from your city. All upcoming shows will appear as as a tag cloud on the right, with shows that most closely match your musical preferences highlighted.

For example, if you picked Dilated Peoples and Maximo Park as favorite artists, and you lived in Minneapolis, Mos Def and The Fratellis would be a whole lot bigger than Balkan Beat Box and Leann Rhimes.

Through the site, you can also find “fansintown” and, ideally, network with those that have similar taste or are attending the same shows as you. Cool stuff! Is it unique? Yes and no.

Social networks like Facebook operate on the broadest principles of social networking – they start with the network itself and build down. Interests are added to the person. You can find other people who like the X-Files or support Lobsterman for President.

However, niche SNS are built from interests up. For youth, the web is about discovery and experiences–not just superpoking–and music is a vast common ground. (It’s like the weather is for old people.) Bandsintown operates like other music-focused SNS (iLike, iMeem, Blip.fm, even MySpace to some extent), but brings it to the local level. So, like Going.com and Eventful, it helps bring community and recommendations to life, but solely tied to music.

Gen Y lives online, yes, but they also like to go outside. On the whole, they value experiences over content, and music over everything else. They also want things to be easy, automated, and sharable. Thanks to Bandintown’s widgets, you can share your concert schedule with your SNS friends. And speaking of SNS friends, if you follow them on Twitter, you can get free tickets = more fun than weather updates.

Marketing to Millennials [BusinessWeek]
Facecard is a new prepaid credit card aimed at youth that leverages the idea of microlending between friends and “prewards” from companies.

Targeting youth on mobile: adidas, Nickelodeon, Sony [Mobile Marketer]
According to top brands, it’s not enough to simply be using mobile to reach your audience, you have to offer something and the richer the content, the better. For example, full songs sent out at a concert could garner a huge response vs. a simple text-for-coupon campaign.

How Disney Mobile Is Succeeding In Japan (After Failing In the U.S.) [TechCrunch]
Disney Mobile is thriving in Japan due in large part to the company’s focus on content – leaving the more technical aspects to partners – further proving that to be successful in mobile marketing you either have to have worthwhile content or figure out a way to create it.

The Millenial Rules [Motorola eZine]
Millenials are tuned in and everyone from parents to marketers are, in turn, tuning in to them. A recent Motorola study attempted to get to the bottom of this new breed, with a little help from our own Alan Rambam.

Cell phones promise fairer elections in Africa [Textually.org]
The faster, and more efficient, spread of information via cell phone may lead to more democratic elections in some African countries where fraud and miscounts plague the electoral system.

Here We Go TV
Like VTV6 in Vietnam, Here We Go TV, from South Carolina is looking to educate a younger crowd about things that matter – like finance and health (and not Nicole Richie’s diet regime).

Amazon may enter college textbook market with new Kindle [ars technica]
The Kindle may make the college textbook scene soon, according to some. The best part? it won’t break the bank–or your back.

Music Phones that Actually Make Music [PFSK]
While most music phones designate themselves only as having a music player, au Design Project and Yamaha have teamed up to create phones that are more akin to music instruments.

Sports are a natural fit for mobile, mostly because they depend not just on real time viewing, but reacting. Fans feed off the adrenaline of the community–in the case of the Olympics, it was a global one. So how did mobile play out during the games?

Well, NBC was a big winner. During the first few days after the opening ceremonies, visits to the network’s mobile WAP site doubled, going from 210,000 on August 8 to 476,000 on August 11. More importantly, nearly half of users had never viewed mobile TV prior.

Beyond content, though, the mobile conversation around the Olympics was particularly noteworthy. Much of it has come through microblogs like Twitter, where people from all over the word exchange 140 characters by the minute.

“Why am i suddenly patriotic during the olympics???”

“hangin with the fam watching the olympics”

“Nail-bighter of the olympics: USA vs. China for womens beach volleyball gold!”

“I’m over the olympics. I saw syncronized jump-roping and that did it. Oooh Cheers is on.”

Pretty mundane, but taken in sum, these messages (or “tweets”) can be seen as a collective pulse, and any mention of the Olympics as an “endorsed impression.” I might read them and tune into beach volleyball, for no other reason than to join in the conversation.

Some bloggers in Beijing even started a Twitter campaign for the Olympic around the lucky number 8. At 8:08am on Friday 8th August 2008, they encouraged users to twitter in the with hashtag#080808 to celebrate and support the opening of the Beijing Olympics. While Twitter isn’t very popular in China, tweets came in at the rate of 2/second.

More popular there is Fanfou.com, which was also a virtual nurse during the Olympics, taking the pulse of commenters 24/7. When Chinese superstar Liu Xiang suddenly withdrew from the 110 meter hurdles, thousands of people reacted on Fanfou, such as:

“Nothing in the 2008 Games could sting me more seriously than the pulling-out of Liu Xiang,”

“The hearts of millions of people were emptied by Liu Xiang’s withdrawal.”

So mobile use was amplified by the Olympics, but it can be drawn upon for any sport, any time. To promote its Wimbledon coverage, for example, the Tennis Channel not only created a twitter channel to push out news, but pulled in tennis-related tweets onto its homepage at http://www.twennis.com.

Beyond content and conversation, the experience of sports will also get mobile. We’ll see more initiatives like Adidas miCoach-a Nike+ for Samsung phones in Europe-and mapmytracks.com. Of course, you can always tweetup with your “followers” for a group run.

At 3:44am EST this morning, Obama sent out this text to his followers:  “Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3pm ET on www.BarackObama.com. Spread the word”.

It was a nod to the mobile lifestyle of his often young, tech-savvy supporters, but also shows how mainstream the technology has become, and–more importantly–that Obama “gets it.” (The Democratic nominee is not only embracing digital media, it’s embracing him. He just moved into the #1 spot on Twitter, beating out former tweet king Kevin Rose.) His sign-off to “spread the word” has actually been key to his success. Young people trust their friends and peers, and the campaign’s grassroots level mobilization (no pun intended)–both online and on campus–has taken advantage of this very concept.

However, some people got the memo a bit early:

So last night I got a text message from the number “62262″ that said “DUDE, IT’S OBAMA HERE, I CHOO CHOO CHOOSE YOU TO BE MY VP, DAWG.”

Thinking that couldn’t POSSIBLY be anything other than one of my friends f***ing with me, I wrote back asking who it was. I got back this message: “Thanks for your submission to Obama mobile. Reply with your zipcode to get local Obama info. Text HELP for help, STOP to quit. Std charges may apply.”

Taking “Std charges” to mean “sexually transmitted disease charges”, I thought that whoever this was, they were obviously hilarious. But sort of weirded out after seeing it again a few minutes ago, I googled “62262″, and sure enough it’s actually the Obama campaign.

First of all, at what PR team meeting did they sit around and decide that they were going to text me that, and how awesome, on a scale of 1 to 10, was that meeting. Secondly, why would they EVER DO THIS. Dude is running for PRESIDENT. It’s funny, but it’s also incredibly unprofessional. And it’s sort of bad, because it’s ammunition for the idea that Obama’s campaign is just trying to “popularize” itself, appealing to youth and youth culture and trying to draw people onto the fun, young bandwagon, rather than characterizing itself with the integrity a campaign of new, progressive principles and values deserves.

I mean, aren’t there better ways to motivate me as a 26-year-old voter than an Old School-esque text message with weird pop-racial undertones? Like maybe a tactic that gives me a little more fucking credit? Are they just trying to provoke a response so my interaction is registered in their records?

So weird. Next I’ll be getting a text from John McCain asking me what I’m wearing and propositioning me to meet with him IRL.

As it turns out, it was quite simple to fake texts from Obama on Verizon’s service. In “Freak Out Your Friends With Fake Obama Texts,” Wonkette blogged step-by-step instructions.

But as grandma-gullible as this 27 year old was, he did bring up a good point. Is the Obama campaign just “trying to ‘popularize’ itself, appealing to youth and youth culture and trying to draw people onto the fun, young bandwagon”? After all, the candidate did opt to attend a fundraiser with Usher over an AARP debate. Is he selling out? Or is that just his shirts?

Well, it’s politics after all, there is obviously going to be some pandering. But on the whole, Obama’s been authentic in everything he’s done, and that is what resonates with this younger audience. The mantra goes: You can do it, as long as you “keep it real,” which as Hammer said, means staying true to your own reality. It was the contents of the text–spoken like a true teenager–that ticked off this Tumblrist, not the text itself.

Truth is, young people DO want to be spoken to on their turf (most teens have taught their parents to text so they can stay in better touch), but in an authentic way. So stay away from the txt spk and slang, boomers, unless you’re making a blockbuster comedy with Halle Berry that is:

User-generated photo blog Fotolog goes mobile [Mobile Marketer]
After surpassing the 20 million mark for members, Fotolog – “the world’s number one photo blog” – decided to take it on the run with mobile.

Lonely Planet Goes Mobile With Nokia [Mobile Content Today]
Popular travel guide Lonely Planet is teaming up with Nokia to sell city guides and maps to Nokia 2.0 users.

KCC reports South Korean mobile statistics [WirelessWatch]
The Korean Communications Committee is reporting 45 million cell phone users in South Korea – which equals 91 percent penetration. 43 million of these also have wireless Internet.

Commercial Craze: Moving Signs In Tokyo And Osaka [pingmag]
Popular attention-getters in Japan are “moving signs” or 3D advertisements–a drumming clown, a giant moving crab, a professional wrestler dressed like Elvis. We can’t say this has the typical “wow” factor all things Japanese inspire, except maybe “wow, that looks annoying.”

Cell Phone Disco - LEDs, Music and Mobile Phones (VIDEO) [Trendhunter]
This trippy art installation combines music with moving LEDs that react to mobile phone radiation and frequencies as people walk past.

YouTube Community at VloggerHeads? [NewTeeVee]
Middle-age, video-blogging men tired of YouTube’s popularity and youthful vibe have rebelled and created their own video sharing site—VloggerHeads—where they post self-describe boring videos without anyone making fun of them.

CollegeHumor.com debuts ad-supported mobile games [MobileMarketer]
CollegeHumor.com has partnered with mobile gaming guru Greystripe to release a slew of ad-supported games–just in time for back-to-school!

Activists promote safe sex in India with cellphone ‘Condom, condom!’ ring tones [Mobile Industry Review]
India has taken awkward to another level. In hopes of breaking the stigma surrounding sex, the BBC group has released a mobile ringtone with a professional singer chanting “condom” 50 times in succession.

KDDI’s au design project creates cellphones that double as instruments [EngadgetMobile]
The KDDI and Yamaha partnership are churning out some excellent mobile/instrument concepts like “Strings for fingers,” “Sticks in the air,” and “Key to touch.” Awesome for people who cannot afford both a cool mobile phone and uber-expensive drums set.

Visa and Eight Banks Test Real-Time SMS Notifications For Transactions [Gizmodo]
Users can choose to receive SMS notifications for any withdrawal or transaction over a specified amount. If the amount is not legit, simply alert your bank via SMS to catch the identity thief.

Intel moves to free gadgets of their recharging cords [International Herald Tribune]
The microprocessor magnate will demonstrate its new wireless recharging capabilities today which broadcasts 60 watts of power over a two feet radius. We’d hate to get in the way of that. Unless it gives you super powers…hmmm.