MTV or Music Television built its brand celebrating the new art form of the early 80s, the music video. It gave the music industry just what it needed, the eyeballs of a young generation to promote its product which it made a buck a disc for.

Fast forward several decades to the emergence of MySpace as THE music brand and you see a radically different notion of the role of music. Music is given away and streamed, the value of this is to provide exposure and shared advertising revenue for bands and record companies. The money is not made in the music, but in the merchandise and concert ticket revenue.

As Techcrunch told us in October.

"But today the labels have all but given up on DRM, and users can now play virtually any song ever recorded on demand for free. MySpace has created the first ecosystem that has a shot of producing sustainable revenue streams for artists based on advertising, merchandise and concert sales.

If it works, the next step is the fall of per-stream fees and download fees. Instead labels will see music consumption for what it really is - free marketing. Labels will compete to encourage song downloads and streams to move those songs up the charts, attracting premium advertisers, merchandise sales and sold out concerts."

What's interesting to see here is the role music has played as a glue to generate revenue for media companies, but the context of that revenue generation has changed over time.

It seems that MTV has lost its way as a brand with television no longer being the dominant media of the youth generation, music video dying as a form and the network shifting focus away from music to regular television shows.

Apple became the next brand to exploit and dominate the music channel with iTunes and the iPod, but the software was always just there to sell the high margin hardware. iTunes has now being panned by the critics for not keeping up with the times and Apple has a few other heavyweight players including Nokia trying to take a big share of the hardware business.

Another player is MySpace, who came out of the gate in October with a relaunched music service that achieved incredible traction. Just a few DAYS after launch, the brand streamed one billion songs.

At the recent Web 2.0 conference there was all kinds of speculation about the potential for an MP3 player to be launched by MySpace.

However, this isn't really the game anymore.MySpace's core competence is all about community and from day one its community has been focused on music. This is something that can't easily be copied and Apple, Nokia and Sony will struggle to make this happen. The story here is not about an iPod rival from MySpace, but instead the arrival of MySpace as a formidable media player in the new world of music.

Posted by Ed Cotton

Nokia demonstrates how it's leveraging insights gleaned from the developing world into products. The mobile phone is made to work a lot hard in developing countries; it becomes the mobile office and primary computer for many of its users. In response, Nokia is launching Life Tools; software included in its phones that can help those involved in agriculture better understand market and weather conditions.


Posted by Ed Cotton

Girls Walker has announced the beginning of the search for the next Miss Tokyo Girls Collection, the finale event for the now famous biannual real fashion festival. This is the ultimate opportunity for a would-be reader model, not only to grace the pages of one’s favorite magazine, but to actually join the stage with top teen fashion icons.

Unlike traditional pageants, where the winner is selected by a panel of expert judges, Miss TGC is eventually chosen from a panel of peers: the girls in the audience who can vote with their mobile phones.

For the original post and the latest reviews of other Japanese trends please visit our CScout Japanese blog.

A snapshot of the latest trends of Location-based Service (LBS) in Beijing, Shanghai, Hongkong and Tokyo.

Trend Description:

Many people would agree that Location Based Services are becoming more and more popular worldwide and are opening a host of opportunities for business, but few would agree on the business model that will best monetize the service. Nokia, the mobile market leader, expects to ship 35 million GPS-phones in 2008 and the latest  ABI report blueprinted a $ 3.3 billion market value for LBS, but still the way to whip up revenues from existing technology and infrastructure remains unclear. Here we filtered some promising, if not profitable, practices of LBS in Asia to summarize new trends for industrial practitioners and those who may be concerned.

Cases:

GyPSii is a social networking platform headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherland. It has partnered with Shanghai Rannuo and China Unicom to launch its GyPSii service during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and has opened a China Data Center to enhance local user experience. What GyPSii is doing in China is encouraging its network users to send back location information via mobile devices and integrate it into the digital map. Other users (who are also content creators) then, can experience a seamless mobile lifestyle, connecting with friends and communities, searching UGC and viewing maps and directions to points of interest.

Naviblog X is Japan’s first location-based moblog/mobsearch website. With this service, usrs can easily create their mobile diary sites within 60 seconds even if they know little about programming.  After the sites are created, they point their mobile phones to the QR Code auto-generated with the sites and transfer them to the mobile phones of their friends or clients to log on the sites. It is also designed to geo-tag users’ information by one-click. Naviblog is said to be used on non-Japan phones soon.

LV Soundwalk

Fashion makers lag behind to none in creativity if not in high-tech. With thousands of foreigners entering China this Olympic year, Louis Vuitton, the French luxury fashion brand entered the mobile space with a unique location-based audio guide, available in six languages, to three major cities, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The voice is coming from three locally born actresses: Gong Li for Beijing, Joan Chen for Shanghai and Shu Qi for Hong Kong. It directs visitors by mobile phones in real time through the cities and costs 17 USD for for each city in one of the six languages, English, French, Cantonese, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

Trend Potential:

The convergence of social networking, user-created content and location is a big trend. Mobile-enabled LBS is important because it links up something missing on the internet. There are some major barriers for business related to mobile internet, such as licensing and sophisticated algorithms, but as some of the global players have discovered, a fast track to enter a local market is to line up with local mobile carriers, technological developers and last but not least the users, who know best what they want.

Read the original post at CScout China Blog.

A combination of factors underpins rapid growth in the Chinese mobile commerce sector.

Trend Description

China is rapidly emerging as the global capital of m-commerce applications, driven by an increasingly high-tech digital environment, the world’s largest mobile phone subscriber base (nearly 600 million), and the recent launch of the country’s own 3G standard (TD-SCDMA).

Although China currently lacks the advanced mobile applications of Europe, North America, Japan and Korea, many cellular players are now launching sophisticated mobile applications, and analysts predict the country may leapfrog more traditional m-commerce markets in the near future.

Penetration of new markets, including retail, ticket purchases and person-to-person transactions, is predicted to result in increasingly high volumes of small payments to Chinese m-commerce service providers. Because this type of transaction costs businesses far less than retail or other forms of transaction, the demand for m-commerce solutions is expected to grow and result in tremendous opportunities for these SPs.

Cases

UFIDA’s hapigo

The “hapigo” platform developed by UFIDA Mobile is China’s first large-scale, multi-functional m-commerce platform. With a strong focus on mobile internet technology, hapigo provides retailers and consumers with an efficient and effective  one-stop m-commerce shop. Last year hapigo became “the first brand of mobile e-commerce in China”, serving 200,000 retailers over 1 million mobile consumers.

UFIDA Mobile is a recently created US$13.42 million joint venture between the Beijing-based Ufida Software Company and Japan-based wireless heavyweight NTT DoCoMo.

Taobao’s WAP Site

Alibaba’s Taobao, the Chinese version of eBay, has recently launched a WAP version of the site at wap.taobao.com., in an effort to expand its reach to China’s huge mobile phone subscriber base, many of whom do not have net access of their own.

More interesting still is the way in which the site is served by a mobile interface for Alipay. Payment for most m-commerce in China so far has been processed by mobile service providers as part of the consumers’ bill. Although China Mobile may not be too happy with Alibaba’s move to cut them out of the loop with its “m-Alipay” service, its hard to imagine they can stop it in the long term.

Trend Impact

While the future for m-commerce in China looks rosy, there are still many obstacles to overcome. China is still largely a cash-based economy, with m-payment support structures only recently being developed. The rate of mobile phone uptake is also very  biased toward urban areas, especially when it comes to smartphones / PDAs.

Since voice is still the dominant application, decades-old mobile technologies are still some of the most profitable, and many mobile operators will need to upgrade large parts of their networks to the 2.5G and 3G technologies needed for most m-commerce applications. Still, with m-commerce proving increasingly popular and profitable, the financial incentives will surely continue to drive investment in both infrastructure and applications.

Find the original blog at CScout China blog.

The Freewheelin story.

Bike sharing was a hit when launched in Paris in 2007. It was cheap, convenient and eco-friendly. End of story? Not so fast. A U.S. health insurer changed the game and wrote a new story. Humana promotes its business agenda - lower health care costs - through a state-of-the-art bike sharing program tested during the 2008 U.S. political party conventions in Denver and St. Paul.

Freewheelin promotes its social and business agenda through communication - made possible by wireless/mobile and social networking technology. When you ride a Feewheelin bike, wireless networks track your mileage and calories burned. Social networking tools help individuals track their personal successes and, by calculating reduced carbon emmisions, their contributions to the shared health and wellness of their community and the planet.

Andra bloggar om: cykla, motion, träning, miljö, hållbarhet

When it comes to mobiles, everyone knows that they can make great nursery decorations and playthings for babies, but sophisticated, abstract mobiles can also function equally well as artsy decor for grownups. Such is the case with Frazier & Wing’s beautiful recycled magazine mobiles. Made from hundreds of paper cut-outs from old magazines, and strung in linear cascading forms, Frazier & Wing’s chandelier-esque mobiles make a stunning centerpiece for any room: nursery or grownup.

READ MORE AT INHABITOTS >