Earlier this year at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group showcased a prototype of a next-generation wearable computer interface that allows people to display and interact with the Web on any surface – including the human body. The video below shows the system’s main developer taking photographs with his hands, calling up Amazon review data onto the cover of a physical book, displaying information about a person he’s just met on the person’s t-shirt, and calling someone by inputting a phone number onto the palm of his hand.

In the presentation, Pattie Maes refers to this system as a “sixth sense” because it gives you seamless, easy access to information about objects and people you encounter. It removes several manual steps from the process of receiving relevant, contextual information. It’s a MicroSoft Surface Table without the table.

The possibilities are mind-boggling. Read a great review at ReadWriteWeb.

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Just 13% of teen mobile subscribers told the Nielsen survey that they were allowed a limited number of text messages. About 1/5 had a limited number of voice minutes.

Mobile video: Teens also watch a lot of video on mobile devices–an average of 6.5 hours per month–which is significantly more than the 3 hour 37 minute average across all age groups. Music and comedy videos are the most popular with teens.

Mobile Internet: Mobile Internet was used by 37% of US teen mobile users. Among the countries studied by Nielsen, only China had a higher teen use rate at 50%.

Sources: “How Teens Use Media” and “Teens Go Mobile for More Than Texts.”

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You can now receive LDS Church breaking news text alerts from the Church Public Affairs Department on your mobile phone from Newsroom.lds.org.

To sign up, text the word ldsnews to 29222 (United States and Puerto Rico). If you’re outside the United States, text the word ldsnews to 447624805710.

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I am pleased to report that the free Mormon Channel iPhone application is now available. This application allows iPhone users to tune into content being broadcast on the Mormon Channel, as well as listen to audio recordings of General Conference addresses, magazine articles, and the Church’s standard works. This application also works on the iPod Touch.

We are working on something similar for other mobile phones.

Get the Mormon Channel iPhone app

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How many households are abandoning land-line telephones and going mobile-only?

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, nearly 15% of all US households were wireless-only in 2007. 25% of the households in Utah were mobile-only in 2007 (second highest state in the USA). In emerging markets, people are likely to by-pass fixed communications altogether and go straight to mobiles.

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TNS Global reports that 74% of the world’s digital messages were sent through a mobile device in January 2009, up from 59% a year ago. In emerging countries, 9 out of 10 messages are sent by a mobile device.

Although PC e-mail is still the most popular message method  in developed countries, its use is waning. Worldwide, more and more messages will be sent via mobile devices.

Source: eMarketer

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I happened today across a Web site called Tagga.com which provides free text messaging services.  Tagga (82442 on the phone keypad) allows you to create text messaging campaigns so that when people text in a keyword, they will be texted back with additional information.  Additional Tagga services allow you to put a Tagga button on your Web site or blog that then gives visitors the ability to easily send information from your site to their mobile phone.  The video below explains Tagga’s text messaging services in more detail:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are many cool potential uses of Tagga, but one I want to try out soon is the ability to sell something, even your home or car.  This is how it works, just log on to the site Tagga.com, create an account, then go through the steps to set up a text campaign.  The campaign will include a brief text message and a link to a mobile site with more information.  Put the campaign code on your for sale sign, then people who see your sign can text the campaign keyword to Tagga and receive back on their cell phone more detailed information. To test it out, and to let you see how it works, I set up my own text messaging campaign on Tagga.com to sell a fake house. Text the word ‘myhouse’ to 82442 to see how it works.

Church Uses for Text Messaging Services

As we have been contemplating the next generation of Church Web sites, there has been a lot of discussion around mobile phones and text messaging services. Text messaging is continuing to grow in the US and around the world, in fact, there are many people in remote places of the world that do not have access to a computer, but they do have cell phone service.  Text messaging services that the Church has thought about are:

• Texting something like ‘map’ to the Church to get directions to the nearest Church building.
• Text a ward name to the Church and receive back its meeting times.
• Providing a Web site for bishops who can’t (or don’t) text to exchange text messages with the youth or other members of their ward.
• Text keywords like ‘priesthood’ to the Church and receive back a definition of the term.
• Allowing a bishop to text a member’s name to the Church and receive back their contact information (address, phone, email, etc.) and who their home teachers are.

What additional ideas do you have for Church uses of text messaging? Leave a comment to let us know. How about the features listed above, are they ones you would use? Fill out the survey below to let us know. (If you don’t see they survey in your RSS reader or email, then go to the blog Web site and you will see it).

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A group of researchers have devised a method which allows people to communicate over a 2G cell phone network using Sign Language. This is a pretty big step for deaf people, because text messaging is a poor substitute for the expressiveness of Sign Language, and for many who have been deaf since childhood, English is truly a foreign language.

Source: Aaron at NorthTemple.com

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eMarketer estimates that 82% of US teens (ages 12-17) and 43.5% of children (ages 3-11) will use the Internet on a monthly basis in 2009.

About 19% of active Internet users in July 2008 were under age 18. (Source: Nielsen Online)

71% of US teens have a mobile phone. (Source: The Pew Internet & American Life Project)

59% own a desktop or laptop computer. (Source: The Pew Internet & American Life Project)

The following chart shows how they communicate.

Teens expect to be able to navigate between social networks, text messaging, instant messaging and virtual worlds seamlessly. They want messages sent by one means to be accessible in another. In fact, the distinctions between online, offline, and mobile communications are meaningless to many teens. They want simple means of communicating that are engaging.

The trick for most parents is to even understand what this fast-moving audience is doing.

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In late 2007, Reuters reported that “worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion.”  This fact has generated a lot of discussion here at the Church on its implications about how cell phones could be used to keep members and church leaders connected and otherwise further the work of the Lord.  Particularly intriguing to the Church is that in many developing countries with little landline telephone infrastructure, mobile phone usage has grown rapidly.  The scene like that in the picture below are common: folks that may not even have electricity in the home, often have cell phone service. 

Photo used by permission from Craig C. Christensen

On the surface, it certainly appears like a golden opportunity to use cell phone technology to reach audiences the Church otherwise could not.  As an analyst, though, my nature is to approach the subject more cautiously and do a little more digging before I jump to such a conclusion. Here’s what my investigation has revealed:

You can’t say that half the world has a cell phone. There are about 6 billion people on the earth, so you might think 3 billion cell phones means 50% of people have cell phones, but this is not the case. The 3.3 billion figure does not take into account people with multiple mobile phones, so the actual number of mobile phone users is less than that. Hong Kong and much of Europe has mobile penetration of around 150%, meaning 1.5 mobile phones per person, on average across those populations. The Reuters report above further states that “59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent.”

Mobile phone access does not equal mobile Internet access. The US has one of the highest rates of mobile Internet access, yet even here the Pew Research center says that only about three fourths of mobile phone users have mobile internet access.  Worldwide the percentage of cell phone users with Internet access is much lower.  Some estimates put it around 800 million, or 25%, of cell phones worldwide have Internet access. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone)

Not all mobile Internet access is a broadband mobile connection. Earlier this year, the GSM Association reported estimates of only 32 million broadband mobile connections worldwide, though it’s increasing at a very fast pace. This means that only a very small fraction, about 10%, of mobile users worldwide have broadband Internet on their phone. This does not prohibit slow-connection mobile Internet users from accessing content on their phones, but studies show much higher usage with broadband mobile connections.

What all this means for the Church’s use of mobile networks to further the Lord’s work is yet to be determined. On the surface, an aggressive mobile strategy seems like a no-brainer, but digging into the analysis reveals a very different story. What do you think the Church’s mobile strategy should be? What direction is your company headed with regard to mobile?

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