m-Commerce - Amazon Mobile hits $1 Billion

Amazon announced Friday that its revenue from mobile sales had passed $1 billion per year (total sales are $6.57 billion) – most of which came from smartphones, particularly the iPhone. So what are Amazon doing to drive sales?


Amazon has it’s own application for all the major smartphone platforms, plus very effective mobile internet site. Whether you’re on an iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Nokia, you can access an optimised mobile site where you can search and buy products. Amazon has as utlised other mobile technologies in its US application, with built in scanning feature it will recognise and search for that product – so if you see something that in store can scan it, check the Amazon price, and buy it all over your phone.
Amazon realised if a mobile app isn’t as easy to use as your website, you wont use it. So they took the 1-Click payment system from the main site and made sure it worked in the mobile application. So once you’ve set up your account, you can make an order over your mobile just as easily as you can on the web.

Not the only fruit....

Less than two years after Google opened its Android Market application store, consumers have now apparently downloaded more than one billion apps to their phones (according to estimates from analytics provider AndroLib.com).

Although Android store is still far behind Apple's rival App Store, which recently topped 5 billion downloads, interest in Android is clearly on the up.The report boasts about 92,000 applications, showing rapid growth, and is on pace to hit 100,000  by the end of the month. Developers have already submitted over 10,000 new applications through the first 15 days of July, compared to 15,000 new Android apps in all of June. An increase in volume, but perhaps not quality.

Last week, Google introduced App Inventor for Android, a free software tool enabling users to create their own Android applications regardless of previous programming experience - I have signed up and expect to see my efforts in future weeks. Under development for a year and tested in environments including a variety of schools, App Inventor for Android does not rely on conventional coding - instead, consumers visually design the application's appearance, using blocks to specify its behavior.

100M plays a day on Mobile YouTube

YouTube has just relaunched its mobile site. The impovements include faster downloads and a more touch-friendly interface. The mobile site also includes more features, including search query suggestions, playlist and favourites - making it more like its full web big brother.

According to YouTube it is seeing more than 100 million video plays a day from mobile users. So it looks like users like video via mobile.

YouTube has said that it will now be able to roll out new web features more quickly to the mobile site and that this will not be the case with YouTube native applications which will not be updated as frequently. The site requires a handset with a HTML5 browser.

iPhones users on visiting the site are being invited to set it up as a homepage bookmark, which could spur users to switch from the preloaded native app.

You can try the site at m.youtube.com, but dont forget video will eat up your data allowance, so best make sure you are on an large data bundle.

BBC Wildlife Fund

On June 20 the BBC Wild campaign that started in mid May came to a conclusion with a "Wild Night In". BBC Wild Campaign is a fundraising season along the lines of BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief aimed at supporting Wildlife charities.

Wild Night In promoted the keyword WILD on shortcode 70700 on the Sunday show and a mid week repeat. Also had the text number on the website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wild/donate/)  and got over 15,000 donations and collected over £75,000.


They raised over a million in total but mobile was a late addition and not heavily pushed, hopefully we can do more similar projects with BBC charities in the future.