Text Campaigns are About Immediacy, Email Less So, Exec Says

Immediacy is what differentiates text message marketing from its email counterpart, according to an ExactTarget executive.

While the two channels are complementary ones that should tie together in multichannel campaigns, the campaign that simply mimics an email strategy in mobile will fail.

Consumers expect more immediacy from mobile than email

National Mall Gets Free Wi-Fi

The District of Columbia has launched Wi-Fi along the National Mall.

The new free, wireless hotspots from the project "DC Wi-fi" cover the mall from 3rd Street on the east to 14th Street on the west.

D.C. Offers Free Wi-Fi Along National Mall

Wal-Mart Gets Deeper into Mobile

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Monday that it is introducing the first cell phone plan that uses the chain's own branding, Associated Press reports.

The Wal-Mart Family Mobile service will run on T-Mobile USA's network. Unlimited calling and texting will cost $45 per month for the first line and $25 for each additional line for the family. The service will be offered starting next week in most of its stores across the nation.

breaking news

When Kindle Shines

If you absolutely must read your tablet or ebook in bright sunlight, Kindle has an edge. Of course, most of us in the northern hemisphere will not need to do so for a while.

The Struggles of the Middle Class (comScore Voices)

The August 2010 government jobs report showed that unemployment remains stubbornly high at a level of 9.7 percent of the civilian labor force and rose marginally by 0.1 percentage points from July.

The loss of jobs during the current recession has been deeper and more prolonged than was seen in any other recession since World War II.

It isn't yet clear whether there is a "structural" element to the job losses, or whether something "merely" related to continued uncertainty about the business environment which is causing the unusually-deep and protracted job loss pattern.

One suspects there is a structural element, at one level related to recoveries after "financial" induced recessions. The other possible structural element is akin to what happened in many countries as economies changed from "agricultural" to "industrial" stages, and are continuing to evolve from "industrial" to "information" based forms.

The Struggles of the Middle Class (comScore Voices)

Gaming Might Improve Decision Making

There's a significant controversy over the value of games that are designed to improve people's mental faculties, as some studies have indicated that brain training only helps prepare you for similar tasks, while others indicate that general improvements are possible.

But there turns out to be a type of game that is known to boost a variety of skills, from decision making to tracking multiple objects: standard action games. A study, released today by Current Biology attempts to explain how these video games can produce such wide-ranging improvements.

The authors of the study argue that the root of all these tasks involves making a probabilistic inference, where complete information is missing, so people have to make a best guess based on known odds. Video gaming, in their view, increases the efficiency at which people can process the odds and make an accurate decision—gamers simply can do more with less. As a result, any task of this sort sees benefits.

Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, are just as accurate

More Tweets From Mobile Devices

Since April this year, the number of people using Twitter has risen 27 percent from 106 million to 145 million.

The driving force behind the growth has been the addition of clients that make mobile access easier.

"We quickly understood that we were doing users a disservice by not having a great client on each of the major mobile platforms," said Twitter's CEO, Evan Williams. "So, we took a similar approach with Twitter for BlackBerry and Twitter for Android."

Twitter's mobile site, mobile.twitter.com, was used by 14 percent of users and Twitter's SMS option was used by eight percent of users. Twitter iPhone apps represented eight percent of usage and the BlackBerry app represented seven percent of usage.

More Tweets via mobile

iPad headed to Target?

Will the Apple iPad be sold in Target for the Christmas selling season?

iPad headed to Target on October 3rd? -- Engadget

E.U. Wants to Release Local TV Spectrum to Mobile

The European Commission is poised to back a plan that would divert a portion of the TV broadcast spectrum to mobile operators by 2013.

The proposal is part of a package of broadband changes drafted by Neelie Kroes, the E.U. commissioner for telecommunications, that would require the 27 members of the bloc to set aside the 800 megahertz frequency band for mobile broadband by Jan. 1, 2013.

E.U. to Back Plan for Pan-Euro:

Goulsby Cannot Say When Unemployment Will Fall Appreciably

Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has no idea, or "won't say" when unemployment will move appreciably below 10 percent.

Our Government Is Now So Huge That It's Choking The Private Sector

Bigger government leads to slower growth, this chartfor France suggests.

It shows the ratio of the private sector to the public sector and relates it to growth. The correlation is high.

That is not to say that the best environment for growth is a zero government. There is clearly a role for government, but government does cost and that takes money from the productive private sector.

Our Government Is Now So Huge That It's Choking The Private Sector

U.S. Users Spend More Time on Facebook Than Google

"U.S. Web surfers are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google, according to new data from researchers at comScore Inc.
In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said Thursday, about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, people spent on all of Google Inc.'s sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.

The Associated Press: Facebook inches past Google for Web users' minutes

Brazil Presents the Highest Mobile Broadband Penetration in Latin America, Finds Frost & Sullivan - Yahoo! Finance

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Brazil-Presents-the-Highest-prnews-3247506883.html?x=0&.v=1

AT&T, Sprint, Verizon to carry Samsung tablet

Samsung Electronics has struck deals with AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp to carry its new tablet computer, the Wall Street Journal says.

Samsung is scheduled to unveil the Galaxy Tab in the U.S. market at an event at New York City's Time Warner Center on Sept. 16.

The Galaxy Tab is essentially a larger version of Samsung's new Galaxy S smartphone.

Twitter Displacing RSS?

Many users appear to be abandoning RSS readers as a way to read the news. Hitwise, for instance, tells us that visits to Google Reader are down 27 percent year-over-year, while visits to Bloglines are down 71 percent year-over-year.

Real-time news increasingly seems to be something people think they can get from Twitter, or maybe Facebook. It is clear that real-time search has become more crucial now that real-time content services have gotten more popular.

The Death Of The RSS Reader