Monthly Archives: June 2013

CMIYC – The New Craze of Lovers with WhatsApp

Here is a story about a new game that may has contributed to WhatsApp’s recent record figure of 27bn processed messages (tweet from 12th June 2013; 10bn messages sent and 17bn messages received within 24 hours) – another milestone in the history of a great mobile disruptor, if not currently the greatest. Another amazing figure is the average number of sent messages per day per active user which is at about 50 messages. Based on 10bn sent messages per day and about 200m active users (April 2013). Equals up to 50 messages per day per active user.  Now back to the game story.

Some people can’t get enough of each other. Especially at the beginning of amorous feelings, when two are getting eager to know each other closer and start to develop stronger feelings. Right in this setting, a new act has become very popular among WhatsApp users.

The game is called CMIYC – catch me if you can. The rules are contagious. The foundation of the game is WhatsApp’s helpful status display of “Last seen at…” or even “online”. This exactly is the starting point of the new hpye.

The game kicks off with a mutual agreement: Two people (lovers or soon-to-be lovers) agree to try to hit the same online time in Whatsapp – without agreeing on any specific online time – and inform each other when they had a ‘near miss’ whenever during the day. This pact is a carte blanche to contact each other rather often. But that is precisely what they want at that moment of the ‘new thing’.

So when person A is at 9:15pm in Whatsapp online, and person B is at 9:20pm in Whatsapp online and is checking on him/her by looking at his/her account,  person B is allowed to send a teasing acronym message like ‘5m’ to person A. Meaning that they just missed the event of being online in WhatsApp at the same time by 5 minutes. It is obviously that from that message on, normally a further conversation starts. And it also is rather obvious that one does that only if the near miss is kind of smaller than 15-20 minutes. This subset of rules, again, makes the two ‘players’ going even more often online in WhatsApp to be able to virtually meet each other.

When both hit the same online time, and that’s the aim of the game, they write ‘hit’ to each other, like ‘hit by cupid’s arrow’, a new way to say ‘yes, you are very welcomed in my life.’

The only question that remains is: When will WhatsApp be hit by an acquirer?

 

 

An Inconvenient Truth for the MIT Mobile Summit 2013

In the opening speech of the MIT Mobile Summit on 10th June 2013 this slide was shown to illustrate and emphasize the current magnitude of the smartphone revolution. It is a nice analogy but the even more impressive figure would have come from Samsung. See picture caption below. It is understandable that these two narrow figures are more appealing in this story context; although this global comparison is kind of outdated as the number of sold smartphones per day has passed the number of births per day long ago and at much higher scale than suggested by this slide…

Actually, currently every day Samsung phones are sold: 720k :)

Actually, Samsung currently sells about 7ooK smartphones every day 🙂 (Source: Reuters)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Reality about Viewing Timeshifted TV, and How Much Time Americans Spend with TV Media?

Below chart has an interesting statement even though the chart is not focused on mobile usage only. In the IPTV industry, there is the concept of traditional TV and timeshifted TV, which suggests that timeshifted TV consumption will soon be the main share within TV watching; as viewing timeshifted TV is regarded by the IPTV industry as one of the biggest advantage of IPTV. But this chart from 2012 tells the opposite: The group with the lowest ratio between traditional and timeshifted TV are the 25-34 year old viewers (124h50m vs. 14h54m –> about 8:1), but these viewers still watch 8 times more traditional TV than timeshifted TV. Interesting is that, with teenagers, watching videos on the mobile is as popular as watching timeshifted TV. For sake of completeness, it should be mentioned 1) that there maybe missing a max. 12% share of web viewing, and 2) that the USA is a rather difficult environment in terms of legal freedom to deliver timeshifted TV content (a new positive light in opening competition in IPTV is the dispute around Aereo).

Another stats from Motorola Mobility says that 29% of television watching is time-shifted. Most often one will find a stats which is contradictory to the statements of another statistic.

US_consumer_Media_consumption