by Mark Walsh, 3 hours ago

The iPhone is increasingly going global. That’s a key finding in the latest monthly metrics report from mobile ad network AdMob. An analysis by the company found that 54% of iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide in June were in the U.S., down from 61% in January. This signals that international adoption has picked up since then, although the U.S. still has by far the biggest proportion of users of any country.

The next-closest is the U.K., accounting for 7% of iPhone and touch users, followed by Germany (6%), France (5%), Canada (4%) and Australia (3%). Countries that represent huge potential markets include China, Russia and Brazil — each with at least 1% share. Regionally, North America had 58% of iPhone/touch users, followed by Western Europe with 26%, and Asia with 7%.

In terms of actual device totals, that translates into about 13 million iPhones in the U.S. and 1 million apiece in European countries such as the U.K. and Germany. Apple, which reported third-quarter earnings Tuesday, said it has sold 45 million devices using the iPhone OS globally to date.

The company posted a 15% profit gain for the quarter, in which it sold seven times as many iPhones — 5.2 million — as in the year-ago period.

Among other highlights from the AdMob report, Google’s Android in June for the first time surpassed Windows Mobile among smartphone operating systems in its share of ad impressions. Android increased its share to 5%, edging ahead of Windows Mobile’s 4%. The iPhone OS and Apple, as a manufacturer, continued to dominate with a 47% share of smartphone impressions.

AdMob says it serves more than 7.1 billion mobile banner and text ads per month across more than 7,000 mobile sites and 2,500 applications worldwide.

According to AdMob, there are many similarities between iPhone and iPod touch users in the US, especially in the demographic makeup of each group in areas such as age and household income. iPhone users are generally older. 69% of iPod touch users are between 13-24 years of age, while this same age segment represents just 26% of iPhone users. 31% of iPhone users are 35-49 years old, while only 12% of iPod touch users fall in this age segment. In total, 74% of iPhone users are over the age of 25, compared to 31% of iPod touch users.

The research also found that 5 in 10 consumers on both iPhone and iPod touch devices use the mobile Web more frequently than they read printed newspapers. More than 40% reported using the Internet on their mobile device more often than using the Internet from their computers or listening to the radio.

Loftlon Worth, vice president, comScore, concludes that “… (it is) important for marketers to understand the mobile landscape and the characteristics of the users of a particular platform or mobile device.. ”

Additional findings from the study:

• More than 70% of users on both the iPhone and iPod touch are male
• 78% of iPhone users have an annual household income of at least $65,000, compared to only 66% of iPod touch users with much less
• 46% of iPhone users have children, compared to only 28% of iPod touch users

In the next six months:

• 57% of iPhone users plan to purchase clothing, 47%, entertainment and 45%, travel
• 61% of iPod Touch users plan to purchase clothing, 53%, entertainment and 36%, cell phones

The total sample size of iPod touch participants is 3,848, while the total number of participants in the iPhone sample is 3,454. All results were tested for statistically significant differences at the 95% confidence level.

For additional information, please go here.

NYT iPhone App

In its ongoing quest to save itself from financial peril, it was reported Thursday that The New York Times is considering charging a monthly fee of $5 for online access to the paper. It sent out a survey to subscribers asking if they’d be willing to pay $2.50 a month, or a 50% discount for existing customers, to access NYTimes.com.

The newspaper previously experimented with charging for online content several years ago via its Times Select service, which put its columnists behind a pay wall and brought in about $10 million a year before being abandoned in 2007. Its Times Reader software offers an offline electronic version of the paper and is free to print subscribers but otherwise costs $14.95 a month.

What about The Times iPhone app? Free. That’s not surprising given that most iPhone apps are distributed free, and ad-supported like the Times‘ app, or simply as a promotional vehicle. But the App Store provides another digital platform for the newspaper to test new payment models if that’s the direction it’s headed.

USA Today Publisher David Hunke last month told the AP that he regrets the newspaper didn’t start by charging for it’s iPhone app. Like The Times and all other newspapers, USA Today is struggling with how to make up for rapidly declining print revenue. Hunke didn’t specify how many downloads the USA Today app has had, but added, “I’m not sure we realized what we had,” he said. “I think that’s a value readers will be willing to pay for.”

Interestingly, the App Store offers both USA Today and New York Times branded crossword puzzle apps, at $4.99 and $5.99 respectively. USA Today also offers a separate puzzle game for 99 cents. It wouldn’t be surprising to see The Times use that as a starting point to sell other types of specialized content, like an app version of Times Select or other material not offered in the free edition.

Unlike the Web, the App Store and other mobile storefronts aren’t places where people are expecting everything to be free. So getting consumers to start paying for apps might not be as hard as convincing them to pay $5 a month for the Times online.

by Steve Smith , Thursday, July 9, 2009

There are a handful of media types that seem to be struggling mightily to find their proper mobile form. Intuitively, we know that formats like radio, podcasting, short-form video, and even books and magazines should map well against the portability of mobile and the enlarging, lush palette of the smart phone screen. Watching each of these media experiment with different modes of delivery and presentation is one of the unique joys of being involved in the early stages of a new technology.

In the early years of film, this sort of experimentation went on at Thomas Edison’s makeshift Black Maria movie studio in New Jersey. A decade before television became the defining post-WWII medium, CBS maintained an experimental TV broadcast schedule and lab in New York, where veteran entertainers tried to understand what kinds of information and entertainment really worked best here.

The Internet was among the first technologies that made the experimental stage very public. Watching companies and their new media ideas rise and fall was itself part of the drama of the new medium. In mobile, where the mobile Web and applications lower the barriers to entry, we are seeing a similar process work out. Sure, companies are throwing some serious money at mobile now, but in 20 years we will look back at these efforts as antediluvian. Just as no one imagined Google in 1995, the true forms of mobile media likely have not revealed themselves yet.

It is true that every new medium requires its own discrete forms of content. Throwing the Web, or TV or gaming as we know it, at phones, and expecting users to respond, is a necessary but doomed approach. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But it is just as true that emerging platforms also tend to reach back historically to retrieve even older formats to try on the new technology. Interestingly, when TV did blossom in the late 40s and early 50’s, one of its most popular formats, comedy variety, revived the conceits of vaudeville.

For entirely selfish reasons, I am rooting for the comics to enjoy a renaissance on mobile. The static but sequential art of the classic comic strip or the more modern graphic novel seems to be naturally suited to a smart phone, and companies like UClick and Genus are playing with the format across apps and Web. In many cases a single frame of comic art on an iPhone or G1 is as large or larger than it appears in its original printed format.

As we have already seen with high recall and click-through rates on mobile ads, the mobile screen focuses attention in a way that a larger, more cluttered screen does not. When I look at Will Eisner’s “A Contract with God” on Genus’s Kamikaze mobile player, I am zeroing in on the line work in a new way. Jeff Smith’s “Bone” series of graphic novels are being sold an issue at a time in the App Store, and they demonstrate how entertaining a frame-by-frame flip-through can be. Smith often has his characters talk at each other across the frame. Flipping frame to frame heightens the sequencing effect of a strip and even the surprise of the punch line more effectively than its usual presentation in a newspaper or even online. The comics exercise an economy of storytelling that seems perfect for the needs of the mobile medium.

On the mobile Web, UClick has a repository of its many licenses at GoComincs.com, from “Doonesbury” to classic “Krazy Kat.” This comics portal demonstrates unwittingly why the application format may work best for mobile comics. Every strip in the library is a bit different, and getting the frames to fill the screen is a frustrating exercise in zooming, pinching and swiping. Too often the zoomed art is poorly resolved, which ruins the real impact of the line art filling the screen. Wisely, UClick is launching a ton of comics apps where the experience is much better, but we still wait for a flexible reader that can pull in diverse kinds of art. I want my Chester Gould “Dick Tracy” and Windsor McKay “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend” available in a single pipeline of great comics I can enjoy and share anywhere.

Arguably, the most artfully designed graphic novels do not shoehorn well into the phone format, because the artists use the entire page rather than traditional frames to communicate. Genus is trying to split the difference in a reader that can present the full page and then zoom into key sections. Other developers are using the Ken Burns pan-and-zoom effect to bring us through a graphic novel. DC Comics translated the entire 12-issue “Watchmen” comics into “motion comics” that rejiggered the frames for mobile animation and added voice narration. I found them captivating, if not a real replacement for the original experience.

Ultimately, we want to see whether the audience and the medium can support comics made expressly for mobile. The frame-by-frame presentation, the multimedia layers, and the timing a mobile platform allows arguably could inspire a different kind of strip. A mobile comic might not be a strip at all. It could be a continuous linear flow that the artist adds to each day or week. Obviously, the one-panel comic is perfect for mobile, but why not add sound and a touch of animation? One company, Ringtales, has been doing this for The New Yorker cartoon for a while.

As I started by saying, my interest in promoting mobile comics is entirely selfish. I am a shameless devotee of the art (note my email address) because I think marrying art and language is uniquely powerful. That is precisely why I think mobile marketers miss a tremendous opportunity to learn from the format. If mobile ad creatives want to understand what is possible on handsets in terms of leveraging art, the frame, timing, story arc, etc., they could do worse than to study the comic strip as it evolves here.

Why is a “landing page” a “landing page?” Shouldn’t it be a launch pad to a story arc that makes best use of the display, the screen resolution, the user focus of the mobile experience? Why would you want to have your audience lean back to watch a clip, when they could lean in to interact with a visual story? Are photographs really the best way to convey information or involve the user in all cases?

There may well be an art of mobile storytelling available to marketers, and the odds are that experiments like mobile comics will scout that territory more effectively than simply waiting for the mobile banner ad to evolve.

Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, 200 artists attended a convention in Washington, D.C. Politico asked a handful of them…Can you draw Uncle Sam?

Ian Paul, PC World

Apple iPhone 3GS

The iPhone 3GS is hot according to AT&T. No, I’m not talking about the overheating issues, but a alleged leaked memo from the iPhone’s exclusive U.S. carrier. In the memo, AT&T reports the iPhone 3GS launch day on June 6 was the best-ever sales day for AT&T retail stores, according to MacDaily News. June 6 was also the second largest traffic day for AT&T stores, and the most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day were performed during the iPhone 3GS launch day. The 3GS debut was so huge, for AT&T retail stores anyway, that sales for the device surpassed launch day sales for the iPhone 3G by noon Central Time.

After the iPhone 3GS initial launch weekend, Apple also reported a successful launch of its latest smart phone reporting that it had sold more than one million iPhone 3GS devices at Apple retail locations. That’s the same number Apple used to describe the iPhone 3G launch weekend last year.

What’s surprising, however, is a growing consensus that the iPhone 3GS debut may have been far bigger than the launch of the iPhone 3G. Last summer, the iPhone 3G debut was lauded as the most successful launch of any tech product in history. For days after its initial availability, fans were lining up around the block at Apple Stores across the United States and the world to get their hands on the iPhone 3G. Device shortages were a regular occurrence, and customers in less populated areas were left waiting for months to get their own wonder gadget from Apple.

This year, the lines were not as long for the iPhone 3GS, and the frenzy that accompanied the 2008 iPhone 3G launch was not present. This could have been for a number of reasons including better inventory supplies on Apple’s part, and a public less willing to line up for days on end just to get their hands on a smartphone. But if suspicison are correct, then relative customer apathy was not an issue for Apple this year, and the recession may not have made much of an impact on iPhone 3GS sales either.

Other signs of the iPhone 3GS’ popularity are also starting to crop up. Earlier this month, Apple resurrected its iPhone availability tool to help you find the Apple Store with the best 3GS supplies near you. Customers in the United Kingdom and Canada may find it harder to get the iPhone 3GS in the coming weeks. The World of Apple is reporting that two carriers–O2 in Britain and Fido in Canada–have run out of their iPhone inventories; however, Apple Stores in both countries are still stocked up with inventory.

So the iPhone 3GS is shaping up to be the hottest iPhone ever, but we may not know how hot until Apple releases its quarterly earnings report later this month.

According to an AT&T company memo, the launch of the iPhone 3GS wasn’t just a banner sales day for the carrier this year but broke records for any single day of retail sales in the company’s history — including for already stellar iPhone sales.

The leaked e-mail characterizes “iLaunch Day 2009,” its nickname for the June 19th iPhone 3GS release date, as the “best-ever sales day” and just second in terms of actual floor traffic. Many of its other sales-related records were also shattered at the same time, ranging from the number of upgrade eligibility checks made in a day to the sheer volume of orders taken through AT&T’s website.

The notice obtained by multiple anonymous MacDailyNews readers also illustrates just how quickly the seemingly more modest iPhone update outpaced the already large-scale iPhone 3G launch last year. 3GS sales not only exceeded the first days after both Thanksgiving and Christmas, either of which have always been popular shopping days, but were so brisk as to overtake the iPhone 3G’s launch day count by just noon in Texas time.

Interest in the stores was so high that AT&T stores were considered at “peak” activity for 11 hours, or nearly half a day, despite the company accepting pre-orders online for day in advance.

As could be expected, the cellular company doesn’t provide a concrete sales number in the memo and, when contacted by AppleInsider for confirmation, only repeats its mantra that it accepted hundreds of thousands of pre-orders in the run-up to the iPhone 3GS going on sale less than two weeks ago.

“We have no further comment beyond that,” a company spokesman says.

Apple has been slightly more open on the subject and previously said it sold one million iPhone 3GS devices over the course of its launch weekend through all of its outlets. Although the same number as for last year, the California-based electronics firm reached this figure in 2009 with only eight countries onboard for the first day, or less than half the 21 that were ready on July 11th, 2008. The similar numbers, combined with a smaller-scale launch, indirectly confirm that US launch sales, including through AT&T, have spiked that much higher in 2009.