Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie

Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie..

Introduction BlackBerry and the rise of the smartphone How BlackBerry users consume data BlackBerry internet connectivity BlackBerry Wi-Fi connectivity The future of the BlackBerry Identification and payment challenges Helping overcome the challenges Points to note for optimization GoSpoken capitalize on their slice of the BlackBerry pie BlackBerry breakdown BlackBerry vs other handsets 2 2 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 6 6 6

Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie

Introduction
This is the first in a series of white papers that will provide key information and data to help you capitalize on particular areas of the mobile market. Bango research and product development enables thousands of mobile developers and content publishers market their mobile sites and sell content and services worldwide. Including the latest BlackBerry data and points to note for optimization, heres what youll learn from this white paper: Why BlackBerry has become a popular consumer device How BlackBerry users consume data services The challenge of capturing identity and delivering payment to BlackBerry users Optimizing your mobile services to overcome these challenges In future white papers we will analyze opportunities in the broader smartphone market, the role of mobile applications stores and how to analyze your marketing campaigns across multiple mobile channels. Make sure your contact details are registered, so that youll automatically receive notification of all white papers published in this series and other valuable market information email whitepapers@bango.com

BlackBerry and the rise of the smartphone

Smartphones have become the standard handset of choice in the mobile phone market even during global recession the growth in smartphone sales continues to soar. Gartner reported a global smartphone sales growth of 27% year-on-year in Q2 2009 compared to a 6% drop in cell phone sales during the same period. And the numbers in the USA were even more dramatic during the second quarter. The research firm NPD Group reported US smartphone sales grew by 47% and accounted for 28% of all handset sales. Its not just the iPhone that is selling so strongly. The NPD Group report shows 35% of handsets shipped with keyboards rather than touch screens, which points to a significant number of BlackBerry style handsets being sold. ComScore recently reported that BlackBerry accounts for 42% of all smartphones sold in the US. In fact, according to the IDC Q2 US Smartphone Sales Rating four out of the top six handsets are a BlackBerry including the top selling smartphone.

Top selling smartphones

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. BlackBerry Curve Apple iPhone 3GS BlackBerry Pearl Apple iPhone 3G BlackBerry Bold BlackBerry Storm T-Mobile G1 Palm Pre HTC Touch Pro

10. HTC Touch Diamond

Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie

This success is clearly good for business too, Research in Motion (RIM), the manufacturer of the BlackBerry phone, has been named as the worlds fastest growing company according to the August 31 , 2009 issue of Fortune magazine. To put this into perspective Apple only appears at position 39 while Google makes it to position 68. The full list can be seen at: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortunefaste stgrowing/2009/full_list/index.html RIM has long been a visionary force in mobile internet technology, first with their push email technology and more recently with fast access to the web. They have achieved this dominance by tightly controlling how their phones connect to the internet to access email and web pages. By focusing on the high value corporate market initially, the BlackBerry has become the trusted way millions of people communicate and interact while on the move. The handsets have gained a reputation for ease of use and even addictiveness among business users! Many of the worlds top companies choose BlackBerry as the corporate phone of choice, making use of the excellent, secure integration with their corporate systems.
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However with an increasing range of attractive business-oriented internet services becoming available, the browsing capabilities of the BlackBerry have now become attractive. Recently, BlackBerry has begun to expand their dominant corporate position to provide a range of consumer friendly features and their Curve 8520 handset now dominates the IDC US smartphone charts ahead of all the Apple iPhone variants. The Curve takes the industry leading email and web browsing capabilities the BlackBerry is famous for and adds dedicated media keys, a media player, mobile streaming for videos and music, and social networking with Facebook, Flickr and MySpace.

BlackBerry internet connectivity

The challenge for RIM was one of internet connectivity. The BlackBerry was designed to connect through the GPRS or UMTS network of a carrier to the RIM servers at the HQ in Canada. That is where the email systems were implemented, enabling the push capabilities so much enjoyed by the BlackBerry user. However, when a BlackBerry user wanted to browse the internet, the browser did not open another TCP/IP connection, but instead channeled through this route passing through the RIM servers to get to the wider internet. Most mobile handsets are set up to pass their TCP/IP connection through an operators gateways before going to the wider internet. This allows a degree of enrichment of the data with, for example, information that identifies the user. When a user browses from a typical LG handset, to (say) the AT&T user home page, the enrichment enables the display of user specific information such as billing data, user settings and also allows phones to be set up to prevent access to adult content such as gaming, unmoderated chat and so on.

How BlackBerry users consume data

Until mid 2002, the BlackBerry was primarily an email device and a very good one. Executives at the company tended to dismiss the idea of internet browsing as being something you did from a PC. The teams in mobile operators that looked after the BlackBerry were obsessed with it as an email device. The mobile web teams tended to ignore the device in fact back in 2001 operators such as Vodafone and Orange in the UK were so disinclined to embrace the BlackBerry that O2 managed to get the six month exclusive on the product in the UK.

Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie

The traditional BlackBerry had no such capability. Browsing was through the RIM gateways, meaning OK behavior for general internet browsing, but the loss of functionality for more sophisticated sites that could take advantage of the operator enrichment. Many Bango enabled content providers noticed, for example, that BlackBerry users on networks where operator billing is enabled were unable to access that capability so were presented with credit card instead. Another factor with BlackBerry devices has been that mobile operators did not have generally available all you can eat or flat rate tariffs for internet connectivity. Therefore two different routes enabled them to bill a flat fee for email access direct to the RIM gateways and a rate based on consumption for the internet connection. Over the last few years, the operators have started to configure BlackBerry devices so that there is a browser that can pass through the carrier gateways and get enriched enabling the provision of superior services. Sometimes however, the functionality is provided with a second browser accessible through an additional icon on the BlackBerry home page. A user gets a very different experience connecting through the second browser because it provides websites, through Bango, with extra capabilities like identity and payment.

is liable to be presented with a different experience, especially with mobile billing. Fortunately, Bango is able to glue the two latter situations together, so that identity and payment capabilities are preserved when a user switches to and from Wi-Fi.

The future of the BlackBerry

As BlackBerry becomes more consumer-oriented to successfully compete with Nokia and Apple, it has to evolve to provide the expected functionality. At Bango we are now starting to see BlackBerry devices configured to route traffic through operator gateways by default en-route to the RIM email systems. This brings the best of both worlds. The only quirk is that enabling flat rate tariffs for email/BlackBerry-mail also requires the operator to make internet browsing part of the package. We are already seeing major operators, such as AT&T, mandate data tariffs for all new smartphone customers. BlackBerry is a focused early pioneer of mobile data. This has caused some issues for operators and website developers wanting to provide a good experience for their end users, but the problems are now being ironed out as they become more apparent and RIM starts to compete outside its email/business heartland.

Identification and payment challenges

Sophisticated though BlackBerry phones now are as mobile internet devices, the challenge for a content provider or website publisher is how to treat these users as mobile phone connections or ordinary web connections? In practice the device can operate in either mode, but as discussed earlier in this white paper, by default BlackBerry devices will connect via the RIM proprietary data gateways when the web browser is launched. These data connections operate outside of the mobile operators own network, so your

BlackBerry Wi-Fi connectivity

What can be more confusing is that some newer BlackBerry devices include Wi-Fi connectivity. Since the BlackBerry browser does not get enriched, it works just the same through the Wi-Fi connection. However, when the operator browser is used, if Wi-Fi is active the enriched data is lost. This means the consumer cannot access their billing records and

Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie

customers are not automatically seen as AT&T or Vodafone users, but as RIM users. Without the necessary optimizations to how your systems look at these users, your customer base may all of sudden appear to have migrated to Canada! For businesses wanting to optimize for BlackBerry users, this presents a couple of fundamental challenges: firstly, how can you accurately identify BlackBerry users for tracking, CRM and marketing campaign purposes; secondly how is it possible to enable these customers to make transactional payments on their mobile phone bill, just like any other phone user? These kinds of optimizations are vital for the successful tracking of user behavior on websites. Without them, a significant segment of your mobile web traffic will be incorrectly identified in your analytics reports and your mobile marketing campaigns targeting users by specific networks will fail to pick-up this segment.

Helping overcome the challenges

For most on-line marketers, the BlackBerry customer base is an important segment and it is targeted with an optimized version of the website designed specifically for the device. The ability to automatically identify the user, attribute them to the correct home country and understand how these customers use the site is vital to deliver the best experience and maximize your return on marketing to these users. Bango data collected across many millions of users accessing the internet from mobile devices reveals one other important usage characteristic: the BlackBerry user base will be much more likely to use Wi-Fi as a connection method where available. BlackBerry devices make it easy to locate Wi-Fi hotspots and connect off-net. In these cases, not only is there no mobile network profiling available, it may be just as likely to be a corporate network as a commercial hotspot provider that brings the user to your website. This raises a number of significant issues:

Points to note for optimization

1. CSS/Table support Many sites rely upon CSS and tables to achieve styling. Some BlackBerry devices have these browser options disabled by default. You can detect from the headers if CSS has been disabled. 2. Firmware differences - The same BlackBerry model will be shipped with different firmware versions of the operating system. The way the browser renders a site depends on this firmware. For example, support for padding and margin differs between firmware versions. 3. Form factor BlackBerry devices are often very landscape in form factor including some of the widest screens (in pixels) in the market. However the screens are often reasonably short which has an impact on what content is shown above the fold.

Is this a new user hitting my campaign landing page, or a user Ive seen before?

If it is a returning, regular, customer, how can I identify them for CRM purposes?

If the user wishes to make a purchase, how do I offer them the ability to pay to their phone account with no network or billing information?

This ability, and tendency, for BlackBerry users to swap connection types, along with the off-net gateways managed by the device maker, rather than the network operator, means tracking this part of your mobile customer base requires specific pairing capabilities, of the kind built-in to Bango Analytics.

Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie

This technology ensures that BlackBerry users are paired with key data including their mobile network operator and a specific network identity. This second data point is vital to allow these customers to make single-click purchases directly to their phone account, which delivers the highest achievable conversion rates for your business.

BlackBerry breakdown
Over 90% of the international BlackBerry traffic seen through the Bango system is made up of the following top ten devices with the top two accounting for nearly 43% - good to bear in mind if you are optimizing your mobile site for specific BlackBerry devices. 1. 2. BlackBerry 8330 Curve (28.98%) BlackBerry 9530 Storm (13.66%) BlackBerry 9000 Bold (9.56%) BlackBerry 8900 Curve (9.05%) BlackBerry 8130 Pearl (8.78%) BlackBerry 8310 Curve (6.16%) BlackBerry 9500 Storm (4.89%) BlackBerry 8320 Curve (3.95%) BlackBerry 8100 Pearl (2.65%) BlackBerry 8830 (2.63%)

..capitalize on their slice of the BlackBerry pie

GoSpoken is an innovative international mobile e-book and audio book company that offers a wide selection of bestselling titles for purchase and download to mobile phones. The catalogue includes top selling fiction, comedy, history, poetry, childrens titles the options are endless. The business started in 2007 and counts former special services soldier and best selling author Andy McNab amongst its founders. GoSpoken see a high proportion of users visiting their site from BlackBerry devices - current figures show on average they account for over 30% of the total number of mobile visitors each month. To ensure GoSpoken effectively capitalize on the spending power of these visitors they use Bangos payment technology to present the highest converting and most efficient operator billing experience this experience has been specially adapted for smartphone users including those visiting from BlackBerry devices. We see over 30% of users with BlackBerry devices visiting our site each month. Its important for us to provide the most efficient operator billing experience to enable the maximum number of sales. Bango enables us to get the highest conversion rates from this slice of the market and from visitors on smartphone devices Steve Crawford Operations Director of GoSpoken www.gospoken.com

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

(Data from the Bango system June-August 2009)

BlackBerry vs other handsets

In the US BlackBerry devices account for 14%* of the traffic Bango sees browsing the web. BlackBerry ranks third four places above Apple. On an international scale BlackBerry accounts for 5%* of the traffic Bango sees browsing the web and ranks fifth two places above Apple with almost three times the number of people browsing. Nokia is the overall leader accounting for over 36% of traffic seen.
(Data from the Bango system June-August 2009)

Increasing your slice of the BlackBerry pie

About Bango
Bango is the leading provider of payment and analytics products for businesses targeting the fast growing market of internet enabled mobile phones. Bangos unique technology and relationships with mobile operators, handset manufacturers and consumers enable significantly higher payment conversion rates for the worlds leading mobile content businesses. For more information about Bango Payment solutions visit: http://bango.com/payment Bango Analytics provides mobile marketers and website owners the most accurate information about consumers interacting with their campaigns and visiting their site from their mobile phones. For more information about Bango Analytics solutions visit: http://bango.com/analytics As more people access the internet from their mobile phones, Bangos innovative products are an essential part of a businesss web strategy.

Special thanks to
Shaun Barriball from Mobile IQ and Tom Thurston from Mobile Impossible leading mobile site builders and service providers. www.mobileiq.com www.mobileimpossible.com

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