We all love Quentin “Pulp Fiction” Tarantino, agreed? And we also know how weird can he can get. But can you actually dig what Mr. Q is doing in this Japanese commercial? It’s not that there’s something wrong with making a fool out of yourself in exchange for probably millions of yen, but for the sake of reporting can somebody tells us what’s happening in the commercial? Anybody can translate the commercial for us? Or better yet, send us the transcripts?

It’s a commercial for Japan’s Soft Bank, right? As you can see from the video, there was Quentin clad in Japanese Kimono, talking to two Japanese ladies eating noodles from Ajinomoto, a robot dog on a table a real dog together with a Japanese guy. Then the phone attached to the robot dog rings, and an American lady was seen yelling at Quentin on the phone.

Now, what can you deduce from this commercial?

It’s cute though. They all seem so serious about it.

QR codes have been around for more than a decade, but it is only now that they are gaining popularity in the United States. And now, more than ever, marketers are looking at the extensive possibilities that QR codes offer.

QR stands for Quick Response, and a QR code is another version of barcodes, so to speak. It is composed of black and white squares, and it serves as a repository of data in large amounts. You’ve probably seen QR codes – think of them as barcodes on something, steroids maybe. They are just a little larger and look slightly different from barcodes.

Much like you need a barcode reader to decode the data contained in a barcode, you need a QR scanning application to your smartphone, or any other similar device with a camera. You then need to scan the QR code, and it is up to the application to give you the data that the code contains. More →

Don’t look now folks, but pretty soon,  your favorite restaurants and other business establishments might soon be offering various discounts, freebies and other promotional gigs in cooperation with Foursquare. Yes Foursquare, you it right?  This is because Foursquare has just launched a business strategy that encourages establishment owners to use its service to engage mobile customers with specials and give them the ability to track how their venues is performing over time – through venue analytics.

Foursquare Business provides simple self-service tools that would allow you, as a business manager, to cook up with various kinds of special gigs that would attract customers to your business establishments. Specifically Foursquare Business will let you created the following specials:

• Mayor specials can be unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days).
• Count-based specials are unlocked when a user checks in a certain number of times.
• Frequency-based specials are unlocked every so many check-ins.
• Wildcard specials are always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the special.

What’s cool about this is that Foursquare has mobile apps in three major mobile platforms – Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. And Foursquare can use this mobile apps to send notices to potential customers nearby to possibly invite them to check out your Foursquare promotional gigs.

To use Foursquare’s business tools, all you need to do is claim your venue. Once you’ve done that you can have access to various Foursquare venue analytics tools that will let you view:

• most recent visitors
• most frequent visitors
• the times of day people check in
• total number of unique visitors
• a histogram of check-ins per day

So, what are you waiting for? Get into Foursquare and claim your venue now before somebody else takes it.

Among those who are taking advantage of the growing traffic on Facebook are mobile carriers which created their own Facebook Fan Pages.  Major wireless carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless have their own respective Pages on Facebook which they used as marketing tool containing company profile and other content related to their products and services.  While these Pages maybe a good marketing tool, the question is – are these Pages driving traffic towards the wireless carriers’ websites?

Compete’s data and analysis say yes. According to Compete, traffic as well as engagement to these fan pages have been increasing over the past few months.

Measuring level of user engagement on Facebook fan pages and comparing them among wireless carriers, Compete’s analysis yielded the following:

• The average time per visit for any carrier fan page from December to February was only 36 seconds
• Both Sprint and Verizon Wireless were able to boost their time per visit above one minute in February
• T-Mobile, the newest carrier to create a Facebook fan page experienced a decrease in time per session from December through February

While engagement data were not significantly high, it would be interesting to note that spikes occur whenever these wireless carriers are announcing new features, products and services. And that’s also the time when Facebook Pages are driving more traffic to the wireless carrriers’ websites. More →

Through the years, eBay has proven itself as a very viable e-commerce site providing consumers with fast and reliable platform for both selling and buying consumer goods. But that’s just eBay’s web interface.

Today, eBay is taking its selling business on mobile, specifically on the iPhone with the release of two new apps – eBay.com global marketplace and the new  eBayClassifieds.com site.  Both these iPhone apps allows you to take photos of an item that you want to sell, upload it to Ebay.com or EbayClassifieds and wait until someone notice and buys it.  A pretty simple and quick way of transacting sales online, with the help of the iPhone.

“The eBay Selling app makes it easy for sellers to bring even greater value and selection to eBay and offer more great deals for buyers. Whether selling or shopping, we’ve put the world’s largest online marketplace in the palm of your hand, and we’ve introduced a great new option for consumers who prefer to sell and buy in a trusted, family friendly local classifieds format,” said Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplaces.

True enough both the Ebay Selling App and Ebay Classifieds app lets you do the following:

For eBay Selling Ap – point, shoot and click to list an item from their iPhones in 60 seconds or less, research sales trends and price ranges on eBay and list similar items for sale, easily and clearly view the status of items for sale, share listings with Facebook and Twitter social networks and quickly link to other eBay and PayPal iPhone apps.

For eBay Classifieds App – free ad postings in less than a minute with up to eight photos, either from the iPhone’s photo library or its camera, fast and simple search by keyword, location, price range and other attributes and single-page ad view with reply, watch, and share features – all while on the go.

And before I forgot, if you ordered the iPad, you’d be among the first users who will enjoy the upcoming eBay app for the iPad.

Here’s a demo of the eBay Classifieds iPhone app:

Since everybody in the mobile tech scene are all agog about mobile applications right now, here’s an interesting report called – Sizing Up the Global Mobile Apps Market. According to the study, the overall mobile apps download could grow at the rate of 92% from 7 billion in 2009 to almost 50 million by 2012.

In terms of revenue, mobile ads and virtual goods is expected to bring in 62% more from a mere $4.1 billion in 2009 to around $17.5 billion by 2012.  These include revenues from both paid and free apps.  Free apps developers get to earn through mobile ads peppered on their applications’ interfaces.

The study also highlighted the contributions made by Apple’s Apps Store in sparking new interests into mobile apps. Actually mobile apps have been around since the nineties, but only reached its peak of success when Apple launched its Apps Store. True enough, we’ve only heard about the Google Android Market recently. And soon after the BlackBerry App World, WebOS apps market, and even Nokia’s Ovi store which houses its mobile apps gained some recognition and online mileage.

To achieve this growth, creative strategies should be implemented by countries to attract new customers and different business models since the dynamics of the app market varies in emerging nations. The mobile apps ecosystem will prosper if some actions to enhance discovery, improve user experience, drop price barriers and increase developer revenue share are adapted.

With the increasing popularity and media mileage being gained by location-based social networking sites such as Gowalla and Foursquare, it is not surprising that the Facebook people will take notice of this. And this could be threatening to Facebook especially since this location-based social networking services can take away a number  of users from them.

So, what’s the best way to handle this threat? – Facebook decides to offer the same location-based services. NYT Bits Blog is reporting that Facebook is preparing to launch a new feature that will allow users to share their location.  This will be launched in late April, just in time for Facebook’s f8 developer conference.

What this means is that starting April expect to receive status updates from your friends stating their current locations. But of course, sharing location among friends is just the tip of the iceberg.  This new feature could also be the start of a social recommedation feature which eventually would bring in more brand participation Facebook.

This also explains why Facebook updated is privacy policy last November 2009, where part of the policy stated –  “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

Facebook’s location feature will either be through Facebook’s site or through APIs that will be made available to small time developers.

It’s too early to tell whether which of the location-based services will this new Facebook kill. Although according to the report, Facebook is not really eyeing any of these startups but rather a bigger competitor – Google with its small-business advertising program powered by Google Latitude.

As rumored awhile ago, Google indeed run their own Super Bowl commercial right after the 3rd quarter of the games.  And staying true to what it has grown accustomed to doing, Google’s Super Bowl ad was very simple sans all the fanfare of other Super Bowl ads. Google was not advertising any upcoming product or gadget or anything but rather decided to show the power of its localized  search engine. Simple as it is, the ad was able to convey its message well and has probably endeared many who have watched it.

Actually Google’s ad dubbed “Parisian Love” is an old clip. It has been on YouTube for three months now. So, instead of coming up with an explosive ad which could have cost them a lot of money, like the other ads Google was able to save some money as well. Except for the $30 million fee that it has to pay for the highly coveted 30 seconds  Super Bowl slot.

In case you’ve missed it during the airing, the Google Super Bowl commercial started with a search for “study abroad in paris france” and ended with “how to make assemble a crib.”  Yup, it’s a love story  for crying out loud! It shows how Google search can be a part of everyone’s life.  Simple, straight forward and extra-ordinary way of telling a love story with the help of a search engine. You’ve got to give it to the Google folks for pulling this one out effectively.

Just a quick note to follow-up on the latest development about New York Times plan of introducing a paid model for its online newspaper.  It is now official, NYT will be rolling out the paid-metered model beginning in 2010.

The metered model approach to making its loyal readers pay for their access to the New York Times will give users free access to a set number of articles per month. NYT will start charging users online when they’ve access more than the number of free articles.  According to NYT, this is their way of creating a second revenue stream that will somehow help in preserving the online newspaper. Furthermore, offering the NYT online on a paid subscription basis will also give them the flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content – hence helping them stay connected to the Internet.

To prepare the online NYT, new online infrastructure will be designed.  The good news is,  those who subscribe  to the print NYT will continue to have free access to the online NYT, even when the paid model system is already implemented.

NYT Chairman Arthur Sulzberger expressed confidence that the loyal NYT users would not mind the paid model since it will help the NYT improve on its content.

“Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

Pricing and other details about the new paid model will be released in the coming months. In the meantime, you’ge 11 more months of free access to the NYT online, so make the most of it.

 

If Moto Droid’s controversial ad campaign sparked some tremendous amount of buzz in the U.S., its European counterpart, the Motorola Milestone seemed to be a tamer version. The Moto Milestone is currently available  in most Europe mobile distributors and earlier report from Expansys indicates that sales is starting to pick up, slowly.

Maybe the dull and boring ad campaign is not helping out Motorola to gain some market momentum for the Milestone? Or is it because Europeans are still not ready yet to embrace Android?

Now, going back to the ad campaign, any idea as to why the European version is not as hard-hitting to iPhone as the American ad campaign? Right now, I could only think of one thing – that Motorola was not after all behind the ad campaign that kept on attacking the iPhone and even AT&T. So, it’s quite obvious that Verizon is the mastermind of the iPhone bashing after all.

Anyway, Motorola Milestone’s video ad aside from not hitting any competitor was also nicely done with a bit of serious tone. It actually suits well with the Motorola Milestone’s features.

So, which of the Motorola Droid/Milestone’s video ads do you like better?

Via Pocket-lint