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Pizza Hut’s iPhone App Has Generated $1 Million

More and more companies are creating iPhone applications as a way to reinforce branding and to gain new customers. Some companies are even seeing increased sales thanks to iPhone apps.

One of those is the Pizza Hut app for the iPhone and iPod touch, which has now generated more than $1 million in sales according to MobileMarketer. The US-only iPhone app was first introduced three months ago.

Although Pizza Hut had a WAP enabled mobile site before launching the iPhone app, the iPhone app has far exceeded expectations.

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New WAP portal from Disney

The Walt Disney Company has launched a brand new WAP portal, allowing South African kids, tweens and families to access a range of Disney content directly from their cellphones.

The portal, which is accessed by simply entering a shortcode into the Internet browser on a cellphone, features a range of exciting content including downloadable wallpapers, games, animations, music, ringtones, competitions and news.

Content will also span the Disney Channel’s most popular series such as Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place and Phineas & Ferb. The portal can be accessed as follows: Type in disneysa.mobi into the WAP browser on a cellphone or text Disney to 33978 and a link to the portal will be sent to your phone.

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Internet access from mobile phones is on the rise

The latest Sweeney Research (SR) found that 20 percent of respondents had visited MySpace via mobile, and 15 percent were frequent users of the site, visiting more than once a day. According to MySpace, its internal showed around 150,000 Australians visited the MySpace Mobile WAP sites in December 2008. Many WordPress blogs and WordPress blog hosting companies use Mobile Plugins that let you display your blog or a site on a mobile device such as a Blackberry.

The latest SR shows that Australians are using their mobile phones to go online for music (43 percent), games (33 percent) and sport (32 percent). They are also sharing photos (70 percent), ringtones (46 percent) and music (46 percent) via their mobile when they are online.

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Move beyond voice

Mobile phone owners are embracing a multitude of mobile services these days. In addition to making and receiving calls, the latest mobile phones offer a lot of features like built-in camera, games, text messaging, internet connectivity through GPRS, Bluetooth, etc. Currently, text messaging is catching on with a more than half of the population. Better mobile handsets play a major part in encouraging consumers to try text and to make this an easier activity for them. This technology has changed the way people interact with mobile phones. Text messaging is indeed a simple yet powerful communication medium for mobile phone users.

Another type of mobile messaging which is gaining popularity is MMS (Multimedia messaging service). The growth of MMS will mirror the growth of camera phones. MMS allow you to send picture messages and share it with others. As the network of MMS capable handsets grows, there is an increase in sending pictures between phones by MMS.

Mobile phone companies such as Motorola, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and many more have seen their profits sore since the introduction of camera mobile phones. Various networks like Orange, 3 Mobile, T Mobile, O2, Vodafone, Virgin etc offer free camera phone with special deals. The larger colour screen of camera phones makes the mobile phone an interesting and leisure device. These phones allow you to take an excellent photo and set it as the background image in your phone.

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) adoption has partly been slowed historically by an unattractive, slow and text based user interface. WAP allows mobile phone users to have access to information services. The WAP enabled mobile phone can be connected to the internet instantly and can access any internet service immediately. Colour camera phones tend to support GPRS connectivity and also icon based graphical interface. This makes WAP a far more convincing user experience, and hence is increasing strong WAP adoption. All these features make a mobile phone more than just a device for handling calls.

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Why WAP isn’t as bad as people say

It’s unlucky that the acronym for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) has such an unfortunate rhyme! Even more unlucky for WAP, it burst onto the mobile communication scene with lavish promises from the Mobile Operators (you know who you are) of ‘The Internet on your Mobile’ and ‘Take the Internet with you’.

That really was a load of WAP.

So, a few years on we can ask, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ‘WAP, what is it good for’?

More than you might think, given the current deafening silence from those same Mobile Operators.

The rise (and rise) of SMS is instructive. This has gone from nowhere to everywhere with practically no promotion from the networks. Type SMS into Google and you get 52 million hits! In China in 2003, 220 Billion SMS messages were sent. During 2003 in the UK alone, 30 Billion were sent, which equates to 500 for every man, woman and child in the entire country! What is going on here?

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Wap is Crap

WAP is crap and the growing epidemic of WAPlash are two of the familiar taunts repeated by users of phones with wireless application protocol browsers, which allow users to access so-called Web content on their phones.

WAP has received a bad rap, not only from the media, but also from users of WAP phones who choose not to access data on them. Less than 20 percent of Americans with phones that have WAP browsers actually ever access WAP sites, according to Jupiter Communications analyst Lucas Graves. Only 10 percent of Sprint PCS’ customers access the “wireless Web,” according to Jay Highly, vice president of business marketing for Sprint PCS.

It’s cumbersome to input data on a phone’s keypad and read from such a tiny screen, analysts say. Data is transmitted slowly at 9 kbs and the user pays airtime for the content.

However, don’t blame WAP as a technology for the lack of interest in the phones, analysts say. Perhaps WAP developers are to blame for over-hyping the technology and then receiving a black eye for it, but some think the real limitation of WAP is the lack of compelling content written in its wireless markup language (WML).

On the other hand, software developer Openwave has 14 million subscribers worldwide — which means there’s little interest when compared to the 70 million WAP-enabled handsets that have been sold.