MobileWebsiteWatch

Discover® Card today announced the launch of a mobile solution for its cardmembers, Discover.com Mobile. This mobile version of the Discover Card Web site will allow cardmembers to manage their credit card account directly from their mobile phone’s browser.The new mobile Web site offers a simplified version of the Discover.com account summary interface and includes the following functionality:

• Make a payment

• View recent transactions

• View recent and pending payments

• View rewards activity

• Enroll in the 5% Cashback Bonus® program

While there are a few banks out there that offer mobile services, such as Chase (SMS only) and services like Paypal, for the most part this major function of that people need access to in their everyday lives and consistently report having a desire to do via mobile in surveys, is sadly underserved. Discover is making some great headway ion this space and clearly has a solid understanding of the market and its customer base.

“At Discover, we know that busy consumers are constantly looking for more convenient ways to stay in control of their finances,” said Sarah Alter, vice president of e-business and new markets at Discover Financial Services. “Discover.com Mobile provides a new service channel that allows cardmembers to have access to their account information right at their fingertips. Whether by telephone, Internet or now mobile phone, Discover Card is committed to providing cardmembers with the services they need at the time, place and method they choose.”

As more and more companies turn to using the booming mobile web channel to provide serives to thier cusometers, streamlined and mobile optimized products like this will continue to grow rapidly in importance use and payoff.

This is just a guilty favorite of mine. Gamefly, the online service that rents video games through the mail, in the same way that Netflix rents DVDs, has launched a full mobile version of its web site. This is a really great example of best practices for mobile web. The user has access to almost 100% of the features and functionality available on the regular site and it is presented in a view that is specialized for mobile. The interface is sleek and easy to use, Users can add games to their queue, organize the list of games they have coming, look up games and get info an cheats, even purchase games right from their phones. Another best practice point: no new URL. All you have to do is go to gamefly.com on any phone and you get the specialized view automatically. It even detects what kind of device you have and sets it up especially for that. I have tried it on both a Nokia and an iPhone and got a custom interface. Pretty slick.

The benefit here is that a service like Gamefly needs to keep it users engaged to keep them paying their subscriptions month after month. Allowing gamers to add a game to their queue wherver they may be (at a store or on the schoolbus getting a reccomendation from a friend) increases the level of interaction customers have with the service, and makes it personal since the interaction is occuring on their personal device.

All retailers take note: Ralph Lauren is leading the way in innovation of more than just clothes. The visionary luxury brand has taken some big and bold steps into the mobile realm, including a new mobile e-commerce site. The site, (http://m.ralphlauren.com or just ralphlauren.com if you’re on a mobile device) allows you to do a number of things including shop for, and buy apparel right from your phone. There are also sections about tennis and style and about the brand in general.

One oddity that was noted was the rendering of different site sections. The home pages and informational pages about tennis and other stuff seem to just be plain old CSS and, although heavily designed a and well put together still a little dumb. When the home page renders on a hi res screen (like an iPhone) the entire site is crammed into the upper left-hand corner of the screen, forcing the user to zoom and peck and basically defeating the purpose of the mobile site.

The shopping area, on the other hand, has a much more robust interface. We tested it on 3 different devices and it resizes for all of them perfectly with zero distortion. On an iPhone, the pictures even resize when you rotate the view. Strange why they didn’t do this for the rest of the site.

Another big move is the major push for the QR code campaign. MobileWebsiteWatch caught this clip on Good Morning America on Wednesday. In the video you can see how easy it is to get to a product right from the camera on the phone. While this application is not yet widespread here in the US, the idea is very solid and it seems that Polo is making big strides to get out in front of the market which I expect will pay off pretty big. According to a Reuters interview with David Lauren, SVP of Advertising:

The apparel maker will begin placing special codes in print ads, mailings and store windows along with its sponsorship of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, which begins later this month.

Shoppers can download special software to camera-phones to scan the codes and be directed to a phone-friendly version of a Ralph Lauren website, where they can shop, watch tennis videos and read company content…

Cell phones with preinstalled code-readers should come to market within a year, Lauren said.

Full back cover ad of "New York Magazine" this month

Polo Ralph Lauren is a sponsor of the US Tennis Open Tennis Championship and is expected to release the marketing blitz with the commencement of the tournament on August 25th, 2008. Lots of print material is already floating around, like the full back cover of New York Magazine this month (the issue with “Race” on the front)

The American Journalism Review reported this month that more than ever, news organizations are rushing to engage their readers on the reading device they use the most, their mobile phones.

American news companies aren’t waiting for the ultimate smart phone (one equipped with a microprocessor and storage capability) to jump into the mobile race. Consumers can use any of 500 different handheld devices and 20 different mobile Internet browsers to access breaking news from the Washington Post, New York Times, Gannett, Cox, Hearst, ESPN, CNN, Condé Nast, MSNBC, Fox Mobile, CBS Mobile and The Weather Channel, among many others. All of them are offering, at the very least, a slimmed-down mobile Web site featuring text-based news and links to stories, sports scores, restaurant and movie listings, maps and traffic alerts, celebrity gossip, tidbits like stainbuster guides, stock quotes and “dude decoders” for single women. Some sites feature simple (and very tiny) photographs, others offer mobile video, sports coverage and bilingual TV programming - all part of a wonderfully weird, not-quite-there multimedia outreach.

I think it is really relevant that this article points out something that we all know to be true about mobile internet, but that gets short play time next to glitzty talk about iPhones and new devices. What I am referring to is the purposful nature of the mobile user. People who are browsing the web on their mobile device typically know what they want: to buy a movie ticket, to read an interesting magazine article while waiting for the bus, to check the price of an item in a store against that online, etc. Mobile publishers and companies that recognize this and provide optimized versions of their websites for mobile users have not only been the most successful, but will continue to be the most successful, even as phones themselves get faster and more advanced.

Ironically, the most successful publishers of mobile content may also be the most focused - channelized, in industry jargon. Hearst, which has had a mobile presence since 1999, now boasts nine mobile sites, including m.cosmopolitan.com and m.goodhousekeeping.com, with more than 5 million page views per month. All of the mobile sites are aimed almost exclusively at women. But just targeting women in general may not be focused enough, suggests Sophia Stuart, director of mobile for Hearst Digital. “We’ve followed women around and noticed the gaps in their day,” she says. “And we’ve discovered there’s a new type of consumer, a woman who is out on the go and needs a lot of very different information to make her life easier, such as parenting information, or if she’s nursing a new baby, or wants her stainbuster’s guide - we’ve tested every single stain on every single fabric.”

Hearst compiles the information into a series of easy-to-use lists, links and databases accessible to cell phones on its magazines’ mobile sites. Instead of relying on actual articles, Hearst readers get fashion news, recipes, blog snippets and dating tips on the fly. The mobile Web sites are designed to do just a few things very well. “You need to know a hell of a lot of technology to make this seamless,” Stuart says. Hearst does technology by outsourcing to many different mobile software vendors, although its digital media group contributes wireless expertise and knowledge of content and branding.

Moreover, the sophistication level of the device does not change the psychology of the human user, in fact, quite the contrary, it only changes their expectations. As people acquire that new phone with high speed data services, they expect seamless and focused content that can only be delivered by finding the right mobile partner with expertise required to deliver that optimized experience in a seamless fashion to whatever device this new class of consumers has while on the go.