Free is also France’s youngest Internet Service Provider and since a few weeks also its hottest new mobile telco. Launched in 1999, Free started by offering free Internet access, adding telephony and TV services in the years thereafter while continuing to upgrade its network.

Free mobile

This month, Free launched its own mobile network and a subscription model that appeals to the company name.

Using a strategy of very low pricing and an unlimited voice and data bundle, the new operator managed to win almost 2 million subscribers overnight. The number is growing fast – it currently stands at around 3 million.

This already represents 4.5% of the French market, which counts some 66 million subscribers currently according to The Netsize Guide.

Netsize and Free

Netsize messaging solutions are directly integrated with Free. Netsize customers can thus reach Free subscribers and efficiently send Application-to-Person (A2P) SMS messages, reliably and quickly. In addition to using our SMS gateway API, they can also reach the Free network with Netsize mMarketing, our easy-to-use web-based mobile campaign solution.

At present, Free is taking its place at the French mobile operators’ dining table. While the saying goes, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Free seems to prove the opposite. Meanwhile, Netsize focuses on delivering the best solutions for reaching all French subscribers – via messaging as well as operator billing.

Click here to discuss your needs to launch or extend mobile services in France.

Gemalto and Netsize launch the brand new Netsize Guide by Gemalto today, the comprehensive reference work on the state of mobile technology and its impact on business and society.

Available as a free PDF download today from www.netsize.com, the 10th edition has identified three themes that characterize the state of mobile today and its future:

• Transaction – How we’ve come to rely on mobile devices for commerce from researching products to making purchases.
• Transformation – How mobile devices are increasingly driving content, communications and connectivity.
• Trust – How we require — and will soon demand — simple, transparent services and devices we can trust.

Aptly titled Truly Mobile, The Netsize Guide by Gemalto underlines these three key themes, supported by insights and interviews with over a dozen senior executives from companies across the business ecosystem including ARM, Atlas Premium Brands, BNP Paribas, CMO Council, The Coca-Cola Company, Gameloft, GlobalPlatform, Informa Telecoms & Media, Millennial Media, SingTel, Texas Instruments, Trusted Logic, Yahoo! and others.

We thank Peggy Anne Salz — chief analyst and publisher of MobileGroove.com, a top 50 source of analysis and commentary on all things mobile — who once again did a great job of interviewing the companies and writing the theme chapters of the book.

Highly rated …

In its 10-year history the Netsize Guide has built a large and loyal audience of readers who rate it among their must-read industry resources.

According to a 2010 survey of Netsize Guide readers, the majority of respondents — that is to say, YOU — gave the Netsize Guide high marks indeed! On a scale of 1-to-10, 75 percent of respondents gave the book an ’8′ or higher. Specifically, 37 percent gave it an ’8′, 29 percent gave it a ’9′ and 9 percent awarded it a perfect ’10′. You also told us you consider the Netsize Guide to be better or much better than other mobile industry reports. Allow us to thank you again for your participation in our survey and for your high appreciation of our work!

Packed with stats …

In line with our long track record for excellence the Netsize Guide by Gemalto uniquely brings together a wealth of market statistics from its partners Informa Telecoms & Media, comScore and SocialBakers. The 220-page book is packed with detailed market forecasts that reveal current operator market share, smartphone penetration, and consumer usage of mobile apps and social network Facebook across over 40 countries, and 3-year forecasts (2011-2014) for selected data.

An expert resource for benchmarking and planning …

Covering the use of mobile technologies for business and entertainment applications, the Netsize Guide has served as a beacon for business professionals and executives across industry sectors for a decade. Its unique format represents a balance of thought leadership and exclusive C-level interviews with in-depth market analysis, practical case studies and a wealth of practical mobile telecommunications data. Thus, the Netsize Guide by Gemalto is an indispensible knowledge resource for benchmarking and planning mobile services, allowing mobile professionals everywhere to stay up to date with mobile trends.

… available today as a free pdf download

The Netsize Guide by Gemalto is available as a free pdf download directly from the Netsize website and from our global launch partners including: 4A’s, AIME,the Mobile Data Association (MDA), Mobile Entertainment, the MEF, MobileGroove and ServicesMobiles.

We are confident you will enjoy reading this Netsize Guide by Gemalto and benefit from its insights. It is an essential read certain to serve you well as an industry reference for the year to come. Please feel free to contact us any time with your comments or ideas via Twitter (@NetsizeGuide and @NetsizeCorp), email [guide (at) netsize.com] or our websites www.gemalto.com and www.netsize.com.

Alexander Vlasblom
Marketing Communications Director, Netsize & Trusted Logic
Gemalto

Few major brands are as sophisticated in their use of the mobile channel as Coca-Cola. To date the company has embraced a wide variety of activities and mechanisms, including apps, games, high-performing SMS campaigns, and even a music download store. At the other end of the spectrum, Coca-Cola has also reported successful mobile commerce trials involving mobile phones and specially equipped vending machines.

Coca-Cola is also one of the first to actively embrace branded apps. In December 2010 it joined with the GSMA to sponsor the Brand App Challenge, a competition in which mobile app developers created “brand apps” for a select group of global consumer brands, including Coca-Cola, with its Coca-Cola, Coke Zero and Diet Coke brands.

While Coke has been quick to jump into branded apps, some recent reports question whether applications can deliver positive results across the board.

A survey of 781 adults in the U.S. conducted by EffectiveUI on behalf of Harris Interactive found the vast majority (76 percent) of mobile app users felt that all brand name companies and organizations should have mobile apps to make shopping or interacting with them easier. However, 38 percent of mobile application users revealed they were not satisfied with most of the apps currently available from their favorite brands. What’s more, 69 percent reported that a brand name mobile app that is not useful, helpful or easy to use, results in a negative perception about the brand.

“Mobile applications are the sure fire way to extend a brand,” Rebecca Flavin, CEO of EffectiveUI, said in a statement. “It’s time for organizations to understand how to fully leverage the mobile channel and optimize a user-centered approach to drive adoption, as well as reinforce and drive brand loyalty.”

What is the business value of branded apps? Which marketing approaches deliver the best results? How has Coke harnessed mobile to encourage brand engagement and deliver effective (even location-linked) mobile advertising? We ask Tom Daly, Coca-Cola Group Manager, Global Connections.

Q: Coca-Cola is a mover in the mobile space. Your company is a premium member of Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and active in promoting the benefits of the mobile channel. Why is mobile so central to your strategy?

A: You need to first understand how we see mobile. For us it’s all about idea of making mobile an “enabler of desire”. Essentially, our mobile strategy was written some 70+ years ago, way before the first cellular connection was ever made. Back then it was about putting our brands “within arms’ reach of desire”. That sentiment was expressed by Robert Woodruff, who was our chairman. That was the way we defined the company’s role as a brand marketer, and as a partner to the bottling companies that manufacture and distribute our brands and our retail partners who carry our brands.

Our task is to create desire for the brands that we create. We have a choice: we can make the mobile phone and enabler of desire, or we can make it a barrier to desire. We chose to make mobile an enabler.

Q: Desire is the end-game – making consumers want to and be able to connect with your brands. What are the recent mobile activities you have pursued to achieve this goal?

A: We use all the mobile mechanisms available. Take simple SMS. We use SMS in a campaign that allows consumers to earn free airtime. They just purchase a Coke and text the code on the packaging to receive free airtime or free text messages. Teenagers, in particular, love our brands and love their phones, so it’s a natural marriage, if you will. It’s a great opportunity to leverage consumer desire for Coca-Cola and mobile.

For the World Cup we did a great program where we let consumers express their feelings about the brands using mobile. Consumers could upload videos of how they celebrated the goals. So this is a great expression of people’s passion and energy for football, which is their same energy and passion they have about Coca-Cola. We connected the two using mobile videos.

Q: One of your most successful campaigns has been Gimme Credit, which received an award from the MMA for its effectiveness and exemplary use of mobile. What can you tell me about the campaign and the key learnings?

A: Yes, that’s the campaign I mentioned that gives consumers free airtime. We have rolled it out in multiple markets and it’s been successful everywhere we’ve tried it. As a company we are testing and learning what works not in one market; but in many markets. We’ve learned that there are certain things that consumers everywhere want and Gimme Credit is success because people want free airtime and rewards for their purchases.

We’ve done something like Gimme Credit in India, the U.K. and Germany, and we’ve done it in tests in the U.S. as well. The challenge – and the opportunity – is how to get scale. The next step is to get the scale of The Coca-Cola Company and the scale of mobile technology aligned so we can really start building bigger, more broadly accessible programs. That way, by the time we get to events like the London Olympics or the next World Cup, we will have the ability to deploy these mobile campaigns on a much larger scale and on a much more global level.

Q: Gimme Credit is universally accepted, universally appreciated. But brands still have to have a local focus. What are the tensions or challenges of being a global brand and maintaining a local focus?

A: The challenge is to develop powerful core ideas for a campaign and then to localize the “art” of execution, while scaling the “science”.  One way we accomplish that is to empower a country to take the lead for certain global initiatives. For example this year’s [2010] Festive campaign is a global campaign with the digital –including mobile – led by teams in Germany. Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, or Kwanza, or Christmas, or have just celebrated Ramadan – it’s all about family and bringing people together. Coca-Cola is a part of that experience, but there’s enough that is similar to create common experiences around the world and across digital and mobile campaigns.  Broadly speaking, that’s the territory of the “big idea”. From there, we find ways to scale while at the same time enabling maximum flexibility for localization.

Q: Staying with the global push for a moment, how do you manage these, to drive global mobile services and marketing innovation at Coca-Cola?

A: It’s a disciplined process, as you might imagine. The key is to keep a clear understanding of the roll out and who is doing what. So, we may have a single lead agency for mobile, a company that is doing work at the center. The work they do and the deliverables they are responsible for are clearly defined. There may be a transition to a local agency that has the latitude to take a hand- off related to certain core ideas and assets.

We have elements that can be reused across geographies. It’s back to the idea of scaling the science and localizing is the art. Underlying it all, from a technical point of view, are well documented standards and processes.

Q: You are sharply focused on mobile and it is listed as a line item in your budget, which is quite a statement. Could you quantify for me the opportunity in mobile for Coca-Cola?

A: I can certainly share are a couple of data points with you. We serve our products 1.6 billion times a day, which means that 1.6 billion servings of Coca Cola are poured every day.  There are five billion mobile subscribers worldwide. Do the math and there is a lot of opportunity to use mobile to reach these consumers. And again, when you think that our core strategy is about enabling desire for our brands, then there is also opportunity to use mobile to reach and retain many of the five billion consumers who have mobile and may not currently drink Coke, for example.

Mobile is a line item in the budget. Mobile is included because we know we need to manage and understand mobile. Most importantly, we can not treat mobile as a standalone activity. We know that mobile works best when incorporated in a larger marketing context. So, to help us understand the optimal mix, we’re keeping track of it along with other line items. I can’t share the precise trajectory, but it wouldn’t surprise anyone to know that mobile is growing.

Download the updated Netsize Guide 2010 to read the rest of this interview.

It is with great pleasure that we present to you a brand new edition of the Netsize Guide 2010, Mobile Renaissance. For the first time in its 9-year history the book is now updated in its publication year with five new interviews and hot new 2010 telecommunications market data. We´ve kept the original 2009 data, providing you with a unique quarterly view on the mobile telecommunications market trend in 40 countries globally.

Download the Netsize Guide 2010 Updated Edition

Share with us your opinion of the Netsize Guide. Please take a moment to take part in our Netsize Guide reader survey. The questionnaire will take a few minutes to complete. Your feedback will help us to stay focused on what matters to you.

Take the Netsize Guide reader survey

We´d also like to stay in touch with you via social media. Follow @NetsizeCorp and @NetsizeGuide on Twitter. You can also visit our Netsize Guide microsites – Mobile Renaissance and the Netsize briefing room on MSearchGroove – where you are welcome to post your suggestions regarding new topics and trends you feel we should explore in the Netsize Guide.

We are confident you will benefit from the content and case studies we are covering in our upcoming projects, and we look forward to learning what content and companies you would appreciate most.

9th Edition of the Netsize almanac provides unique and candid report on how the industry currently views market issues, business opportunities and mobile’s winners and losers

Netsize, the leading mobile communications and commerce enabler, today launches the Netsize Guide 2010, the comprehensive annual almanac that uniquely combines analysis of key developments that top the mobile industry agenda in 2010 with a wealth of statistical data on the global mobile services and content markets.

The Netsize Guide 2010, aptly titled Mobile Renaissance, examines the role of mobile as the catalyst for change and improvement in society, enabling innovation across all industry sectors and countries.

“The advance of new devices such as touch screen mobile phones, new services such as mobile healthcare, and new business models such as applications stores are significant developments that together yield an exponential increase in ideas and innovation,” says Stanislas Chesnais, Chief Executive Officer, Netsize. “We are indeed on the edge of a modern-day Renaissance, which is why this year’s Netsize Guide takes its name from this remarkable period. Mobile is not about technology; it’s about the means to collaborate, communicate, and connect with diverse networks of people, breaking down the walls between cultures and bringing together the physical and virtual worlds.”

Exclusive interviews with 28 industry senior executives at leading companies and organizations including Havas, Marks & Spencer, Mobile Marketing Association, Nokia, Paypal and Sony provide unique perspectives on these themes and reveal how players across the mobile ecosystem are preparing to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities ahead.

The Netsize Guide 2010 also includes the results of Mobile Trends Survey 2010. Netsize asked over 1,000 mobile professionals and practitioners from 67 countries for their views on 5 key themes, including the advance of mobile applications stores, mobile social networking, customer-brand relationships through mobile, progress towards global mobile commerce and the increasing importance of mobile across a range of business verticals.

The Netsize Guide 2010 presents detailed data on the wireless telecommunications sector in 41 countries, covering revenues, market shares and value added service offerings for messaging and billing of 194 mobile network operators.

The launch of the Netsize Guide 2010 also introduces its online companion, www.mobile-renaissance.com. This blog will feature further interviews, findings and market data updates throughout the year.

The Netsize Guide 2010 is available from www.netsize.com, and Netsize Guide partners globally including American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), Association for Interactive Media & Entertainment (AIME), Comunic@tii Mobile, Direct Marketing Association India, Mobile Data Association (MDA), Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), Mobile Zeitgeist, MSearchGroove, and Services Mobiles. The Netsize Guide 2010 will be available for Amazon Kindle and EPUB format e-book readers in March.

FACTS & FIGURES FROM THE NETSIZE GUIDE 2010

Selected highlights from the Mobile Trends Survey:

• Activation: 87 percent of respondents indicate that the Apple App Store will be most successful, followed by Google’s Android Market (60 percent), Nokia’s Ovi Store (30 percent) and RIM’s BlackBerry App World (27 percent). Surprisingly, applications stores run by mobile operators finished low in the list.
• Interaction: Despite the rising popularity of application stores, side-loading and content-forwarding remains the most important distribution channel for mobile entertainment content, ranked first by 84 percent of respondents.
• Conversation: Mobile is not a stand-alone technology. 92 percent of respondents felt it is most effective when combined with online media – which includes Web, email and social media — as part of a cross-media message; a significant number of respondents said they also see huge growth opportunities for communications that combine mobile and direct mailing via email.
• Transaction: For 73 percent of respondents search, good navigation and targeted offers lead the list of requirements for a good shopping experience on mobile; 60 percent said a choice of payment methods and the ability to have purchases charged to their phone bill is also central.
• Transformation: 2010 will see the take-off of permission-based mobile commerce. 71 percent of respondents expect these purchases will be triggered by location-aware marketing, while 57 percent believe mobile coupons and campaigns involving 2D barcodes will generate sales.

Selected highlights from the Country Data:

• Developing countries have fastest growing subscriber base: India (45.3%, from 2008 to 2009), followed by Morocco (30.6%), Malaysia (17.9%), and the other BRIC countries (Brazil, China and Russia).
• Greece is the country with highest mobile phone penetration (170%), and India has lowest penetration (37.5%). For the 41 countries surveyed, the average penetration rate increased from 62.8% in 2008 to 68.9% in 2009, on a total population of 2.66 billion.
• China is forecasted to top USA in 2010 as largest mobile messaging market, with €11.45 billion and €10.5 billion revenues respectively. USA is the winner on mobile internet revenues with a whopping €14.9 billion forecasted revenues, against €11.7 billion in Japan and €4 billion in China.

Netsize, a leading mobile commerce and communications enabler, today revealed the first results of the Mobile Trends Survey 2010. Drawing from an online survey of 1,000+ professionals and practitioners, the survey provides insights into key trends that top the industry agenda, including the advance of mobile applications stores, progress towards global mobile commerce and the pivotal importance of mobile as a means to bridge our virtual and physical worlds.

Using the occasion of M-Days – one of Europe’s biggest mobile industry events and exhibitions held in Munich, Germany – Netsize provided conference attendees, industry influencers and key bloggers a sneak peek into the controversial survey results, starting with respondents’ views on app store leaders and the enablers that give them and their offers the competitive edge.

According to the survey, the vast majority (87 percent) of respondents believe the Apple App Store will be the most successful app store in the mobile space. Google’s Android Market is a distant second (60 percent), followed by Nokia’s Ovi Store (30 percent) and RIM’s BlackBerry App World (27 percent). Surprisingly, applications stores run by mobile operators finished low in the list, indicating that platform providers and handset makers may well dominate the space for a time to come.

When asked to rate the unique selling proposition of application stores over other software distribution and sales channels, 65 percent of respondents put convenience (“everything in one place”) at the top of the list. This was followed by compatibility “software applications specific to the device”), choice (“a long tail of thousands of applications to choose from”), and ease of payment (“operator billing, for example”).

Netsize, provider of operator billing solutions to most of the large mobile device vendors for their application stores, released the application store survey findings to the stage for a lively discussion of the future of mobile and the role of software application stores during “Mobile Trends 2020, Mobile Research and App-Commerce: What Comes Next in Europe?” The M-Days session was led and moderated by Peggy Anne Salz, mobile thought leader and MSearchGroove Founder and Chief Analyst.

The complete mobile trends survey results – which cover topics related to mobile entertainment, mobile marketing, mobile commerce, mobile payments and mobile convergence – will be released as part of the Netsize Guide 2010, a comprehensive mobile industry analysis and almanac published by Netsize and written by MSearchGroove’s Salz. Netsize will launch the Netsize Guide 2010 on February 16, 2010 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.