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09/24/2004 Add2Phone and Oulu University bring more power to mobile marketing In Finland, an international consortium of research institutes and companies launched a large research project on mobile communications to seek fresh ways to enhance mobile marketing communications in Raahe and Ylivieska districts. Compared to the rest of Europe, mobile media have not been utilized widely as a marketing channel in Finland so far. Add2Phone, as the global market leader in mobile marketing technology, has agreed to join an academic programme to develop mobile marketing in Finland. The objective of the PEAR (Personalized Mobile Advertising Services) project, launched at the beginning of August 2004, is to investigate and solve the obstacles of development and mushrooming of mobile marketing in Finland. "As a 5-year old pioneer company in mobile marketing, Add2Phone brings experience from over 100 international campaigns into the PEAR project. Our global customers will benefit from the findings of the research, and we are also proud to help smaller local brands to take advantage of mobile marketing", comments Aki Snellman, Chief Development Officer of Add2Phone. PEAR project is carried out at the Pehr Brahe Software Laboratory in Raahe with several international research and business partners. The project aims at developing a multi-channel mobile marketing service system for planning, implementing, and analyzing mobile marketing that utilizes value added features such as personalization, user grouping, presence, profile, and location information. The service system will be tested and developed with real end users in real-life settings. The results are expected to contribute to the invention of new customer oriented service concepts and business models, which open potential business opportunities also in global markets. First internationally significant results of the project are expected during this year. The diffusion of mobile marketing as a marketing medium has been hindered for instance by the fragmented nature of the field and untapped technology opportunities. In the project, the testing of new customer-centered operations models, technologies and value added services is intended to generate internationally notable research results and know-how. The project will not only strengthen the role of the existing companies involved in the consortium, but it will also generate new businesses based on the technological innovations emerging from the project. In phase one, mobile marketing is tested with two companies, J. Kärkkäinen Ltd. and Myllymäen Rauta Ltd / Myllymäen Nettikauppa Ltd. Mobile media will be integrated into the overall marketing communications mix of the companies, and the technical implementation will be based on existing short messaging service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) technologies. The result of this phase will be valuable knowledge on consumer shopping patters and acceptance of technology. Based on the results gained from the field tests, the service system can be developed into a more profound service concept that allows better integration and utilization of the mobile medium in managing customer relationships. By this way, it is justifiable to discuss mobile customer relationship management (mCRM) that is becoming of major importance across different lines of businesses. The goal is for instance to integrate mobile medium into the web portals of Oulu South and Raahe districts in the North of Finland, which are developed to environments supporting real multichannel communication. Three national research partners are responsible for conducting research in the project: the Marketing Department at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Oulu (coordinator of the project), VTT Electronics at Oulu, and Oulu Polytechnic, Raahe Institute of Technology and Business. The partners conduct research in the premises of Pehr Brahe Software Laboratory, which is a joint research laboratory of VTT Electronics (Technical Research Centre), Oulu Polytechnic and the University of Oulu. About Add2Phone Add2Phone is Europe's market-leading technology provider for the mobile marketing and CRM applications market. Add2Phone's SMS, MMS, WAP and Java-enabled products include Mobile Advertising Server, Mobile Competition Server, Content Catalog and PresenceGate. Add2Phone technology provides a proven and reliable growth path into advanced mobile services and m-Commerce. Add2Phone headquarters and R&D center are located in Helsinki, Finland. More information is available at www.add2phone.com For further details, please contact: Aki Snellman, Chief Development Officer, Add2Phone Tel. +358 50 5631397 E-mail: aki.snellman@add2phone.com
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