Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage about revenue from Brazil's mobile youth, a Pew report on mobile habits, the conclusion of NPR's look at race and the digital divide, a guide to building voice infrastructure in developing regions, and what m-banking services need to consider about non-literate consumers.

• A report by Youth Research Partners states that there will be an estimated $20 billion in revenue brought in by mobile youth in Brazil in 2010, and also predicts where the industry will be in 2012.

• A study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that "54 percent of U.S. cellphone owners have used their mobile device to send someone a photo or video, 20 percent to watch a video, and 15 percent to post a photo or video online."

• After NPR's series on race and the Digital Divide, Digital Citizen Pulse looked at why mobile phones could provide U.S. minorities with online access - and the benefits and potential pitfalls this could have for kids. 

• If you're interested in building a low-cost telephony system, then this guide to building voice infrastructure in developing regions will be handy – it's available for download in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic and explains both technical and non-technical guidelines for building out telephony over the Internet.

• Designing m-banking programs for non-literate users of mobile phones means that developers need to account for a lot of extra considerations - how will icons be interpreted in different regions? Will non-literate users have help from literate friends or family to use mobile services? What level of literacy do users have? This CGAP article looks at some lessons from research into literacy, and how they can be translated to mobile banking.

[Mobile Minute Disclaimer: The Mobile Minute is a quick round-up of interesting stories that have come across our RSS and Twitter feeds to keep you informed of the rapid pace of innovation. Read them and enjoy them, but know that we have not deeply investigated these news items. For more in-depth information about the ever-growing field of mobile tech for social change, check out our blog posts, white papers and research, how-tos, and case studies.]

Image courtesy Flickr user QiFei

India is a country of villages, with over 70% of its population living in rural areas. For mobile operators, this means future mobile subscribers in the country are going to come from India’s villages.

Between 2002 and 2006, mobile penetration increased by a more than 40% in India (source ITU). Still, rural penetration is low, making up just over one fifth of the total mobile user base in India, as reported by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in 2007.  The future of the mobile industry is exanding in rural India, but what do mobile operators need to do to tap into this market?

In 2009, Accenture, a global management consulting company, surveyed 2,400 current and potential rural consumers and interviewed 15 senior-level executives representing the mobile telephony ecosystem. The goal was to understand the needs of rural customers for mobile services and identify the value propositions for rural services by mobile operators.

The research was divided in two phases. In the first phase, 15 executives representing mobile operators, handset manufacturers, telecom infrastructure providers, application and content developers were interviewed. The second phase involved an assessment of 2400 surveys completed by rural citizens (802 current mobile customers and 1634 non-users) to gain an understanding of what mobile services and devices customers value.

The research offers valuable insight to mobile operators to inform their strategies for profitable rural expansion in India. Urban markets have fuelled the majority of profits, but as penetration begins to pass the 80% mark and prices and profit margins are plummeting, operators need to look closely at their rural strategies.  

Key challenges faced by mobile operators for (profitable) rural expansion were presented in Accenture's full report that can be found here. A few key findings:

• Rural markets are more expensive to serve because there is a shortage of technical infrastructure across rural India.
• Diverse cultures, educational standards and technical knowledge in rural areas influence mobile phone adoption differently.
• Frequent power shortages and more rugged environmental conditions are obstacles for mobile phone use.
• Cost recovery is the main challenge for operators in their rural expansion.

The survey of rural consumers revealed some fascinating information as well. Several disconnects between rural consumers and the mobile industry were identified. Rural consumers and senior executives agreed that cost of handsets and lack of mobile infrastructure resulting in poor reception were among the top barriers for mobile adoption. However, operators were surprised to learn that the issue of accessing electricity to charge phones was noted as a significant barrier by rural users.

Rural customers identified their top three needs to be: cheap long distance communication for personal or business purposes; reliability of tool for communication, and privacy. Senior executives perceived rural consumers’ needs to be: cheap communication, style/status, and platform for entertainment. There clearly exists a discrepancy between mobile operator’s understanding of what is needed and valued and their rural customers.  While rural consumers value functionality, operators seem to think that entertainment, style and status are most important.

The most value-added service, according to rural users, was SMS (31%), but only moderate (50-74%) awareness around this function was reported. Other services included download ringtones/wall papers (19%), agricultural alerts (9%), and news in local languages (8%). Mobile banking in local language ranked low, perhaps as its favorability depends on a reliable infrastructure.

The Accenture study offers some key strategy points for mobile operators when examining their rural plan of action. Among these suggestions are:

• A provision of culturally specific and personal after-sale service is highly valued by rural customers.
• A distribution strategy that accommodates rural lifestyle.
• Reduction of costs through outsourcing services.

It is also clear that collaboration between players in the mobile ecosystem is essential if infrastructure shortages are to be tackled.

At MobileActive, we’ve held a bi-weekly Research Ignite series to keep up with the latest in research related to mobiles for development. For the past few weeks, our team has been learning and discussing new research and reports. We invite you to put on your learning caps and plug into our screencasts, where we will feature some exciting developments in the world of m4d.

For this Ignite, we’re featuring three studies that were presented at the 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The research covers mobile games in rural India and China that address literacy, and a study on mobile Internet use in South Africa.

mGames for Literacy and Mobile Internet - Research Ignite #1 from MobileActive.org on Vimeo.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of California, Carnegie Mellon University and Nokia Research Palo Alto developed two mobile games, Multimedia Word and Drumming Stroke, which aim to help young children in rural China recognize Chinese characters and practice strokes. It is the first known m-game that leverages a mobile learning tool for the Chinese language.

In rural India, empirical studies show that children often miss school largely due to family labor, assisting in domestic work at home or in the farm without wages or as hired labor. The authors believe that “Mobile learning can empower poor children to balance their educational and income earning goals,” and so, pursued the development of a mobile game to teach English vocabulary. Mobile phones with the m-game were deployed to children living in rural Uttar Pradesh, India for 26 weeks. The pilot identified opportunities for out-of-school learning, revealed gender influences on m-game usage and surprisingly, showed that m-games traversed caste and village boundaries and facilitated social interaction.

Presentation starts at 4:03 min.

More and more mobile users are surfing the internet on their phones. For most people in developing countries, there is no plan B – in other words, no PC-based internet access. This study reports the experience of a group of women in Khayelitsha, in Cape Town, South Africa who connected to a mobile-based internet for the first time. In this article, six challenges facing mobile-only internet users in developing countries are identified. The authors propose how to the mobile industry can move forward by keeping the end-users in mind and introduce the concept of “digital divide” that is secondary to mobile access – it’s “after-access”.

Presentation starts at 9:59 min.

Thank you to the authors for providing permission to use images, screenshots and data as well as helpful feedback for the screencast. For more research, reports, and white papers about mobile technology for social change visit our mdirectory.

Full citations:

Tian, F., Lv, F., Wang, J., Wang, H., Luo, W., Kam, M., Setlur, V., Dai, G., and Canny, J. (2010). Let's Play Chinese Characters: Mobile Learning Approaches via Culturally Inspired Group Games. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (CHI 2010) (pp.1603-1612). New York: ACM. Archival http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1753326.1753565. 

Kumar, A., Tewari, A., Shroff, G., Chittamuru, D., Kam, M., and Canny, J. (2010). An Exploratory Study on Unsupervised Mobile Learning in Rural India. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (CHI 2010). (pp. 743-752). New York: ACM. Archival http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1753326.1753435.

Gitau, Shikoh, Marsden, Gary, & Donner, Jonathan. (2010). After access - Challenges facing mobile-only internet users in the developing world. Proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI 2010). (pp.2603-2606). New York: ACM. Archival http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753326-1753720.   

MobileActive.org's content license is here. Please note that some materials in this slidecast may be separately copyrighted by the respective authors of the papers we presented. Images and materials are used here with the author's permission.

The Mobile Minute is here to bring you the day's mobile-for-development new. Today's Minute covers disaster assistance applications on smartphones, a BBC guide to using pocket-sized video cameras for reporting, the UN ICT Hub's first Briefing Report on ICT4D in the Asia-Pacific region, the development of two new systems that allow mobile phones to work in areas with no reception, an intriguing idea for an iPhone app to combat homelessness, and an event on mobile payments in the Tech@State series in Washington DC.  

• Victims of disasters in the U.S. can now apply for federal disaster assistance on smartphones through FEMA's mobile website. See a video of the program in action here.

• The BBC College of Journalism released a handy guide to recording with small cameras like the Flip, Kodaks, or other pocket-sized devices (such as video-equipped smartphones). Tips include keeping the camera still, capturing wide, mid-level, and close-up shots, avoiding zooms and pans, and how to create the best lighting and sound conditions.  

• The UN ICT Hub released the first in its series of ICTD Briefing Notes series. The first Briefing Note focuses on ICT applications and how they can be used for meaningful development, especially in countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

• In Australia, a new open-source project has developed two ways for mobile phoens to get reception even when mobile towers may be down. "One is specifically for disaster areas, and consists of a temporary, self-organizing and self-powered mobile phone network that operates via small phone towers dropped into the area by aircraft. The second system consists of a permanent mesh-based phone network between Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones, with no tower infrastructure required."

• iHomeless is a video promotion for an iPhone app idea that could provide a new way to help the homeless - givers can send mobile donations directly to a card that the recipient can redeem for food, medication, shelter, or other necessities. 

• On August 2, Tech@State (The State Department's tech discussion series) will host an event that focuses on mobile money.  RSVP is required but the event will be livestreamed.

[Mobile Minute Disclaimer: The Mobile Minute is a quick round-up of interesting stories that have come across our RSS and Twitter feeds to keep you informed of the rapid pace of innovation. Read them and enjoy them, but know that we have not deeply investigated these news items. For more in-depth information about the ever-growing field of mobile tech for social change, check out our blog-posts, white papers and research, how-tos, and case studies.]

Image courtesy Flickr user QiFei

Ths manual give an overview for how to implement and use RapidSMS in a mobile data collection project. RapidSMS is a SMS framework for data collection, group coordination, and complex SMS workflows.  The tutorial outlines when and when not to use RapidSMS, guides the user through project steps and milestones, outlines factors for a successful implementation, and provides worksheets for project planning. Example training materials are included.

More documentation and developers guides can be found here on the RapidSMS site.

Today's Mobile Minute brings you news about the relationship between consumers and telecoms in Sierra Leone, potential problems with mobile phones for transparency in elections, law enforcement officials pulling evidence from iPhones, how international roaming charges were dropped in East Africa, and why geotagging photos may not be in your best interest. 

• The third-annual meeting between consumers and Sierra Leone's National Telecommunication Commission happened last month, bringing together mobile users and telecoms to discuss the country's mobile service. 

• In "Elections, Mobile Phones and the Traditional Media," Hannah Brown looks at the hype around mobile phones and transparency for upcoming East African elections – and why mobile phones may not live up to that hype. 

• Information pulled from iPhones may be used in police investigations – everything from browsing histories to geotagged photos and GPS data can be searched and used as evidence in cases.

• The research paper "Regulatory Intervention or Disruptive Competition?" looks at how the creation of Celtel's (now Zain) One Network catalyzed telecom operators to drop international roaming charges in East African countries. 

• The International Computer Science Institute reports that photographs shared on social networking sites can "be used to reveal the geographical location of the people who post them." 

[Mobile Minute Disclaimer: The Mobile Minute is a quick round-up of interesting stories that have come across our RSS and Twitter feeds to keep you informed of the rapid pace of innovation. Read them and enjoy them, but know that we have not deeply investigated these news items. For more in-depth information about the ever-growing field of mobile tech for social change, check out our blog-posts, white papers and research, how-tos, and case studies.]

Image courtesy Flickr user QiFei

In Tanzania, a non-profit organization is using airtime as an incentive for increased condom sales. “Ongeo Zaidi na Salama,” or “Talk More with Salama,” offers mobile airtime incentives to shopkeepers who stock and sell condoms (Salama, which means 'safe', is the largely PSI-distributed Tanzanian condom brand), bringing greater visibility to safe sex practices.  

The program, run by Population Services International, an organization widely known for pioneering condom social marketing since the 1970s and 1980s, was developed in reaction to the lack of condoms in Tanzanian stores.

85 million condoms at 100,000 retail outlets were sold in 2009, with the vast majority distributed by PSI. Because the PSI-distributed condoms are subsidized, they are considered lower-value by the shopkeepers than other products as they have low profit margins. Retailers were also reliant on the PSI agents to push and deliver the product and were not incentivised to proactively requests re-supplies when their condom stocks ran low. As a result, promotion and requisition (and sales) of these Salama condoms is not a priority for shopkeepers.

The organization felt that if shopkeepers were incentivized to buy, stock, and promote the PSI-distributed condoms, that the added visibility and availability could result in increased sales and ultimately safer sex practices. Daniel Crapper of PSI Tanzania who gave a presentation on Ongeo Zaidi na Salama for the SHOPS/mHealth Alliance online conference says, “We wanted to find a way to motivate the retailers to actively ensure that they would stock our condoms when they came to wholesalers.” 

In order to do so, the organization recognized that there was high mobile penetration among vendors (in rural areas more than 70% of shop owners had mobile phones, with urban rates even higher where 80% of shop owners used mobiles), and that mobiles could be a good way to reach out to the shopkeepers. To target them, the organization developed a scratchcard system that rewarded vendors with mobile airtime.

New boxes of condoms came with scratchcards; when vendors set up the displays they kept the scratchcards and texted in a code to PSI. Users had to enroll in the system, but once they enrolled they received eight cents for each card, with bonus money for every tenth card they submitted. See the chart below for an illustration on how the enrollment system works:

PSI works with three of the five mobile operators in Tanzania, and working, with a technology vendor, developed this "loyalty reward scheme"  - talk more with Salama.

In addition to encouraging shopkeepers to stock and promote condoms, the program also allowed PSI to have an instant look at the availability of condoms, since they could see where stocks were low. High-risk areas could be targeted for additional supplies and were monitored for condom sales. PSI monitors slaes per head of population, for example, and sales by ward.  So far, more than 900 retailers have enrolled in the program, and each region of Tanzania is represented.  The project is now out of the pilot phase and is focused on rolling out more aggressively across the country which started in June 2010.

Today's Mobile Minute covers the mobile gender gap, mobiles in the classroom that allow deaf children to learn alongside hearing children, a study about mobile over-sharing, mobile credits on cell phones during disasters, post-Haiti disaster management with ICTs, and a 90-second interview with Patricia Mechael about mobile health. 

• In developing countries, there is a 300 million-person gap between male and female phone ownership.  "A New ICT4D Paradigm: Women + Mobile Phones + mServices = Economic Development" examines the findings of Women and Mobile: A Global Opportunity and covers how women using mServices (mHealth, mPayments, mEmployment, mAgriculture) could lead to greater opportunities and economic development in developing countries. 

• The Child Africa International School in Kabale, Uganda encourages the use of SMS at school in order to foster communication between hearing and non-hearing students, as described in "Deaf Children are Being Heard in Africa." (Hat tip Textually.org)

• According to a Webroot Study of 1,645 social network users, 55% of people polled said "they worry over loss of privacy incurred from using geolocation data" on mobile phones."

• The Wall Street Journal writes about Concern Worldwide, an NGO, that is testing a mobile credit system in Niger for cash aid: "Looking to Cellphones to Deliver Aid in Africa." We wrote about the scheme a while back.

• "Disaster Response 2.0: Learning from Haiti" looks at how ICTs were used after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, covering mobile donations, Ushahidi, and how ICTs can help during emergencies. 

• In a short, 90-second audio piece on Earth Sky, Patricia Mechael talks about mobile health, her work with ChildCount+, and the promise of mhealth.
  

[Mobile Minute Disclaimer: The Mobile Minute is a quick round-up of interesting stories that have come across our RSS and Twitter feeds to keep you informed of the rapid pace of innovation. Read them and enjoy them, but know that we have not deeply investigated these news items. For more in-depth information about the ever-growing field of mobile tech for social change, check out our blog-posts, white papers and research, how-tos, and case studies.]

Image courtesy Flickr user QiFei

There are now over 5 billion mobile subscriptions around the world. Smartphone ownership is steadily growing, both in the United States and abroad.  Smartphone ownership is projected to be above 50% of all mobile phones in the United States by next year. This has many NGOs and other content and media prodicers wondering about how best to produce content for mobile phones (high-end devices, in particular). SMS and voice-based applications have their use cases, but many content producers today are wondering whether to produce a mobile website or a mobile application (app) to distribute their content. [Note: In fact, in much of the developing world, SMS and voice are still the killer applications. But increasingly in the developing world, and already in much of the developed world, there is a debate about whether to produce mobile web content or content on mobile apps. This article addresses that specific debate].

This article provides an overview for anyone producing content about these two options. We argue that most content producers should focus on the mobile web, especially if they want to make their content more widely accessible. Mobile apps may be appropriate if looking for new sources of revenue, or deep user engagement, but many other factors make the mobile web the more sensible platform for most content producers.

I'll provide a detailed comparison of both mobile web and apps for the dissemination of content focusing on the following: making content accessible, dealing with a multitude of devices and platforms, cost of production, control over what content can be published, leveraging social networks and search engines, features (such as ability to access users' location), user engagement, and monetization.

One of the main reasons content producers want to distribute their content on mobile phones is to increase the size of their audiences. Today's audiences consume content on their phones, and distributing content on mobiles is a way of letting an audience consume your content. If that is the primary motivation, content producers should focus on the mobile web over apps, without question.  There are many other reasons why targeting the mobile web may prove more helpful to content producers, which include:

• More phones have the ability to access web-based content than specific app-based content.
• Content on the mobile web can be served easily to many different types of mobile handsets.
• Cost of production is lower for mobile web content.
• You are free to publish anything on the web, whereas  application distribution platforms sometimes tightly control what can be distributed, based on content in the app or a set of other criteria.
• Content published on the mobile web is automatically accessible through search engines and social networks, two primary ways people find content today.
• Many must-have features for mobile content distribution (location, multimedia support, offline storage) are available through new standards like HTML5,  supported on many different high-end devices.

That said, there are reasons to look at mobile apps over mobile websites. Some of these reasons include:

• Mobile apps make it easier to monetize content by charging for content both easier and more culturally acceptable.
• Despite HTML5's support of many important features, some features (like hardware support) will only be available to native apps.
• Mobile apps have a better case of high user engagement,  at least according to one case study of a United States-based content producer.

Let's delve a little deeper these issues.

In this section, we'll define what we mean by the mobile web and by mobile application. We'll compare the mobile web and mobile apps and compare them along the following categories: making content more widely accessible, dealing with a multitude of devices and platforms, cost of production, control over what content to publish, leveraging social networks and search engines, features (such as the ability to access users' location), engaging users, and monetizing content.

"The mobile web" is a confusing term. In this article, a "mobile website" will simply refer to a website that is accessible on most mobile phones ("the mobile web" is a collection of all such websties). This is web content written in HTML/XHTML 1.0 and caters to the restrictions of mobile phones: smaller screens than traditional desktops and laptops, more difficult text input, and low processing power and bandwidth. But it also includes new content written in HTML5, that has more features, but is only supported on browsers of iPhone, Android, and Palm OS devices.

A mobile application is an application runs natively on a mobile phone. This includes applications that run on smartphone platforms like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Symbian, or other platforms like J2ME or BREW. J2ME applications run on many particular devices at once (see "Dealing with Different Devices and Platforms" below for a deeper discussion of this), while applications for other platforms only run on that platform.

One of the main reasons content producers should produce content for mobile phones is to make that content widely accessible. People the world over are increasingly consuming content on mobile phones. Soon, not allowing mobile users to access your content will be akin to not having a website - some people won't be able to find you at all.

To provide access to content, it is much better to produce mobile websites rather than apps. Take the United States as an example as decent ownership and usage data is available for this region. Comscore's May 2010 report shows that the percentage of U.S. mobile owners who use their browsers and downloaded apps is similar (30% vs. 32%). So a basic mobile website will be accessible to 32% of United States mobile users. But a mobile app for a specific platform will be accessible to much less than 30% of the mobile population. The largest smartphone platform, RIM OS, constitutes 41% of the smartphone market, or 9% of all mobile phones. So an application produced for RIM OS will be accessible to 9% of the U.S. mobile owners, an iPhone app to 5%, and an Android app to 3% of U.S. mobile subscribers. It is not hard to see that an individual app, in terms of increasing access, loses out hugely to the mobile web.

Elsewhere around the world, the story is similar in that in many countries smartphone apps reach only a tiny percentage of the population. Only around 15% of mobile phones around the world are smartphones, with Nokia and RIM owning most of the marketshare. (Because both those smartphones run Java (J2ME) apps well, Java apps are a contention against the mobile web for making content widely accessible on the global stage. However, as we discuss in the next section, the wide applicability of Java apps is somewhat a false notion, which is why Java apps don't "win" this category).

Winner: The mobile web. If you want to enable widespread mobile access of your content, make a mobile website.

An unfortunate reality of producing content for mobile phones is that there is a bewildering variety of devices and platforms that one needs to produce content for. In the personal computer world, anything written for the web is accessible on nearly all platforms. Most programming languages and libraries offer support for multiple operating systems. With mobiles, the world looks different.

Apps, by design, have to be built for a specific platform. One has to develop a different application for each operating system and the operating system-specific SDK (Software Development Kit). Separate applications have to be written for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm OS, and other platforms. While platforms like Java ME promised a 'write-once-run-everywhere' paradigm, they did not quite deliver this reality. Java ME support is notoriously inconsistent on different types of phones. One of the most used Java applications MXit boasts it has been tested individually on 1940 different handsets, and mobile game developing firm ZMQ told this author that after years of software development, they still expect most of their games to run on about 65% of handsets in the wild. This is hardly a 'write-once-run-everywhere' platform.

Hybrid platforms like PhoneGap, Titanium, and others have tried to enable developers to write content for multiple smartphones recently, but their usefulness is in a dubious state after the iPhone developer license introduced a clause forbidding development using third-party languages (most of the platforms are most robust for iPhone app development).

The mobile web is a more standardized technology, despite its own hitches. The oldest phones supporting the mobile web only support WML (Wireless Markup Language) served over WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Fortunately, most of today's phones support basic HTML/XHTML. The inconsistency that mobile web designers have to design for is different screen sizes, which do end up matter because all mobile screen sizes are small to begin with. In addition, the new and feature-rich HTML5 is only supported on a few phones. But HTML5 support on newer mobile phones is growing, and techniques like user-agent detection makes whatever inconsistencies handsets may have easier to deal with.

Winner: The mobile web. The mobile web allows you to produce content accessible on almost every phone, and content with advanced features that are accessible on an increasing number of devices.

One obvious factor to consider when producing new types of content is the cost.

The general consensus is that mobile web content is much cheaper to produce than mobile apps on any particular platform. When considering multiple platforms, the mobile web is the clear winner (a Google VP said in June 2009 that "even Google" isn't rich enough to create apps for every smartphone platform). The entry point technologies for both the mobile web and apps are quite cheap: Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org plug-ins, and Mobify allow even non-technical audiences to build mobile websites for free; Mobile Roadie, AppMakr, and similar technologies allow non-technical audiences to build apps for costs of around $100.

For more complicated sites and apps, the main cost is development time. One advantage mobile websites do have is that they are developed using the same languages and technologies used for the desktop web (ie, HTML/CSS/Javascript). For organizations with an established web team, this can be a huge help. Mobile apps will require developers familiar with particular application frameworks. To make aps for multiple platforms, development costs will undoubtedly grow, as much of the development done for one platform cannot be repurposed.

Winner: The mobile web. Mobile websites seem to be cheaper to produce than individual smartphone apps. When you consider multiple platforms, mobile websites win big.

Another thing to consider when producing content is what kinds of content you are allowed to produced on a given platform.

Mobile apps are distributed over highly-gated channels, which sometimes restrict certain types of content. Apple's App Store, in particular, has drawn criticism for having deeply flawed content revision policies. The policies have gained notoriety due to multiple events, including one when the store rejected a set of cartoons by Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore. Although in less notorious ways, other application stores (see  BlackBerry App World policies, Android Market Policies). The web (or the mobile web), on the other hand, faces only legal restrictions about what content can be published on it (through the DMCA, for example).

Winner: The mobile web. Application stores can control what applications are distributed, while the mobile web is only subject to governmental regulation.

Another factor to think about when producing mobile content is how the content will be found. The technologies for distributing content on the desktop web - search engines and social networks - are important on mobile phones as well. In fact, 10% of Google searches come from mobile phones, while 37% of Twitter users and 30% of Facebook users use their mobile phones to access these services.

It is important to consider how your content can be found by mobile users on these platforms. Peter Kirwan's idea of the "tweet-led link economy" emphasizes that a lot of content today is spread through links on social networks, and search engines continue to be the biggest referrers to most sites. Both technologies spread information using links. Mobile websites have an automatic advantage here: when a user clicks on a link, they are led to the mobile website and not to the app (except in select cases).

Winner: The mobile web. Social networks and search engines distribute information using links; mobile websites leverage this infrastructure.

One thing about mobile content that gets many content producers excited is the ability to select content based on location. Other features like offline access to content, easy loading of multimedia content, and access to hardware devices (like the camera) are also important.

For such features, the best support is provided in native apps. The software development kits for each platform exposes all the features of the phone that can be used by third-party software. However, the features most relevant to content delivery are now being made available on the web through HTML5. Geolocation suppport, offline content access, phone orientation detection and support for multimedia is all included in HTML5. HTML5 is becoming fully featured enough so that many app-based content is now delivered over websites rather than apps (one example is YouTube's recent switch). One should also note that mobile websites can leverage  features that mobile browsers have already built. As Fred Wilson describes eloquently, mobile apps don't always allow cut-and-paste, tabbed browsing, and don't provide a consistent interface the web has taught users to expect.

Winner ? It's a Tie: Mobile apps and HTML5-based websites. Apps allow the best access to features on most mobile handsets. However, HTML5 lets mobile web developers access many of the most relevant features of mobile phones, and also let them leverage features mobile browsers have already built.

Many bloggers and commentators have responded to the rise of mobile phones with the call to build apps, some citing studies like this that express user preference for apps (particularly on the iPhone). However, this preference is under contention, especially as companies like Google push boundaries by making the websites that perform better than apps. And there is another contention: users don't use most apps they download for a long time: after 10 days, only 10% of paid applications and less than 10% of free ones are still used.

There are exceptions: National Public Radio's experience in the United States leads us to believe that apps may still provide better user engagement for certain types of content. NPR has a mobile website and iPhones and Android apps for content delivery, and in their experience, the apps are used more than the corresponding mobile website. While the number of people using the iPhone app and the website are similar, app users view six times as many pages of content, and are engaged with content for longer time periods. The fact that Android and iPhones are disproportionate traffic sources compared to market share alludes to this deeper engagement as well.

Winner: The mobile app. With the caveat that this applies only for apps that users actually keep using on their phones, apps seem to offer deeper user engagement.

Finally, there is the issue of making money-which content producers worry about a lot in this media climate.

Charging users money is possible on both the mobile web and apps, but there are two things that tip the scale towards apps: ease of use and culture of payment on apps.

On the web, users can be charged through web services like PayPal or Amazon payments, or by having users submit their credit card information. On apps, billing integration makes this process far simpler. Most app stores have streamlined processes for users to buy apps; Apple's platform even allows in-app purchases (leading to monetization experiments like McSweeney's). Additionally, many argue that the culture of apps centers around small payments, especially on the iPhone, whereas the culture of the web is focused on lots of free content.

As a result, for making money (especially by having users pay small fees), apps are the better choice. (Two notes here: app stores charge 30-50% as commission on all fees paid. This fee is waived for non-profits on some platforms but not on the Apple app store).

Winner: The mobile app. The culture and ease of payments over apps make them better for monetization experiments than mobile websites.

Duda Mobile. "Mobile Web vs. Mobile Apps" September 2009
Tech Republic. "Apps are Hot, but Don't Forget the Mobile Web" March 2010
WAP Review. "Mobile 2.0: Apps vs. Browser Based Services" October 2009
Jason Grigsby, Slideshare. "Native vs. Web vs. Hyrbid: Mobile Development Choices" 2009 Mobile Tech. "Mobile Apps Web vs. Native Apps Revisited" April 2010

Prabhas Pokharel is Project Lead for the Mobile Media Toolkit at MobileActive.org. He tweets at @prabhasp.

Image Credits: Anne-Ryan Heatwole, Flickr Users NimBuzz, James Cridland, Cocoarmani, davepatten.

The Mobile Minute, our new daily feature, is here to keep you up-to-date on mobile-related news.

• HP Labs India develops "SiteOn Moobile India" a program that allows users with basic mobile phones to access the Internet.
• "Digital Diplomacy" The U.S. State Department's Jared Cohen and Alec Ross show how they use ICTs in foreign policy work in this in-depth New York Times article. 
• mLand Management? Internet Silk Road (@NetSilkRoad) uses mobiles for land dispute resolution in Afghanistan.
• A story in the Wall Street Journal on Concern's project in Niger, using mobile payments for aid payments, a very interesting scheme we wrote about a while back.

[Mobile Minute Disclaimer: The Mobile Minute is a quick round-up of interesting stories that have come across our RSS and Twitter feeds to keep you informed of the rapid pace of innovation. Read them and enjoy them, but know that we have not deeply investigated these news items. For more in-depth information about the ever-growing field of mobile tech for social change, check out our blog-posts, white papers and research, how-tos, and case studies.]

Image courtesy Flickr user QiFei