Adva Mobile Mobiflex Partnership Press Release
Adva Mobile Mobiflex Partnership Press Release
February 23, 2011
Adva Mobile and MobiFlex bring the Power of Affordable iPhone Apps to Bands and Recording Artists
Leading mobile companies partner to deliver new online service for providing iPhone Apps and Mobile Web presence under integrated mobile marketing platform
Bands and recording artists can now quickly create iPhone Apps at low cost that extend their brand across the mobile Web and iPhones.
Adva Mobile Corporation, a pioneer of mobile web, mobile App, and marketing services for touring bands and recording artists, has partnered with MobiFlex™, a self-service portal that lets you create robust native smartphone custom apps in just a few hours without coding, to provide this new support for iPhones. Features include playing songs and videos, showing concert schedules, band photos, sharing fan feedback, mobile purchases, targeting fans through location and more.
“Touring bands and Recording Artists need to connect to their fans on mobile phones across all major phone platforms, and we’re excited to bring the MobiFlex App creation platform to help them achieve this goal,” said Jack Kelly, Adva Mobile CEO. “The MobilFlex platform is simple and integrates seamlessly into our portal, ensuring that their messages and marketing outreach efforts reach their iPhone audience.”
George Adams, MobiFlex CEO, added “Mobile apps for the iPhone and other smartphones have quickly become a major new touchpoint for professional musicians and groups to engage their fans and reach new audiences. We’re very pleased to provide Adva Mobile with a version of MobiFlex to empower their band and recording artist customers to quickly create their own apps, leveraging the native resources of the iPhone without having to find engineers to do the coding.”
The Adva Mobile service has quickly become the leading mobile marketing platform for bands and recording artists, with more than 1,100 artists using the service to acquire, engage, and sell to their fans on mobile phones. Combined with Adva Mobile’s mobile web and Android App services, bands can now also use the MobiFlex iPhone App creation service to have a branded iPhone app presence that can be deployed in a few hours as part of outreach programs to virtually all of the 6 billion mobile devices on the planet.
About Adva Mobile: Adva Mobile provides a software service that enables entertainment and recording artists to create closer relations with their audience through mobile marketing. The experience includes mobile messaging, mobile presence (mobile internet pages and mobile Apps), mobile social sharing features, mobile commerce, and mobile content fulfillment. The service is free to the fan, and generates revenue to the band. Adva Mobile was founded by Jack Kelly and Amir Rozenberg in March 2008 and is privately funded. For more information contact Jack Kelly, CEO, jackk@advamobile.com or 508-740-3359.
About MobiFlex: MobiFlex™ is a self-service portal that lets you create robust native smartphone custom apps in just a few hours - without coding. The service supports smartphone native resources such as GPS and the camera. MobiFlex supports the iPhone and Android, and will soon support other major smartphones. You can create and test your MobiFlex™ app for free up to 14 days. A short demo video on http://MobiFlex.me shows how to create your custom app. Then, you can distribute your app for as little as $14.99 per month. More details and pricing is at http://MobiFlex.me.
Adva Mobile Resource Center:
MySpace: www.myspace.com/advam
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wayland-MA/Adva-Mobile/140513737394
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/advamobile
February Newsletter
In This Issue… On Stage: Tommy Walker
Measure SuccessUse Voting to Reach Fans
Artist Name: Tommy Walker Genre: Christian
Hometown: Los Angeles, CAKeyword: Text gettommywalker to 88704
Tommy Walker has written over 100 songs that are currently being tracked by CCLI and are being sung in churches around the world, including “He Knows My Name,” “Only A God Like You,” “That’s Why We Praise Him,” “Lord I Believe In You,” “Mourning Into Dancing,” “Break Through,” “We Will Remember,” and “I Have a Hope.”
For the last decade, Tommy has traveled internationally holding worship concerts and mercy ministry outreaches in places where people are in great need. He has led his worship team to the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Guatemala, Zambia and Brazil.
Hook Up with Adva
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Featured
Ultimate Charm Girls The Ultimate Charm Girls are one of the hottest rising music groups you will find. With a funky pop beat, awesome lyrics, and high energy, UCG will leave you speechless. .. .. Formed in early 2008 by Cali Amber and Cornelia, Ultimate Charm Girls have yet slowed down. With tough roads and setbacks, these girls have continued to put on a wild, crazy, and amazing show. .. .. “We make our music age appropriate which is hard to find in the pop genre. We are both on a mission to inspire others with good, clean, and fun music.” Text getucg to 88704
or Click here to visit the mobile site of Ultimate Charm Girls 
This eNewsletter helps you get more fans so you can get on a bigger stage, create buzz about your band and sell more.
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Check out this new custom web design for Natalie Stovall
Creating and optimizing your own website - desktop AND mobile - is important to get the right message out to your fans about who you are. The Natalie Stovall mobile web and Android App sends a clear message about Natalie’s brand and the important ways she connects to her fans. While it’s important to have her own unique mobile presence, fans find her on social nets, so her mobile site links to her Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and iLike pages. She engages her fans with a free download, and for that, she collects email and location information to help her market to them on an ongoing basis. The links to her store, tour schedule and blog provide fans with essential information about what is going on in the musical life of Natalie Stovall. Adva Mobile worked closely with the Natalie Stovall team to design the site and prepare for the launch of her mobile campaign, focusing on fan acquisition and engagement activities while she’s on tour. When she posts on Facebook or her blog, she can’t be sure her fans will notice, but by sending alerts to her fans and engaging them in mobile marketing, Natalie makes sure they’re in the know and stay connected to her in a way that’s much more personal. Adva Mobile can create a mobile strategy and custom design site that reflects your brand. Call us! Adva Mobile Analytics - Measure Your Success 
A music band’s fans are essentially its”customers”and you should make every effort to understand and please them. That can include maintaining close contact through a band-specific mobile web or app and other band-management tools, but sometimes, there’s no substitute for good, hard analytics. The Adva Mobile service includes incredibly deep analytics to help you identify fans, measure social engagement, find hot markets, discover trends, gauge attitudes, create in-depth reports and more! The Reports tool - part of your Dashboard - is designed to give bands new insight into where their biggest fans are and what they want to hear. To read more of this blog, click here . ……………………………………………………………………………………….
Use Voting on your mobile web to attract new fans 
I am noticing a lot more polls today being used on everything from Sports Illustrated, the Weather Channel, and my own Yahoo web landing page. Advertising for car insurance is even presented as a poll. It got me thinking about how valuable the VOTING feature on the Adva Mobile service is for recording artists. Fan engagement is the key to maintaining loyalty and Voting events represent a very cool way to keep engaged with your fans. You never want to overwhelm your fans with too many texts, but I can see where they would never get tired of answering polls because they are so much fun. Asking your fans about everything from what they think the conclusion of the Egyptian revolution will be to what should be your encore song at the next show helps you understand your fans and connect with them in a personal way that only the mobile phone can offer. To read more of this blog, go here .
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Thank you to our musicians- that’s you! We hope this information helps you play more music for more people. We want you to be successful in giving your fans a great experience!
If you have something to say about our services, please share it with us.
The band of music lovers at Adva Mobile bid you farewell.
December Newsletter
The Artist Advantage eNews: Helping You to Get More Fans
and Sell More Music, Tickets & Merch
In This Issue…
On Stage: AntagonistJC Flow - Seattle Superstar
Check out our Video
Artist Name: Antagonist Genre: Heavy Metal
Hometown: Whittier, CA Keyword: Text getantagonist to 88704
In the rapidly changing and evolving world of heavy music, bands come and go faster than you can get a value meal at a fast food restaurant. Finding bands who are still slugging it out after a decade is a rare occurrence. What’s even more uncommon is finding a band who have recorded their most intense and career defining album 12 years into their career. But, that is exactly the case with Southern California’s ANTAGONIST, and their new album, “World In Decline.”
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JC Flow
Seattle, WA
Island Def Jam Digital Recording Artist JC Flow gets our featured spotlight this month. His second album “Verb Noun Vibe” is playing on national airwaves and he’s the #1 Seattle Hip Hop Artist on Reverbnation. Text getjcflow to 88704
or Click here to visit the mobile site of JC Flow 
This eNewsletter helps you get more fans so you can get on a bigger stage, create buzz about your band and sell more.
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A Major Milestone - 1000 Bands! 
We’re excited to announce we’ve reached a major milestone - 1,000 members are now using our platform! Our 1,000th band is New Orleans funksters Dumpstaphunk (YAY!!). Look for them to be highlighted in our January Newsletter as they are one of the country’s top road bands. Since launching in January 2009, we’ve seen remarkable growth and we are the leading provider of mobile marketing and sales services for bands and recording artists. We owe it all to you! All Adva Mobile members should be proud that you are innovative and forward thinking and early adopters of an exciting new way to connect with fans. Reaching this milestone so quickly is a statement about how easy our platform and mobile marketing service is to use, and also a clear confirmation of the growing demand for mobile services for bands and recording artists.
Thanks and congratulations to everyone that helped us reach this milestone! On to the next 1,000!
NOW AVAILABLE - Android App!
Android phones now outnumber iPhones and smartphones are becoming the phone of choice for many of your fans. Introduce your fans to your NEW ANDROID APP with all the features of your mobile web in a sleek new App experience. Our pre-built native Android App mirrors the features of your mobile web and is automatically set up for you, and we handle the placement in the Android Marketplace for you so you’re up and running in a few days. Since the back end portal is integrated, all the changes you make to your mobile web automatically update and synch to your Android App. It’s “2in1”, with your mobile web wrapped into an Android App, promoted in the Android Marketplace.
Our Android App is available to our Bronze and Silver members and priced at $24.95 per month and has a $200 setup fee. Think about it - for about 25 tickets to your shows, you can get an Android Appm, plus a much cooler mobile site that you can help design! You can learn more about the Android App and how to get it for your band here.
New Mobile Web Site Designs! 
Check out this new home page design. For the home page, we’ve replaced the “footer” links and made access to your back pages part of the home page content. We can use pictures for each link, as we’ve done here, or use simple icons, which we’ve also redesigned. The back pages also have a new design, with your home page image at top and new footer icon designs. In addition to the web design template you already have, we’re presenting twelve (!) new designs you can choose from.
Our new design templates are available to our Bronze members, part of our $9.95 per month package. (Silver Members /Android App Subscribers get this also, and VIP Members get custom designs.) These sleek, modern designs take advantage of our pre-built mobile back end services, including mobile messaging, content delivery, storefront, social network and fan engagement tools. You can check out all the designs here.
New Adva Mobile Video 
We made a new video that explains why bands need mobile web, Apps and mobile marketing. It’s 3 minutes long, lots of fun, and you can watch it here. It’s also on our web site under “Take The Tour”. Have fun with it, spread it around, tell your friends!
Thank you to our musicians- that’s you! We hope this information helps you play more music for more people. We want you to be successful in giving your fans a great experience!
If you have something to say about our services, please share it with us.
The band of music lovers at Adva Mobile bid you farewell.
MP3 or M4A (AAC) - Now Your Choice
We’ve made an important change to your Adva Mobile service. Now, you can upload MP3 files to your mobile web pages.
Since we started, we’ve always required uploaded music to be in .m4a format (also acalled AAC) - the format used by Apple and iTunes. Most phones played .m4a, and it was easy to convert most other formats, including MP3, into .m4A using iTunes on your computer. Not all phones played MP3.
Some new phones now accept MP3 and also allow you to save the music as a song or a ringtone. This is a great way for you to offer ringtones to your fans by uploading MP3 files of short duration - 30 seconds - and have fans save the file as a ringtone. Phones that allow this automatically save the file in the right ringtome format and in the correct folder. One issue is iPhones. The iPhone only plays m4a. Most of your iPhone users know that you can’t save a song you uploaded to your mobile site - you can stream it, but can’t save it. So one drawback to this new MP3 format choice is that many phones now have flexibility with how you save music, but it doesn’t work on iPhones. Over time, all these incompatibilities will dissolve. Remember early PC days, when you had Windows Media, Quicktime, Real Player, etc. You needed the player for each file type. Right now, phones play only specific file types, but this will standardize.
Making Sense of Mobile Commerce
We’ve been spending time working with Artists that are selling music and merchandise on their mobile fan club sites, and are learning a lot through the process. We’ve made some changes to the merchandise / commerce features of your mobile site we thought you should know about.
New Merch Page Design
We have made the links to Amazon and iTunes permanent. So, even if you add your own merchandise / music to your merch page, fans can choose to buy from you or from these other stores. When the fan clicks on one of these links, we send them to the store, but also do a search query automatically so the fan is directed to your products. If you’re not part of Amazon or iTunes, they’ll end up on the home pages of those sites. We fould some other interesting attributes of these sites as regards mobile, which we share below.
Selling Directly by the Artist - Physical Goods
This service has been with us from the beginning and has been the most straightforward. You put physical merch up for sale on your mobile site and the fans can buy it directly from you on their phones. They pay with Paypal and you get a notification of the shipping information and just send it out. You get 100% of the price - the fan pays that plus shipping plus small transaction charges from Adva Mobile and Paypal. We send you the money right away.
Selling Directly by the Artist - Digital Goods
We’ve just started having success with digital goods sales with Artists that use Bandcamp. When you set up with Bandcamp, you get a URL for digital goods downloads. There’s a feature on the Adva Mobile merchandise portal that lets you send a confirmation email to the fan after the sale is made. When you set up this email, you include the link for the fan to download the digital song. This works really well but isn’t perfect. The fan can’t download to their phone. They have to download to their desktop and then sync their phone. Also, the fan can forward the email to their friends, so some others can get it without paying. We’re working on a digital download service for music, ringtones, wallpapers, etc. directly from you to the fan. We haven’t set up the system for the fan to download digital content and have the charges show up on their phone bill, because the wireless carrier takes more than 50% of the money from you. But we’re interested in hearing from you if you want this.
iTunes
Since you need to have iTunes installed on your computer to make purchases from, and download from, the iTunes store, only iPhones support this in the mobile world. (Not a problem in the desktop world, as you can download the iTunes Application to any desktop PC.) I don’t think you can download a song from iTunes to a Blackberry, Android, Palm, Windows or Symbian (Nokia) phone. Since we know the phone type of the fan when they are on your mobile site, we only show the iTunes logo on your merch page if the fan has an iPhone. On my iPhone, when I click on the iTunes logo on an Artist merch page, it opens up my iTunes Application automatically and goes to the page of the Artist from the search string.
Amazon
Since Amazon sells both physical and digital goods, the Amazon link will always be on your merch page. Fans who click on this will be brought to the Amazon mobile site and a search string will bring them to your products, if you have products for sale on Amazon. Otherwise, they will go to the Amazon home page. Amazon, however, will not allow a digital download to your phone! I think this is because digital songs from Amazon are in MP3 format and not every phone will play that format. They do have a cool feature though - they tell you they can’t download it to your phone, but you can add it to your Wish List and then purchase it from your PC.
Summary
These early days of mobile commerce, as you can see, are complicated and not totally simple for you or the fan. We’re working hard to develop a simple “Direct To Fan” purchase experience for all your items - digital, physical merch, and tickets. Meanwhile, innovative Artists are experimenting with mobile commerce through their mobile fan club and having success (sales!), and I encourage you to do the same.
Adva Mobile Voting Contest at the MIT In-NOW-Vation Event
Last Thursday Adva Mobile had an opportunity to showcase its VOTING feature at the MIT Enteprise Forum’s In-NOW-vation event. This event was a showcase/networking event with 26 Boston area technology companies showing off their goods to an audience of about 250 worldwide MIT Enterprise Forum volunteer officers and a healthy group of Boston technologists, entrepreneurs, and Venture Capitalists.
Attendees were encouraged to vote in four categories:
- Best in Show (won by Zeo)
- Most Likely to be a household name (won by Everyspace)
- Coolest Technology (won by Infrared5)
- Company I want to have a beer with (won by MocoSpace)
We used the Adva Mobile Voting platform to vote. Attendees texted GETVOTE to 88704 (the same way you would do this at a live event or promoted on your Facebook page) and got a SMS link to the voting page. It looks like this:
During the event, we were able to show real time updates on a PC of how the voting was going. We could have put it up on a big screen, like you might do at a live event, but we just used a PC. It looks like this:
It was really cool to see how excited people got when they were using their phones to vote for their favorite companies. We did 3 shout outs during the event to remind people to vote, but as you can see from this chart, it was pretty 
consistent throughout the evening:
We learned that people with iPhones and Blackberry’s and other smart phones had a better experience than feature phones, but everone could participate. We had a corner stand where people could come and get help - this was useful because it’s still new (using your phone this way) so it was good to be able to help people who were trying this for the first time. (You could put a “VOTE HERE” sign at the merch table where fans could come for instruction if they needed it.)
About 60 percent of the attendees voted on their phones, so we think this was terrific engagement. It can definitely be used to engage your fans and collect their phone numbers for your mobile fan club, so be sure to try out Voting - another cool feature that’s part of your mobile fan club.
Stars Go Dim Mobile Marketing Campaign Success
Stars Go Dim are prolific marketers of their music and it shows: Their music is featured on the Letters to God movie soundtrack, “Get Over It” was just featured on the AOL Music homepage, and they’ve been on MTV’s The Real World. So when they wanted to get their mobile fan club rocking, they used the Contest feature of our mobile marketing service to get the word out and build their mobile fan base quickly. Working with Adva Mobile, Stars Go Dim designed a marketing campaign around a free giveaway of SGD Content: an exclusive Stars Go Dim USB Thumbstick with music, video, pictures and a wonderful pdf file of song lyrics and the history of the band. Only 25 of these were created, adding to the exclusive nature of the prize. For a chance to win this exclusive Stars Go Dim content, fans had to join the SGD mobile fan club (by texting in to SGD on their phone) and click on a link to participate in the contest. The Adva Mobile Artist Portal handled all of the details of the contest, including start date, end date, fan information collection, administration of the contest and reporting. At the end of the contest, the system automatically and randomly chose winners and sent them a text message telling them they won and how to collect their prize.The contest ran for 3 weeks and was promoted on their Facebook and MySpace pages, and to fans on their email list. Stars Go Dim now have 87 new members of their mobile club (from zero at the start) and plan to grow their mobile fan club and incorporate mobile marketing into their ongoing marketing activities. And the lucky winners have one-of-a kind Stars Go Dim USB thumbsticks with exclusive content to show off at the next concert!
Adva Mobile Introduces Freemium Payment Plan
This weekend, we are making a major change to our mobile marketing service for music artists. We’re moving to a “Freemium” model. Through surveys, communications with you, interviews with others in the industry, and advisors to us, you’ve told us that what we do is valuable and, like other marketing services, is part of the total marketing mix that helps you make money.
For the past 15 months we’ve been working through our initial service, adding functionality to help artists reach out to their fans on their phones. And, everything about it has been free. Today, we’re taking an exciting step that will help us support the growth of Adva Mobile.. Over 700 of you have joined our service and I am pleased to announce that all of you will continue to receive all of the services that you currently use without charge. We’ve upgraded all of you to our Plus service. Beginning next week, for new artists who choose to upgrade to this level, they will pay $9.95 per month. It’s our way of saying thank you to the pioneers of music mobile marketing — that’s you!
Our free service includes most of the features you have been using to promote your music on mobile phones, and is certainly the most comprehensive mobile marketing platform for music artists that we know of. As you grow your career and begin making money, you’ll need more sophisticated marketing tools, and for that we will now charge a small fee. Also, as your fan base grows, you’ll be sending out more SMS messages. You probably wonder who has been paying for all of those messages for the past 15 months, and it has been us. For some of you who are now sending out lots of messages as your fan base has grown, we now need to ask you to pay for those messages. Again, I want to emphasize that for the 700+ of you who have joined our service, you’ll continue to have your existing services, including a limited number of monthly messages, all without charge.
To see the differences between the three plans we now offer — Free, Plus, and VIP — go to the artist portal at www.AdvaMobile.com, login, and check out Account Services.
Thanks again for using Adva Mobile, best wishes for your careers in music, and let me know what you think of this change and any other ways we can improve the service to help you create closer relations with your fans.
Jack and the Adva Mobile Team
Adva Mobile Artist Survey Results
Many thanks to everyone who participated in our recent survey. We were very encouraged by the general feedback that you appreciate the service, see value in it, and want us to continue providing a service for you, to reach your fans on their mobile phones. We also appreciate the comments related to simplifying the experience. We will be working on that as we continue to add new features and try to make the service simpler.
Your response to the questions “whether the service was valuable enough to pay for” was encouraging. We are looking to introduce a “Freemium” model, where some artists could receive basic mobile web and mobile marketing services for free and others could have more specialized services for a small price. While some of you indicated you would never pay for it, more than 85% indicated you would pay for it, or you would pay for it once it started generating revenue for you. That’s great news for us, since we expect mobile commerce to really take off in and outside the US in 2010, and that your fans will be increasingly comfortable with making purchases for your music, tickets, and merchandise on their phones. Shortly, we’re going to introduce a paid service to complement our free service. While going from a free service to a partially paid service may be a difficult transition for some, were committed to our existing artists and you will continue to have all the services you currently have without cost. Moving to paid services is good for everyone, since it will make us stronger and more valuable to you, the artist, and to your fans. The financial support we receive from those of you who choose to upgrade to the paid service will help us build a stronger platform and provide each of you with better resources.
We built our mobile marketing platform when we realized nothing existed to help artists connect with fans on their mobile phones. Our mobile fan club service will continue to be, built with your feedback. We want to hear from you about these changes and the many future improvements we will introduce to help you expose your music to more fans, market to them, and realize your dream of creating a career in music.
Jack and the Adva Mobile Team
Use Mobile Alerts to Help you Market
For people to come toward you when you are marketing to them you have to make your fans’ lives better in some way for them to accept mobile marketing from you. Otherwise, they will ignore your campaigns just like they ignore anything that is irrelevant or annoying to them. Two insights here can help you make sure you are providing value, and not interrupting their lives:
Timely Alerts: Your fans want timely alerts. Adva Mobile provides a terrific tool - Fan Blasts - for you to schedule your mobile alerts so that the information your fans are receiving is timely and relevant. there’s lots going on in your music career, so let your fans know about it! Upcoming show this weekend? New merch item for sale? Heading into the recording studio? Relevant info is important, and mobile provides you with the capability to reach out to your fans.
Location Specific: Your fans in Tampa don’t need to know your upcoming show dates in Portland, so think about who needs the information you’re trying to send them. Our Fan Blast tool lets you filter your messages by location, so that relevant information is sent to those who really appreciate the alert.
