Speaking Sensis

Sock's back. This year we’ve let him loose in the 1234 Call Centre and after being locked in a bottom draw for the past three years he’s determined to make up for lost time.

He exploded (quite literally) onto our screens in 2007 and now he’s back! He’s Sock, 1234’s green, keen information machine. This year we’ve let him loose in the 1234 Call Centre and after being locked in my bottom draw for the past two years he’s determined to make up for lost time.

In 2007 you may remember Sock launching out of an old chest and a laundry dryer before he caught a rash and needed plenty of recuperation in 2008.

Now our gregarious garment has decided that action speaks louder than words. Rather than telling people about the benefits of 1234, Sock is on the front line, providing answers to customers who call or text 1234.

Sock loves working in the 1234 Call Centre and will stop at nothing to impress his new boss, Ryan. Although Sock’s dedication to 1234 customers is unwavering, his cheeky personality remains unchanged from his early days and he wreaks havoc at the Call Centre much to Ryan’s dismay.

Sock is the brain-child of White Pages® Marketing Manager Nick Winbanks and the team of advertisers at DDB Melbourne.

He is a fantastic medium for communicating the benefits of 1234, which is a difficult service to promote as it has no tangible product.

Keep an eye out for Sock as he decides that pens are redundant for Telstra customers looking for answers on the move. And later in the year he takes his dedication to the job even further forsaking his sweet tooth in the process. 

If you have missed the ads and just can’t wait for them to appear, you can view them on the 1234 YouTube site.

Hi again. Well, Winter is here with some great rain for our gardens and dams. There’s a lot of exciting things happening at Sensis. And, to top it all off, St Kilda’s nudging the top of the AFL ladder. Could life get any better? In this update, I wanted to share with you some comments on our two speed economy, an exciting couple of months on the innovation front and a few beautiful sets of numbers.

Australia’s two-speed economy
We seem to have hit an uncertain cross-road in the Australian economy. There are signs of a solid return to growth and businesses in many sectors are performing well.

At the same time, however, confidence has dipped among Australia’s small to medium enterprises (SMEs). While SME confidence grew strongly from its historic lows during the GFC, the June Sensis® Business Index reported a significant quarterly drop in confidence. Confidence is still above the lows of last year, but it is concerning that it has fallen so far: especially when you consider that the chief concern among SMEs is ‘lack of work/sales’.

As we all know, the Federal Election is not likely to be far away. Given the importance of Australia’s SME sector and the millions of people it employs, I sincerely hope that the policies of all political parties will reflect a real focus on support for the SME sector.

A busy time for Yellow Pages®…
On a more positive note, we’re currently finalising the distribution of our Yellow Pages® print Regional and Living Local directories to households and businesses around Australia. As I mentioned in the last report, I’m proud to say that we have taken responsibility for the carbon footprint of all Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print and online directories from 1 February 2010. We will offset the carbon emissions through Government accredited providers and projects in Australia.

At the same time, the 2010 Yellow Pages® metropolitan campaign is now well and truly underway. This is one of Australia’s largest customer engagement operations with more than 1,000 consultants developing solutions that help hundreds of thousands of Australian businesses connect with the well over six million potential customers who use our print directories every month¹. That’ real muscle for Australia’s SMEs.

Of course, Yellow Pages®’ value extends far beyond the print directory these days, with millions more searches of Yellow Pages® advertising being conducted in online, mobile and voice every month.

… and a busy time in the labs as well
And we’re committed to building on that value. The evidence of this lies in the ‘run’ of digital innovations we’ve delivered recently. All these new releases further improve the quality and ease of use of our services for buyers and sellers. With so much to report, it’s hard to know where to start, so let’s just jump in.

Early June saw the launch of Yellow Pages®, White Pages® and Whereis® sites specifically designed for the Apple iPad. It was great to be able to launch these tailored sites (complete with gestural interactions like panning and zooming with a swipe or pinch of your fingers) in time for the iPad launch.

We’ve also released upgrades to our Yellow Pages®, White Pages® and Whereis® Mobile sites. All three incorporated auto suggest features to make searching easier for users as well as gestural mapping for high end Android and iPhone supported phones. On top of this, we added a more seamless click to call feature for the White Pages® and Yellow Pages® sites. In the case of White Pages® Mobile, this dropped the call wait time from around seven seconds to practically zero. And we also incorporated a range of new features for Yellow Pages® advertisers, including text descriptors, business logo and image gallery capabilities.

More recently, we launched a new social networking feature to White Pages® Online. ‘Save and Share’ lets you save interesting White Pages® listings or share them on Twitter or Facebook. Save and Share is already proving popular, with thousands of shares and a large number of resultant click backs from social networks to White Pages® Online. That, of course, means more potential leads for White Pages® advertisers.

Another exciting online announcement was the launch of an upgraded Bing search engine, which can now include Yellow Pages® listings (in the form of a ‘5-pack’) as part of its search results. This means Yellow Pages® advertisers can now be searched for on both Bing and Bing Maps.

We’ve loaded Citysearch® restaurant listings into Whereis.com. This has the joint benefit of improving the richness of the Whereis® experience, while helping to drive more potential customers to Citysearch® advertisers.

And we’ve launched online behavioural targeting for MediaSmart advertisers®. This gives advertisers the ability to deliver more relevant advertising to people using the MediaSmart® online network, which includes Sensis and Telstra sites and an extensive roster of third party sites.

Finally, we’re seeing great advertiser uptake of our bundled advertising products. Over the last year or so, we’ve released a strong range of new multi-product, multi-channel advertiser bundles such as the Yellow Pages® print and digital bundles and the priority advertiser bundle that spans 1234, Citysearch® and Whereis®. These bundles combine different advertising products into a single package, making it easier for advertisers to broaden their reach and create advertising solutions that meet their specific needs.

A beautiful set of numbers
Recently, there have been some great votes of confidence for what we’re doing at Sensis.

I mentioned in a previous update that Sensis looked like receiving great results on the 2010 Corporate Responsibility Index. The CRI, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is run by the St James Ethics Centre and is used by many major Australian businesses to benchmark their sustainability performance. Well, the results are now in. Our first year entrant score of 79.44% (bronze) last year has grown substantially to 92.51% (gold) this year. This result includes platinum scores (a new rating for benchmark performance) in three of the total six areas: sustainability strategy; integration; and assurance and disclosure. This achievement is a real source of pride and is the result of a strong commitment to sustainability from everyone in the business.

Meanwhile, we continue to see fantastic growth in mobile usage. In June, Whereis® Mobile officially became our first mobile site to hit a million visits in a month². Our other mobile sites – like Yellow Pages® and White Pages® – are also doing well. In fact, the whole portfolio is now being visited more than 3 million times a month², which represents high double digit growth over last June and potentially a huge amount of new ROI for our advertisers.

And on a totally different topic, we’ve been working with Mission Australia on the ‘1234 Project’. For every person who clicks ‘like’ on the 1234 Project Facebook home page, Mission Australia will give a pair of socks to a person in need. Our initial target was 12,340 socks and, in less than a month, we’ve already reached it!

The Human Yellow Pages®
Finally, if you think this update is a long read, spare a thought for Tansel Ali. To prepare for the upcoming World Memory Championships, Tansel, who is our own Australian Memory Champion, has turned himself into something of a human Yellow Pages®. Tansel is attempting to memorise every display advertisement (business card size or larger) in the Sydney Yellow Pages® so that he can recite any business name or number. For the record, that’s 2,306 pages, more than 16,000 numbers and a hell of a lot of reading!

That’s an incredible feat Tansel. All the best for the Championships in China later this year.

Best wishes,

Bruce Akhurst

1: Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, April 2009 to March 2010. Base: Australians 14+
2: Omniture SiteCatalyst. June 2010

“If you’re going to communicate sustainability you can’t just talk about it, you have to do it. If you do, people will talk about you.”  That’s how Ben Peacock from Republic of Everyone summed up what people, business and government need to do in relation to sustainability at the recent National Green Brands Forum in Melbourne.

At Sensis we have been “doing” for some time and there’s a good summary of our sustainability commitments and achievements on our website if you’re keen to take a look.

Sensis’ Group Manager Brand and Marketing Communications Geraldine Davys presented a case study on our recent carbon neutrality announcement for our Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print and online directories.

The carbon neutrality announcement, which involves offsetting the carbon emissions of the directories through accredited providers and projects in Australia, was a big milestone for us. In fact, Sensis is the first major directory company in the world to have had its print and online directories certified carbon neutral.

Following this, Geraldine spoke about sustainability and why it is part of our brand architecture.

Using the examples of the Cupid and Hidden Pizza campaigns, Geraldine explained how they were produced with sustainability in mind.

For instance, with our Yellow Pages® Cupid television commercial, during the shoot we were very conscious of water wastage so we used recycled water for every take an included a ‘recycled water’ sign on the set being mindful of the water restrictions in Melbourne at the time.

With the Yellow Pages® Hidden Pizza restaurant campaign, almost everything inside the restaurant was made of recycled materials from the lights, to the pizza boxes to the rubbish bins.  All produce was sourced from local businesses and after the restaurant closed all leftover items were donated to local charities.  

At Sensis, we don’t just talk about sustainability, we do it.

They may sound like little things, but I get really excited by them. It shows that ‘sustainability’ is filtering its way through our business and is no longer something driven by the sustainability team and our green office champions alone. People in our business don’t make decisions based solely on quality and cost; we also look at the environmental and social impact as well.

The search is on for Australians who are working to create a better future as Sensis commences its annual Covers program to recognise the achievements of local heroes by featuring them on the cover of Yellow Pages® and White Pages® directories in 59 regions across Australia.

The “Australians Creating a Better Future” theme will run for the next six months as it searches for Australians to grace the covers of the 2011/12 Yellow Pages® and White Pages® books across regional and metro Australia.

The theme allows Sensis to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability and compliments the recent carbon neutral certification of our print and online Yellow Pages® and White Pages® directories under the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly™ program. The carbon emissions created through these directories will be offset through the Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia.

Anyone can nominate and this year, it couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is visit the new White Pages® Community site by clicking here.

Remember, we are searching for people who are thinking beyond themselves and making positive contributions to their local and wider communities from an economic, social and environmental standpoint.

So, if you feel you know someone who fits the bill, feel free to put them forward.

I was delighted to recently receive our recent Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI) scores.  For Heads of Sustainability across the country, the release of the CRI results is a tense time. Essentially for us, it is a little bit like waiting for your exam results.

Measuring, benchmarking and reporting our sustainability performance and practises is a critical part of being transparent and accountable.  One of the ways Sensis measures its progress in sustainable practises, is through the international Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI) run by St. James Ethics Centre in Australia.

Importantly CRI is independently audited, which provides third party assessment of our performance.

This year, Sensis achieved a score of 92 per cent (a 13 per cent increase on last year) and reached an overall gold star rating. 

Significant achievements in our scores include three judging areas reaching the new “platinum” level, which was established for companies considered to be setting the benchmark (scoring 96 per cent and above). 

Sensis achieved the new platinum level in corporate strategy, integration and assurance and disclosure.  I’m particularly proud of the assurance and disclosure score given the significant increase from a participation ranking last year.  Transparency and assurance, I believe ,are also the foundations for sustainable practises and often more challenging to achieve. 

In addition to these platinum scores, Sensis also received a gold rating for management practise and social impact, alongside a silver rating for environmental impact. 

Last year Sensis participated for first time and were pleased to score 79 per cent, achieving a bronze star and the award for Best New Entry. Our initial submission also identified areas for improvement, which we have focused on.

Already this year we have made significant steps in improving our performance, particularly around environmental impact. Sensis announced its Commitment to Climate Change in February, which included reduction targets for operational greenhouse gas emissions and the carbon neutral certification of the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print and online directories through the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly program. The carbon emissions created through the production of these directory products will be offset through Greehouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia.

For Sensis, other mechanisms we use to measure, benchmark and report our performance are through the London Benchmarking Group (community investment measurement and verification); and through our Sustainability report which meets AA1000 standards and reports against Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines.  Sensis’ Sustainability Report was independently assured last year for the first time and achieved an A+ GRI reporting standard.   It is available for viewing and download on our corporate site (about.sensis.com.au).

Sustainability remains on of Sensis’ five priority business areas and with the ongoing focus and drive for improvement, I hope to see us continuing along the journey and also achieving even higher scores in benchmarking indexes to reflect our progress.

Distribution of the 2010 / 2011 White Pages® started recently to around 1.4 million homes and businesses across metropolitan Melbourne. The cover of this year’s residential book features 18 emergency services workers who battled the Black Saturday bushfires.

This year Melbourne’s apartment dwellers will have up to 14 days to collect books from their foyer. After this time, books remaining will be collected for redistribution in other areas.  A postcard explaining the process will be delivered to apartment residents.

This is about Sensis looking at new and better ways of doing things in response to changes in consumer demand and the environment we work in.  We know that people want choice in how they search for contact details of people, organisations and government, depending on what they need, where they are and what they’re doing. That’s why White Pages® is available in print, online, from your mobile and through telephone directory services.

In the last year, mobile phone based searches of White Pages® listings have grown strongly, with a sharp boost in searches since the launch of the White Pages® iPhone app last November which has been downloaded almost 250,000 times. But despite all of the technology available today, Australia wide, 60 per cent of all searches are still using the White Pages® book. On average, there are about one million searches each week of the White Pages® Melbourne book.

People with queries about the delivery of White Pages® should contact Sensis on 1800 810 211. To request not to receive a book in future please call 1800 008 292.

Sensis was the “book-ends” to the Australian newspaper’s Business section on Monday, with a feature interview with Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst (read it here) on the front page and a piece with Chief Operating Officer Gerry Sutton (read it here) in the Media section on the back page.

Both pieces touched on the opportunities digital media was providing Sensis and its Yellow Pages® business, with the focus squarely on the iPad as the latest digital device to take the media industry by storm. As discussed by Bruce and Gerry, the exciting prospect for the iPad is the value Sensis can help deliver to end users and ultimately our small and medium sized business customers.

Add to that the impressive strides Sensis has made with its presence in other digital channels such as online, the iPhone, Android devices and Telstra’s T-Hub, and you can see how technology is opening new worlds and chapters for Yellow Pages® and its users and advertisers.

Hi again, and thanks for taking the time to find out more about how Sensis is bringing buyers and sellers together. In today’s update you can read about a tasty new way to demonstrate the value of Yellow® Pages; kicking off the 2010 metro canvass; more new innovations to make life easier for buyers and sellers; the phenomenal growth of mobile; and some more great news about our commitment to sustainability.


8,500 guys and girls and a pizza place
In April, Sensis ran a ground-breaking campaign that really brought the value of Yellow Pages® to life. The campaign worked a bit like this. Team up with well-known Melbourne pizza chef, Tony Fazio. Open a restaurant offering free pizza for two weeks. Don’t tell anyone the address or phone number. Instead tell them to “look it up the way you would any other business”. Then sit back and watch the dough fly.

And fly it did. Over the campaign’s two weeks, over 8,500 calls were made to Hidden Pizza, with over 70% of the callers saying they found Hidden Pizza through the print, online and mobile Yellow Pages®. That’s a lot of pizza… and a great testament to the ability of Yellow Pages® to bring buyers to your door.

Yellow Pages® Metro Canvass is up and running
Our people are now out and about talking to businesses as part of the 2010 Yellow Pages® metropolitan canvass. This must be one of the largest customer engagement programs in Australia, with consultants all over Australia contacting more than half a million businesses over the next few months.

This year, we’ve got some great new products for our customers. These include a Brisbane version of the popular Yellow Pages® In the Car book, Yellow Pages® Online Gold Plus, which is a new advertising solution for businesses without a web site, and enhanced accountability through our metered ad program.

But, perhaps the most exciting new step is a range of bundles that make it even easier for our customers to advertise right across our network. As I’ve talked about before, Yellow Pages® has evolved from a print directory to a diverse and sophisticated advertising network spanning print, online, voice and mobile. These bundles make it easier for businesses to profile themselves to potential buyers right across the network.

From the labs
Of course, we’ve been busy delivering for buyers – the people who use our products – as well.

Firstly, we’ve launched more new features to make our digital services easier to use.

Recently, we reconfigured the Yellow Pages® Online search experience. To begin with, we’ve dropped the ‘business name’ and ‘business type’ radio buttons in favour of a more intuitive search. Now, you can search for a business name, like ‘Sensis’ without having to click a ‘business name’ search button. Instead Yellow Pages® Online will drop down suggested listings relating to Sensis for you to choose from. We’ve also re-built the business profile pages to give buyers easier access to more content. The results of this have been pretty immediate, with a significant reduction in nil result searches and a big rise in interaction: most notably in the number of business profile readers clicking on email links and image galleries.

We’ve also added a series of new features to the White Pages® Online site. White Pages® is all about finding people and businesses you already know, so it’s a fair bet that you’ll be wanting to find your White Pages® contacts over and over again. Recently, we made this easier with the ability to save your contacts to a new ‘My List’ feature on White Pages® Online. We also launched send to mobile, which lets you send your listing from White Pages® Online straight to your mobile to save in your contacts.  In May, we’ll be taking this a step further by launching a new ‘save and share’ feature. With save and share, you’ll be able to save your White Pages® contacts to your pages on Facebook and a wide range of other social networks.

Secondly, we’ve made our services easier to access with new additions to our network.

As you may know, Telstra recently released the home phone of the future, the T-Hub. This is great for buyers and sellers using our services because White Pages®, Yellow Pages® and 1234 (with Whereis® coming soon) are all easily accessible right where your phone is. Just one touch of the console and you’re searching. And when you find the result in Yellow Pages®, you don’t even have to dial… just click to call.

The Yellow Pages® enhanced location search on Whereis.com I mentioned last time is also delivering results. Yellow Pages advertisers are now being profiled on Whereis.com more than 8 million times a month: a number that’s been boosted by about 2 million since we launched the enhanced location feature . This is fantastic for both buyers and sellers. It means Whereis is playing a growing role in bringing buyers and sellers together, while improving the ROI we can offer Yellow Pages® advertisers.

Finally, we’ve also been busy in the mobile space.

We launched a new CitySearch® Mobile site, with an improved look and feel, expanded TV and Movies content, a new ‘Bars’ vertical and improved mapping functionality. And we also launched new Yellow Pages® and White Pages® apps for Android devices to complement the incredibly successful launch of our iPhone apps.

Mobile coming up trumps
On that note, mobile has been an incredible success story for the buyers and sellers who rely on our services. As I’ve mentioned before, mobile usage is growing at a rate of knots. Average monthly Yellow Pages® Mobile visits for the March quarter have doubled YoY yet again. When you look across our entire network, mobile now accounts for over 13% of our total digital (online and mobile) usage.

And smart phone apps are playing an enormous role in this exciting growth. iPhone apps account for something like half of our total Yellow Pages® Mobile and White Pages® Mobile usage and these two apps still sit in the lifestyle category Top 10 in Apple’s App Store … months after they were launched.

More great news on the sustainability front
As I mentioned last month, I’m really proud of the positive contribution being made by our sustainability initiatives; such as our directory recycling program and the decision to offset our carbon emissions through Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia.

Now, we’ve taken this a step further with the release of a new book: Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth. This free book, which is a complement to our highly successful advertising guide, provides practical information on how businesses can reduce their impact on the environment and save money as well.

Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth has been written by Jon Dee, who is the Founder and Managing Director of the not-for-profit action group, Do Something, and the NSW Australian of the Year 2010. If you’d like to order a copy, just check out the Small Business section on our corporate web site.

And finally, in more good news on the sustainability front, I’m pleased to say that our efforts to support a more sustainable future are being acknowledged. Last year we joined the global Corporate Responsibility Index program for the first time. This program is run in Australia by the St James Ethics Centre and we were incredibly proud to achieve a ‘Bronze’ rating and Best New Entry Award in our first year. Since then, we’ve put a lot more work into our sustainability commitments and, as a result, I’m told we have lifted our result even higher this year. More on that next time, when the results are out.

Until then, all the best,

Before I kick off today I’d like to take this opportunity to mention an industry first advertising product for iPhones launched by MediaSmart. Simon Canning at The Australian wrote about it today. You can read his article by clicking here. Sensis’ new interactive mobile ads product was launched to the market this week with Open Universities taking out the first campaign.

Mobility – advertising’s first portable medium

With the buzz surrounding the launch of the iPad in the US - claiming to have sold 300,000 of them in the first day! – now is a good time to touch on an area I feel will provide unprecedented opportunities for advertising agencies, brands and digital publishers in the months and years to come. That area is mobility. And with the launch and uptake of new devices, mobility means the web has become an anytime, anywhere proposition with obvious and exciting opportunities for the ad industry.

To provide you with some background to my thinking, the mobile internet has exploded over the last two years. It is now so large, mobile internet is now considered by many in the industry as mainstream. In December last year, our mobile network hit 2.5m visits for the first time, growing  70% YoY. And by ‘our mobile network’ I am talking about the Yellow Pages, White Pages, Whereis, Citysearch and Sensis Search mobile sites.

And let’s not forget about the continued growth of the BigPond mobile portal – these guys now enjoy more than 2m unique visits each month and the numbers keep growing!

To put this into perspective, after Yellow Pages Online was launched in 1995, it took  five years to reach half a million unique visitors a month. In comparison it’s taken Yellow Pages Mobile only two years to reach that number and White Pages Mobile, which was launched mid last year, has almost achieved that number in only six months.

Now that’s impressive growth by anyone’s standards.

The future of mobility

After Kindle was launched last year, Amazon advised that, on Xmas Day, they sold more e-books than printed books for the first time.

We’re seeing a raft of new touch screens being released onto the market, with the big one – Apple’s iPad – due to hit Aussie stores in the coming weeks and the critics predicting it will revolutionise the way content is accessed.

So we now have devices for almost every occasion and they’re all internet-enabled. From large screen TVs to tiny mobile phones. So what’s next? Accessories!

Will one device eventually control everything? The phone making all other devices its slave? Will all devices operate separately, drawing from the cloud? Or will the future be a hybrid of the two?

That leads me to discuss applications.

The application environment for mobiles is far richer than online in its early years. There are already thousands of apps, books, games etc in Apple’s App Store, we now have Kindle looking for applications. More than half of the White Pages Mobile usage I mentioned above is coming from iPhones.

Precision targeting – it’s now becoming a reality

In 2008, we launched customer profile targeting in mobile which means more efficient advertising for companies and more relevant content for users. With geo-targeting growing rapidly, location services one of the most used mobile apps through both mobile phones and sat nav devices.

Whereis continues to be our most popular mobile application as well as being very popular on the web and sat nav. These sites enable the search for services based on location and the targeting of people based on their location.

So the future of mobility is exciting – and we’re only just warming up.

Mark Shaw

Mobile phone apps – everyone is talking about them and everyone wants them.  Whether it be for playing games or finding a business, service or friend close by, people are jumping on the app band wagon and for good reason.

Apps, short for application software, add an increasing array of functions to mobile phones. At Sensis, our Yellow Pages® and White Pages® iPhone apps were some of the first on the Australian market, with the Yellow Pages® iPhone app being downloaded more than 300,000 times since its launch in August last year. The iPhone app has so far connected more than a quarter of a million people with businesses, and boosted Yellow Pages® Mobile usage by more than 50%.

And on the back of that success we have launched the Yellow Pages® Android app, which is now ready to be downloaded.   

To get the app on your Android phone, simply visit the Android Market and search for ‘Yellow Pages® Australia’ or ‘White Pages® Australia’ or follow these links from your Android phone:

• Yellow Pages® – market://details?id=au.com.sensis.mobile.android.yellow

• White Pages® – market://details?id=au.com.sensis.mobile.android.white

The free apps connect Android-enabled mobile phone users to all the helpful information that can be found at Yellow Pages® Mobile and White Pages® Mobile but enhanced with some features that leverage the enhanced capabilities of the Android platform like:

• Auto-location
  The GPS capability of Android devices allows you to search for businesses close to you. This means you don’t have to type in the location when you do a business search.

• Save to favourites and recent searches
  Create a list of favourite businesses within the app and include notes against listings i.e. “Café Grotto – great coffee, friendly service”. There’s also a list of your most recent searches.

• Auto-suggest categories
  When you start keying text for a business type search, suggestions are presented, meaning you don’t have to type the whole word if there is a match.

While the first Android devices were launched in Australia in early 2009, it will be another 12 months before they really take off.  At the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Richard Fink, Director Device Management & Operations at Telstra, announced  that the first Android handset, the HTC Desire, will be due in next month. 

“We have decided to include Android smartphones on our device roadmap now because there is real momentum building behind the platform. There is a growing range of excellent handsets to choose from, real maturity in the operating system and an ecosystem of around 20,000 apps (growing rapidly) — which gives customers unprecedented freedom to decide how their mobiles look and what they do.”