Despite Android’s lead in market share, Apple still [...]]]> Mobile web traffic has increased 202 per cent over the past year, according to the latest Quarterly Mobile Report from digital marketing company Latitude. 11.5 per cent of all website visits in March came from smartphones, with a further 3.5 per cent from Tablet devices.

Despite Android’s lead in market share, Apple still rules the roost on the mobile web. 70 per cent of visits come from an iPhone, compared to 24 per cent from an Android handset.

“The first quarter saw the fastest growth in mobile web traffic to date”, says Latitude CEO Alex Hoye. “Yes, mobile is growing rapidly, but what’s even more exciting is the way consumers are using and engaging with their devices. There’s a huge difference in the way PCs, Tablet and mobile are being used to access the web, ranging from the solitary, task-based user experience of the PC to the localised, personal browsing experience of the mobile.”

Latitude anticipates that 30 per cent of all Paid Search clicks will come from smartphones and Tablets by the end of 2012, but for now at least, cost per click remains 45 per cent cheap on mobile than desktop. 97.2 per cent of all PPC clicks on smartphones come from Google, unsurprisingly storming ahead of Bing (2.2 per cent) and Yahoo (0.6 per cent).

Please continue here…

“We’re solving some of the biggest challenges in mobile advertising today,” said Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, CEO [...]]]> Just about every ad tech company wants to link desktop and mobile in order to retarget ads between the platforms. It’s assumed that it’ll happen eventually, but one company exiting stealth mode today claims the ability to do so now.

“We’re solving some of the biggest challenges in mobile advertising today,” said Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, CEO and founder of cross-device ad tech firm Drawbridge. Specifically, Drawbridge aims to fix “the lack of sophisticated targeting and lack of insights into audience behavior in mobile” through its proprietary “self-learning ad technology,” she said.

Ok, cool. But what makes Sivaramakrishnan’s startup so special if most big mobile companies are conceivably also looking to solve the same issue? For starters, Sivaramakrishnan. The Stanford Ph.D. previously worked as a senior research scientist at one of the largest mobile ad networks AdMob—and then joined Google’s display group when that company acquired AdMob in May 2010.

Sivaramakrishnan left Google in October of that year to start Drawbridge, where she’s been quietly cooking up algorithms to associate desktop and mobile devices.

The quest to connect desktop and mobile ads took a hit in March when Apple began to deprecate the use of UDIDs (unique device identifiers) by mobile app developers and advertisers. UDIDs could be used to monitor users’ interactions with ads on a device and track conversions, but can also flare up privacy concerns. Drawbridge claims it can sidestep that issue by algorithmically correlating data to make essentially highly educated guesses as to whether a desktop user and mobile user are one and the same.

“We crunch vast amounts of data and build probabilistic models by which we make associations between a user on multiple devices. It’s a statistical technique, so we are not using any deterministic pieces of information to make these correlations,” said Sivaramakrishnan. In other words, without actually identifying a specific person’s iPhone, for example, Drawbridge believes it can crunch enough data to figure out that a person surfing the Web on their mobile device is the same person identified surfing the Web on their laptop later on.

Please continue here…

The path to a successful mobile payment solution in the U.S. has been long, windy, and full of potholes.  The carcasses of failed mobile payments companies litter the curb like roadkill.  Predicting the future of mobile [...]]]> This is a guest post written by Caribou Honig, a cofounder and partner of venture firm QED Investors.

The path to a successful mobile payment solution in the U.S. has been long, windy, and full of potholes.  The carcasses of failed mobile payments companies litter the curb like roadkill.  Predicting the future of mobile payments has been difficult at best, or a fool’s errand at worst.

Nonetheless, feeling a bit of a fool myself, I believe the answer to the case is sufficiently clear to call it out.  As a venture capitalist, I assert the following investment thesis:

Apple will include Near Field Communication (NFC) in the next iPhone, embed a digital wallet as part of iOS, and enable  to Pay.  3^rd party developers will create innovative, value-added “spokes“ to plug into the mobile wallet “hub.”  This will be the watershed event that prompts merchants, motivated by a mix of fear and greed, to upgrade their point-of-sale terminals to support NFC, and as a consequence even competing mobile wallet platforms will benefit.

Please continue here…

During the “How to Allocate Mobile Budgets” panel, mobile experts discussed how companies are slicing up their marketing [...]]]> CHICAGO – A Draftfcb executive at the Results 2012: Mobile Marketing Day conference said that although mobile accounts for a large chunk of consumer time, the medium is still a grossly small portion of a marketer’s spend.

During the “How to Allocate Mobile Budgets” panel, mobile experts discussed how companies are slicing up their marketing budgets with a disproportionate amount of spend allocated to digital compared to traditional media. The executive also discussed how mobile measurement is being tackled by brands.

“No one ever got fired for making a television commercial because you cannot prove that it is not working,” said Patrick Moorhead, senior vice president of mobile at Draftfcb Chicago.

“A lack of measures creates a mushy place in budgets,” he said.

Digital divide
According to a report from Flurry Analytics, mobile is grabbing 23 percent of consumers’ time. However, mobile receives approximately one percent of budget money, showing the deep divide between brands’ marketing campaigns and user habits.

“Clients are saying how mobile is inevitable and how people are addicted to it, but they do not know how to pay for it,” Mr. Moorhead said.

Brands that have a mobile presence no longer have a first-mover advantage. Instead, brands that do not have mobile initiatives will eventually be left in the dust as marketing switches to a mobile-first mentality.

Mobile has a targeted, small niche that is beginning to put mass media in its place, per Mr. Moorhead.

Brands looking to divide up their budgets to accommodate mobile should take money from a channel that receives more revenue, such as print.

Then mobile budgets should be placed in two buckets – services, which includes mobile sites, applications and SMS and media to help promote the services.

“Despite PC vendors and phone manufacturers wanting a piece of the pie and launching themselves into the media tablet market, so far, [...]]]> (Reuters) – Microsoft’s push into the tablet industry will see only limited success, with the U.S. software maker remaining a distant No. 3 behind Apple and Google, research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.

“Despite PC vendors and phone manufacturers wanting a piece of the pie and launching themselves into the media tablet market, so far, we have seen very limited success outside of Apple with its iPad,” Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said in a statement.

Gartner said it saw Microsoft winning 4 percent of the market in 2012, with its upcoming Windows 8 platform, while market leader Apple would control 61 percent of the market and Google’s Android platform 32 percent.

The research firm said it expected Microsoft’s market share to rise gradually, helped by enterprise purchases, but to reach just 11.8 percent in 2016 as it lacks consumer appeal.

Please continue here…

The service being tested allows both subscriptions and purchases [...]]]> Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) (AMZN), the world’s largest online retailer, is testing a service that lets tablet users make purchases through mobile applications, a sign it may enter a market pioneered by Apple Inc. (AAPL) (AAPL) and Google Inc. (GOOG) (GOOG)

The service being tested allows both subscriptions and purchases of individual items within apps, according to Maria Ly, co-founder of Skimble Inc., a seller of physical fitness programs that has been involved in Amazon’s pilot for about a month. Sally Fouts, a spokeswoman for Seattle-based Amazon, declined to comment.

Selling items from within downloadable software can generate revenue for developers as well as companies, such as Google and Apple, that distribute apps through online stores. Amazon could use the transactions to wring more sales from its Kindle Fire tablet and the widening array of applications that can be downloaded to the device. So-called in-app purchases will generate $5.6 billion in revenue in 2015, up from $970 million last year, according to IHS.

“We really wanted to attack the Kindle Fire market, but also have access to the payment methods that support our business,” Ly said.

Most of Skimble’s sales come from subscriptions and in-app purchases, such as specific workout regimens, she said.

Commission

Amazon plans to charge a 30 percent commission to clients for its in-app purchase service, the same rate as it charges developers for app sales, Ly said. The shares increased less than 1 percent to $199.66 today in New York.

The move would be an important step toward making Amazon more competitive as developers look to in-app purchases to increase profit, said Brian Blair, an analyst at Wedge Partners Corp. in New York.

Please continue here…

Marketers disagree about its [...]]]> Mobile marketing may be experiencing an identity crisis. Is it push marketing, delivering banners and messages to distinct on-the-go targets? Is it a convenient ordering mechanism or primarily a facilitator of social networking? Or is it less than the sum of its parts, the next “big thing” that will likely disappoint?

Marketers disagree about its functions and seem uncertain as to its possible advantages. The use of mobile marketing to complement other channels is more confusing today than social media marketing was a mere 12 months ago. But the explosion in the use of portable computing devices makes it imperative for marketers to try to make sense of it all.

“There are so many vendors eager to help with marketing strategies, but marketers don’t know where to turn,” said Melissa Parrish, senior analyst-interactive marketing at Forrester Research. “Most marketers today are not putting huge budgets behind their mobile marketing strategies because they don’t know what they want to get out of mobile yet.

“But mobile has moved so quickly, even more so than social, that it’s almost an embarrassment for marketers not to be involved,” Parrish said.

Mobile’s potential is huge. The Mobile Marketing Association, in its “2012: The Year of the Mobile Imperative” study in January estimated that there are currently 5.3 billion mobile devices in use in the world.

Please continue here…