Not only are companies, developers, and entrepreneurs of all varieties looking to develop a mobile presence as part of a comprehensive marketing campaign, even US states are delving into mobile territory.

This week it was posted on the official web site of the state of Alabama, that a new (and free) iPhone application is being released courtesy of Alabama.gov. Available now from iTunes and Apple’s App Store, the state of Alabama is looking to boost everything from tourism to resident awareness about state happenings through the new app.

Alabama Interactive, which is the “official eGovernment solutions provider” for the state of Alabama, reveals that the aforementioned application will serve up a variety of tools and resources that will certainly prove of interest to both Alabama residents and potential visitors to the great state. Such features include: Full site and state employee directory searches, access to state maps (parks, educational references, public services) through Google maps, news feeds, alerts and – of course – Twitter.

According to the official announcement from www.alabama.gov, the state’s website generates in excess of 800,000 visitors each month. The mobile extension of the site via the new app “will provide another gateway for citizens to interact with government.”

What it may also provide is the inspiration for every other state to develop a similar mobile application to promote the virtues and values of their own state.

Share This

r2integrated, an internet marketing and technology firm, has developed a simple and innovative tool to help brands plot the future of their mobile apps.  By comparing an app’s brand value against its usefulness, the tool predicts whether the app is doomed for failure or future success.

The quadrant is comprised of “campaign focused,” “most successful,” “least successful,” and “utility focused.”  By plotting a proposed mobile app’s brand value proposition against its usefulness, the quadrant can help predict its likely success based on one of the four aforementioned outcomes.

The first of which is obvious; if your app has low brand value proposition and low usefulness, the likelihood of success is inherently low, and it’s not worth the investment.  Low brand value compared with high usefulness, however, will place your app in the “utility focused” quadrant, meaning its success will improve, but will still face heavy competition from other utilitarian-based apps from larger software companies and providers.

If your app has high brand value but low usefulness, you’re app will be deemed “campaign focused,” meaning it will likely be successful for short-lived branding initiatives, but will lack long-term viability from a user-perspective.  Finally, if your app has high usefulness and high brand value, you’ll find yourself in the “most successful” quadrant for obvious reasons, meaning its utility will keep it “top of mind” with users, while driving brand impression and buying behavior as well.

Read the rest

Share This

Point Inside, makers of the innovative “Smart Map” Android and iPhone shopping center mapping and navigation apps, today announced the launch of its new indoor mobile advertising platform that provides the world’s first indoor location and pull-based advertising solution for mall-based retailers and brands.

Point Inside’s Smart Map application provides a fully interactive directory of the interiors of shopping malls, level by level, allowing users to find over 100,000 stores, kiosks, or restrooms in hundreds of the top North American malls across nearly every U.S. state and Canadian province.  It can be described as the “Google maps for the inside world,” and as such, provides a unique mobile advertising opportunity for the brands and retailers located inside shopping malls.

The new mobile advertising platform is primarily pull-based, meaning the consumer initiates the query to view the ad based on their interest in a particular store or brand.  Retailers benefit from highly-targeted, highly-relevant location-based advertising, and consumers can more easily find information on the events and promotions occurring from the brands and stores they like while they’re actually in the mall or the store itself.

A recent example of the new mobile ad platform in action was this past President’s Day Weekend, from 2/11-2/16, when Kate Spade New York  ran a special promotion to Point Inside app users promoting; “Enjoy 40% off your entire purchase at our outlet shops.  Show this offer in store to receive an additional 10% off.”  Point Inside is targeting all levels of retailers, from large national chains — such as current promotions with Nordstrom and American Eagle — to mid-size and smaller chains such as Kate Spade, Takken’s Shoes, ROAD Apparel and Obadiah Salon, all of which already implementing Point Inside’s mobile ad-platform.

Read the rest

Share This

Shazam, the startup focused on mobile “music discovery,” today announced the launch of its innovative “Audio Recognition Advertising” (SARA) solution to integrate mobile marketing into its hugely popular music tagging technology.

The SARA program works by letting brand advertisers directly reach, influence and interact with target audiences using the company’s immensely popular music recognition technology to tag a commercial.  Advertisers can then create campaigns that incentivize viewers to engage with the promotion and ‘Shazam’ the ad-spot, meaning viewers access the Shazam service on their respective mobile devices, point the device in the direction of the commercial and hit the “Shazam” button.  Shazam’s audio technology recognizes the specific advert and returns a customized result.

Brands can use SARA for special promotions and hidden content — such as exclusive videos and interviews — by providing a click-through to a branded mobile web experience where viewers can interact directly with branded content. The tagged item remains in the viewers tag list so they can revisit it and share it with friends.

To bring the SARA platform to North America, Shazam has teamed with Augme Mobile to integrate its mobile marketing technology and reach within Shazam’s platform.  The combined solution allows for a 100% ‘opt-in’ environment and, unlike other interruptive advertising formats, is wholly controlled by consumers who can choose to interact with only those adverts or programs that are relevant and of value to them.

It’s a unique solution for advertisers, and one I think will be very successful given the popularity of Shazam and the methodology involved.  It’s nice to see something completely new coming out of MWC, and the new SARA platform has a lot of potential to make waves in the near future.  This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Share This

mOcean today announced the launch of a beta program related to its new mobile advertising platform aimed squarely at mobile apps.  Dubbed “MAST for apps,” the new platform claims to be the industry’s first “comprehensive ad management” solution tailored specifically for iPhone and other smartphone app developers.

Put simply, MAST for Apps enables developers to monetize their apps by selling and managing their own mobile ad space.  To do so, the MAST for Apps platform incorporates a full suite of features, including enhanced targeting, real-time reporting and analytics, conversion tracking, yield optimization, and rich media support.  After the beta period, the company will be adding several features to the platform, including a searchable directory of apps across multiple platforms, and a cross-marketing program allowing developers to drive inbound traffic and downloads for their apps.

The MAST for Apps ad serving system is available for all major mobile development platforms, including the iPhone App Store, Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm Pre App Catalog, Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and BlackBerry App World.

“With the massive growth of smart phone devices, and the recent announcement of the iPad and other tablet devices, mobile applications are becoming more prevalent than ever. And developers are looking for new ways to capitalize on this trend,” says Dave Gwozdz, CEO of mOcean Mobile, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mojiva, Inc. “MAST for Apps will help any size developer increase their profits, by allowing them to manage their own ad inventory, and by giving them access to the same set of tools that up to this point only Web publishers have had. This is a huge step forward for app monetization.”

Read the rest

Share This

So far, there’s been a lot of emphasis placed on wireless carriers during this year’s MWC, with numerous solutions tailored specifically for wireless operators and their need for everything from network optimization to mobile content distribution.  Openwave is continuing that trend, with its debut of “Openwave Analytics, Data Mediation Edition (DME),” which aims to help operators effectively monitor, manage and monetize mobile data traffic.

Openwave Analytics DME enables operators to gain “detailed network and usage related insights across a wide array of operator data sources,” or in other words, allows carriers to know exactly how users are interacting with their network to better leverage various opportunities.  The solution also allows operators to seamlessly insert this intelligence into their control points in the network and mobile ecosystem, allowing them to stay focused on providing the ability to build rich profiles and segments and leverage insights into new revenue streams.

The solution is fueled by real-time analytics that provides early identification of mobile data trends that enable operators to make timely decisions to avoid bandwidth problems while targeting business driving opportunities.  To make it happen, the platform mediates among all different ecosystem elements, enabling the enhancement of every mode of IP traffic, including mobile internet, messaging, video and social networking.

Startups and solution-providers have recognized the deficiencies present with wireless operators, and have begun to offer solutions targeted directly to solving those shortcomings.  As the mobile ecosystem has evolved, the real innovation has lied in third-party providers, not the carriers, and those providers are now trying to bolster the networks that fuel their products and services by offering specifically targeted solutions such as Openwave Analytics DME.  Whether operators will make use of such solutions is yet to be seen.

Read the rest

Share This

Mobixell utilized the first day of MWC to unveil its new RSS gateway solution, whereby RSS feeds can be delivered to subscribers via SMS/MMS, eliminating the need for users to download a client to keep up on the latest news their interested in.

The solution was designed to offer an alternative to existing client-based mobile RSS feed readers and enables operators to generate additional revenue and retain a prominent position in the so-called “value-chain.”  The solution allows RSS feeds to be delivered to all multimedia-enabled handsets without users having to install and configure anything.  The RSS Gateway tracks the feeds of selected websites — be it news, sports, weather, stock quotes or podcasts — and sends registered subscribers the newly available content  as an alert service via SMS or MMS.

The URL to the target website is embedded in the notification message, prompting the subscriber to launch a browsing session to get the whole story.  The idea is to give operators a way to add a range of Web 2.0 services to their offerings, while driving additional revenue and promote customer loyalty along the way.

Being aimed squarely at carriers, the RSS Gateway solution is yet another attempt to help carriers get in on the explosion of mobile services that are prime to be taken advantage of.  While it’s a unique solution, I don’t foresee the advantage for consumers in the end.  It adds benefit for carriers in adding a solution for furthered engagement of subscribers, but consumers are already bombarded with ways to access mobile content on their devices.  Also, receiving news alerts from an RSS feed via SMS could get annoying overtime.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this one plays out.

Share This