Mobile WiFi Usage Up, Steady Growth Continues

JiWire, remains the leading mobile audience media company leveraging currently serving 20 million unique users monthly via 30,000 high-traffic, premium Wi-Fi hotspots.

JiWire is the leader in reaching business travelers, affluent families and trendsetters in an online environment with high quality receptivity and response, and leveraging the effectiveness of reaching an on-the-go audience.

DMB’s Sheila Shayon spoke with David Staas, senior vice president of marketing at JiWire, in March. Today, after five months of additional research, DMB is following up as JiWire releases its latest Mobile Audience Insights report.  Q2 findings reveal granular and comprehensive data about location-based ads: the preferred types of ads and audience segmentation and engagement preferences.

The report sampled 2,260 randomly chosen JiWire customers and data from 315,000 public Wi-Fi locations. Every ad request between April-June 2010 from North America’s 30,000 hot spots was recorded and analyzed.

The top end results are: 39% of mobile users find location-based ads with coupons the most appealing; mobile users want to discover stores in close proximity to their location and review those ads on location-based apps.

More than 50% of the ‘on-the-go’ audience will share their location in order to access more relevant ads. Gender differences are minimal, with 42% of women amenable to location disclosure and 54% of men.

“People today are demanding much more localized content as they spend more time on the go, creating a great opportunity for advertisers. Just as brands were challenged with how to ‘socialize’ themselves in the social media space, today brands need to think about how to ‘localize’ themselves with their consumers,” says David Staas.

DMB asked Staas what the top 2 or 3 things a brand can do to ‘localize’  with their consumers:

Include Local Messaging and Content.  Don’t just run a national ad with the same message in every location.  Adapt the creative itself to include location relevant messages that better engage consumers in their own market.

An example: Microsoft ran a campaign for Microsoft Office that included customized local messages in each ad based on the users location.  For example, and ad in Denver would show a local landmark and customized call to actions such as “A PC without Office is like Denver without the Rockies”

Ceate a Local Call to Action:  Brands can localize themselves especially if they have a local presence.  Calls to action that provide store locations and directions, or specific offers and promotions at nearby location help a brand become much more localized.  Rather than click-through to a corporate site, have each local ad click-through to the local store’s website.

Leverage Context of a Location:  With people spending more time on the go, the context of their location becomes extremely important.  Creating campaigns that speak to people differently when they are in a coffee shop vs an airport for example, recognizes the unique mindset of that person of that point in time, and allows brands to be far more effective.

How much does the actual device effect consumer behavior?
We are seeing people spending time on multiple devices. In fact, 24% of people said a Smartphone, netbook, iPad (non-laptop) was their primary device to connect on. The key for an advertiser is to develop a cross channel approach to engage with their audience across all devices. It’s important for advertisers to organize campaigns around audience instead of distribution paths like out-of-home, online or mobile.

Someone on a mobile phone might be in-store doing research on a product; whereas, someone on a laptop in a café might be looking up the closest locations for a nearby store.  Understanding the context of the location were people are connecting is what’s most important, and then make sure you can reach them however they choose to connect.

Additional highlights include:

• Thirty-six percent of mobile users want to receive location-based ads about nearby stores;
• Over half are interested in location-specific advertising;
• Forty-seven percent of men and forty percent of women are most likely to engage with mobile ads that are hyper-local to their location;
• Thirty-seven percent use location apps where they live as much as when they are traveling.
• World-Wide Public WiFi locations have grown from 132,080 in 2006 to 310,732 in Q2 2010, an increase of 135%.

Q2 Ranking of Top Ten Location Usage:

• United States
• China
• France
• United Kingdom
• Germany
• Russia
• South Korea
• Japan
• Sweden
• Taiwan

Q2 Ranking of Top Ten U.S. Cities:

• New York
• San Francisco
• Chicago
• Houston
• Brooklyn
• Los Angeles
• Seattle
• Bronx
• Atlanta
• Portland

WiFi usage has grown by 17.3 percent in the past quarter, with 55% of U.S. locations now offering free Wi-Fi, a 12.6 percent increase from Q1 2010.

Hotels, airports and cafes are the top venues, while universities and transit grew by 11 percent.

Percentage of Change from Q1-Q2 in Venue Visits:

• Hotels +22.5
• Airports +22.6
• Cafes -1.8
• Other +11.0

As for most popular WiFi devices, the iPhone and the iPod maintain top positions with the iPad emerging as third most popular gaining 5% of all mobile device ad traffic in its first quarter. Closely following are the HTC Droid Incredible, now the most popular Android device, followed by the Motorola Droid.

The full Q2 JiWire Report can be found on the company’s website.

Will WAC Unite Cellphones?

By Linda Broughton

The Wholesale Application Community (WAC) is an “open global alliance” that seeks to “unite a fragmented marketplace” through providing an open industry platform for developing applications for mobile devices. The platform would enable application developers to more easily write an application that could then be immediately distributed across a number of mobile devices, most obviously cellular phones.

In an analyst and journalist update, Tim Raby, WAC’s interim CEO, discusses how WAC will benefit the mobile device application ecosystem – made up of app developers, handset and hardware providers, users and operators. WAC aims to offer developers a common software development kit (SDK) for creating apps, along with network and device application programming interfaces (APIs) that will enable developers to “write and submit once, deploy and sell everywhere” rather than the more common “write once, debug everywhere”. Users of apps developed via the WAC platform will not only have more choices in apps, they’ll be able to access their favorite apps from different mobile devices. (At the moment users are normally limited to accessing apps according to their chosen mobile device’s current Operating System or OS – that is Google, Apple or Windows.) WAC claims that mobile device distributors using WAC-made apps will save money, benefitting from consistent operator requirements and specifications. Operators like Google, Apple and Windows will be able to offer more apps and still be able to customize apps for their customers.

Communication giants including AT&T, Telefonica, Vodafone, and Orange have already contributed their support and several resources to WAC. WAC plans to begin publishing documentation for developers and holding developer events in September and November 2010. WAC will be a non-profit, using all its revenues to cover its operational costs.

So why are some developers still skeptical?

Carl Corcoran, owner and operator of TridentLoop, LLC, a software consultation company operating in North America and the European Union, is skeptical of the initiative. He notes “Different technology platforms seem to do about the same thing, but crossing between them seems to be an enormous hurdle for developers. If you had to re-learn how to drive a car every time you switched makes, then the natural reaction is to wish for standardization.” However, Corcoran goes on to point out that while standardization of mobile device applications may increase the audience capable of accessing an app, standardization may also compromise the app’s sophistication. Standardization can limit the developer’s use of the unique features offered by the different platforms currently available. App developers select platforms in which to develop in order to create an app specifically geared towards users of that platform. Standardization would remove this customization.

Moreover, Corcoran notes that mobile devices are less powerful and less flexible than desktop computers, meaning that any extra platforms and services provided via a mobile device are thus more limited. Adding a layer of “translation” between a mobile device app and its hardware can reduce the app’s available functions.

Lastly, Corcoran calls into question the interest that mobile device developers have in standardization. Microsoft, Corcoran explains, is promoting their own platform (.NET) and would most likely prefer to highlight their platform’s special features rather than invest more in yet another standard.

The Domain Name Game Goes Mobile

By Sheila Shayon

dotMobi, a global leader in mobile content and the company behind the .mobi domain, announced today the launch of goMobi, a new service enabling small-to-medium businesses (SMB’s) to create and publish mobile websites in minutes. Their proprietary product levels the playing field and gives SMB’s tools for a state-of-the-art mobile presence that works on any mobile device, across multiple carriers and platforms and with no need for development or coding skills…and all at a reasonable price.

The biggest difference in their service according to Pinkard (Pinky) Brand, Director of Global Sales for dotMobi, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, “We’ve built this from the ground-up suitable for the mobile experience for business. We didn’t take existing PC sites and squeeze them down to a 2-3 inch screen. That doesn’t work and the customers don’t come back.”

There are currently 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide — four times more than PC’s. Projections are 1 billion mobile web users by 2013. (Quantcast) Morgan Stanley predicts that mobile Web traffic will surpass PC web traffic by 2015. There’s an urgency for SMB’s to create an efficient mobile presence - or risk having no presence at all.

Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, VISA, Vodafone and T-Mobile are among the founding companies working with dotMobi for several years to create this category of scalable service with no technical barriers.

According to usability research commissioned by dotMobi from Human Factors International, 43% of consumers use mobile phone browsers to access the Web versus 14% who use custom apps to access a website; and 68% would rather visit a ‘made-for-mobile’ website vs. a ‘designed-for-desktop’ version when using a mobile phone or portable device.

“goMobi is a new model for mobile websites. The mobile experience has changed end user’s expectations. Transcoding in the past resulted in squeezed-down, unsatisfactory mobile interactions and there was little or no repeat business or usage,” continues Brand. “People are used to speed, rich media, video, and reasonable rates. goMobi provides all that and is break-through, one-stop-shopping for any business that wants to be global mobile.”

goMobi websites are hosted ‘in the cloud’ by dotMobi, so SMB’s have no ‘overhead’ hosting costs. Changes to a site can be rendered virtually in seconds, and existing customer contacts leveraged via calls, texts, location-based services and lead conversion.

All sites use a friendly, icon-based design as seen in these two samples from the Beta test:

Web developers and designers have a robust suite of tools at their disposal for the automated transformation of website content to mobile-friendly content including accessing HTML meta tags for site key items, mobile/desktop switchers and sophisticated device detection capabilities. goMobi sites recognize any handset in use making every phone work like a smartphone and are deployable on all mobiles - not just iPhones and Androids.

name.com, based in Denver, Colorado was the exclusive partner for goMobi’s Beta trials and is now first to market with the service. Soon to follow will be Tucows, Network Solutions, InterNetX and EuroDNS.

“We’ve been testing in Beta but expect thousands of sign-ups after today’s launch,” says Brand. “Our proprietary technologies ‘Device Atlas,’ and ‘Instant Mobilizer,’ make it easy and efficient to go mobile. The software finds an existing site and converts it. It’s a pre-populated, click-to-call set-up. The service will probably retail somewhere between $30 - $100 a year.”

Included in the goMobi package: hosting of the site; unlimited Setup Assistance for modifications; fair use policy to traffic volumes of 2000 page views/daily. Full details on setting up a goMobi mobile website are available at http://goMobi.info (for desktops) and http://go.mobi (for mobile devices).

As for what’s coming next in the mobile space, Brand says they’re working on payments direct from mobile devices and the ability to upload third party apps. Asked how he got into the ‘domain name game, Brand said it happened in the 1990’s when he and a college fraternity brother purchased their first registered name, ‘business.com’ for $150,000 - a large sum in those days as most were free or available for a $35 fee. The ‘business.com’ name subsequently sold for $7.5 million.

“The power of identity and name presence hit me like a ton of bricks,” adds Brand. “In 1996-1997, there were 1 million names registered. By 2000 that jumped to 10 million. Today, we’ve topped 200 million.”

So what’s in a name? In the domain name game - millions of dollars, millions of customers, and one more step forward in the digital evolution of enriched end-user capabilities and experience.

Question for iPad Competitors: Now what?

By James Zipadelli

Now that it’s been a few weeks since the iPad has launched - and the numbers look good - two questions come to mind. First, how can this technology be used to benefit iPad’s competitors?

In this YouTube video, HP has a “Slate Device” concept. HP declined request for comment and would only say that they have “yet to announce pricing, specs, etc. for the device.” HP’s latest products can be seen on their blog. A spokesman from Dell says they have shown some prototypes “but there is nothing in market” that competes with the iPhone. Microsoft directs people to CEO Steve Ballmer’s remarks at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. A Microsoft spokesman says the company plans to release slates and touch screen computers later this year.

The iPad also has some kinks to work out. Israel banned imports of the iPad out of concerns that its network “could disrupt other devices” because local transmitters have a lower power than in the US. Some colleges and universities, such as Princeton and George Washington University, have raised similar concerns. Ashish Chordia, founder and CEO of  Appdiscover.com, thinks that Apple will fix the problem quickly.

“They have the ability to take what is already out there - in some ways they are groundbreaking innovations,” Chordia says, referring to Apple. “Nokia had 800 series device that you could argue was a souped up iPhone. Of course they have great marketing and cult following, but they make it a little bit better and useful for the user. And I’m sure they’ll do more of it in the future.”

Chordia says iPad’s competitors can compete, but they need to have an App store.

“We feel that Apple has a big head start with the apps and the content that is created,” Chordia says. ” HP acquiring Palm will create that competition. Smaller players can be big players by adopting the Android player. There is an India-based startup and their Android based device is called Adam.”

Gartner analyst Angela McIntyre says Apple took the existing technologies that were already out there and brought them together with the iPad.

“The iPad is in between the smartphone and a PC in terms of computing capability,” McIntyre says. “What Apple saw in the market was a gap in the computing spectrum between smartphones and PCs that was starting to close.  Connected consumer electronics, such as e-readers (Kindle) and portable media players, e.g. iPod Touch and Zune, were gaining traction with consumers to fill that gap.  Apple designed a product, the iPad, with a high quality user interface that can serve as a media player, e-reader and has many functions of a mini-notebook (netbook).”

“Their App store and itunes store is second to none,” McIntyre adds. “They have a strong ecosystem of developers and applications that can take advantage of touch.”

Is the iPad an “i-fad” or the future? Rick Singer, CEO of GreatStartups.com, says it remains to be seen, although he added, “I’m sure Apple has five or ten versions planned.”

“I just ordered my 13-year-old son an iPad and he’s fascinated by the latest technology,” Singer says. “The iPad is really in an unfamiliar territory in the sense that, I don’t personally see the fascination with it. It’s really an enlarged iPhone without the iPhone’s capabilities. You don’t even have the ability to connect to an Ethernet cable.”

To be competitive, Singer says that companies need a product with increased battery life over the iPad, less expensive apps, and a cost-effective 3G or 4G network.

Gartner’s McIntyre says that while the functionality of the iPad is high, its high price is a turnoff for some consumers.

“The iPad starts at $499 goes up to $900,” McIntyre says.  “In order for media tablets to be accepted and adopted, they are going to have a price comparable to mini notebooks, which often retail for around $300. The price for a media tablet needs to be low enough that consumers feel they can justify its purchase as another computing device as most would have already bought a PC and a smartphone.”

Sometimes, for business reasons, the alternative to the iPad, is, well, not purchasing the iPad.

Richard Seppala, founder of YourROIGuy.com, does trade shows. When the iPad launched, he thought it would be helpful for his booth. Seppala has an iPhone already, so when he went to CommXperts.com, an Orlando-based company who works with businesses, they suggested a PICO projector. Seppala says it worked very well.

“I plugged (my iPhone) into the PICO projector so I have a crowd of 10 people watching my presentation on the wall,” Seppala says. “I was able to sell 10 clients watching this thing. When the two people side by side are looking at the iPad, the people that can’t see would walk right by. Everyone can see the presentation on the wall with the PICO projector. It’s like speaking on stage in your booth. People from across the room that saw the movie playing walked by the booth and it was a great lead generator. I have the iPhone so I didn’t need something that was larger with the same features.”

Courtney Barnette, President at CommXperts.com, says the projectors are $550, about the same as an iPad, but clients can rent the projectors for the trade show - it costs $200 to rent with a $350 deposit, and clients are refunded the deposit after the show. Barnette says it’s a good value for clients.

“Most businesses have a device that has a video out, and you could just add the PICO projector to it and not purchase the iPad,” Barnette says. “Most people like the iPad because it has a larger service. But if you can connect a PICO projector to an iPhone you can have surface of 200 inches on a wall. It’s really amazing what this projector can do.”

New Web site WhatApp? tests apps for safety and security

By Rebecca Henely

As the number of mobile-based and Internet browser-based applications increases, many app review web sites have sprung up, trying to separate the good apps from the bad.

However, while sites like AppVee and AndroidTapp look at the quality of an app or how fun it is to use, Ryan Calo, one of the two creators of WhatApp? said those review sites do not look at whether an App is secure or protects a user’s privacy.

“We wanted to have one place where experts, users, and developers could discuss these aspects of the online and mobile apps we increasingly rely upon,” Calo stated.

Calo and Lauren Gelman, both of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, began the beta for WhatApp? in mid-March. Since then, Calo stated 250 apps for a myriad of different platforms – from the smart phone iPhone and the social networking-site Twitter to the web browser Firefox and web application Google Docs – have been submitted to WhatApp? for review.

Of those, one-third have been reviewed. Calo stated reviews come from a panel of 26 registered and approved experts. These experts use a survey of questions to rate the apps on a sliding scale of how each app protects the privacy of its users, its security and the openness of its source.

“Some joined at my invitation; others signed up and were approved,” he stated. “They have different expertise – there are computer scientists, lawyers and other privacy and security specialists.”

In judging how each app protects its users’ privacy, the experts judge whether the app makes it clear to the user what information it will collect and how it will use that information, if the information it collects is necessary for the app to function or if it is in excess, and if the users can control the data they provide to the app after it has been submitted.

“The most common [privacy] issues are apps that gather more information than they need to perform the service they offer,” Calo stated.

He stated the most common security issues are app creators neglecting to encrypt user data and anticipate well-known security problems. Thus, the experts look for potential security vulnerabilities, whether or not the app encrypts or protects its user data and if the app could perform with fewer security risks to the user when judging the security of an app.

The experts also judge if the app’s source code is closed or open, if the data can be migrated away from the application and if the app uses open standards and data formats.

“Some believe that if you can see and experiment with the source code, it is easier to anticipate and therefore combat security vulnerabilities,” Calo stated. “Also, the idea is that open source projects catch errors (for instance, around memory) that can lead to security problems.”

Calo stated these rating standards were formulated from consultations with various experts and WhatApp? is still taking experts’ comments on their survey questions.

He stated his advice for developers entering the marketplace is to make security and user privacy a priority from the beginning. “This is ‘good for business,’ as our friends at the ACLU of Northern California have written, because if users discover that an app is insecure or that a developer is abusing their information, they will not use the product,” Calo stated.

Distimo Provides Insight & Analysis Across Top App Stores

By Ron Callari

Less than a week after Apple introduced its iPad, its app store was offering approximately 2,400 applications optimized for the tablet device and “games” represented 35 percent of all iPad titles. This analysis, coupled with comparison pricing, number of apps sold and the specific app store breakdowns by source is a small snapshot of the work that is done by Distimo, an innovative app store analytics company that addresses the widely fragmented app store marketplace.

Distimo, a privately held company based in the Netherlands provides in-depth reports and analytical monitoring for companies interested in how their apps are doing across the mobile application ecosystem. While the company competes with the traditional market analysis companies such as comScore, Forrester and Gartner, in stead of basing findings on panels and surveys, “Distimo Reports,” according to co-founder and VP of development Remco van del Elzen, “are more timely and accurate, covering the whole app store market based on factual information.”

Jan-Joost Rueb, CEO and co-founder of eBuddy, a Web based instant messaging service uses Distimo’s reports and monitoring analytics for his firm. Differing from some of the other research companies, he finds most useful, Distimo’s ability to not only track popularity of his app in other countries, but also to “compare the performance of competing applications with our own apps.”  The total cumulative download (to date) breakdown per source for eBuddy is shown here.

Interesting to note, eBuddy app is #2 most downloaded app on GetJar (behind Facebook).

Both Distimo Reports and Distimo Monitor are free to companies. The Monitor service offers mobile developers a free analytics tool to track their own and competitive applications across all app stores, without any adjustments needed to their application’s code. The company is monetized by selling their reports to device manufacturers, operators and large developers, with the future goal of “introducing premium features,” notes van del Elzen.

Companies can view daily downloads and revenue figures of all their applications and analyze their rankings, worldwide and compare these findings to how the competition is doing in terms of publicly available data, such as popularity, rankings and price changes.

The app stores currently analyzes findings from the six largest applications stores in existence today: the Apple App Store, Blackberry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile.  According to an aggregate report of the number of applications available in the market for the month of March, it is clear that Apple’s App Store is by far the clear front-runner.

Book apps are proven to be lucrative for the eReader market. One of Distimo’s studies indicates that the highest percentage of apps in the Apple App Store is now paid book applications. For example, there are 27,0000 books in the store, and of those 92 percent are paid apps, according to Distimo’s data. When questioning van del Elzen why Kindle, Sony Reader and Barnes and Noble’s Nook were not included in their reports and monitoring, he indicated that Distimo currently focuses on the stores that provide applications. “The line between applications and books however is blurring and we will provide analytics on some of the eReader market as well,” he notes.

The different ratios of free apps versus paid were one of the findings that Distimo presented during MWC 2010. In the chart below you can see the percentage breakdowns per store. While Android has the most free applications, Nokia has the most paid.

Developers can use Distimo’s data-mining to adjust pricing and distribution channels to maximize growth and revenue streams of their apps.

Rueb finds Distimo’s analysis invaluable because of the changing competitive market his firm has to deal with on a daily basis.  Tracking eBuddy’s performance on a worldwide level with Distimo, Rueb sums up Distimo as a service that which “allows us to act fast, based on country level analyses, popularity of competing apps and competitor’s actions.”

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