Can technology help parents monitor their kids online?

By James Zipadelli

While kids and teens have grown up with technology and using the Internet, it’s not always easy for parents to monitor them online. There are many online services who offer technology that can be used to monitor your child’s Internet use. Among the most recognizable websites are SafeKids, KidsHealth.org and NetSmartz.org, which is run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  Norton Family Online also has software that parents can find helpful.

Into this crowded field comes SafetyWeb.com, a website that attempts to bring technology and the expanding reach of the Internet to parents’ fingertips. Once parents access the Web site, they can put in their child’s email address for free to see how many times they are mentioned on the Web. Once they click “Search Now” a query goes out to more than 800 million social profiles across 100 social networks and public Web sites, says SafetyWeb.com co-founder Geoffrey Arone. To access more of the site’s features, parents can sign up for $10 per month. Generally, there are three settings regarding profiles: “private,” which means the child’s information on that website has been made private; “public” and “exposed,” which means that some of your child’s information on a website, such as LinkedIn, is private and some is public.

SafetyWeb.com is very user-friendly and built like a social Web site. Parents and kids can easily see what is being said about them on public websites like Facebook and  Twitter. If there is something positive the child has done, such as make their information on Facebook private, it is highlighted in green; if something is a cause for concern, such as profanity, it is highlighted in red. SafetyWeb.com does not look at private networks, such as a child’s or teen’s email.

Experts DigitalMediaBuzz.com spoke to all say any Web site is no substitute for good parenting and communicating with your child.

“We will not guarantee that child will not make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes,” Arone says. “However, we will help ensure that when they do make mistakes, we are there to help you ensure that it is not broadcast to the world, thus potentially jeopardizing your child’s privacy, safety and online reputation.”

According to Arone, technologies that attempt to restrict Internet use by ‘blocking’ websites or spying on kids are ineffective.

“The format of having one centralized home PC is shifting,” Arone says. “Kids today connect from computers at home, public computers at available schools and libraries, mobile devices, iPads, and when all else fails they can use their friends’ machines.”

Arone says SafetyWeb.com grew out of his experience doing interviews with prospective students for colleges and universities. He says while the quality of students has gone up, so has the digital footprint of those students - and a Google search easily reveals questionable content.

“The kids and teens we spoke with initially reacted to existing solutions (spy or block) very negatively,” Arone says. “Once I demoed SafetyWeb and made it clear that what we were searching was already out in the open, they were a lot more accepting, and in some cases relieved. People forget the amount of information that is out there. Our goal is not to catch and punish, but detect, share and encourage communication - that is going to lead to successful communication online.”

Hilary Bates, a spokesman for the children’s magazine Highlights, says the magazine did a survey in which they asked parents whether they used an online service to help keep their kids safe. ”Less than 3% of our respondents mentioned using a NetNanny or other service,” Bates says. “Obviously, when we included Glubble users, that number changed. But Glubble users tended to talk about how the technology was a tool, not a stand-alone solution to security.”

“Highlights recommends that families get involved with their kids’ on-line experience, as they do with other media, so it is a chance to share positive skills, and help kids navigate the risks as well,” Bates adds.

Devra Renner, a licensed social worker and author of the book  Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids, has a tip for parents on how to tell if their child is using the Internet properly. Renner has two children, ages 9 and 14.

“If your child is active on the Internet, sit down with them and have them show you the places they visit, the social networks they use, and how they use them,” Renner says. “Not only does it allow them to teach you something, it builds their confidence, and yours, that they understand what they are doing online. If they are unable to communicate to you what they do online, then you probably have a logical reason to incorporate a monitoring service.  And if you decide to use the service, you can explain, “You know what, we’re going to try this for a while until all of us are more comfortable with using the Internet.”

Renner also says a good way to find out if your child is could use the Internet responsibility is to monitor how they handle their friends and responsibilities offline.

“Ask other parents about the sites their children use and how they use it,” Renner says. “Keep in mind your child will inevitably make mistakes online. Keep your response in check by making sure your child understands the mistake, help them fix it if you can, and have them tell you ways they can possibly prevent the mistake from happening again.”

The Future of Google’s Technology

By Barbara Gengler

Sara Kleinberg, Google’s head of marketing, leads Google’s marketing team for established industries. Sara’s team works with marketers from the retail and technology industries to provide insights into the value of online advertising and how marketers can connect with their target consumers through Google’s advertising platforms.

Prior to joining Google, Sara was a product marketing manager at American Express. Previously, Sara was a strategy consultant at The Parthenon Group in

Boston and worked in business development for various internet companies.  Sara holds an M.B.A. in Marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated magna cum laud with a B.A. in Communications from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Sara lives in New York City.

Could you talk about Google’s multichannel marketing and where the technology is heading?
Think about yourself as a consumer and when you’re thinking about buying something. More times than not the easiest thing to do when you’re first considering a purchase is you go to Google and search to get more information,  about something you’ll buy or something you’re planning to buy. So that’s kind of where it all begins and you might then search at the broad category level. Hey, I’m interested in re-doing my kitchen or you might say I’m ready to buy kitchen cabinets, and that would be product information, the second type of search. Then you might say how much do kitchen cabinets cost? Should I buy at  Home Depot or Lowe’s or should I get them custom? The fourth thing may be do I want to search because I’m about to drive over there and need directions to get there?

It all starts with the consumer and their interest in researching something and buying something. And because Google is a place consumers go to determine what they want to buy, it’s also a good place for retailers and other businesses to market their products and services. Because it is where in-market consumers are looking and researching and shopping. So that kind of ties in back into Adwords and why Adwords is successful and a useful forum for businesses that are trying to reach out to customers.

So the idea is because consumers are on Google search asking questions and stating their interests, Adwords platform enables businesses to place the right ad to the right user for right time to answer those inquiries. So that could be anything from big Fortune 500 companies or the Mom and Pop shops. Adwords can really serve the big to small and do that same service of connecting the right ad to the right consumer at the time based on the searches.

Now thinking about ecommerce I gave the four things that people look for. They look for category information, product information, price information or the link to the store. And so getting into multichannel, sometimes you’re looking online or searching online because you actually want to buy something online and that’s ecommerce.

Is the gap between expectations and capabilities in multichannel marketing significant? What challenges do companies face in planning, deploying and measuring campaigns?
Where the multichannel marketing approach comes into play is with the fourth type of search that links to the store offline. So again back to kitchen cabinets, if you need custom kitchen cabinets you may order them online or you may feel more comfortable going to store to talk to a representative. What we find in our consumer research is you still go to Google to search to do the research online but then you’ll actually visit the store and that’s what we call  (or a business thinks about) as multichannel.

If you think about retail overall and how big that market is online and offline, according to Forrester Research, 45 percent of all retail sales are impacted by online. So it’s not that the purchases are made online but the impact online, Forrester is recognizing how much of general business is impacted by this online research.

If I’m a pure-play ecommerce company and online search company, search marketing is a smart online marketing vehicle for me because that individual is searching online. If I’m a multichannel retailer that means I have ecommerce but I also have a physical store. Even if I’m just a physical store and I don’t have an ecommerce platform, (like a lot of local record shops that don’t have the  infrastructure to sell on line), but because like Forrester said 45 percent of sales are impacted by online, so even if I’m a record store that doesn’t have any ecommerce, that’s what multichanneling marketing is all about.

It’s about using the online channel to market your products and services even if the sale is made in the store. And as marketing is evolving and as consumer behavior is increasingly turning online into search ads the critical research piece to the purchase, it’s smart marketing for these multichannel or even offline businesses to use the search marketing to reach the consumer.

And so the whole Adwords platform or concept of search ads on Google is a way to enable that type of advertising. It’s a self-serve system that even a small cabinet maker or record shop or a big multichannel conglomerate can all access to run these search ads and respond appropriately with the right message to the right companies.

What are some of the most effective ways to get the most optimized campaign possible with Adwords?
At Google we encourage what is called test and learn. We do have some general pointers about ad copy and making sure that the ad copy is directly relevant to the search term that is typed in. And making sure it’s very clearly written and that it can have a special promotion reflects that in your ad copy because that’s going to attract attention.

So there are certain tips that we make available for how to write smart copy and then the other thing we encourage is trial and error so that the Adword system enables you to put several different variations of Ad copy and then you can see which one wins. You can trial and error and see what works best for you and see what works best for your business and your product set, or which products you should be promoting more heavily than others through this self-search system. Not only is it a way to place ads but it’s also a way to be strategic and to learn about your campaign because you get the feedback.

Another advantage of search advertising is the real-time feedback about what’s working whereas in traditional advertising it’s just not an option, like television advertising or newspaper circulars which are all traditional marketing vehicles for driving purchases. It’s difficult to know if the green circular or the blue circular works better, or if the picture of the bicycle or the picture of the tricycle is going to sell better. But on the Adwords marketing platform you can learn real time what’s going to be the most effective advertising for you.

Could you talk about measurement and ROI? Online marketing efforts are claiming a lot but without proper measurement, it doesn’t mean much. So what does Google think about ROI?
That builds on what I was going to explain - that one of the advantages and more unique attributes of online marketing is the ability to see results, to see who’s clicking on what. What online marketing provides is hard and fast data and real time reaction.

If you think about ROI, that is the return on your marketing investment, it depends on your marketing goals. So, for example, when we’re talking about ecommerce, one of my goals would be to get people to my website, and that’s something that I can easily measure on Google’s Adword platform, just by seeing who is clicking and the traffic that I’m getting. If you want to see the return on investment, clearly you’re interested in the sales or the actual transactions or the products that you’re able to sell, based on your advertising. And again that requires a little more analysis but Google has tools to help you do that.

You can sign up for free to get some of these tools that allow you to optimize based on your transactions and learn about that and that way you can better optimize your marketing so you can figure out which ads not only bring the most traffic to your site but you can also figure out which ads yield you the most purchases.

Google has these tools, conversion optimizer and conversion tracking. What Google offers is limited to online transactions. It’s possible but more complicated to also measure offline transactions so let’s talk about the world of online transactions.

Google has these free tools that any Mom & Pop or any major corporation can set up. One is called conversion tracking and one’s called conversion optimizer and if I were a retailer on my website I would set up some tracking links and input some of the information and set it up so that the tool tracks the search terms that are coming in or the ads that are getting clicked. It tracks in this online world on the back end, what kind of things are sold or what kind of transactions made on the back end and its all propriety to the retailer.

So if I’m the record shop that’s selling online and decide to sign on for one of these free tools that Google offers nobody else see that information, that’s my private information.

There are plenty of tools and products in the marketplace offered by many different companies. So again the advantage of online marketing is that it is trackable and it is accountable and it provides a lot of data to be able to make smarter marketing decisions based on the impact the ads are having. And now tie it back to ROI, if you understand the effectiveness of your ads, and you’re able to make smarter marketing decisions about which ads to run, you can optimize to get greater yield, more sales, more transactions or whatever your marketing goal is and then that yields you higher ROI versus the kind of traditional market model, its guesswork. You can try to figure it out, and there are ways and data models to help figure it out, but it’s much more complicated; it’s certainly not real time and it’s certainly not as accessible as implementing a free tool from Google’s.

Could you tell us about the vision for the Google Retail Blog?
At Google we have specialists to address different industries because we want to make sure we’re giving the best advice to businesses based on whether they are retailers or in the travel space or whatever it is. So I look after retail and technology, and we have this blog, the retail blog, for retailers whether they be Mom & Pop shops or large multichannel and this is where we provide tips and advice for smarter, more effective online marketing. For example, at the blog’s entry for April 7, which is called Get Ready for Outdoor Entertaining, there’s a trend that we noticed people searching for patio furniture, what kind of patio furniture and what’s on sale.

And by this blog we track and communicate these trends to help marketers be more effective. And in March there’s an entry about Mother & Father’s day coming up and we took a look at when are people searching for gifts for Mother’s Day and when are they searching for gifts for Father’s Day. This is all based on human behavior and we know that consumers start to search when they’re thinking about making a purchase or when they’re ready to make a purchase.

And so by revealing that information about these consumer insights and the learning we have about how consumers shop and how they research, it can help guide advertisers into when people are shopping, if they’re shopping more for Mom’s than Dads or Dad’s more than Mom’s. The blog is a forum for us to help by revealing some of these insights. And we can also provide information on the types of terms people are searching on. There’s an entry on March 25 for fastest rising search terms or things that people are typing into the search engine, what’s bubbling to the top of frequent new things. Here we see graduation party invitations and dresses for graduation. Because search is what consumers do when they’re thinking about shopping or what’s going on in their life right now, we can come up with a lot of insights on consumers behavior and consumer shopping behavior.

Archiving Tweets, With the Help of Google

By James Zipadelli

While much of the media attention recently has focused on the Library of Congress making Twitter a part of history, Google was doing the same thing, on a smaller scale. Google’s feature, called replay, which was recently rolled out.

Google spokesman Jake Hubert says the replay feature helps broaden the scope and relevance of real-time search. The Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine launched real-time search in December 2009.

“Twitter and other micro-blogging services host useful content about breaking news, public opinion, and hyper-local events like weddings and bike races,” Hubert says. “Sometimes the only place someone published information is in short-form from a mobile phone. Just as people want to search for Web sites, today people want to be able to search the public content on update services like Twitter.”

The feature uses a Twitter feed to archive people’s text messages, called Tweets, which is subject to an agreement made between the two companies last year. Hubert says the agreement allows Google “to protect user privacy by ensuring we can delete tweets from our feature in a timely manner after a user deletes a tweet on twitter.com.”

According to Hubert, initially, the Tweets will be archived going back to Feb. 11, 2010; they hope to eventually archive the entire history of Twitter, which began in March 2006.

“When you’re in the “Updates” and “Any time” view in search options, we apply ranking algorithms to determine the most relevant updates content for your search,” Hubert says. “Once you click into the chart and explore Tweets from a specific time, we organize those tweets by date and time, enabling users to see a “replay” of the activity on Twitter about that subject during that time period.”

Co-founder of Twitter reacts
Dominic Sagolla, co-founder of Twitter and author of “140 Characters” (Wiley, 2009) says the inclusion of Tweets into the Library of Congress fulfills the goal Twitter’s inventor, Jack Dorsey, had, which is, “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.” According to Sagolla even though many powerful people have been using Twitter since its founding, it became popular once presidential candidates and the White House started using it regularly.

“Individual tweets can be interesting or mundane, but what is truly fascinating are the trends and patterns in aggregate,” Sagolla says. “For example, the shapes and patterns of sand on a beach are considered beautiful, whether or not you may find beauty in an individual grain of sand.”

Sagolla says Twitter helps Google and the way it indexes information.

“The message itself is simply a seed, the beginning of relevance. Beneath the message is a deep root structure of meaning and association, and Twitter’s new developer tools will enable us to add even more information to each tweet,” Sagolla says. “Each result in a Google search has a relevance score associated with it once it is found. Each message sent from Twitter has relevance associated with it _from the start_, making discovery easier and more immediate.”

Sagolla also talked about the impact of Twitter in the world, from the Twitpic of the “Miracle on the Hudson” to places like Mumbai, Iran, Haiti and Chile.

“Mobile devices penetrate the walls of society and short-form messaging provides the transparency that we sorely need. We will soon see a tipping point, where those who govern us will hear our voices more clearly,” Sagolla says.

Founder of Craigslist reacts to Twitter and the LOC
“I don’t think we have value in the historical context in the same way Twitter does,” Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says. “The great value of Twitter is that people do serious work via Twitter, like breaking news, how the world is changing. I do feel this decade represents a tipping point in the way people work with each other, and there will be great shifts of power and influence to the grassroots.

“We have a database which might be useful to detect trends, both behavioral and economic, and maybe someday we can look at that, but right now were swamped and

there are privacy issues,” Newmark says. “We could archive that information, though we are obsessed with privacy. We fear disclosing personal information and were passionate about privacy so we’re very careful.” There are 1.6 billion ads in the Web site’s database.

“In terms of the big trend, I think people are using the Net more and more for down to earth things,” Newmark adds. “Our site is about housing and jobs and everyday needs. Explicitly, we show that it’s easy to work together for mutual benefit and it’s easy to do so.”

What analysts have to say about the future of Twitter and social media
Pitzer College Media Studies professor Alex Juhasz says she supports the addition of Tweets to the Library of Congress. Juhasz taught a class previously within YouTube’s framework and will teach it again this fall.

“The way we benefit as a society is that the voices of everyday people expressing the texture and regular practices of daily life will be available to historians in the future,” Juhasz says. “So it won’t be just from headlines, and presidents, and the seats of capital but a more complex and diverse picture of history.”

“For YouTube, they do a poor job of archiving. If National Archives is archiving Tweets we assume that it will take seriously the work of archiving these materials. Because it’s text-based, it’s easy to search and categorize. YouTube is currently not a useful database for serious pursuits.”

Gartner analyst Jeff Mann says there are other archives besides the Library of Congress.

“In 1776, it was the Declaration of Independence and today it’s Twitter,” Mann says. I definitely don’t think it’s a bad thing. There are different types of archivists - some have an academic and others have a public interest approach. That’s what Google is trying to do, organize world’s info and make it more accessible. But they won’t have all the solutions because there will be other archives (like the Way Back Machine.)

AOL, Google: Searching for the Benjamins in Display Advertising

By Sheila Shayon

The first online advert ran on Oct. 24, 1994, on HotWired, the forerunner of Wired Magazine. It was 468 x 60 pixels and asked:

“Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”

And we did. The click-through rate was 42 percent. (For the record, Global Network Navigator ran the banner two or three weeks earlier, but HotWired garnered the coverage.)

Today’s display ads are virtual micro-sites, replete with interactive, social elements, animation and video. An example of an award-winning rich media ad:

In three days, this campaign earned 170 million impressions, 50,000 clicks and 17,000 hours of brand engagement, according to Google.

JPMorgan analyst, Imran Khan, predicts an $8.3 billion display advertising economy in 2010. The name of the game in the digital space has moved from search to advertising as the big brands step further into open access platforms with suites of tools and metrics to make it easier for advertisers and agencies to create and ’self-serve’ display ads and track and measure their effectiveness.

DMB spoke with Jeff Levick, executive vice president, AOL Advertising; and Rachel Nearnberg, Global Communications & Public Affairs, Google, about their advertising platforms.

AOL
AOL recently launched a beta version of Advertising.com Ad Desk. Levick was on the floor of Ad Tech San Francisco, where he said AOL’s presence in the middle of the exhibition was attracting traffic and attention. “It’s the most exciting experience at AOL you can imagine. We’re still testing Advertising.com Ad Desk, and learning as we go. It’s a huge leap forward, as it opens up all the inventory we have as well as gives access to a massive number of properties across the web through Ad.com.”

The AOL network has 78 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers and 70 of comScore’s Top 100 publishers. ‘Lead-back targeting’ is a distinguishing feature for AOL’s new platform, which allows advertisers to target their ads, and once it’s seen, re-target the same ad across the web. AOL’s suite of tools allows for retargeting consumers who have:

• Visited your website (Advertiser LeadBack)
• Seen or clicked on your ad creative (Creative LeadBack)
• Visited a webpage that you’re sponsoring (Sponsorship LeadBack)
• NOT visited your website - a great way to reach more unique visitors (Reverse LeadBack)
• Searched for a relevant word or phrase on AOL Search (SearchBack)

Formats include rich media, video and widgets, and AOL Advertising’s ad serving platform, ADTECH, manages campaigns across multiple platforms for web publishers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers.

“Transparency and control are the future of online advertising,” Levick says. “Providing clients with a greater level of personalized control over digital marketing campaigns is paramount as organizations continue to look for innovative ways to promote their brands and evaluate their ROI when planning campaigns.”

The build-out of Advertising.com Ad Desk over the last 10 months has deep-dived into technology to create the ‘lead-back targeting’ capabilities. Ads uploaded by the users are virus scanned and monitored as they run, as well as reviewed for ad spec compliance, quality and content.

Next up, Version 2 will deliver increased Reporting and Insights tools and metrics. “We’re connecting the advertising experience to the publishing side of the house. Church and state are talking,” Levick added.

Google
We all heard Eric Schmidt’s prediction that display advertising would be Google’s next billion-dollar business. According to Nearnberg, “In such a fragmented media landscape today, with users on social media sites, e-commerce, blogs or online games, the challenge is where best to reach people and how to tailor ads across thousands of sites and track performance.”

According to Google data, US users spend 12 hours online per week, about 32 percent of their media time. But online advertising comprises only 13.6 percent of US advertising spend. “Scale and reach are the key challenges, and serving display ads is a more sophisticated and complicated process than search,” Nearnberg says. “Our Content Network enables keyword, contextual targeting between ads and content.”

The Google Content Network serves hundreds of billions of ad impressions to more than 500 million Internet users worldwide every month. It includes several Google properties including Google Finance and YouTube, and reaches 100 countries, with ads in 20 languages. Major publishers include New York Times, LinkedIn, Univision, About.com, and Food Network. “94 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers have run campaigns on Google Content Network - display not search,” added Nearnberg.

For smaller businesses, Google’s Display Ad Builder, offers designed templates that enable the creation and distribution of an ad in minutes. The goal is to make display advertising as simple as search, those functions being complementary. “20,000 advertisers using Display Ad Builder are first-time users. We are adding the science of search to display advertising,” commented Nearnberg.

According to Comscore, “average lift of search activity when display was added to a campaign was 155 percent.”  Douglas Anmuth, a Barclay’s Capital media analyst, predicts that display ads will account for $1 billion in revenue in 2010, or about 4 percent of Google’s total sales.

Experts agree that the gold rush towards display advertising is still early stage. Predictions for the advertising landscape in the near future include: data will be more valuable than awards; ROI will be the metric of success; engagement will trump creativity; and the technology deep dive will continue - with those who can afford to own their own - in the driver’s seat.

In April 2005, DoubleClick released a white paper, “The Decade in Online Advertising (1994-2004) - Online Advertising.” The summary included: “Advertisers still lag consumers in their adoption of digital media. As broadband reaches more American homes, as entertainment companies develop more digital content, and as televisions, mobile phones and other devices further blur the distinction between “online” and “offline,” all advertisers will be forced to adapt faster to the new media environment or struggle to stay relevant.”

Five years later, the struggle continues - but advertisers are adapting faster, listening more to their consumers, and making online engagement a more worthwhile endeavor.

Google Search Seeks Speed

Amit Singhal discusses the future of search at the SABEW conference./Chris Prentice

By Matt Robinson

Google is synonymous with search, but could be onto to something greater: inference. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and tweaker of Google’s search algorithm since 2001, says search is beyond key words and at the door step of understanding language. Singhal, speaking at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in Phoenix held in late March, used some examples. If you google “GM cars,” you get General Motors, but if you google “GM food,” you get genetically-modified. “Search is about matching meaning to what users want,” he says.

Another example, if you google “panasonic lock TV,” you get hits about “parental control.” Singhal says marketers probably didn’t like the word “lock” and went with the nicer “control.” But Google infers the difference. Other points made at the conference include:

• Information wants to be free he says, but that doesn’t mean websites shouldn’t impose a pay wall, citing that good content costs money. But differentiating that good content from “McContent” - quick, cheap generated content - is difficult since the language between the two is often similar.

• Web content is suppose to be free. And citizens with information are better ones. Singhal sees China inhibiting its best interest by restricting search.

• The future of Web search is still based on the what made google popular: speed. “We are crazy about speed,” Singhal says. He noted that if a user’s is slowed down by 200 milliseconds, the site will end up losing traffic. Relevant algorithms are now more important than ever, he says. “As the amount of information has exploded, the importance of relevance has gone through the roof,” he says.

• The kind of information that people seek on phones is much different than what people search for on their computer. Singhal sees a future in location-based advertising.

(Images from home page are courtesy of the Tuscon Citizen.)

Tower of Babel: Developing Mobile Apps for Multiple Platforms

By Ned Smith

Software application developers had it easy in the lazy, hazy, crazy days of the 20^th century. Personal computing was pretty much a platform duopoly with Microsoft and Mac battling for market share and bragging rights. The meteoric rise of mobile computing, fueled by the smartphone eruption, wrote finis to all that. The mobile world today is awash in a sea of competing  platforms.

This poses a dilemma for developers. How do you know where to begin or what platform to focus on? How will the introduction of Apple’s iPad or the opening of the Kindle to outside developers affect the mobile marketplace?

The developers at Where, a mobile search and recommendation service, ran the calculus and decided to cast a vast mobile net.  This service is available on six major platforms — iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, J2ME and WAP — as well as through nine operators and seven OEMs. That approach was driven by bottom-line considerations, according to David Chang, Where’s vice president of product. “It’s a fairly straightforward decision process based on P&L,” he says. “The first component is the overall market opportunity in terms of technology readiness - is the technology market-ready?- and consumer adoption - will consumers buy and use the devices and applications? The second component is the initial cost to develop and the incremental cost to maintain and support.”

And sometimes the decision is made for strategic reasons. “One of the main reasons we developed an application for multiple platforms is that you get a larger footprint of consumers,” Chang says. “It’s more useful when you have other people who use the application. Friends and family members may be on different platforms. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever meet a family where everyone across the board uses the same phone.”

But there are challenges in developing for multiple platforms, he says. You have to deal with different form factors and the different development languages require different development skill sets.  The devices themselves also have different capabilities. This gives rise to the development of one-off feature sets. “One of our more popular features on the iPhone is the 3-D maps where you can see what’s around you in 3-D,” Chang explains. “That capability doesn’t quite exist on all platforms, so that’s one feature that’s only on the iPhone for us.”

A market fragmented by competing platforms provides a litmus test for the stickiness of new features, says Chang. “You tend to learn things on one platform and figure out whether it’s a platform-specific innovation or whether it’s applicable to more than the consumer base that’s on that one platform.”

Fragmentation also favors larger developers with deeper skills resources. “If you’re a two-person development shop, you probably can’t take advantage of the fact that you can be on all these devices because it’s very distracting to develop to a totally different platform,” Chang says. “We have developers in-house for these platforms, so whenever there’s a fragmented opportunity, we feel we can take advantage of it because of our assets. We can hop on one of those fragmented opportunities right away.”

The fit between application and device is also a key consideration, says Chang. Because of that, he says, Where may be expanding and looking for a spot on the iPad and Kindle dance cards in the near future. “We did actually take a look at both,” he says. “The nature of our application is that it’s really meant for people on the go. We envision the Kindle and the iPad to be much more home devices or stationary devices where there won’t be a pressing need for finding something like the closest coffee shop. You probably already know where it is.”

How users interact with an application is another consideration. NBA Digital is a partnership between the NBA and Turner Sports. They jointly manage the NBA’s digital assets and are extending the league’s reach into the mobile marketplace with 33 paid and free applications across the Android, Blackberry and iPhone Platforms, including its signature, NBA Game Time.  “The key for us is to develop new products for our experiences,” says Michael Adamson, Turner’s vice president new sports products. “We began our mobile app development a year ago. We want to reach the most NBA fans possible. That necessitated a mobile strategy.”

NBA Digital took a look at who was engaging with NBA.com already on a mobile phone and paid close attention to the momentum of the iPhone in selecting the platforms to support. “Video was one of the major challenges in developing across platform,” says Adamson. “We developed with a screen dimension and user experience in mind. All the devices look incredibly similar. We have been very pleased with the results. It’s not intended to be NBA.com; it’s filling in the gaps.”  Given their druthers, says Adamson, fans want to see sports live, not on a small screen.” But life gets in the way.” That’s where NBA Digital comes in.

Adamson says this has been a learning process to find out what works in mobile. “We are trying to learn as much as we can during the 2009-2010 season,” he says.  “Here’s one surprise. The number of fans who engaged us on the Android platform has been much higher than we expected. They’ve become really avid and engaged.”

The fit between the application, device suitability and prior fan interaction with NBA.com lead NBA Digital to home in on developing for the Android, Blackberry and iPhone platforms.

You don’t have to have the deep pockets of the NBA and Turner Broadcasting or the deep skill-set bench of Where, however, to develop cross-platform mobile applications. There’s a way to port without pain.

Appceleartor made its bones by providing a platform that lets developers create native mobile application experiences for iPhone and Android devices using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP.  Though the apps created are not true native apps, they’re well beyond good enough, according to Scott Schwarzhoff, Appcelerator’s vice president of marketing.”We’re at 99 percent of native speed,” he says.

Mobile, Schwarzhoff says, is not a mature marketplace. In making the decision about what platform to pick, he advises, a developer should ask,” What’s the market today versus where it will be when I get my app to market?” He needs to get a sense of the opportunity across the market.

Appcelerator, echoing Where’s thumbs-down on Amazon’s device,  is going to pass on making its platform work with the Kindle. “We don’t have plans to support Kindle,” Schwarzhoff says. “It’s a business decision. We go where the opportunity is. The Kindle is not designed from the get-go as an applications platform.”

Not so, though, with Apple’s iPad. “The iPad is not only a new platform,” he says. “It’s a new category.” In a recent survey of 23,000 developers conducted by Appceleator, 90 percent said they were interested in building an iPad application within the first year.

“The principles of the iPad have been proven by the iPhone,” says Schwarzhoff. “People say the iPad is just a big iPhone. Is there anything wrong with that?”

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