The Future of Wi-Fi

By Sheila Shayon

David Staas is a 13-year veteran of marketing and product management experience in the mobile and advertising industries. Prior to his tenure as senior vice president of marketing at JiWire, Staas was at Ad Infuse, a pioneer in mobile advertising, where he was vice president of marketing and helped build a premium network and platform business with leading mobile operators.

JiWire is the leading mobile audience media company serving 20 million unique users per month at more than 30,000 high-traffic, premium Wi-Fi hotspots.

Staas will be speaking at the Digital Media Measurement & Pricing Summit, held in New York April 7-8.

DMB’s Sheila Shayon spoke with Staas about JiWire, consumer mobility and understanding the effectiveness of reaching an on-the-go audience.

Any significance to the name, JiWire?
Yes - when the company began in 2003 and it was all about using Wi-Fi for connectivity, the name was created to mean “Joining Invisible Wires.”

How did you build one of the largest location-based interactive learning channels?
We were in the wireless Internet access business and built a directory of public Wi-Fi locations. We developed deep relationships with advertisers around the directory and this evolved into a new business model for early usage - instead of subscription driven with daily/weekly/monthly fees, we moved it to an ad-based model.

How big is that directory today?
291,493 free and pay Wi-Fi locations in 145 countries.

JiWire leverages the context of a user’s location. How?
WiFi is a media channel. It allows us to track location and context. Venue is as important as place. In other words, are you in a Starbucks in San Francisco, or an executive lounge at JFK? Then we can supply advertisers with user location, network provider, and even the venue brand: 123456 café, in Barnes and Noble, at such and such street corner, using a MAC. So the inventory plan and model back into the venue type.

Which venues are seeing the most user growth?
Obviously airports have exceptionally high traffic, and hotels, but as brands like McDonald’s integrate free Wi-Fi, and market themselves as café environments, adding free connectivity results in consumer affinity and the café footprint is growing quickly. US McDonald’s locations that have become free in 2010 are 11,400.

So does being able to reach audiences in the context of their daily lives drive deeper engagement than traditional media?
Absolutely. The mind-set of the consumer is critical to the advertiser. Our channel allows for dynamically delivered, location-specific campaigns. We know the DNA of our audience across our footprint - are they a college student, a tech enthusiast, or a business user. You need scale for the economics to work.

Can you give me an example?
We worked with Microsoft in customizing messages about their Student Edition and Home Edition. In Denver, the ad might read, “A PC without Office is like Denver without the Rockies,” or in New York, “A PC without Office is like NY without the Statue of Liberty.”

Who do you make your business deals with?
The wireless carriers — AT&T or Boingo — and they negotiate the deal with Starbucks or McDonald’s. Foremost on our mind is always — how do we connect with an on-the-go audience.

What verticals will see Wi-Fi next?
Transportation - trains and subways. Also in-flight and college campuses.

How does the U.S. mobile audience compare to the rest of the world?
U.S. leads in public Wi-Fi locations with about 70,000. China is next with 36,000. Then England with 29,000 and France is fourth with 26,000.

How about U.S. cities?
New York is number one with 887, then San Francisco with 869, and Chicago with 794.

As legacy media distribution channels become less relevant to marketers than audience segmentation, how is JiWire leveraging this?
The shift is more to digital and interactive - and as widely distributed as possible. Consumers on average spend 44 percent of their time today on the go - not in front of their PC. The industry needs channels that reflect that behavior. It used to be separate agency teams addressing the issue, digital, OOH, emerging media and mobile. Now those teams are working together and pulling budget from each towards the unified goal of audience as focus - not individual channels.

So in 2010 mobile ad buys will start to look more like online buys?
Yes. The history of online is that people bought channels. Today the buy is to identify the audience and not the device - this is the heart of the mobile ecosystem.

Let’s talk about cost per engagement as an increasingly important metric.
Digital campaigns are all about engagement - it’s the new paradigm. Social media is about spending time with a brand, being a part of the conversation. Banner ads are no longer sufficient. Our Ads for Access model is a value exchange for the consumer and the advertiser: come spend time with my brand and you get free access. It’s an opt-in value-add proposition.

When Bing first arrived on the scene, we did a promotion with Microsoft offering visitors to airports and hotels across the country access to free WiFi in exchange for performing one search.  The results were significant. The average online click through rate of .01% was transformed into a 29% rate when the user was engaged by the value-add offer.

Has the mobile consumer himself become a DOOH destination?
In a sense - yes. It’s all about “the channel finding me.” The key problem with DOOH is the lack of measurement and interactivity. How many people saw an ad - and were they the right audience and was it personally relevant?

Where do you see the mobile industry heading in the near future?
The overall evolution of the mobile ecosystem is amazing considering the time frame is roughly one decade. Mobile devices changed consumer behavior — ahead of the advertising industry. Consumer’s lifestyles are not slowing down. 900 million new, wirelessly-enabled devices will ship this year. The advertising industry has to keep up with the convergence of technology and legacy channels.

UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?

By Linda Broughton

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.

Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.

In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.

Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.

Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.

The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.

Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.

Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.

Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?

http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/

Google Exec: We’re Here to Help Newspapers

By: adage.com

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Devices like Apple’s iPad may help newspapers and traditional publishers, but only significant evolution will save them, Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, said in a talk with journalism students at UC Berkeley.

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Mobile Credit Card Payments: Fad or Future?

By Sheila Shayon

According to Ross Howe, sales and product development director for mStation/Mophie, “Mobile credit card transactions are the first big innovation since PayPal, and the biggest innovation in the credit card industry in 50 years. Plastic is old news.”

Mophie, a leader in creating iPhone accessories, is releasing a new product called the Mophie Marketplace. It’s a magnetic Strip Reader for iPhone 3G and 3GS. It enables the phone as a mobile payment solution that is fast, secure, completely transportable, light-weight and form-fitting. It’s an intelligent case solution for any merchant looking to drive sales at point-of-purchase, with assurance to customers that their card data is encrypted as it is swiped.

Encryption is ensured at the iPhone entry point by a tiny circuit board that bypasses the HH device completely. The iPhone never actually sees the credit card information - but sends it to a server in cyberspace where it is decrypted. Mophie is working on the next level of security, another layer at the swipe-head level, and the company is passionate about the issue.

The particular expertise at Mophie comes from its experience on the consumer side, rather than the payment side. Howe refers reverently to “making accessories for Apple customers that are beautiful, sexy products. The biggest challenge in developing Mophie Marketplace was to keep it as small and thin as possible. We are driven by a commitment to ergonomic design.”

Competitor VeriFone recently announced PayWare Mobile, which turns the iPhone into a card reader. A combination of an iPhone/iPod touch app, with a swipe card reader, it allows merchants to accept and process credit cards on the go. VeriFone’s product is aimed at small business merchants who need a mobile card reader for enterprises like home repair, small cafes and door-to-door sales.

Paul Rasori, senior vice president of marketing, considers his company the granddaddy in the payment business, with a 30-year track record and penetration in more than 100 countries. “In addition to the PayWare payment App, the card reader and the hardware device, the VeriFone gateway adds a fourth crucial component - connectivity. Our proprietary gateway allows the merchant to manage payment devices and credit card transactions seamlessly. It has built-in features that help merchants manage and update security and safety, provide extra reporting, and the ability to turn your device off and deactivate it remotely,” Rasori says.

The average consumer uses the VeriFone gateway in drugstores and supermarkets at check-out, but the company is striving to raise consumer awareness of its mobile brand with commercials now running in 10,000 taxis in New York City.

The PayWare Mobile card reader slips over the iPhone to accommodate card swipes and uses the secure magnetic stripe read head and certified firmware. “With the VeriFone gateway, the swipe read head is already secure even before the data gets to the phone. There’s no chance of rogue data capture,” Rasori says. “Our gateway gives PayWare a pedigree for quick adoption by iPhone users. When you buy online, making manual key entries is tedious, and the merchant pays a higher fee. PayWare is an alternative that bypasses large transaction fees.”

Both Mophie and VeriFone would like to enter the Blackberry and Android markets with their mobile Apps, but for now, Apple’s standardized ecosystem wins hands-down for ease in development and deployment.

Both companies would also like to enter global territories outside the US. “Everybody is ahead of America,” Mophie’s Howe says. “In the Asian markets, particularly Japan, they’re making big purchases on mobile as well as micro-payments for bus fare or a stick of gum. Cash is out. The younger you are the less cash you carry and ATM’s are considered an inconvenience.”

“But it’s five times more complicated outside the US with smart card chips and individual PIN’s - it’s much more complex,” Rasori says. “VeriFone is working with big bank customers in Europe to launch something later this year. It’s a solid business, but still in biz dev mode. There’s great interest in it - but how it all develops remains to be seen. Our US experience is successful so far - we’ve embraced the banks and their issues with fraud and come up with solutions that suit everybody.”

Howe agrees it’s an innovation that’s here to stay. “The greatest challenge going forward is paying attention to what’s possible tomorrow, making connections and thinking in advance.”

And then of course there’s Apple - who may outmaneuver them all with its recently announced EasyPay touch. This change to an iPod touch with Apple software would bring the entire point-of-sale (POS) system under Apple’s control.

U.S. Mobile Web Usage Grew 110 Percent Last Year; Apple Dominates, Android No. 2

By: techcrunch.com

The mobile Web grew 110 percent in the U.S. last year and 148 percent worldwide as measured by growth in pageviews, according to a new Quantcast Mobile Trends report (embedded below). Even so, the mobile Web accounted for only 1.26 percent of Web consumption in the U.S. (and 0.99 percent worldwide).

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How Integrated is Your Web Analytics Package and is That a Good Thing?

By: cmswire.com

According to BtoB Magazine the web analytics market is expected to hit US$ 953 mil by 2014, and suggesting that the pickings might be even juicier Adobe recently acquired Omniture for the tidy sum of about US$1.8 billion.

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