AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, has released some interesting data about mobile web browsing and the devices that are doing it the most.
The data captures some trends that I think alot of people in the mobile industry are already are aware of, namely if the on phone browser is bad then mobile browsing won’t happen that much. AdMob goes a step further to provide some hard numbers to support this and shows some concerning downward trends in mobile browsing activity on Nokia and RIM devices, but big uptick trends in mobile browsing from iPhone, Android and Palm Pre.
This will make our atfollow.com product managers happy seeing they are focused on providing a mobile browser based real time data following service on iPhone, Android and Palm Pre devices.
Data from AdMob…
“In August, AdMob found that 40 percent of queries came from iPhones, up from 33 percent six months ago. Android users hitting AdMob sites grew to 7 percent of users, up from 2 percent in February. The Palm Pre — which only just launched in June — had 4 percent of traffic in August.
While those new entrants to the mobile market are growing their share of mobile online usage, the established phone makers are losing share.
Users of Nokia’s Symbian phones who hit AdMob’s ads dropped from 43 percent in February to 34 percent last month. BlackBerry users fell from driving 10 percent of traffic six months ago to 8 percent in August. Windows Mobile phones went from generating 7 percent of hits to AdMob sites in February to 4 percent in August.”
The big opportunity still rests in the hands of Nokia and RIM who have about a 60% combined marketshare of smartphones shipped globally. Get a good browser and you are serious contenders to keep that number growing. RIM has made some moves to acquire some new browser engineering talent of late and Nokia is now shipping a Mozilla based browser with the new N900. We will see if their next gen smartphones keep with this trend.
There is an amazing new initiative going on in Vancouver, Canada called Wavefront.
As per the website… “Wavefront is the commercialization centre accelerating the growth of British Columbia’s growing cluster of more than 1,000 wireless and new media developer companies. Wavefront improves speed-to-market and delivery of mobile applications and devices by providing emerging companies with a suite of WaveGuide™ training, mobile industry advisory, testing and incubation services that facilitate commercial engagement with mobile network operators and enterprise companies around the world.”
Kontexto has joined Wavefront and will use the facility as a small office and a device testing center for our mobile services including atfollow.com. As a company with operations in the UK and Canada, Wavefront is an excellent choice for us to get involved with the Canadian wireless community. Getting your hands on several handsets in one central environment is a godsend for wireless app developers. Our developers are definitely looking forward to using the facility.
Kontexto is an official member of the UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) Global Entrepreneur Programme (GEP), more information on UKTI GEP. We have been part of the programme for over a year now and it has helped us navigate the waters of setting up our European HQ in London, not to mention provided us with loads of other valuable advice as an emerging software company. As an organization they are available to assist with business introductions, financing introductions and general assistance on a business level. Most importantly to me though has been the pleasure of getting to know the team members over the past year.
I have just spent a catch up week with some of the team members at UKTI GEP and there is alot of new activity going on within the program. I am looking forward to working closely with them over the next year to move our UK operations forward. If anyone is contemplating setting up shop in the UK, explore this program for sure.
The Palm Pre smartphone has been receiving stellar reviews on the whole across the web Engadget, Gizmodo, CNET.
In a recent article by The Globe and Mail Palm’s plan for Pre apps the question is posed as to how Palm intends to make this device a consumer success given it only has about a dozen or so apps available at present versus tens of thousands of apps for competing devices like the iPhone™.
On the surface it seems like the classic chicken and egg scenario for Palm.
Not enough apps, consumers don’t want the device. Not enough consumers with the device, developers won’t build apps for it. But can Palm make the Pre a legitimate contender to the iPhone™ with only modest growth in apps? I think they can and here is why.
The mobile browser.
Tons of services can now be experienced in the mobile browser with the same quality as a downloaded software app. Just the way desktop apps have given way to the browser, the same can happen on mobile devices.
In the case of @follow™, we made the decision to build a browser based service instead of native apps for each mobile platform such as iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian. It’s not to say we won’t roll out native apps over time for specific platforms, but in order to get on as many devices as possible with the same exact code base, going after the mobile web browser was the correct choice for us.
This is why I think the Palm Pre is wide open for creative web developers. Hunt through the Apple app store and pick a bunch of apps that can be recreated as a web app, build them and right away you have Palm Pre owners as an audience.
One thing that gets us going at Kontexto is building things we want to use, but can’t find anywhere else.
Our whole team surfs around all of the Social News sites on the net either using an RSS Reader or going to the actual websites, nothing special, but really repetitive.
After doing this over and over and more and more from our mobile devices, it was obvious that we needed to make it easy to follow all social news sites in a single click from any mobile browser.
We needed to make the experience real time, so that when we were dipping in and out of the social news stream on our iPhone’s and Gphone’s we were assured of the most recent stories at that moment in time.
A quick video below shows you how you can use @follow™ on your iPhone or Gphone™ to follow all the social news sites in real time.
“CPC” has been pounded into our brains to mean “Cost per Click”, an advertising format that charges the advertiser a cash amount only if someone actively clicks on an advert, typically a link.
Advertisers buy the right to show an advert for a given word or set of words. So in essence an economy of words exists that as we know Google, Yahoo, MS and dozens of other advert networks have proven to be very lucrative.
I have been giving some thought lately to the notion of moving beyond charging for words and actually charging for characters. Is there a similar marketplace that could be developed driven by purchasing a collection of characters (I know it’s a word) and pricing characters?
A fascination with characters seems to be prominent these days with services like Twitter limiting your character participation to 140 or less per post, other social networks letting you post short snips as often as you like and of course URL shortening services trying to shrink traditional http url paths to an invisible size.
Well muckrack.com beat me to the “Cost per Character” dream. In what I believe is a simple and genius service, they have created a community of journo’s on Twitter and are offering anyone the chance to post a press release with a “Cost per Character” model.
It is one dollar per character. That’s it.
You write, you pay, paypal takes a 3% cut and muckrack keeps the rest.
Now there is a $50 buck minimum, which kind of defeats the purpose in my opinion, but you have to start somewhere and I hope over time they will get it down to a true cost per character model. Imagine all the BS press releases that would be trimmed down!
Some good eye candy and chart data on iPhone™ penetration, app store growth and some comparisons of this data to the iPod™ and iTunes™ growth. Summary, iPhone™ market and app store market dwarf the growth and potential of Apple’s success with iPod™ and iTunes™.
This presentation by VC firm Kleiner Perkins captures their thoughts on the “Big Ideas” they are considering when looking to invest in iPhone related deals. They have a fund of around $100 million set aside for ‘i’ related deals.
You can jump straight to Slide 13 for these ideas… but the one we like the most?
Big Ideas to Consider - Real-Time Anywhere & Everywhere
We are back with Part 2 of The Followers Series, which explores some ideas around ‘Localized’ Following.
‘The Follower Series’ is a long term posting series that explores the emerging concept of ‘following’ on the web and the new types of web services that will spring up as a result.
@follow™ is a real time following service that builds communities of followers around specific areas of interest. Areas of interest can be centered around an event, a topic, a publication, a person, a blog or any combination of these things mashed up together into what we call a ‘bundle’.
Bundles are alive, active and constantly updating in real time so that anyone interested in following a bundle can dip in and out of the real time stream.
One particular type of bundle and following request popped up this week by a large TV brand we are working with in the Northeastern US. Their request was the catalyst for this post on ‘localized’ following.
Here is the request:
“I want to follow a real time stream of every item posted online by all of the broadcast TV networks in Chicago”
In essence, they wish to set up a real time information bundle that a community of their employees can follow that is LOCAL to them. In this case, local at the city of Chicago level.
So, we set up a localized real time bundle using @follow™ to solve the request. You can see all of the Chicago broadcast TV network content streaming in as it is posted on the web…
We then let them take localization even further using the filter in order to track one specific local story as it unfolds and is being covered by all local tv broadcasters online. In this case, it is a bizarre Cemetery story that has a Michelle Obama slant to it…
So not only were we able to solve an actual real world process problem for this publishing brand (which is always a good feeling), we also had the chance to see the flexibility of the @follow™ service and how our guiding principles of following information in real time in a single view can be applied at the local level.
