mobile advertising « Five Feet of Dynamite

Social Media News 1/19/10

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

What will Google and Apple go head-to-head on next? I think it’s going to be geographically sensitive ads. Apple submitted a patent which details how the iPhone could potentially pick up location-aware ads and apps for immediate and automatic download. Google was awarded a patent which teases real-time digital ads overlain on billboards and signs seen from Google Maps street view. It’s really interesting that news of these patents got picked up by the media in the same week.

Another thought to ponder is what does local, on-the-go mobile advertising mean for the likes of Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla? Will one of these location-based social networking portals discover a new revenue model in location-based advertising? Maybe, maybe not. Leave a comment and tell me what you think. Each day, we’re moving closer to having our digital content on any screen, at any time, at any place. Marketers need to keep that in mind.

Many bloggers and industry analysts have pointed to how our society uses social media in a time of crisis. Haiti, of course, has seen a huge reaction in social media- the devastating loss and suffering has touched people from around the world. Like most people, I’m sure, I first heard of the news through my social media channels. And through social media, the Red Cross has raised an astounding $5 Million towards their rescue effort in Haiti. Below is a special section about the reaction to Haiti in social media.

Social Media News 11/14/09

Sunday, November 15, 2009

It’s been known for a while that Rupert Murdoch has no love for Google. However, this week was the first time the leader of the second largest media conglomerate (News Corp.) said that he will prevent his news from being indexed by Google. That’s including sites like WSJ.com. It sounds like Murdoch is quite serious about the claim, even though sites like WSJ.com could lose 25% of its traffic or more, according to some estimates.

Then a few days later, TechCrunch Europe published this article detailing a secret presentation by Microsoft to various leaders of UK news media. According to the article, Microsoft is developing something known as ACAP, “Automated Content Access Protocol,” to index content like news stories on Bing in a more robust way than Google’s robots.txt protocol. If a significant amount of news media corporations get on board with the new indexing protocol, it will have a serious damaging effect on Google’s popular news search, news.google.com.

Though it may be bad news for Google in the news media industry, the communications industry might be looking up. On Thursday Google announced that it had purchased Gizmo5, which will power Google Voice with VoIP capabilities. This move makes Google Voice a serious competitor for Skype, and could also be a really nice addition to Google Wave.

In the same week, Google also purchased the popular mobile advertising platform, AdMob, for $750 Million. With this deal, Google now has a powerful mobile display advertising product that it can add to its existing mobile search advertising offering.

Twitter is in the process of rolling out its Retweet feature, though the public launch of the feature may take a little longer than expected. Prior to this announcement, retweeting has been an established norm in the Twittershere but has not been officially supported by the Twitter API. Due to its enormous popularity the Twitter developers have been working on incorporating the retweet action to become an official part of Twitter.com, but apparently they are still trying to figure out exactly how to do it.

Now here’s an interesting story in the world of social gaming. Personally, I avoid Facebook games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Sorority Life like the plague, but I’ve always known that these games are popular among my friends. And I wouldn’t have guessed that a game maker like Playfish, the creators of games like Pet Society and Word Challenge, could be worth a whooping $400 Million. Last Monday, Electronic Arts (EA) acquired Playfish in a move that signifies just how lucrative social gaming has become. Be sure to check out this Mashable article, The Future of Gaming: 5 Social Predictions.