Mobile advertising piece in Venturebeat

Venturebeat put together an interesting post on mobile advertising and the effects of the downturn.
Their point is that the iPhone is driving growth (as Admob, Google and other have touted publicly), and that advertisers are transitioning from "testing" the medium to actually planning spend against it.

Having interacted with dozens of agencies and advertisers over the past year, I continue to feel that mobile is seen as "experimental" for now, but with everyone eyeing iPhone, Android and other "true-web" phones to see how quickly they get a significant install base.

If you can have 100 million devices that leverage the technology (banner ads, tracking, analytics, targetting) of the web AND provide location based targetting and a deep personal attachment for users, then we have a compelling medium.

As always, I am very bullish on mobile and I am glad to see others begin to agree.

Google mobile app with voice

In case you have been hiding under a technology rock you might not have noticed that this week Google launched an update to its Google Mobile App for the iPhone with voice support.

This is what Fortune said: "For tech bloggers, this was bigger than Obama."

To summarize what this is: Install app on your iPhone, click on nice blu Google logo, bring iPhone up to your ear, speak query, marvel as Google brings the result back to you.

What is happening behind the scenes: Using the accelerometer it determines that you are bringing the phone to your ear, and starts listening for your query. It takes your query (with some fairy dust to take into account the noise around you) and brings back results in the usual web-based format.

The media went mad on this. The NYT had a big article on it on Friday (before it launched) and bloggers picked it up

Google's iPhone app gets a voice: Yours
Google. iPhone. Voice search. Awesome. (If it works.)

As the application did not launch on the Apple store some even started speculating on some conspiracy:
Google Speech recognition app for iPhone delayed by Apple?
Even Google Gets Shafted By Apple's Ridiculous App-Approval Process

And then Monday, all was well as Apple made the app available and we posted our official post about the app along with a video by the Product Manager that built it, Mike LeBeau who is now world famous and has his own Facebook fan club:

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Mobile browser test

If you have heard anything from Google on mobile over the past year, it has probably centered on the importance of the browser (and unlimited data plans) in driving true mobile internet adoption.

Gizmodo just did a great test on the major Smartphone browsers side by side. In summary, the iPhone gets a not-undexpected A- with the Android G1 coming in second with a B+. Nokia rounds out the Webkit browsers with a B-. I was surprised by his B-/C+ for the BB Bold (no way!) but highly supportive of the big fat F for pocket Internet Explorer.

SGN ifun app - links mobile/social apps

I am in tech geekdom heaven... I just installed and played with SGN's new application for the iPhone (iFun Golf). To the consumer, this simple iphone app allows you to use your iPhone much like a Wii controller to swing a golf club. The difference is that you are using your iphone to control a game on your PC screen.

On the backend, it's social network apps (SGN's) meets social paltforms (Facebook Connect) meets iPhone apps. Throw in a few ads (powered by Admob) and an ability to buy games and new courses (via Paypal from the device) and it's a VC's social network monetization dream!

Zynga just launched a phone version of its Live Poker game also connecting the iPhone user to players using the app via social networks.

Geekdom, web 2.0ish heaven indeed!

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AA launches mobile boarding pass

FINALLY... American Airlines is introducing mobile boarding passes

Mobile panel at Monaco Media Forum

Last weekend at the Monaco Media Forum Rich Wong from Accel hosted a panel on mobile. Very interesting discussion on whether 2009 is the year of mobile (again). Same themes come out - iPhone, flat rate data plan.

Panelists: Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO, minfo;Omar Hamoui, CEO, AdMob; Alexandre Mars, CEO, Phonevalley and Head of Mobile, Publicis Groupe; Federico Pisani Massamormile,CEO, Hanzo; and Jon Medved, CEO, Vringo; Moderator: Rich Wong, Accel Partners.




Nikesh Arora also spoke at the event and served as co-chair.

Obama Mosaic

An amazing mosaic of Obama made up by the covers of newspapers around the world following his election. Zoomable version here and high res version here

New facebook UI's impact on Apps

Everyone, not least of all the Facebook app developers and the VCs that invest insane amounts of money into them, has been wondering the impact of the Facebook redesign on applications. Obviously finding and accessing apps has become a lot harder (in my view) but it seems facebook's core intent to increase usage, has been met. Stats by App from Developer Analytics below:

Facebook redesign impact on apps

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: platform developer)

Google Flu tool

And a little something for Flu season...

A trends graph showing flu related searches as an indicator of the Flu, by state in the US

Flu Trends

What Obama did right

An insightful blog post from The Atlantic on what Obama did right...

1. Practice what you preach. The preach: the neighborhood precinct captains are the linchpins of the ground effort. The practice: let them do the job. Staff didn't talk to voters. They were, in fact, two steps removed from voters. Responsibility was vested in tens of thousands of precinct captains and volunteer leaders; they identified volunteers, supervised canvasses, and reported back to field offices. The Obama campaign had ways of verifying the data that was come in, but in most cases it was accurate; the supervolunteers and precinct captains were empowered and incentivized to do their jobs, and they did them. (Note: the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign used this same model, as did the McCain-Palin '08 model, but the big difference was...)

2. Scale / Force Of Numbers: No matter how you measure this election, the Obama campaign was able to do so much because it had so much. What ifs abound. What if they were limited to the federal match? What if they weren't able to raise as much money? What if they didn't spend more than $150 million on field? Can this possibly be replicated? Can the Democrats ever again have hundreds of paid staff in states like Ohio weeks before election day? Can they ever find two million active volunteers?

3. Win Bigger / Lose Smaller. That was an Obama field mantra. The campaign opened up a field office in Warren Co., Ohio, where George W. Bush won by nearly 50 points in 2004. Well, Obama lost Warren County... but by 37 points. That's a big improvement. Losing by smaller margins in those smaller counties is how Barack Obama won Ohio. (His margin in Cuyahoga County: 243,000; Kerry's was 221,000...not a big enough difference.)

4. African Americans and the early vote. Problem: black voters habitually, historically distrusted in-person early voting. The solution: fix the problem. Contact black voters early and often about early voting. Spend money to habituate this demographic to early voting.

5. Finding new voters; this one's obvious, but the campaign spent its entire summer finding out who wasn't registered and registering them, and then compiling reams of data about these voters in order to figure out how to target them.

6. Technology (and Google): beyond the obvious, beyond MyBarackObama.com, it was the advances in technology that increased the efficiency of Democratic turnout efforts. For example: the campaign's VoteBuilder software had a turf-cutting tool. Look at a map. Draw a polygon around a neighborhood. And, boom: you could instantly print a "walk list" of voters. This year's version was based on Google Maps which made it infinitely easier to use than the previous versions...

7. Catalist. More on that in my next post, but this Democratic data consortium was a major behind-the-scenes force... UPDATE: Upon further review, I think the DNC's VoteBuilder program also deserves lots of credit, too. More later.

Mobile destinations

Last May Opera has put out some data on where people are browsing to on their mobile phones. I came across it recently and feel the stats are still applicable and relevant as we think about what people are doing on their mobile phones. Opera publishes this State of the Mobile Web report on a monthly basis and its a quick read of what people are doing in different countries.

They state that 63% of US traffic is to social network sites... and that is evidenced from the list of the Top 10 sites below:

Top 10 sites in the U.S.

1. www.myspace.com
2. www.google.com
3. www.mocospace.com
4. www.yahoo.com
5. www.facebook.com
6. www.live.com
7. www.hi5.com
8. www.wikipedia.org
9. www.itsmy.com
10. www.ebay.com

Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 2008

[Dying to post some thoughts about the election results... but it will have to wait...instead here is a video of Mary Meeker at the Web 2.0 Summit 2008]




Also here is the link to the PDF and a web version of the slides

I do wish she had spent as much time telling us all how over-hyped the market was LAST time she gave this presentation... As always, she continues to be bullish on Mobile with some interesting stats on Opera.

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Great tool for election night

Great little widget to track the election results state by state... What a historic night!

Watching Google watching world - Go Sumit!

My Google mobile colleague and friend Sumit Agarwal seems to have brought down the house at a recent Informa event as evidenced by this post by David Wood, CTO of Symbian.

David's source of awe was both the content of Sumit's talk (summarized below) combined with his usual flair in demos (Steve Jobs has a long way to go!)

"Interspersed among the demos and the statistics, Sumit described elements of Google's underlying philosophy for success with mobile services:

• "Ignore the limitations of today": don't allow your thinking to be constrained by the shortcomings of present-day devices and networks;
• "Navigate to where the puck will be": have the confidence to prepare services that will flourish once the devices and networks improve;
• "Arm users with the data to make decisions": instead of limiting what users are allowed to do on their devices, provide them with information about what various applications and services will do, and leave it to the users to decide whether they will install and use individual applications;
• "Dare to delight" the user, rather than always seeking to ensure order and predictability at all times;
• "Accept downside", when experiments occasionally go wrong."

A video of Sumit showing off his wares to Scoble on FastTV is below