Anyway, the founder of the company behind that initiative has written a fantastic analysis of his experience starting, and ultimately closing that business.  

If you're interested in learning the lessons of an early player in mobile location based marketing this is an essential read.  It's also interesting to anyone interested in startups.  You can download the pdf for free below

Download Microsoft Word - Mobile Phones, Bluetooth and Location Based Marketing num

or you can grab the book for Kindle here 

http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Bluetooth-location-marketing-ebook/dp/B005VGRHR2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319735848&sr=8-1

Whilst us mobile phone geeks as well as young kids know all about the latest handsets and features the average punter finds it difficult to get their heads around what 'Android' means or why you cant get Angry Birds on a Blackberry. When you think of all the different operating systems now, all with different ways to do even basic things like change the screensaver or ringtone, add a contact or connect to Wi-Fi it's pretty clear that many people are going to have real trouble navigating all this technology.  In my day the hardest thing you would have to do is show an old lady how to use text messaging - imaging having to explain how to download an app...

So the UK mobile operator O2's latest customer initiative looks interesting - they have a network of O2 Guru's in stores that are trained up to answer questions about how to use your phone.  They've now extended this onto an O2 Guru channel on youtube.  Quite a smart bit of 'education based marketing' which is what the sales masters are recommending these days as the best strategy for selling to people. 

O2 YouTube Channel

O2 then have links back to their online store - effectively extending the model that they are operating in stores onto the internet.  Not a bad bid of youtube marketing - a lot of attention is on facebook marketing these days but this shows there's a fair bit of room for innovating using other social platforms.  It's a good idea to use video as well - a lot of people dont like reading a lot of text and it's much easier to explain stuff. 

Back to the mobile gurus that I used to work with in the Orange shop back in the day.  If you look at the model used here there is no reason why someone couldnt create their own mobile phone review and tech channel on youtube and build a massive audience.  Howard Chui did it with http://www.howardforums.com years ago and new technology creates a new opportunity to become an authority.  With affiliate marketing sales of mobile contracts, handsets and so on you could make a good living out of this.  Very similar to what Gary Vaynerchuck advocates in his book Crush It! - if you have a passion about something the tools are now there to make a living from it. 

Anyway good to see an operator trying out different marketing channels and trying to solve a problem for consumers rather than blowing money on TV ads. 

The crew behind the 02 Litmus mobile application store are now working over at Telefonica Developer Communities and pumping out some good stuff over on the blog there.  Carnival of the Mobilists regular C Enrique Ortiz has written up a guide to the facebook APIs for mobile which is well worth a look.    

There's some other good writing there including a piece by Tom Hume from Future Platforms and they've also sponsored a very good bit of research by Vision Mobile on Developer Economics.

Mobile operators have typically struggled to build strong developer communities but Telefonica are going the right way about it by trying to add a bit of value with the free reports and so on.  So worth checking out what they are up to.       

The spammy component is that they are using the name and branding of the game they are covering, presumably without permission.  The thing is those that uncover these type of techniques before they get banned get probably do pretty well out of it in the window of opportunity that is available.  Also this technique does point towards other legitimate approaches.  For example, the Angry Birds publisher could develop many more spin-off products using the brand name e.g. their official Angry Birds cheats and so on or other complementary apps.  Publishers increasingly need to develop networked strategies in order to succeed in app store marketing and related products is one potential option.  

Using mobile PPC ad network arbitrage for affiliate marketing 

Ok so a lot of people are getting interested in mobile affiliate marketing and whether there is a PPC arbitrage model yet on mobile. Can you take traffic from a pay per click mobile advertising network such as admob or inmobi and drive it to a CPA-based mobile affiliate program and make a profit? In some cases this can work, but it needs very careful management, tracking and targeting. One of the issues with mobile advertising at the moment is that the quality of a lot of traffic on the blind mobile ad networks if of questionable quality, which makes conversions pretty poor in a lot of cases. Here's an example - the chart below shows the results from two different types of traffic - using organic traffic on a site controlled by us, and using traffic bought on admob. The creative, landing page and offer was exactly the same in both cases however the conversion rate was hugely different. 

Comparison of organic and admob traffic performance

As you can see from the data the organic traffic performed over 25 times better in terms of conversions. Despite having 3.5 times as many clicks the traffic from admob only delivered less than 25% of the revenue of the organic traffic. We have had a lot of success using admob for various things and it is a fantastic tool but you need to be very clever about how you test and target by geography, handset and platform to get the most out of it. So - what should affiliate marketers take from this? No you should not totally rule out using PPC on mobile, but it is very hard to make it work - just like on the PC web. Let us know any questions in the comments or on our forum and we'll try and answer them. 

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• Affiliate marketing - the new business model for mobile app developers? (mobyaffiliates.com)

Very clever - Storm8 have had every single game they publish get into the top 10 on the appstore so they are one to watch.

However, it's not just the ad networks that are getting snapped up - already M&A is moving down up value chain into the agency space and down the value chain into the ad optimizers. 

Firstly, RingRing Media, a mobile ad agency and media buyer in London got snapped up by Amobee Systems a few days ago.  The rumoured price was £12m - not bad for a company founded in 2008 and grown to £2m a month in gross revenue with only small investments.  Congratulations to Ben and Harry the co-founders at RingRing. 

Secondly, we learn that the ad optimizer/ ad network aggregator AdMarvel has been bought by Opera.  Ad Marvel started life as a B2C play called Frengo and spun off a service that helps mobile sites and apps to manage their ad inventory through analytics, ad serving and real-time pricing data. 

With Mary Meeker predicting that mobile is the big tech trend of the next decade we can expect more acquisitions like this over the next year, which means more investment at the other end of the pipeline.  VCs and other investors will be more willing to move into mobile now that they can see the big exits happening and real value being created. 

So what are the opportunities in the mobile ad space for startups and investors? Here's a few ideas:

• New types of mobile advertising networks - the first wave of ad networks have all been based on a fairly straightforward CPC, banner and text ad driven model served over a general range of sites.  If you look at the PC-web there are a huge range of different types of ad networks out there, often targeting very specific verticals or offering particular types of inventory.  Is there room for a vertically-focused ad network on mobile?  Similarly, the likes of Greystripe have focused on full-screen rich media ads, but there have got to be other new formats and ideas that can work on mobile. 

• Mobile agencies - with mobile advertising hotting up all the big digital agencies will need to burnish their mobile credentials.  The recession probably held back acquisitions last year but expect 2010 to lead to more M&A in this space.  

• Mobile commerce - retail is still the major un-charted territory on the mobile internet and mobile affiliate marketing is still very under-developed.  At the same time people are becoming more willing to buy on their mobiles and this will create opportunities for new players. 

The mjelly post arguing that admob got a bargain paying just $750m for admob is over at Mobile Stance this week as part of the Carnival of the Mobilists.  It's the 200th edition and there's some more analysis of the admob acqusition including a great post from Msearchgroove which goes into some detail. 

So admob just announced they've been acquired by Google for $750m.  In my view they got a bargain:

• admob is easily the biggest mobile ad network out there in terms of overall scale
• in particular, admob has the best position in terms of the iphone (scale of inventory)
• admob has the best data on the mobile internet and iphone app ecosystem through its admob metrics and admob analytics services
• admob has invested in developing new types of ad units e.g. those that use location etc
• admob is strong in the key US and European markets 
• the company has a great team - all the senior people at admob i have met are decent people who really know their stuff
• google has been comprehensively out-innovated and out-performed by admob, so they need to acquire them to catch up in mobile ads

In some ways I am disappointed that admob didn't manage to make a $1bn exit - I really think they could have built the business to that type of scale.  I'd speculate the reasons why they didn't hang on for more are:

• Falling click through rates for mobile advertising as consumers become banner blind to mobile display ads, the same as on the web
• Proliferation of other types of ad networks and ad aggregators in the market 
• Some strong competitors in particular regions e.g. Inmobi in India
• Big brands etc slower to move spend into mobile than expected due to the credit crunch, over-reliance on low quality advertisers (casino etc)

If I were Google I would follow this up with another acquisition of one of the other ad networks which is stronger in the other markets admob has not focused on e.g. buzz city or inmobi.   I wouldn't be surprised if they also acquired one of the premium ad networks e.g. Quattro Wireless either. 

Anyway, great job by admob - they really deserved this win. 

Carnival of the Mobilists no. 199 is over at Mobileslate this week and they featured our post on iphone app store statistics. 

There's a load of other posts including from Tomi Ahohen and a podcast from the one like Peggy Anne Saltz at the excellent msearchgroove.

Anyone who needs to write a presentation or report on anything to do with mobile, iphone or app stores needs to get research and statistics on the app store to help back up their arguments.  For example, you might want to know the number of apps in the app store by category.  Also developers, publishers and marketers also need to get their heads around the data to help shape services and so on.  So here's a list of sources of iphone app store statistics plus some key highlights from a recent presentation on the subject:

Sources of iphone appstore stats

Pinchmedia  - release data on apps generated by their mobile analytics product such as this presentation

Distimo - offer a premium appstore analytics service, but also release some data for free

Flurry - similar to pinch media - release data from their analytics product on their blog

148apps.biz - have a great section on "app store metrics" with data by category and type of app, prices, no of apps etc

Mobclix - lots of nice graphs and lists of top apps by type

Appsfire - the social app sharing tool has some good stuff on their blog

Admob Metrics - mainly covers iphone browsing but sometimes some useful app-based data - they run a big iphone ad exchange and probably the largest iphone ad network so have good data 

Comscore - have been releasing a lot of good top 10 information on the app store since they acquired m:metrics - check their blog for releases

Finally the big iphone app aggregators such as appshopper and apptism are also a useful source of data, especially on number of apps submitted and so on

Also worth checking out is this presentation from Stuart Dredge - have pasted in the key appstore data highlights below:

Appstore key facts and figures

• Addressable base of 50 million
• 100k apps available
• More than 2bn downloads so far
• iPhone games market worth $2.8bn by 2014
• Avg user has spent $80 on 65 apps
• Avg user downloads 10/18 apps a month
• 90% browse and download on the device
• 30-day retention rate for games – 72%
• But 90-day retention rate is 16%

• Own-IP is popular – 58% of Top 100 Paid chart
• Pricing pressure – Avg price in Top 100 is $2.89
• But avg price in Top 10 is $2.09 (and $1.21 without Rock Band)
• 45 games cost $0.99
• Rapid churn – 59% of Top 100 released since August
• Level playing field – 47% indie, 38% publishers
• EA has 13 titles in Top 100, Gameloft has 12
• Glu, DChoc, Tapulous have 3 apiece

This weeks Carnival of the Mobilists is over at Msearchgroove.  We nearly won post of the week with our iphone Appstore Search And Discovery review but this week's winner is a post covering our favorite mobile internet service flirtomatic.  There's a load of other good posts on there this week including from Mobithinking and Holly from Mobienthusiast so go check check it. 

So it looks like the iphone appstore is going to break through 100k apps pretty soon with some of the big tech blogs already jumping the gun a bit and reporting it. This is another major milestone in terms of the scale of the iphone appstore and the growth of the mobile internet in general.  At the current rate of growth there will be over 250k apps by some point in 2010. 

However, the current itunes appstore and native iphone appstore client is arguably not sufficient for providing a truly effective discovery channel for hundreds of thousands of applications.   As a result, the sheer growth in the scale of the iphone ecosystem has created an opportunity for other services to help people search and navigate iphone applications. 

For example, one of the interesting memes of the recent Mobile 2.0 Conference in Barcelona was the idea from Dan Applequist that "Apps are like Songs".  To some extent the appstore is becoming like itunes (the delivery platform) and other services are emerging to be the last.fm or hype machines of iphone apps.  Similarly, Vision Mobile point out that as the iphone apps market matures, retailing will become the key part of the value chain with specialists emerging to focus on selling specific types of applications.  

"as with all fast moving consumer goods (from detergent to mobile phones), retailing and merchandising is the most important segment of the product lifecycle. As applications become ubiquitous, we see specialized app stores with segment-specific retailing of apps, inventory leasing for app promotions (CPC or per week rental as already seen in the Ovi Store and RIM App Center), social recommendations (your friends bought this app, so you should buy it too) and developer back-channels (allowing the developer to reach out to their customers via App Store facilities)."

So here's a quick run down of some of the different types of services that are springing up around iphone app discovery. 

Social

Social search and discovery has made a big impact on web search with the likes of delicious, stumbleupon and digg becoming important filters for the thousands of websites and pages out there.  We can expect similar types of services to emerge to help people find applicaitons.  At the moment, Appsfire is one g socially-focused iphone app discovery tool out there - it allows you to share a list of your iphone apps with friends and on twitter.   Yappler also allows you to share list of iphone applications.   Another similar service focused on social app discovery is Appboy, which recently launched as a kind of "threadless for iphone apps". 

App aggregators

App review sites

Overlapping with the app aggregators to some extent are the specialist iphone app review sites which focus on providing editorial / blogging focused around providing reviews, opinion, news and screenshots to help people find the latest, and the best, iphone applications.  Again, there is an increasing and growing list of these sites but the major ones include appvee, appstorehq and appcraver. 

Magazines

Whilst print media isn't the force it once was, there's still room for magazines to emerge around new trends, and iphone apps are no exception. 

Believe it or not there is actually a magazine on sale at the moment in the UK which is completely focused on providing a Guide to iphone applications.  It's apparently in the second edition, and sells for £9.99.  (no web link available, photo coming soon)

Cross platform appstores

Whilst a lot of aggregators are focusing on providing a view into the iphone appstore only, there are some cross-platform open appstores beginning to emerge.  The main one is getjar, which treats the iphone as just another handset and platform amongst the many others it supports on its site.   Other cross platform stores include handango and mobihand.

At mjelly we are also adding what we consider the best iphone applications to the site alongside those from other platforms.  For apps like Nimbuzz, or Fring which are available on multiple platforms, we provide a single listing and rating for iphone as well as all the other major platforms.  

App Guides

Similar to app reviews a number of sites are beginning to develop guides to apps across different verticals,  For example, there's the App Guide from Macworld which covers apps by type or Apps for Everything from apple itself, which lists things like Apps for Cooks, apps for the Great Outdoors etc

Apple Advertising

To some extent the apple TV and print ads themselves are acting as a search and discovery tool for the appstore.  The "there's an app for that" series highlights key applications, whilst the print ads typically show 10 or so applications and what they do.  

App apps

Finally, in the ultimate circularity, iphone apps which help you to search the iphone app store are also popping up.  For example, App Gems offers daily app suggestions. 

Applications search and discovery is definitely a rapidly evolving area and something we are very interested in over at mjelly so watch this space. 

The post on Appstore SEO has been getting a lot of attention and it was featured as the first post on last week's Carnival of the Mobilists over at Tams60 blog. 

There's some other good posts on mobile advertising and a cracker from mobithinking on "why mobile versions of sites still pay off". 

It seems that Peggy from Msearchgroove has taken over the Carnival organisation duties - massive thanks to Judy Breck from teh brilliatn Goldenswamp who has done an amazing job running the Carnival. 

At present, the iphone app store search system pretty unsophisticated, which means that some of the tricks that stopped working many years ago in the PC web can still be effective.  However, the app store search algorithm is rapidly evolving and already some methods such as keyword stuffing no longer work so easily.  That said, there's still a lot you can do so here's a guide to the top 12 things you can do to improve your ranking.  

1. Do your keyword research

Just like conventional SEO iphone appstore search engine optimization depends on an understanding of the types of keywords that users are going to be searching for.  Once you understand this, you can think about including those that are relevant into your app listing in order to drive search traffic.  High traffic keywords on the app store include:

• Popular apps of the moment e.g. the top 100 charts
• All time popular apps - the all time most popular and big iphone app brands such as Ocarina 
• Major PC-based online brands such as myspace, facebook, youtube and so on
• Generic keywords like "fun" or "sex"
• Iphone specific keywords such as "lite"

The guru of mobile internet SEO is Bryson Meurnior and he has put together a great list of iphone app store keywords based on mining of the app store search suggest feature. 

The aim should be to find keywords that are related to, or relevant to your app.  For example over at howtomakeiphoneapps they give the example of relevant keywords for a wine-related app such as “tasting note”, “wine journal”, “wine’ and so on.

Once you have a list of keywords you can include them in your app listing.

2. Optimize your keyword list

In July iphone developers were asked to submit a list of keywords for new and existing apps.  This looks set to become the key source of meta data for the appstore, to some extent, replacing or reducing in importance the weighting of some of the other fields which have been used in the past, such as the description text.

You are limited to 255 characters for your appstore keywords and these can be changed whenever you submit a new app version. 

3. Optimize your description text

update: It seems this no longer works at all for new listings (existing listings still get the benefit) - thanks to Aaron from The Appency Press for the info in the comments

Until recently it was easy to game the apple app store search algorithm by including a load of keywords in the description text.  This lead to a lot of blatant keyword stuffing - for example developers would include a long list of un-related but popular applications.  For example by using devices like "similar to ... " or  "People who bought this also liked" or "If you like ... you'll like this app" or "Recommended for fans of" it was possible to insert the names of the most popular apps and then achieve a ranking when users searched for them. 

Some developers are even using words which might lead to their app being listed in general itunes searches, e.g. when people are searching for music or video. For example Zaptap is listing words like "Miami vice" and "Madonna". 

However, it appears that already some developers are getting their apps rejected from the store for overdoing keyword stuffing like this. Simiarly, until recently, digital chocoate was getting ranked for searches including the word EA (for Electronic Arts) as they included the abrieviation ea. for each.  However, Digital Chocolate was forced to remove this from the description text and their games no longer rank for the keyword.

4. Use keywords in the app title and developer name

You can also incorporate keywords into other fields in the listing such as the app title and even developer name.  This does still seem to be effective in achieving a ranking for certain keywords. For example, a user searching for "fun" sees a number of apps with "fun" in the title in the top search rankings. 

Again, there's balance to be struck here - if you are planning to build a long-term brand in the appstore with lots of releases, then altering your app title or developer name just to pick up a bit of short-term search traffic probably isn't a great idea. However, whilst it is still possible to get traffic to your app in this way it's definitely still worth considering. 

5. Use numbers or the letter A in the app title

Using a blank or listing your app with a number at the beginning of the name ensure that the app will feature near the top of the results in the "sort by name" view under a specific category.  It will also rank the app above others with the same value, but less optimized title in the other views like "release date".  For example, "1001 pick up lines" or "AAA Bubblewrap".

It is likely thtat Apple will pick up on this fairly quickly but for now there's still benefits in using this sort of naming convention in order to rank higher in alphabetical list views. 

6. Encourage reviews

One element to the Apple app store search algorithm appears to be the number of reviews.  However, users are not really prompted or encouraged to write a review, except when an app is being deleted. As a result only around 0.5% of users leave a review, and this is often negative, as many don't even know they can leave one until they try and delete the app.

One option is to write your own reviews, which is something some developers seem to be doing.  Although this isn't a long-term viable strategy it is well worth encouraging friends, family and friendly contacts to review your app when it first hits the app store and has no reviews at all. 

Alternatively you can encourage users to write a review within your app or wherever your app is promoted.  For example, the appirater code for iphone apps prompts users who have a launched an app 15 or more times, and used it for 30 days (and hence likely to be satisfied users) to leave a review in the appstore, with an on-screen pop up.  

There are also options emerging for buying reviews - for example Fuelmyapp has recently launched and enables developers to gain app store reviews in return for offering free downloads of premium applications to users.  Ratemyapp from The Appency Press is another similar service. 

7. Use price drops

Another way of moving up the charts can be to reduce the price of your app.  Firstly, many of the review sites and directories such as 148 apps specifically track price drops, which can help get your app picked up by them.  Secondly, reducing the price of your app will obviously increase sales, all other things being equal, which can lead to increasing returns if you can generate enough additional demand to push into the charts.  For example,  the Wall Street Jounral recently reported that one of the leading games publishers had some success using this tactic:

"PopCap Games Inc., maker of the popular Bejeweled puzzle game, experimented in June by cutting the price on its Peggle game to 99 cents from $4.99 for four days. Peggle, which had been ranked at around 60 in top paid apps, shot up to second place within 24 hours.

Andrew Stein, PopCap's director of mobile business development, declined to provide revenue figures but said sales during the discount period increased 20 to 25 times the previous volume."

8. Make your icon active

A nifty visual trick some developers are using is to include calls to action or price drop information in their icons.  For example, the use of a "sale" text is already pretty widely established.  Visual hooks like this can be very powerful so it's worth thinking of what can be included in your own icon, even something as small as an arrow can potentially have an impact on the number of clicks you might get. 

Image via the ieverythingcafe

The guys over at A Clever Twist have also written a great guide to improving your iphone app icon - which is well worth a read. 

9. Buy downloads

The more downloads your app has the higher it will rank in the popularity filter of the app store.  One way of moving up the download rankings is to buy traffic to your iphone app store page using an iphone-friendly mobile ad network like admob or by paying for premium listing on getjar. Admob will even let you use your own inventory as credits in their network via their iphone app exchange, which means you don't have to spend anything directly.  

However, if you are looking to boost into the top 100 charts then it is going to cost you.  According to a study by adwhirl it costs at least $1850 per day to deliver the 2500 + daily downloads to hit the charts. 

10. Make the most of your screenshots

11. Promote your app

An alternative to paying for downloads is to use other types of promotional methods.  This includes conventional PR, social media (facebook, twitter, youtube), your own channels (e.g. your website) and submitting your app to the large numbers of iphone application review sites that are springing up such as apptism, appvee and appcraver.   Ultimately, anything which drives buzz around your app can improve your appstore SEO, either directly via increased downloads (and rankings) or even through inclusion in Apple's own pick lists if you bring the app to the attention of an itunes recommended section manager/ editor. 

12. Understand app store analytics

In order to optimize your app listing over time you need to be able to get information and analytics data.   Appviz downloads all your iphone data on the fly and makes it easy for you to review it and see how your app is doing in terms of downloads.  However, the native iphone app store analytics are pretty terrible.   Distimo , Flurry and Pinch Media all offer different types of analytics and reporting solutions to help your optimize your app distribution. 

Bonus Tip: List your app in directories

Finally, you should look to get your app listed in third party directories and aggregators.  For example, you can list your app here at mjelly.com in our iphone applications directory.  Each listing links to your iphone app store page from within a relevant category to help drive users, downloads and reviews.  

update March 2010

Here's a new trick for getting more reviews - iphone appstore seo trick

That's it - as we say Appstore SEO is definitely changing fast so let us know what works for you in the comments. 

The guys over at Welovemobile  have announced the launch of a new BBC mobile search service as the result of a project they've been working on. 

We all know that mobile search is totally broken - Google have essentially stopped even bothering to provide a mobile specific version or index, so it's an area which desperately needs more innovation.   At the same time, as the BBC note, mobile search is more important to them than ever, as mobile internet usage grows and there is more and more content available for mobile devices.  

"There are thousands of BBC web pages on the mobile site, a whole world of additional content that you more than likely don't know about. Offering search on mobile is a no-brainer - it gets you to the content you want with the least possible effort ...."

The new search service covers news, sport, radio & television web pages and iplayer radio and TV content.

Welovemobile helped the BBC to create a search interface design that incorporates 'best of breed' features from other types of search engine and discovery interfaces.   The aim of the design is to allow for advanced content search and discovery, with the emphasis on providing very relevant and personalised "content surfacing" around the BBC's mobile content and services assets.  The search solution contains some interesting new content filtering and presentaiton concepts and a slick UI.

The BBC say it was a tough job coming up with the end solution:

"our colleagues in Search have had many 'interesting' challenges developing BBC search for mobile. We know it's crucial to get the results right first time on mobile ...  we spent weeks fine tuning the search logic, weighting our search terms, and we now know more about the idiosyncrasies of search logic that we ever thought we would need to. Mobile search is still not perfect, but it's been a long time coming and we wanted to get it launched .... "

The end result looks pretty good, and it's great that The BBC has invested in developing a bespoke mobile search tool for its site, rather than relying on a third party white label solution or just bunging in a google or yahoo site search integration.  According to Simon Liss from welovemobile what they have done for the BBC is to 

"...think mobile from the ground up. We’ve applied what we know about mobile devices, mobile usage, user experience and design to create what we believe is a truly original and innovative search concept and interface.’

The BBC mobile search product launched in an early Beta version on 3rd September - you can check it out at http://bbc.co.uk/mobile

Mobango was the mjelly.com mobile 2.0 service of the week over at Mobile Zeigeist a few weeks ago.  Mobango is an interesting mobile startup based in London and Italy which is a bit like the mighty getjar in that it hosts applications but it also offers other content types like ringtones, video, wallpapers and so on. 

I spoke with the CEO of Mobango, Fabio Pezzotti and got some exclusive stats that show the huge scale that mobango now has in the market:

• 5 million unique visitors/ month

• 12 million visits/ month

• 60 million page views/ month

• Downloads (2009 Jul 13 – 2009 Jul 19): 2,872,264

• Registered developers: 23,245

• Registered users: 4,864,284

• Total Game/Application Files: 42,000

Mobango is now positioning itself as a promotional channel for application developers who can buy mobile advertising for their software on a "pay per download" basis.  So - rather than paying admob for clicks, which might not lead to any installs, developers can work with Mobango on more of a CPA model. 

Anyway, you can read the full article over at Mobile Zeitgeist.  

You can find Mobango on the mjelly directory over at mjelly.com (PC)

A belated link back to the Carnival of the Mobilists last week hosted by Rudy at mtrends.  There's a load of great stuff on there as usual including from some of the best mobile commentators out there including Carlo at Mobhappy, Marek Pawloski, Tomi Ahohen and Denis from Wap Review. The content spans Mobile Widgets, App Stores, Touch screens, Mobile Widgets and mobile learning and is well worth a read.  Here's the link

Rudy has also launched an interested new company directory and business social network called dot open which you can check out at http://www.dotopen.com/

Just back from the Mobile 2.0 Conference in Barcelona - wow - what a great event!  It was brilliant to be able to hang out with other mobile people from around the world and listen to a load of great talks, presentations and panels.  The event was brilliantly organized and I think everyone got a load out of it. 

Highlights for me were:

• brilliant group of people there ranging from one or two man iphone development teams to CEOs of the biggest mobile startups to representatives from Vodafone and other bigger companies
• some great presentations from the likes of Skyhook Wireless, Future Platforms and Nokia 
• the smaller Developer Day which made a great complement to the main conference the day after
• pitches from some great new startups like Distimo, Pikkoo, Layar and Zensify 
• friendly and positive atmosphere - was great to forget the recession and doom and gloom for a while and be around people working in an industry with some sort of growth prospects
• the food and drink was great - breakfast pastries every morning and a wonderful lunch at the main conference
• venues were good - Barcelona Activa and ESADE were both brilliant spaces

Some of the key themes included:

• Mobile widgets / web apps have moved forward significantly but still suffer from fragmentation in terms of standards
• Location really starting to take-off with the data from the use of location services emerging as something really valuable when combined with demographic and other segmentation info
• Operators starting to open up with the launch of improved developer programs, APIs and their own app stores
• Business models not evolving as fast as the technological possibilities and consumer take-up...

I'll be blogging some of my notes from the conference here and you can find stuff with the m20eu tag on slideshare and twitter. 

Thanks to Rudy, Miker and the team for organizing - I really appreciated it. 

Future of mobile is touch

- 220m touch screens shipped this year - only a small proportion are iphones

- touch is a fluent, relaxed way of mobile browsing ideal for MASS MARKET

- 10% of the Quantcast top 1000 websites now have a touch-optimized mobile site (GREAT STAT!!)

- this moves to just 0.5% when you expand to top 10k sites so a long way to go...

Taptu is growing strongly

- 60% of Taptu's audience is based in the USA

- they had done 0.25m searches by Dec 07, 2.5m by June 08 and 25m by April 09

- new iphone app coming out which allows browsing and searching of mobile touch sites (it looked great)

Tom Hume from the mobile development agency Future Platforms gave a nice presentation of day 2 of the Mobile Web Summit focused on the idea of play, engagment, happiness and mobile.  The killer stat from this presentation was:

- Mobile quiz app players usually played the games 3 times, this increased to 7.5 times on average if they entered a league table

- Not just explained by these users being just generally more engaged - they played 2 times on average before entering and 5.6 times after entering league

- shows power of social elements, gameplay etc in driving mobile

Tom has written a short summary of his talk here:

"My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element". That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of "social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity - and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude. Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake and loyalty."

Anyway the presentation is on slideshare and embedded below - it's well worth checking out:

Andy Smith, the Sales Director for admob was at the Mobile Web Summit last week talking about what they are up to.  He also hung around a lot during the conference to talk to people which was brilliant - I had a load of questions as a publisher using admob answered by him.  He really confirmed why I love admob as a company - great at what they do and nice people who contribute a lot to the mobile ecoystem.  Anyway, enough of the props, here's a few notes from Andy's presentation.

Mobile ad formats are becoming more developed:

- Text link/ banners
- Lozenge
- Home-screen takeover
- Video
- Interstitial

Actions "after the click" also expanding:

- Microsite
- Iphone app store (a lot of developer using admob to increase downloads and ranking on itunes)
- mapping/ location (e.g. best buy showing your local store on mobile google maps)
- Video streaming/ download (e.g. movie trailor)
- itunes (e.g. for a band pushing to music download)
- Click to call (actually very successful on mobile)
- Form fill in / data capture
- follow on Twitter (not seen that before - quite original)
- add vcard to phone contacts

Case Study - Capital FM iphone app advertised on admob

- aiming to increase rank on app store via advertising
- 1.35% click through rate
- 8% conversion to app store download
- 24k app store visites

- getjar has done 450m downloads to date - currently running at 35m downloads per month

- 46k apps for all major platforms

- 200k developer accounts

- 35k active beta testers

- have grown strongly since launch of the iphone appstore - expanded app market beyond iphone

- aim to provide "everything for consumers'' - support all platforms, all types of apps, all types of device

- aim to provide ''everything for developers'' - tools, distribution, monetisation

- 1% of apps created by established companies - 99% are small 1-3 man shops

- Google maps has 300 different builds on the getjar site!

- Getjar now focusing on improving search and discovery by aligning results to segments e.g countries, devices, platforms - have the scale to do this

- also offering billing - in-app billing 7* more effective than SMS billing in tests

You can find getjar in the mjelly directory

Mippin are a mobile content aggregation and portal company based in London and one of the most advanced companies in the world in terms of using applications stores as distribution channels.  The clever thing mippin realised early on was that you don't need to invest huge amounts in creating full applications for each platform - by using a "wrapper" or "launcher" driving to a mobile website, you can have the best of both worlds - the distribution power of an appstorea and the screen real estate of an app on the device but with the lower development costs of a mobile site.  

Here's some notes on a great presentation on how they use application stores at the Mobile Web Summit from Robin Jewsbury Co-Founder and VP Development.  I actually got them the slot for this presentation as I knew they would have loads of useful points and I wasn't disappointed. 

- initially mippin was 100% focused on an application business (Refresh Mobile) but out of every 100 people that downloaded their app only 20 would open and use (they couldn't find apps on their phone!)

- not so long ago a lot of people therefore thought that mobile apps were dead RIP Mobile Applications and it was all about mobile web - until iphone appstore came along...

- iphone app store not perfect - QA process abysmal, not really a sustainable model? - mippin only getting 100 downloads per week on the app store - need to also look at Ovi etc

- however ... fragmentation of appstores and platforms is a problem

- Nokia - Java, Symbian, WRT, Flash, Blackberry - Java, iphone - C++, Windows Mobile - .net, Silverlight, Android - Java, Palm - Web OS etc etc

- but there is a way around this - use HTML, CSS and Javascript as a common platform and then create a "wrapper" for it -  Phone Gap framework can be used for iphone, android, blackberry mobile web apps, WRT for Nokia/ Symbian

- this has allowed mippin to quickly and cheaply launch a presence on a range of different appstores and be one of the first services on the likes of Ovi and Blackberry App World

- 400% growth in RIM traffic since launch on Blackberry appstore

- 21% increase in page views from Nokia handsets since launch on Ovi with a WRT app

You can find mippin in the mjelly directory