Mobile Is Where The Growth Is

Yahoo Talking to Google, AppNexus, PubMatic as Right Media Replacement Private marketplaces have become all the rage among premium publishers, with Condé Nast and Hearst each erecting walled gardens for their inventory within the past year, and soon Yahoo could join the ranks. Yahoo has been talking with Google, Microsoft-backed AppNexus and PubMatic about replacing Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange with a private marketplace that would exclusively contain Yahoo’s owned-and-operated inventory, according to several sources with knowledge of the discussions. Adweek has also learned that Rubicon Project has signed a nondisclosure agreement regarding Yahoo’s assets but was not able to ascertain whether the company is among those bidding to replace RMX. All Things D first reported on the Right Media talks late Friday afternoon. AppNexus is considered a front-runner in the bidding war. Talk that Yahoo is seeking to sell off RMX has swirled for months.

Mixpanel Is Tracking More Than Actions Now, Introduces User Analytics Every time I talk to Mixpanel co-founder Suhail Doshi, he likes to update me on how many actions his analytics startup is tracking for its customers every month. (In case you’re wondering: The latest number is more than 6 billion.) But Mixpanel isn’t just tracking actions anymore — starting today, it’s tying its data to individual users, too. Specifically, when customers open up their Mixpanel dashboard, they’ll see a new menu under the “actions” section called “people”, where they can get data about all of their visitors, such as gender, age, and country, and then correlate that data with user activity, so that, for example, you can tell whether men or women are spending more time in your app. Doshi says these are the kinds of “really hard but very specific” questions that most companies have to build their own in-house analytics systems to answer. He also says the new features should be useful to companies of all sizes.

Bringing Technologies To Mobile Applications Editor’s note: GD (Ram) Ramkumar is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist. He was founder and CTO of SnapTell (acquired by Amazon in 2009) and is now the Founder and CEO of Concept.io, a new mobile startup. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford. I started as a mobile entrepreneur in the pre-iPhone era in 2006 as the founder of SnapTell, the first successful mobile app in the image recognition space. The Key Lesson: Choose a problem and frame it well Our first product at SnapTell was a service that allowed consumers to send in a photo of a shelf tag in a store for comparison shopping. We learned quickly that this was not the right problem framing. I learned some lessons out of the experience. For a mobile app or product to turn into a sustainable business, it must support a daily use case that turns into a habit. Emerging Mobile App Opportunities The mobile ecosystem today is dominated by the app marketplaces of iOS and Android. Advances in Mobile OS Conclusion

Publications Kellogg's, Ford Embrace Programmatic Buys: Assert They Are 'Premium,' Not Remnant 07/02 KOHLER, WISC. – Programmatic-buying of online display ad inventory has developed a reputation for being a way for performance or direct response oriented advertisers to buy cheap, “remnant” inventory that might otherwise go unsold, but the practice increasingly is being embraced by big brand marketers who believe it is a fast and efficient way to procure so-called “premium” ad impressions. The latter sentiment was championed Friday by Bob Arnold, associate director of global digital strategy for Kellogg’s during a keynote at MediaPost’s Brand Marketers Summit here. “It’s a pretty safe prediction to say that programmatic buying is going to take over the media-buying space,” Arnold asserted, implying that as more marketers and agencies discover the premium branding benefits of the practice it will ultimately expand to include more forms of online advertising, and other media as well. Kellogg’s Arnold is not alone. “For one brand, the ROI went up over five times.

Defining a Market in The Connected World. You Are Not in Kansas Anymore! Instead of looking at the real shift that is happening in our world studies put each mobile device into a silo, leave out a big part of the overall market, and measure each as if they are not connected. I recently came across this graph showing what percentage of people who keep up with news on different devices. The graph itself is very interesting, but Poynter (and several other media companies) then concluded "The chart that shows why iPad apps are so appealing to news organizations." Wrong! Let me explain the problem by illustrating how our market 'thinking' has changed over the past 10 years. The traditional way Back when I was in business school, I learned to look at markets by doing surveys for each one and then conclude that the biggest one is also the one to embrace. For instance in the graph below, UK looks to be the best market to test out your expansion plans. The reason why this worked is because, in the traditional world, people are not connected with each other.

Your Mobile Phone Is The Least Social Device You Own Editor’s note: Jack Krawczyk is Senior Product Marketing Manager at StumbleUpon, the discovery platform. Jack was a founding member of Google+ and tweets about stuff @JackK. No buzzwords are more prominent in today’s Silicon Valley lexicon than social and mobile. When we gather around a movie, TV or even use a desktop, we are carving out time and personally allocating our focus. As we have personalized our media, we have decreased the number of people viewing it together. Build for Bursts – The New Mobile Way The unique nature of mobile requires us to develop for bursts in usage, rather than sustained usage as we have built for in other media. In the past two years, mobile has grown from zero to nearly 25% of all usage of StumbleUpon. 1) Build only 1-2 core use cases; build them really really well Mobile products have to be designed for the quick hit. Secondary use cases should be treated as power user features.

The Case for E-commerce Acceleration (aka, Bye Bye BBY?) // Jeff Jordan Joseph Schumpeter said in his theory of “creative destruction” that the “process of industrial mutation…incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” I believe we’re approaching a sea change in retail where physical retail is displaced by e-commerce in a multitude of categories. Online retail is relentlessly taking share in many specialty retail categories, resulting in total dollars available to physical retailers stagnating or even declining. Let’s start with the historical context. Book retail provides a good example of this evolution. I believe that the demise of physical bookstores is just the canary in the coalmine for all of the big box players, and that the same creative destruction will play out across specialty retail. The steady, relentless share gains of e-commerce have been widely documented. Source: U.S.

Futurestate Blog How would you define your marketing efforts? . . . . . Would it go something like this? You put blood, sweat, tears and maybe thousands of pounds into winning new business. This tough economic climate is putting pressure on your marketing budget and you are concerned about future sales. Sound familiar? Well maybe your energy and hard earned cash are being put into ‘marketing efforts’ rather than a clearly defined ‘marketing strategy’. “Strategy definition: The creation of a unique & valuable market position supported by a system of activities that fit together in a complementary way. – Michael Porter” I’m sure you are well aware of the many routes to market, such as, direct mail marketing, websites, networking, direct calling, email marketing, etc. but let me briefly explain what I mean by ‘marketing efforts’ and ‘marketing strategy’. It may seem like I’m going off on a tangent here but bear with me . . . . Hopefully you’re still with me and you can see where I’m going here . . . . 1. 2. 3.