Author: Mike Boland

Local advertising continues to get smarter as data sets are unlocked to provide more context around places and their interconnectedness. This goes into hyperdrive as smartphone penetration turns the corner on 50 percent of mobile users -- more signals and…

Last week, xAd and Telmetrics released new data from a report administered by Nielsen that measures mobile local user behavior. Earlier today, we had the chance to catch up with TelmetricsCEO Bill Dinan to get some more color on the…

As you've probably heard, earlier this week Starbucks knighted Square as the core payment processing engine at its 7,000 U.S. locations. Now a few days later, its time to clear some things up and talk about the finer points: boosted…

Earlier this week, Yelp announced its Q2 earnings. One of the most notable moments of the earnings call was CEO Jeremy Stoppelman's assertion that mobile monetization is finally coming. This is something we've been looking at for some time, because…

As we may have mentioned, this will be the year that Foursquare starts to more directly monetize the local engagement on its mobile app. Just a week after its Local Updates announcement, today it goes further down the monetization path by…

During last month's MLM San Francisco conference, we tried do break the mold of conference formats in lots of ways. One thing we did differently was a song performed by longtime friend and Cox Digital Solutions exec Leif Welch. A…

Indoor mapping and navigation service Aisle411 has announced a deal with national drugstore Walgreens to map the interiors of its 7907 locations. Those of you that attended our MLM SF conference may remember the demo given by Aisle411 CEO Nathan…

Mobile local ad network Verve Wireless just launched a new program that lets its local publisher partners (i.e. newspaper apps) extend their reach through a broader network of national publishers. The idea is that they can get additional distribution by…

Today at IAB's Mobile Marketplace Conference in NYC, I had the chance to catch up with YP's David Kurtz about a new ad unit the company announced. Kurtz has been no stranger to our own conference stage and editorial, as…

As we round the corner on 2o12's half-way mark, the mobile local space continues to move rapidly. Following our January predictions (some of which have already come true), we took some time to now revisit the biggest trends driving mobile…

Thanks to all who attended or contributed to our Mobile Local Media conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. It was by all measures a success. Google, Groupon, Pandora, PayPal, Yelp, Stewart Alsop ... you can't go wrong. We even had…

Over at Street Fight, my monthly column explores how mobile ads -- despite lots of excitement and media attention -- are still undervalued in terms of ad rates. This is good for advertisers that want to experiment at early stages…

The widely anticipated Foursquare redesign went live today (late last night) with some nice enhancements and feature upgrades. It's important to note, however, that there isn't much new functionality. This isn't the pivot some people are making it out to…

I'm at Street Fight Summit West today and moderating a panel later on how "big data" and local media are coming together. Meanwhile Peter Krasilovsky and I are working the room and pulling out whatever learnings we can from sessions.…

Over the past day and a half, there's been lots of talk about Google's new Google+ Local, effectively fusing its flagship social and local products (and ditching what was Google Places). Peter Krasilovsky has a good writeup earlier about how…

Following last week’s post detailing our webcast, we held it yesterday with lots of discussion around the trends driving mobile innovation and investment. This comes in the midst of preparation, programming and speaker recruiting for our upcoming MLM San Francisco.

You can download the slides or watch the streaming webinar replay here. As a bonus, the webinar had a discount code for conference registration, which can be seen in the replay. You can also see summary points below (and more after the page break) for the “10 Trends” from the webcast.

And we’re close to announcing a new batch of conference speakers, which should really round out the program (a great lot so far). Stay tuned for that, and we hope to see you at the conference.

Trend 1: Mobile Ad Revenues Take Off
We see ad revenues growing a great deal, partly driven by evolving mobile usage patterns and smartphone penetration. The latter just surpassed 50 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers according to Nielsen.

Meanwhile, our forecast indicates that U.S. mobile ad spending will go from 1.7 billion last year to about 7.7 billion in 2015, which is a CAGR of about 39 percent (and affirmed recently by the the IAB).

There are also some interesting dynamics unfolding with the economics of mobile ad rates. Mobile usage is outpacing advertiser demand, so you see greater supply of ad inventory than ad spend.

So ad rates such as CPMs and CPCs are going down. We believe that trend will continue, but will normalize at a certain point over the next couple of years as advertiser demand picks up.

MLM Session Tie-in: Mobilizing Commerce: A BIA/Kelsey Perspective

Gearing up for our MLM San Francisco conference on June 27, we're holding a free webcast this Tuesday to give a sneak peek at the topics that will be most prominent within the program. This will be built around a…

We've been working around the clock to get the speaker roster pinned down for our MLM San Francisco show coming up on June 27. It's starting to really materialize with speakers from Google, Yelp, PayPal and shopkick (full list below).…