Mobile local promotion and wallet services that marry offers to linked credit card accounts and track usage are proliferating. A partial roster of players includes Plum Rewards, MyFavEats, RewardLoop, AirPay and PunchCard. They're all fighting for a share of smartphone…
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…
Elevation Partners' Roger McNamee -- friend of Bono's, the lead in the failed resurrection of Palm and a winner in the Facebook IPO to the tune of $1.5 billion -- is known as a contrarian thinker. He did not disappoint…
American Eagle Outfitters becomes the latest partner to launch Shopkick nationwide, including its Aerie locations, starting today. The announcement comes on the heels of Target's national rollout that we reported here. American Eagle Outfitters and Aerie shoppers will earn "kicks"…
Yellow Medya, Turkey's Yellow Pages publisher, announced a new partnership agreement today with TomTom Places. The Yellow Pages publisher will serve as the business listing and content provider to the navigation products supplier. In addition, Yellow Medya will serve as…
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…
We just passed the one-month mark, in terms of days left until our big MLM San Francisco conference. Meanwhile, the program continues to get better. Last week we confirmed Groupon's Mihir Shah and American Express's David Yoo. It should be…
London-based Telnic is carving out an interesting role for itself as an online enabler of small businesses. Telnic is the organization that offers the .tel top level domain, which for GBP 14.95 per year provides a simple Web presence that…
Mobile ad network Millennial Media is out with its Q1 mobile mix report, showing that tablets were among the top 20 across all mobile devices. The Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Amazon Kindle Fire are the top three tablets…
ScoutMob, the two-and-a-half-year-old mobile-centric deals company, has landed a new $3.25 million round to develop its technology base and add more markets. It is currently in 13 cities and has more than 1 million subscribers. The company, which had previously…
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
Target, one of the largest discount retailers in the U.S., announced today that it will now offer its guests the Shopkick app for their smartphones. When customers walk into their local Target store, they receive points known as "kicks." As…
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…
XAd, a mobile local ad network, released its Q1 2012 report today that shows growth in the local-mobile search category, particularly transportation-related search within the travel sector. We're not surprised by the results, given our forecast of total U.S. mobile…
Verizon's new Visual 411 app is designed to provide a more integrative user experience across mobile, FiOS TV and desktop devices. A common platform supports all three media. In addition, the free app lets users search local businesses and provides…
via CNN If anybody wonders whether the considerable “legs” of Facebook justify a valuation now set for $83 billion, have a listen to a terrific BIA/Kelsey webinar on Facebook’s IPO, featuring Trada CEO Niel Robertson Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom and…
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).…
Just over a year after being acquired by eBay and folded into its PayPal division, Where Ads has further sealed the deal with its name plate change to PayPal Media Network. This represents more than just a name change though.…
At the Local Search Association's Search Starts Here conference in Boca Raton, today's sessions kicked off with Google's view of opportunities in local. As usual lately, this tied in closely with lots of trends and themes in mobile and social.…
