It’s been a busy few days for Twitter since announcing 15 New Types of Ads to users’ feeds. Word has traveled quickly during this period of uncertainty around Twitter’s sustainability as an advertising player. Now Twitter has continued the flow of news by announcing this morning it will acquire Cover, an Android-based lock-screen app. This extends the social media giant’s mobile ambitions.

Cover is a lock screen replacement that provides users with quick access to apps based on a contextual information and user history. For example, Cover will fill the lock screen with email, Instagram, Twitter and news apps because those are the applications that are checked first in the morning. The app utilizes data it learns for prior usage and behavior to predict which applications will be used in a given moment.

Cover has yet to specify what the acquisition means for the company but Twitter’s current crop of promoted advertising products haven’t resonated with mobile game and e-commerce companies. These entities’ advertising decisions are driven by app downloads and purchases Cover may be an answer to that problem. Twitter also has been testing a mobile-app install ad product as well. It is similar to the popular Facebook product which has been successful in pulling mobile advertising revenues.

In fact, this move parallels to what Facebook has done with Home, in carving out user engagement on the home and lock screen. That effort has been somewhat anemic so far for Facebook , but Twitter clearly sees some opportunity in a parallel effort.

Cover’s post-acquisition future could involve revenue through application discovery and promotion. Twitter could leverage the app by suggesting third party apps for the right occasion that users haven’t downloaded or purchased yet. Coupled with Twitter’s geo-targeting capabilities it could suggest apps based on nearby events or or other geographically relevant tie-ins.

Twitter has always possessed some aspects of “mobile-first” (140 characters is born from carrier-dictated SMS character limit). Through last week’s new ad products and today’s acquisition, it further cements itself as mobile player. Through this, we’ll see Twitter to ratchet up the share of ad it dollars — currently 75 percent — coming from mobile

The post Twitter’s Cover Acquisition: The Continued March Towards Mobile-First appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

It’s been a busy few days for Twitter since announcing 15 New Types of Ads to users’ feeds. Word has traveled quickly during this period of uncertainty around Twitter’s sustainability as an advertising player. Now Twitter has continued the flow of news by announcing this morning it will acquire Cover, an Android-based lock-screen app. This extends the social media giant’s mobile ambitions.

Cover is a lock screen replacement that provides users with quick access to apps based on a contextual information and user history. For example, Cover will fill the lock screen with email, Instagram, Twitter and news apps because those are the applications that are checked first in the morning. The app utilizes data it learns for prior usage and behavior to predict which applications will be used in a given moment.

Cover has yet to specify what the acquisition means for the company but Twitter’s current crop of promoted advertising products haven’t resonated with mobile game and e-commerce companies. These entities’ advertising decisions are driven by app downloads and purchases Cover may be an answer to that problem. Twitter also has been testing a mobile-app install ad product as well. It is similar to the popular Facebook product which has been successful in pulling mobile advertising revenues.

In fact, this move parallels to what Facebook has done with Home, in carving out user engagement on the home and lock screen. That effort has been somewhat anemic so far for Facebook , but Twitter clearly sees some opportunity in a parallel effort.

Cover’s post-acquisition future could involve revenue through application discovery and promotion. Twitter could leverage the app by suggesting third party apps for the right occasion that users haven’t downloaded or purchased yet. Coupled with Twitter’s geo-targeting capabilities it could suggest apps based on nearby events or or other geographically relevant tie-ins.

Twitter has always possessed some aspects of “mobile-first” (140 characters is born from carrier-dictated SMS character limit). Through last week’s new ad products and today’s acquisition, it further cements itself as mobile player. Through this, we’ll see Twitter to ratchet up the share of ad it dollars — currently 75 percent — coming from mobile

The post Twitter's Cover Acquisition: The Continued March Towards Mobile-First appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

According to research released this week from Nielsen, 45 percent of new smartphone owners surveyed in December said they chose an iPhone. Only 25 percent chose an iPhone a couple of months earlier in October. In addition, 57 percent of new iPhone owners surveyed in December said they purchased an iPhone 4S.

But Apple can hold off on celebrating just yet. Android-based mobile phones still hold the lead among all smartphone users, with a 46 percent penetration of owners surveyed in Q4 2011.

Other market researchers dispute these numbers. A late November report from comScore claims that Android continued dominating the iPhone throughout last year, with 47 percent of U.S. smartphone customers buying Android handsets that month, compared with just 29 percent for Apple.

Apple isn’t expected to debut its iPhone 5 until midyear at the earliest. Meanwhile, the steady release of Android handsets on all carriers continues. Tech analysts say this is one of many differences between the two products. It may also be a factor that helps Android maintain its overall lead against its rival.

The post IOS Beats Out Android in Q4 ‘Recent Acquirers’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

While Apple iOS and Google Android have attracted hundreds of thousands of apps, BlackBerry remains stuck at some single-digit percentage of that number.

Is it that BlackBerry users don’t have the same appetite for apps that other smartphone users have? That would seem highly unlikely. It seems much more plausible that BlackBerry users have not been habituated to apps because there are so few of them, and frankly many BlackBerry apps aren’t that great.

The primary reason is that software developers shy away from building native BlackBerry apps. The platform is simply much more difficult to develop for than Apple iOS and Android. Some real examples:

1. Multiple Versions/Devices: It’s hard to make one BlackBerry app that will work well for all BlackBerry devices — there’s little standardization among RIMM devices. The “smartphone” BlackBerrys are touchscreen, whereas the other ones use a scroll-ball to move a cursor and make selections. There’s not even a standardization of screen sizes, which makes layout difficult and time consuming. To understand the issue in about one second, take look at the BlackBerry Operating System version chart on Wikipedia.

2. Testing: You can test your code on a simulator in the computer — but each simulator download is 150 MB (!) per device — multiply that times the devices on the above OS chart.

3. Internet Connectivity: Getting a connection to the Internet from your app is not at all straightforward. BlackBerry is designed for security, which means that all of your Internet could be running through a central proxy somewhere. This becomes problematic for development as the app code must probe and prod in order to figure out the best means of connecting to the Internet to fetch data from any sort of Internet-hosted datastore.

4. Debugging: In iOS, the development cycle is:
– change code
– click button
– watch the app load on the device and verify your code change

Now here’s the comparative debugging process for BlackBerry:

Change code, click button, watch your app get sliced in to 64kb pieces, a window prompts for your encryption password, each 64kb is signed by TWO signing servers (meaning that you need to wait for about 40 requests/responses for even a meagerly-sized app — making a build at the end of the day? forget it — the signing servers are too busy to handle all those requests; watch your e-mail box as RIMM e-mails you for every single piece that was signed (hundreds of e-mails); wait for the device to completely reboot; wait for the debugger to attach; then dig through the menus to find the “Downloads” icon to actually launch the app; then, as standard operating procedure, the debugger throws two or three error windows for which you are recommended to “ignore” per the RIM documentation; then you may check your code changes.

Bottom line: Development for BlackBerry is complex for UI, complicated for developers, resource intensive for computers, and time-consuming to test versus the Apple and Android environments.

Not surprisingly, BlackBerry has begun taking the position that native apps are a fad (see the article RIMM co-CEO interview with Barron’s this week), much like the AOL proprietary service was.

RIM’s position is that Web-based apps will dominate in the future. But only time will tell if it is right. At least for now, consumers continue to embrace the use of proprietary apps.

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Tobias Dengel is CEO of WillowTree Apps Inc., a mobile applications developer. He is also BIA/Kelsey’s new technical editor and will be posting regularly on mobile-related topics. The views he expresses are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of BIA/Kelsey.

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Millennial Media — the largest independent mobile ad network, reaching 63 million U.S. mobile Web users — has published its August Mobile Mix report. The report covers impression activity and trends across its network, encompassing device hardware, operating system software and applications.

Highlights from the latest release include:

– Android OS smartphone impression share climbed 7 percent month over month, capturing 26 percent of the U.S. smartphone OS mix. Only Apple is ahead of Android with 48 percent impression share. Apple OS, however, dropped 7 percent from the July report. The results mark the continuation of Apple’s summer slide, as its July impression share score was lower than June. RIM placed third in this category with 19 percent of smartphone impression share. Surprisingly, its relative share grew by 3 percent from July.

– Zooming out, overall smartphone impression share improved from 48 percent to 51 percent, distancing both feature phones (33 percent) and connected devices (16 percent) and serving as a microcosm of the hastening adoption of smartphones.

– In terms of ad requests, Android also gained ground, surging 39 percent month over month while Apple remained flat. The continued rise now brings Android’s explosive growth in this area to 996 percent since the beginning of 2010.

– Apple’s growth spurt occurred with iPad, where ad requests were up 76 percent from July.

– Among device impressions, Apple still holds a commanding lead at more than 28 percent, with Samsung (15 percent), Motorola (14 percent) and RIM (11 percent) trailing. Apple’s iPhone is the dominant branded device at almost 28 percent, with the Motorola Droid rising to a distant second at nine percent. BlackBerry’s Curve checks in at 6 percent.

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Realtor.com has gotten 1.3 million downloads of its iPhone app, which launched in January. “It is the fastest growing app in the category,” President Errol Samuelson told Inman Real Estate Connect attendees in San Francisco last week. “The content is free; the attention is priceless,” he added, riffing on the MasterCard ad campaign.

The iPhone app also provides real leads. People using it make 10 times as many phone calls to agents as e-mail. But there is a dark side to that as well. “Seventy percent of voicemail leads are unanswered,” he said. That points to a real problem if agents don’t figure out a way to answer their phone soon, he said.

While Realtor.com has had success with the iPhone, it is also focusing on Android because it supports many more devices. Whether iPhone or Android, agents have got to not only focus on their apps, but also on their Web sites. “People click on an app, then go to a Web site that is not optimized,” said Samuelson.

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Some speculation (and new details) about Apple’s pending and well-expected reboot of Apple TV found its way last week into The New York Times just before the holiday break. My guess is that the new and obvious name will be iTV and the functionality will mimic other Apple devices running its OS — iPod Touch, iPhone, iBook and iPad.

The time is certainly right for someone to make sense of the TV, which is perhaps the most important information and entertainment device. Just imagine if the next version of Apple TV (a.k.a. the first version of iTV) offered the consumer a user interface as simple and elegant as the iPhone. The iPhone would function as the remote, and we’d do away with the current morass of clickers and remotes that dot the living room landscape.

Of course, Google is not going to sit idle and watch this happen. It is pushing its own Android-like model to counter the much anticipated reboot of Apple TV working with Sony and Intel — two of the most important names in consumer electronics.

And then there’s Microsoft. It would probably like to forget its 1997 acquisition of WebTV for several hundred million dollars. That was 13 years ago — and to date consumers have seen little evidence of the potential of IPTV. Rather, most of us just sit and hope and pray that someone will come along and make the process of watching TV as intuitive and pleasurable as it is to buy and listen to music on iTunes.

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