GPS World

Tag: mobile apps

  • Flurry Announces Ad Analytics for Mobile Apps

    Flurry has announced Flurry Ad Analytics, an analytics-powered service for mobile app marketers to measure the effectiveness of traffic acquisition campaigns across ad networks. The service enables app marketers to track the quality, follow-on behavior, and return on investment of traffic sourced from campaigns across major mobile ad networks including Apple iAd, Google Admob, Millenial Media, InMobi, Jumptap, and Flurry AppCircle.

    “Flurry estimates that during 2012 app marketers will spend over one billion dollars worldwide on app traffic acquisition without the ability to measure user quality, assign attribution or easily determine ROI,” said Simon Khalaf, Flurry president and chief executive. “Flurry Ad Analytics empowers app marketers to change the way they think about acquisition and focus on quality not just quantity.”

  • Tablet Users Will Help Shape Future Mobile App Market

    Between 2010 and 2011 the global installed base of app consumers increased by 104%, according to a report released by  mobile research specialists Research2guidance. While the installed base of smartphones increased by nearly 274 million, tablets were the fastest growing segment. The number of new tablet app consumers increased by 58 million. As a result, tablet owners now constitute 8.6% of the installed app consumer base.

    Based on Q2 projections for tablet shipments in 2012, the installed base of tablet users is set to increase more than 150% by 2013.  As tablet users become a larger and larger app downloading segment, their app behavior and preferences will have an increasing influence on the app market – illustrated already in the growth in the number of apps and stores devoted to them.

    Installed base of tablet users to increase more than 150% by 2013

    During 2011, apps in the Apple App Store for iPad grew 180% to more than 140,000 apps by the end of Q4 2011. While this cannot be easily quantified for Android as tablet apps are not separated out, the growth of niche stores and niche store categories focusing on Android tablets reflects their growing presence. For example, Archos Appslib focuses completely on Android tablet apps, while other stores like Android Tapp has a dedicated category.

    Several studies have shown that tablet users exhibit different behaviour towards app downloading/usage and mobile browsing than smartphone users.  Based on the breadth of use cases for gaming, ecommerce, digital publishing and the enterprise – tablet user growth is likely to have a marked effect on consumption in these areas.

    Tablet apps for the enterprise market

    In the enterprise, for example, tablets have already been largely implemented at upper levels of management and are quickly working their way throughout organizations – according to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook in 2012, 92% of Fortune 500 companies are testing or deploying iPads. As more and more use cases are developed and penetration increases, so too will the number of apps being developed for enterprise tablet users. While Apple has already carved out a niche section for iPad and iPhone Business users called “@Work”, other players like Lenovo and Cisco are trying to do the same for Android Business users.

     

  • Indoor Location Apps Lead to Compelling User Experience

    Indoor location technology is evolving; indoor mapping is coming along and apps that seamlessly work in and out of doors will make a compelling experience more compelling. Bringing mobile location to indoors will stimulate our industry. The killer app? Apps that can self learn to be personalized to a user’s life, lived in and out of doors (check traffic before I leave my desk). Hop on board.

    Indoor Mapping. The indoor market is getting more interesting as Google’s Street View Mapping edges indoors. In a new pilot project, Google is providing glimpses through the front doors of retail businesses. Restaurants, hotels, stores, and other venues will show a 360-degree inside perspective. The imagery will appear on Google’s Places pages, all using the same Street View technology that enables its other map images. The company’s plans are to eventually allow users to virtually enter indoor spaces from street maps. It is a way for businesses to entice new customers. Companies in the pilot volunteer for inclusion. The project links nicely to indoor mapping plans under way.

    Finding Location Indoors. Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) introduced a new mobile phone processor to improve the accuracy of indoor navigation. It is a “self learning” indoor location platform that fuses real-time Wi-Fi, satellite positioning data, MEMS sensors, and crowd-sourced location data. The company claims it can achieve continuous and rapid indoor position fixes. The system’s distinction, says CSR’s Dave Huntingford, is it doesn’t require manual surveys to build and maintain its Wi-Fi and cellular location data base. The CSR system debuts next year.

    Leading Vehicle Integration. “The automakers that can provide the most elegant integration of vehicle and mobile apps will lead the next revolution of providing social media and other capabilities in cars,” states a report from market analysts IHS iSuppli. Integration is critical as automotive infotainment will derive functionality from smart mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Globally, Toyota and Ford lead in successful integration of car infotainment systems with mobile devices, IHS iSuppli reports. A study of production-ready applications showed that the Toyota Entune and Ford Sync AppLink apps had the highest performance on at least four criteria, including content variety, level of integration, daily relevance, and implementation.

    Being Watched? The well-publicized case in front of the Supreme Court may define the power of police forces to put location devices on vehicles for surveillance. The court’s decision may extend beyond vehicles into the far more prevalent police practice of tracking cell phones. According to the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles police tracked 295 phones, up 35 percent from the previous year. The paper reports that a magistrate in Texas who approves cell-tracking requests has used public records to estimate that U.S. federal courts issue 20,000 to 30,000 cell-phone tracking orders annually. In 2010, in comparison, state, local and federal courts approved a little over 3,000 wiretaps.

    Location Data too Accurate? Precise location info spawns lawsuit. Customers concerned about HTC’s location tracking practices have hit the company with a lawsuit. HTC is charged with using the AccuWeather app to track customer’s precise locations and providing it to advertisers who use it for location targeted ads. It boils down to location precision. The suit claims that HTC collects “unnecessarily precise” location data. Weather is a regional phenomenon based on coarse location and can be easily determined by cell towers, and not the GPS data HTC obtains. The AccuWeather app is integrated into some HTC phones and cannot be uninstalled, according to the suit. HTC can be added to the honor roll of company blunders that fuel concerns about the misuse of location data.

    New Innovators. Localmind was one of the winners at recent competitions for young location-oriented companies. This real-time, location-based clever Q&A platform leverages social check-in services. Users can ask questions of others. For instance, someone might query about waits at a restaurant, liveliness at a bar, or the state of the Wi-Fi at a coffee shop. Another winner, Tagwhat, offers a multimedia location guide that reveals videos, photos, narratives, and audio about the world around people wherever they go, based on the users’ pre-selected, customized interests such as food, music, movies, heritage, and sports. Containment in a personalized bubble may or may not be a good thing. A third winner, Right Back on Track (RBT), enables schools to reduce truancy and drop outs. The system lets schools and families know the whereabouts of truant students to enable interventions to attract the students back in school.

  • Consumer Time on Mobile Apps Surpasses Time on Web

    The world is spinning in a new direction. Consumers are spending more time on mobile apps than on the web. In June, mobile app use overtook both mobile and desktop web, as measured by apps analytic firm Flurry. Consumers spent an average of 81 minutes per day on mobile apps, and 74 minutes on the web. App use was measured on Apple’s iOS, Android, Blackberry, and J2ME platforms, and web use was measured on the open web, mobile web, and Facebook.

    Last year, the numbers told a different story. In 2010 iOS was popular, but Android was yet to skyrocket onto the market. Web time led with 64 daily usage minutes; mobile app time lagged at 43 minutes. What are consumers doing with their apps in 2011? Having fun, or more likely, wasting time. Games and social networking categories captured the significant majority of app usage. Consumers spent nearly half their time playing games, and a third were connecting with social networking apps. Together, these two categories account for 79 percent of consumers’ total mobile app time.

    Mapping Apple. Last month I wrote that rumors of Apple’s imminent release of its own mapping database was proven wrong by its renewal of Google maps. This doesn’t mean Google isn’t hard at work on it. MacRumors reports that there are legal disclaimers found in iOS 5 in a new section called “Map Data.” A diverse list of licenses appear from third parties that provide mapping data and services. Included are CoreLogic, Getchee, Increment P Corp, Localeze, MapData Sciences, DMTI, TomTom, Urban Mapping, and Waze. Urban Mapping provides in-depth neighborhood data and Waze offers crowd-sourced real-time map and traffic data.

    Foursquare is set to start making money. Foursquare made its name as a location-based check-in community that awards mayoralships and other rewards for visiting stores and restaurants. Users share recommendations for venues. If you wondered how the company was going to bring in revenue, here’s the dope. Foursquare will team with LivingSocial and Gilt Groupe to offer location-targeted daily coupon offers, its biggest move yet to harness its consumer buzz into a long-term revenue model.

    Foursquare will leverage its location-tracking capabilities and customer data to offer deals. The depth of Foursquare’s consumer database is extensive and should give the company insight into individual perspectives and behaviors, and provide an edge in targeting offers that will grab a high conversion rate.

    LightSquared causes GPS interference. “LightSquared should not be permitted to use the L-Band spectrum for a densely-deployed, non-integrated terrestrial-only network. Such a network would cause unacceptable interference to GPS operations, wiping out an installed base of over 500 million units used in a wide array of public safety, aviation, industrial and consumer applications.” So reads the technical working group’s final report to the FCC. The group concluded that no mitigation techniques, such as using filters on GPS receivers, were considered because they don’t exist and therefore cannot be tested. The FCC is currently holding a comment period and eventually the commission will make a decision about LightSquared band use.

    Continuing to press its case, LightSquared presented the FCC with a plan to mitigate interference with GPS by using Inmarsat’s lower spectrum band, enabling reduced power of base stations by more than 50 percent. However, the working group indicated testing of this lower channel does not eliminate harmful interference to GPS receivers.

    LightSquared has argued that the issue is with GPS receivers, not their proposed system: “Despite the commercial GPS device industry’s best record to rewrite the record and obfuscate the nature of the problem, the simple fact remains that GPS receivers do not adequately reject base-station transmissions in the adjacent band.” Jim Kirkland of Trimble and the Coalition to Save our GPS responded that GPS receivers were designed against satellite transmissions with an ancillary terrestrial component, consistent with LightSquared’s initial design, but not later changes.

    Despite mounting concern of GPS interference, LightSquared recently snared $265 million in financing for its LTE network. This year LightSquared raised a total of $2.3 billion and appears close to a Sprint deal. Does LightSquared have a viable “Plan B”?

    Action-based ads. A bit more than a third of mobile ad campaigns ask subscribers to click to call, click to map, click to download, or click to SMS, reports mobile advertiser, Jumptap. The remaining ads usually invite users to a website, and aren’t as immediately actionable. Mobile ad engagement peaks at mid-day, and click through rates are at the lowest during morning commute and initial workday hours.

    Moment of Zen. When asked about the stealth in which FourSquare just raised $50 million, CEO Dennis Crowley opined, “Loose Tweets sink companies.”