A lot of headlines have focused on the new Galaxy S4 as a potential iPhone challenger in terms of hype and mindshare, but mobile ad firm Velti offers a different perspective in its February summary of global exchange data from its network. The company still sees iOS and iPhone dominating among mobile advertisers, despite the rising tide of Android devices. → Read More
Twitter wants brands to be able to target their ads effectively, otherwise why would you spend money to spray and pray your message to every single person on the network? Since the micro networking site can trap a lot of information about you based on who you follow and what types of posts you interact with, it only makes sense that these would become targeting options for advertising purposes. → Read More
Late last year, former Googler Gabor Cselle had a problem. He’d launched a fun app called DrawChat, and it was starting to see some real usage — which would be great, except Cselle told me that DrawChat was always meant to be “a palate cleanser” and that he wanted to pursue a “billion-dollar thing.” So he auctioned off DrawChat (it was purchased by OneLouder, a division of Handmark) and got to… → Read More
In January of last year, Gil Ben-Artzy and Shuly Galili launched a startup accelerator with the intent to expose Silicon Valley to the next generation of hot Israeli tech companies — and vice versa. While Israel has long been a hotbed for innovation and is home to the R&D labs of many of the world’s biggest tech companies, the founders saw an opportunity to create a more fluid connection… → Read More
Yesterday Google began removing ad-blocking apps from its Play Store on the grounds that they violate part of its Developer Distribution Agreement. Now one of the removed apps, AdBlock Plus, has hit back at what it dubs a “unilateral move by Google”, putting out a statement slamming Mountain View for threatening consumer choice. → Read More
You may not have noticed yet but Twitter added line breaks yesterday. This change clearly hasn’t fully sunk in yet — at least, not to my Twitter stream. But expect a few inflated tweets to start floating through your feed soon. Adding support for line breaks is a pretty subtle change on the surface — yet a few hard returns can spread 140 characters an awful long way. → Read More
In the route to growing revenues, Twitter has been making a lot of upgrades to its advertising services — most notably through the release of an API — and today the social network added to that with the release of a new, upgraded dashboard for the Twitter Ads center. The new interface provides significantly more data to make it easier for brands to measure how ads are performing on the network… → Read More
Corporate websites ranked as the top digital activity for marketing “success”, according to a new poll of U.S. marketers conducted by Gartner, beating marketing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media marketing, however, ranked as the next most important activity, equal in importance to online advertising. → Read More
This coming week, we’re likely to get a peek at Samsung’s next generation Galaxy flagship smartphone, and by most accounts, it’ll have an auto-scrolling feature that can use head movement cues to detect when you’re paying attention to what’s on the small screen, and when you look away. There’s no word on just how specific it will be, but others are prepping tech that detects eye movement with a… → Read More
Facebook announced a number of new common actions today for Facebook activity, joining the “watch video” and other existing ones available to developers. These include actions in the Fitness, Books and Movies & TV categories that help users better express their interaction with media and their world. Of course, they also help developers mining the Open Graph for data get a more accurate… → Read More
The Dutch app analytics company Distimo has built a reputation around offering app developers a cross-platform look at how their apps are performing in terms of downloads, revenues and rankings, covering 2.6 billion downloads per quarter, some 15-20% of the overall download market, across 180,000 apps and 10 app stores (including Apple App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, BlackBerry World, and… → Read More
Google published a blog post today in which it details the first fruits of a pilot program launched last year to reimagine digital advertising for the mobile app age. This year, Google says it’s broadening the scope of that effort with the new Art, Copy & Code project, which is described as a series of experiments combining creative pros, ad agencies and brands to see how branded advertising… → Read More
During my trip to India, one of the most interesting companies that I met with was ZipDial. In a really cool home-turned-office in Bangalore, a team of brilliant people have turned a phenomenon that is unique to the country into a booming business. That phenomenon is missed calls. While that might not sound like big business, once you realize why this is a prevalent behavior in India, it will make… → Read More
In a world of big and small data it’s easy to forget bricks and mortar supermarkets have been gathering intell on their customers for years, thanks to loyalty card schemes. U.K. supermarket Tesco is putting its Clubcard loyalty card data to work to power a new free online TV service, which comes out of closed beta to launch today — available to Tesco’s 16 million Clubcard users. → Read More
Metaps, a Japanese startup that offers Android developers a platform to monetize their apps, has secured a JPY 1 billion ($11 million) Series B round from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan and other unnamed existing investors. It said it plans to use the funding to grow its business in Asia and expand to other countries, as well as to hire new staff. → Read More
Adobe is in the middle of Summit, its annual digital marketing conference, and as expected it’s making a bunch of product announcements. The biggest one is a new interface for Adobe Marketing Cloud, the company’s suite of products that includes Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Social, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Media Optimizer.
Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general… → Read More
AdStage, a startup aiming to make it easy for small businesses and other advertisers to run cross-network ad campaigns, just launched today at the Launch conference in San Francisco.
The company also announced that it has raised $1.4 million in funding, with an investor list that includes Freestyle Capital, Quest Venture Partners, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Digital Garage, XG Ventures, Mark… → Read More
Cheers, the app and social network built around giving users the chance to celebrate the good things in their lives, has raised a $2.5 million Series A funding round led by MindFund and including Charles River Ventures, Trinity Ventures, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and others. The startup launched just over a year ago in February, and is still very much experimenting with its positivity-based… → Read More
Amazon is taking the first steps toward building a mobile ad network across its Kindle devices with a new advertising API in beta for developers. If you judge by the earnings of publicly traded mobile advertising companies like Millennial Media, which has had annual losses for the last five years, it’s a tough business with low margins. But Amazon has something that most other competing… → Read More
Tablets are continuing their rise as the preferred screen for consuming mobile data, according to the latest figures from mobile advertising network Jumptap. The company, which produces a monthly report of what platforms are performing the strongest based on its ad network covering 134 million mobile users in the U.S. and 206 million mobile users worldwide, says that by the end of 2012, tablets… → Read More
TripleLift is a New York City-based startup aiming to help advertisers embrace what Chief Strategy Officer Ari Lewine calls “the rise of the visual web.”
“The web is increasingly dominated by images, and images are quickly becoming the primary currency with which brands communicate with their potential customers,” CEO Eric Berry told me in an email. “TripleLift identifies how consumers engage… → Read More
The app stores are overrun, and there’s little way to get noticed until you break into the charts. So Google has just announced a new AdWords unit called “Click-To-Download” mobile ads that lead directly to iTunes and Google Play. With a similar design to Facebook’s app ads, Google is reaching out its hand for a cut of the paid discovery market emerging as every company in the world goes mobile. → Read More
We’ve been bombarded by advertisers for so long it’s rare we even remember this, but advertising is still valuable.
HitBliss, a new service launching into beta, is looking to put the control back in the hands of consumers, opting in to the notion that content sellers and advertisers shouldn’t even be in communication. “After all, the only thing that advertisers and content creators have in… → Read More
Online advertising company Federated Media just announced that current CEO Deanna Brown is stepping down, while founder and former CEO John Battelle will be taking on the role again.
The company says that Battelle and Brown will be working together during March “to ensure a seamless transition.” Brown joined Federated in 2009 as president and chief operating officer, and replaced Battelle as… → Read More
Through new partnerships with top online and offline purchase data providers Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai, Facebook is allowing advertisers to target hashed lists of existing and potential customers, and categories like role-playing gamers or soda drinkers. This expansion of Facebook’s Custom Audiences program could rake in revenue and attract businesses by matching ads to real spenders → Read More
Sharethrough, a startup that’s focused on native advertising (a topic that CEO Dan Greenberg has discussed in several TechCrunch guest columns), is launching a new way to browse the most popular native ads.
The Native Advertising Leaderboard is based on information that’s publicly available through the APIs of various social platforms, Greenberg said — it turns that data into “a daily news… → Read More
AppRedeem recently launched a new version of its AppTrailers app, which now allows users to watch TV show trailers and to earn points (and eventually rewards) for watching.
There’s a new section in the app for TV. You can watch trailers and also hit the “set reminder” button, so that the app gives you a push notification 15 minutes before the show starts, based on your TV provider and location. → Read More
When the pan-Asian mobile carrier SingTel paid $321 million to acquire mobile ad platform SingTel in May last year, the thinking was that the Singapore-based SingTel could use Amobee to serve targeted ads to its 480-million mobile subscriber base across the region. Some eight months after the deal has closed, that network effect is coming into play: today Amobee is announcing that it will take… → Read More
If you listened to the online chatter about last night’s Oscars telecast, you might come away with the impression that the show tanked. Well, maybe it hit a lot of sour notes in terms of its questionably comedic, and in some cases downright offensive, bits, but in terms of advertising, it has nothing to be ashamed of. ABC sold out its ad inventory at $1.7 million-$1.8 million for a 30-second spot… → Read More
Drawbridge, a Kleiner Perkins- and Sequoia-backed startup aiming to improve mobile and cross-device ad targeting, has raised $14 million in Series B funding. AdAge actually broke the news earlier this week, but a source with knowledge of the deal told me that the story got one crucial detail wrong — the new funding actually valued Drawbridge at $99 million, more than double the $45 million that… → Read More
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