Exclusive: Location-based mobile advertising company JiWire has raised $20 million in new funding led by Trident Capital with Comcast Interactive Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Panorama Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners also participated in the financing. With the current funding, JiWire’s total capital raised to date is $45 million.
JiWire offers a highly targeted, location-based advertising platform that runs across Wi-Fi and mobile for devices such as iPads, smartphones and laptops. Through partnerships with more than 40 public WiFi networks, 30,000 venues and 60 airports, its ads reach more than 40 million people a month. JiWire also has advertising relationships with more than 200 location-based mobile applications. → Read More
When it comes to deals, the bigger the discount, the further people will travel. While this may sound obvious, mobile advertising company JiWire has some numbers to back it up. JiWire is releasing a new study today that evaluates consumers; behavior when it comes to location-based deals and discounts.
In a survey of more than 3,000 respondents, JiWire’s results show that the greater the discount, the further people will travel to redeem a coupon or promotion. For example, for a $100 item, 55 percent of consumers are willing to travel 15 minutes for a 10 percent discount. But 40 percent of respondents will travel an hour for a 50 percent discount, and 28 percent will travel two hours for a 75 percent discount. Essentially, higher discounts motivate consumers to travel farther. But there are limits to how far people will go. Even if you give away a product worth $100 for free, only 31 percent of people would travel more than two hours to get it. → Read More
Mobile advertising company JiWire is announcing today that it has acquired location-based mobile shopping platform NearbyNow. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
NearbyNow allows brands to show products within an app or an ad and confirm availability of the product in the actual store. Users can also reserve the product in the store for pickup. For example, a Seventeen Magazine mobile app user sees an ad for boots online and can click through to check local inventory. If they are in-stock, the shopper reserves the boots and they are ready at the counter when she arrives. The company says that ad click-though rates are more than 20 percent and conversion-to-purchase average rates of 5.8 percent. → Read More
JiWire has been watching their 30K hotspots throughout the U.S. to see how popular iOS 4 is. The results are interesting, if not entirely predictable. As you can see from the slide above, iOS 4 accounted for just over 22% of all iOS WiFi traffic on JiWire hotspots. That’s a pretty respectable number for a brand new operating system’s first week of existence. I think it’s also a testament to Apple’s development team that new versions of their mobile OS enjoy such quick adoption rates. More data after the jump. → Read More
JiWire has been watching mobile and in-app advertising, and says that “Advertisements in mobile applications are especially effective.” Their new report, released today, “examines device use, consumer adoption of Wi-Fi and consumer preferences for mobile content and advertising delivery.” Interesting take-aways from the report include the fact that iPhone has surpassed iPod Touch in number of ads delivered, and that the iPad has had a non-trivial effect on WiFi usage, indicating that people really do want to access content on-the-go but might not want to do so with a phone or a laptop. → Read More
As if specific web sites for iPhone and iPod Touch users weren’t enough, JiWire has announced free Wi-Fi access from over 100,000 locations available only to the aforementioned iPhone and iPod Touch users. In order to glom on to such a network, we’ll be required to first view “a JiWire-supplied advertisement” from companies like HBO and Charles Schwab. When the two devices came out, it was pretty apparent that there’d be optimized versions of web sites but I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t see special wireless network access privileges coming, aside from the whole Starbucks thing. Very nice. JiWire to Provide iPhone and iPod touch Users With First Ever Ad-Supported Free Wi-Fi Access [Businesswire] → Read More
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