Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of Tech Innovation at UNICEF. Her team started UNICEF’s open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class ”Design for Unicef” in NYU’s ITP Program, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University on leveraging technology and design to improve international development. All these views are her own.

In less than three decades, the mobile phone has gone from being a status symbol to being a ubiquitous technology that facilitates almost every interaction in our daily lives. One month after the world’s population topped 7 billion in October 2011, the GSM Association announced that mobile SIM cards had reached 6 billion. A 2009 study in India illustrated that every 10 percent increase in mobile penetration leads to a 1.2 percent increase in GDP.

Yet patterns of mobile phone use in developing countries are vastly different from what you see on the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. This is a market underserved by technologists and startups. This is where the majority of future growth lies, and Silicon Valley has yet to realize the huge economic opportunities for network operators, handset developers, and mobile startups. Where are these opportunities?

Developing Countries are Powering the Growth

China and India account for the majority of new mobile connections, and in developing countries mobile saturation hasn’t yet hit and is still experiencing double-digit growth.

This rapid growth most recently driven from the developing world is surprising when you consider that for the average mobile user, procuring the device costs a few months’ salary. Sustaining this connection generates tremendous value and meets many user needs as they continue to invest often over 10 percent of their monthly income in staying connected.

The explosive growth of mobile in developing countries over the past five years is what prompted us at UNICEF to leverage mobile to strengthen our programmes in 190 countries and territories. Many of UNICEF’s programmes now use mobiles for a variety of purposes. One program ensures that infants are tested for HIV and put on treatment if necessary. Another gathers direct feedback from communities on everything from water sanitation to access to essential medication.

Creativity Despite No Data

For those in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to imagine that 70 percent of all handset shipments are feature phones. Most of these phones go to developing countries. The vast majority of the world, especially in low income and rural areas, is still living the mobile revolution through the constraints of voice, SMS and asynchronous connection.

These connectivity constraints fuel tremendous creativity. For many communities, simple voice and text connections have brought about revolutions in access to financial, health, agricultural and education services and opportunities for employment.  For example, many farmers in rural areas in Africa and Asia use SMS services to to find out the daily prices of prices of agricultural commodities. This information allows them to improve their bargaining position when taking their goods to market, and also allows them to switch between end markets.

Another successful example in this space is UNICEF’s RapidSMS initiative: a scalable SMS-based open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication. UNICEF currently supports governments across six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and over 200,000 RapidSMS users in some of the most underserved and rural communities. Frontline health workers who each serve hundreds of women and children make up many of these users. Success in this space is quantified by time, money and lives saved. It is widely used by governments and the international development community, and has also taken off in business communities. For example, in Ghana, a local entrepreneur uses RapidSMS to monitor the sales of cook stoves around the country.

Airtime is Cash

In many countries where the majority of people are unbanked, airtime has become another form of currency. Imagine you need to get a small amount of money to your sister who lives in a village that’s ten hours drive away. The easiest way for you to do that is to buy some airtime, but instead of topping up your own prepaid mobile service you top up hers. For a small fee, she can now go and cash out this airtime with an agent that sells airtime.

M-PESA, a project out of Kenya that was initially set up to distribute micro-loans to and collect payments from the poorest rural communities of Kenya, has now become a large-scale multi-country mobile cash transfer system run by Safaricom in East Africa and Roshan in Afghanistan.

For many governments mobile money is a conundrum. They like that their citizens can access financial services that could significantly improve their lives. On the flip side, it can mean that mobile network operators and other mobile money service providers now operate and benefit from the revenue that normally would go to the central bank?

Challenges remain. The price points of using these services are still out of reach for the poorest communities. There are often too few agents to cash out airtime. People often don’t understand or trust non-traditional forms of financial services.

Yet this creates a huge business opportunity. Even with all the network operators in this space, there are possibilities for a multitude of services that leverage mobile payments. To be able to successfully develop in this space, we need to better examine how people interact with money across the world and build applications that are flexible enough to be customized and be relevant to different cultural patterns.

In San Francisco you might pay your cab driver through his Square reader, but in Nairobi you’ll send him some airtime.

A Phone for the Developing World

iPhones don’t stand a chance due to their inflexibility and high price points. As it stands, the operating system for the developing world smartphone will be Android. However, even the flagship Samsung Galaxy Nexus isn’t the ideal phone. The ideal smartphone will be:

1. Cheap. Last year, Huawei in partnership with Safaricom unveiled an $80 Android phone in Kenya where 40 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. At this year’s Mobile World Congress the CEO’s of Bharti Airtel, Telefonica Latin America and VimpelCom came out together and stated that $50 is the magic price point for smartphones to become more widely affordable in emerging economies.

2. Rugged and simple. The Nokia 1100 series is the most popular phone in the world. It is dust proof, water resistant, rugged, has a simple menu system, few separate parts and has a flashlight. Every town across the developing world has a local repair shop with spare parts for simple Nokias. When I travel to the developing world, I rely on my trusty Nokia 1100, not my iPhone. Smartphones are delicate creatures that don’t stand up to the daily wear and tear of people’s lives.

3. Battery life of a week. Recharging your phone every night is not an option if you live in a rural village without electricity. At one of UNICEF’s projects in rural Senegal, I encountered a village entrepreneur who started a business where he would collect everyone’s cell phones and for a small fee, bike to an electrified village a few hours away, then bike back with phones at full charge.

People in these countries spend a lot of money to keep their phones charged. Developing a phone whose battery lasts for a week would unlock smartphones to a large market segment.

Apps Optimized for Data Use

Data is as expensive in developing as in developed countries. Data is unlikely to fall in price as quickly as smartphones, so even when handsets get cheap enough for an average user in a developing country, they still won’t be able to afford run many of the apps that make up the smartphone experience. There will be demand for apps – be it banking, weather, chat, social, and market information – but for them to take off it’s crucial that they use as little bandwidth as possible. One feature to emulate is Android’s Data Usage screen which allows you to set limits for data usage and makes it clear how much data you’ve used.

Call to Arms

The continued double digit growth of mobile in developing countries represents a tremendous business opportunity. While companies in Silicon Valley fight over trying to develop the top app in a certain category, huge untapped potential still remains in the developing world. Working in this space will require businesses to be able to think through the design of their applications from a different viewpoint. Their end users will have different motivations, experiences, needs and constraints. While handset manufacturers will need to build a phone whose battery lasts, app developers will need to build appropriate apps that use little bandwidth.

Photos under creative commons sharealike license by Merrick Schaefer, UNICEF; Jan Chipchase, frog; and Terra Weikel, UNICEF.

GameStop is hurting. Same store sales fell 5%-11% and revenue was down 17% to $2 billion. Profit fell to $72.5 million. Arguably, those are still huge numbers and presumably a new console refresh should push the company out of the doldrums. But what the company has just launched – a new MVNO called GameStop Mobile – is almost inexplicable.

GameStop Mobile is, in short, an unlimited voice with limited data offering for $55 a month (down to $20 a month for pay-as-you-go plans.) GameStop is just selling SIM cards and service and is running on AT&T’s network with some notable dead spots.

The stores actually do take trade-in electronics so, potentially, the company could begin selling unlocked GSM phones to customers who come in for games. Because of the intended audience – kids and the adults who bring them as well as a few die-hards who aren’t yet into PC gaming – it makes some sense for this service to exist.

The synergy also opens AT&T to new markets and, more important, places GameStop right at the nexus of mobile and gaming – a place it absolutely needs to be once future consoles stop accepting optical media.

However, with revenue down and hard-core gamers moving to services like Origin and Steam, there is little impetus for folks to trek out to the local GameStop for titles. Here’s hoping this latest attempt at monetizing the audience works as well as their midnight launches of Diablo III.

Mobile payments and identity verification company Jumio is introducing its Netswipe Mobile SDK today, which allows developers to add credit card scanning functionality to their mobile applications. The SDK (software development kit), is available now for iOS, but an Android version is coming soon, the company says.

To jump-start usage, Jumio is also waiving transaction fees for the SDK’s first users for a temporary period of time.

The company is calling this a “$5 million fund,” but it’s not really a fund – it’s a just a discount to developers who choose to implement the solution. They’ll be able to try out the Jumio SDK in their apps before committing to paying the extra cost of doing so. Jumio says it will cover the cost of the first 1,000 scans every month, but did not announce an end date for this promotion just yet. (Until the $5M runs out, it seems).

The SDK allows developers to integrate the card-scanning technology into their app, which means users can hold up a credit card to their smartphone’s camera in order to have the card “read” by the app and the numbers automatically entered into the correct fields. To confirm the purchase, the 3-digit CVV still has to be entered, however.

The technology is similar to what a lesser-funded competitor Card.io already has in place. In fact, while both companies have operated in the same space – “computer vision” for speeding up mobile payments – they’ve been coming at it from different angles. While Card.io started with SDKs for iOS and Android, then moved into web support for e-commerce sites, Jumio has been going the opposite direction. As of March, Card.io already had some 200 developers using its SDK.

The Jumio SDK for iOS is available for download here.

Sign of a maturing marketing flattening out, a lack of compelling devices, or a contraction in the economy? Gartner today released figures that note that worldwide sales of mobile phones were actually down by two percent this quarter, to reach a total of 419.1 million units — the first time the market has declined since the second quarter of 2009, the analysts say.

Gartner’s explanation is a slowdown in demand from Asia-Pacific, because of a lack of compelling new devices getting launched in the period: users are simply holding out until something better comes along. Nevertheless, of the vendors that are doing well, Samsung is riding at the top of the list, with 20.7 percent of all mobile sales globally, and among smartphones, it is the only Android vendor to have more than 10 percent market share — with Android now accounting for 56 percent of all smartphone sales in the quarter.

This will be the quarter that people remember as the one when Samsung swapped places with Nokia, with others like Strategy Analytics also showing a similar shift. In Gartner’s calculations of mobile sales, Nokia has now slipped down to second position with 19.8 percent of all mobile sales to Samsung’s 20.7 percent, equivalent to 86.6 million units.

Nokia, Gartner notes, had been in the number-one position since 1998 — but from the looks of its earnings for the last few quarters, it doesn’t appear that Nokia will be regaining the lead any time soon.

(Don’t rule it out yet, though. Nokia just yesterday launched two more low-cost, souped up feature phones that play to the developing markets where it has continued to do alright, despite its market share losses in more advanced countries.)

Among the other trends that Gartner noted, it pointed out that white-box vendors — the long tail of device makers that fill in the “others” category seemed to have been hit the hardest.

It notes that while companies like Nokia may have been selling in less at the retail level, white-box vendors have a supply issue in that they overproduced and now have a build-up of inventory. That will mean very cheap devices will be hitting stores in the next couple of quarters as they try to shift their stock for the next generation of devices. (This by the way was a similar problem Nokia had in Q2 2011, when Gartner suspected this might have made Nokia appear to have a bigger share of sales than it actually had.)

Overall, Samsung and Apple were the only two vendors in the top 1o mobile rankings to have gained market share: the rest all declined, as you can see from the list below.

In smartphones the power of the two is even more pronounced. Samsung and Apple now represent 49.3 percent of all smartphones sold — a sure sign of the consolidation being that a year ago the pair only accounted for 29.3 percent. Nokia’s smartphone share is down to 9.2 percent, Gartner says.

Samsung also managed to wrest the leading smartphone maker crown from Apple this quarter: it sold 38 million units to Apple’s 33 million.

Among Android makers, Samsung is also proving once again that it is the brand to beat: it accounted for 40 percent of all Android smartphone sales. (In that respect, Google’s Motorola buy seems less and less like a device play, or that it can realistically be one.)

But even with Apple in second, its actual growth was hugely impressive, at 96.2 percent over the year. China, Gartner notes, is now Apple’s second-largest market after the U.S. It looks like those sales were 8 million in total: 5 million from Apple’s official sales channges, and another 3 million from “transshipments” from Hong Kong.

More worryingly, RIM sold only 9.9 million units in the quarter and its global mobile share declined down to a mere 2.4 percent (in smartphone-only, that share is 6.9 percent, roughly half of what it was a year ago). BlackBerry 10, its new OS, will hopefully be the knight in shining armor that RIM desperately needs. Also, while Windows Phone actually grew in real terms, with 2.7 million sales in the quarter compared to 2.6 million a year ago, it’s not at all keeping pace with overall growth, and its share is now down to 1.9 percent from 2.6 percent a year ago.

Overall, smartphone sales accounted for just over one-quarter of all mobile sales: they stood at 144.4 million units, out of total mobile sales of 428 million units. That represented growth in smartphone sales of 44.7 percent, Gartner says.

Samsung’s Galaxy S III, the follow up to its best-selling Galaxy S II, was launched only last month and is now gradually getting rolled out worldwide — although it has seen mixed reviews and so it remains to be seen whether it will prove to be a similar blockbuster for the Korean company. In the meantime, we all continue to guess when Apple might release its next iPhone — with many suspecting it will not be until the later half of this year.

Appia, an app marketplace and white-label app platform, is broadening its support for Android with the introduction of Pay Per Install App Advertising for Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market). Up until now, all the downloads generated through PPD (pay per download) were done through an Appia-powered app store, but now developers can purchase a Pay Per Install campaign and drive traffic back to Google Play. This, in turn, can then boost their app’s install numbers and rank.

The news comes at a time when Appia is hitting another notable milestone: its network has passed 500 million mobile consumers worldwide.

To give you an idea of their growth, when we covered the launch of their PPD service in April 2011, the company was reporting more than 200 million mobile subscribers. In addition to this 250% growth in terms of network reach, the company also claims to have driven more than 15 million sponsored app installs over the past 12 months, with an average of more than 25 million total app downloads per month, and more than 400 million app downloads since its debut.

The new support for Google Play allows developers to now run both Pay Per Download and Pay Per Install campaigns. Plus, it offers advanced reporting which will show campaign activity by platform, device, and geography (country). This allows the developers to really see where their campaign is working and where it isn’t.

To generate this data, developers can install tracking via an in-app API or through server to server integration.

A big difference between Appia and its competition (think TapJoy, and other incentivized Pay per Performance networks) is that the traffic Appia sends is non-incentivized. That means users aren’t offered virtual currency or other rewards in exchange for their actions. In addition, the company allows developers to buy on-deck ad placement on the app portals from over 50 major operators globally, including Vodafone, Vodacom, Telcel, America Movil, Claro, Comcel, Myxer and Zedge.

Given its reach, Appia attracts big-name advertisers. Over the past 12 months, the company has seen advertisers like Facebook, AT&T, Priceline, Gameview Studios, Amazon, MocoSpace, CrowdStar, Blue Lion, Tequila Mobile, Storm8, Pocket Gems, Per Blue, Big Fish Games and others using its platform to bring in new mobile users.

For awhile now “gamification” has largely existed as a buzz word. It’s felt just as ridiculous to write the word as it is to read it. However, as Tim Chang pointed out this weekend, although it’s important to avoid thinking of “gamification as the panacea,” it’s real, it’s moving beyond media and fitness, and it needs to be taken seriously. When it comes to educational tools, gamification has real value in its ability to make learning more fun and engaging. But as with all emerging trends, it can’t be applied willy-nilly.

BenchPrep, a young edtech startup backed by $2.2 million from Lightbank, launched last year to convert content from big educational publishers, like McGraw-Hill, into interactive web and mobile courses. While the startup expanded beyond college admission test prep in January, today it’s announcing that it is teaming up with Princeton Review to contemporize test prep for students, using game mechanics, leaderboards, and social features to make the tedious and teeth-grinding process of test prep more engaging and, hopefully, more effective.

BenchPrep CEO and co-founder Ashish Rangnekar tells us the startup’s core mission is to take the multitude of quality educational content out there — on a host of subjects — and transform it from static, linear material, into an experience that’s engaging, and personalized. Gamification of education is severely undercooked — like entertainment was 15 years ago, the CEO says, as the big publishers are, by and large, hesitant to experiment.

The high cost of education is just one of the industry’s many problems, but the real problem, he says, comes from a dearth of sticky, engaging experiences. Long term, the co-founder tells us, BenchPrep wants to become a platform where any student can go to study for an exam, using material from any publisher on any device. The content is out there, but the rest isn’t.

BenchPrep is already working with Princeton Review, Jon Wiley, McGraw-Hill and others, and the CEO believes it’s among the first to focus on building an interactive learning platform in which students can study on the Web, iOS, Android, and tablets.

So, the startup has teamed up with Princeton Review to launch GRE ScoreQuest, an iOS app that gamifies the study process for students taking the GRE. Obviously, the target audience is fairly limited, as it is intended for those studying to take the standardized test to get into grad school.

But the BenchPrep CEO calls the app “a bold experiment,” which takes the reputable content-heavy world of the Princeton Review and attempts to stretch the boundaries of test prep by bringing in social analytics and gamification. The company wants to use the app to prove that the model works, to validate the idea, and then apply this model to the content from all the big publishers, for all forms of test prep.

And so far, the experiment is showing positive results. In the two weeks since launch, 300+ students signed up, and 99 percent have downloaded the app and are spending more than 30 minutes a day in the app. Those students who used the app regularly over those two weeks have seen a 20 percent rise in performance.

So, how does the app work? Rangnekar, although he hesitates to use the analogy given the implications, likens the experience to that of Angry Birds. The app presents the test prep content through storyboards, like Angry Birds, there are a series of rooms in which there are 9 or 10 quizzes, ordered in level of difficulty.

The average number of questions per quiz is about five, with each quiz taking about 10 minutes to complete. If the student answers four questions correctly, they move onto the next quiz. If they fail to answer four correctly, the app explains the answers, including each part of the multiple choice answers, why each was incorrect, and so on.

Besides this process of leveling-up, BenchPrep wants to give context — something that’s extremely important for a sticky experience. So, the app allows students to see how their test results compare to all those studying for the GRE, as well as to break it down to compare only to those studying for their specific test, like Arts & Humanities, for example.

So the app offers tests in a bunch of different categories, from text completions and sentence equivalence to Algebra and Geometry, with more than 300 practice problems. Students unlock new problems, levels, and boards based on their performance, with this intelligent report card that analyzes each test.

For a free app, the GRE ScoreQuest is off to a great start. There are a huge amount of explanations so that students can understand what they’re getting wrong, they have a valid score card, and then get to compare to local and national leaderboards, which makes the experience that much more engaging. It’s the kind of experience you react to with, “I wish they had this when I was studying for the SATs.” I’m not even studying for the GREs, but I found myself taking the quizzes nonetheless.

Typically, the BenchPrep CEO says, students are opening the app at least twice a day, which he says has been great early validation on this model. Going forward, BenchPrep wants to focus on being the tool, or platform that enables these mobile and web experiences for educational publishers. It’s a complementary gamification service to the approach Inkling and Boundless Learning are taking to eTextbooks, for example.

There’s plenty of opportunity for tools like this in higher education, especially in test prep, and BenchPrep obviously hopes that this is just the beginning.

For more, find the app here, and BenchPrep at home here.

What do you think?

Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company’s efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the results it is getting from Google+ so far – or at least that’s what the company is saying publicly. No matter your overall feelings about Google+, though, Google’s new native Google+ app for iPhone is worth a look, especially because it’s hopefully just a first glimpse at what more of Google’s mobile apps will look like in the near future.

So far, the Google+ mobile app was adequate but nothing to brag about for Google. For the most part, it worked (though it did crash at times) and gave you access to Google+’s most important features. Even Google+’s most ardent fans wouldn’t have called it exciting, though.

The latest redesign, however, suddenly makes the app one of the more interesting social networking clients on the market today. Unlike the previous version of the app, which felt like it was designed by committee and lacked luster, this new version almost makes Google+ feel like a Path-like “mobile first” service. It’s highly visual, puts an emphasis on images, and its endless scrolling with new items quickly sliding into place as you scroll down is a nice design touch that feels very different from Google’s latest, often lackluster, design efforts.

Just compare the new Google+ app to something like Currents, Google’s once-hyped Flipboard competitor. It’s not a bad app. It does what it says it does, but it just doesn’t inspire the same kind of enthusiasm as the highly visual Flipboard. The Gmail for iPhone app, which didn’t even work at first, is a better effort but still feels more like Gmail for a small screen than email re-imagined for mobile the same way Sparrow, for example, does.

The new Google+ app, however, finally re-imagines what the service should look like on a mobile device. It doesn’t just try to recreate a version of the Google+ desktop site for a smaller screen.

From what we’ve heard, the new app was developed in-house by Google and the new design wasn’t informed by any recent acquisitions. So Google clearly has the design chops to develop apps like this.

The Google+ team, Steven Levy wrote last year, generally gets a bit more freedom to experiment and make fast decisions than other groups at Google. Maybe it’s no surprise then, that we would first see an app like this come out of the Google+ group. Let’s just hope other teams at Google will look at this app and let it inform their work as well.

Verious, a new mobile component marketplace (and recent Disrupt finalist), is announcing an expansion of its service today, to also include components for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform as well as those for HTML5 mobile apps. The addition means there are now hundreds more components, SDKs, and open source projects available on Verious’s platform, which previously focused primarily on offerings for iOS and Android.

According to Verious founder, Anil Pereira, the company made the decision to add the Windows Phone category based on what it was seeing on both the consumer side of things – 80,000 Windows Phone apps, new Windows-enabled smartphones, and positive reviews – as well as on the developer side. Already the company had over 2,000 Windows Phone developers on its site via its Elance partnership, and several were asking about Windows Phone components and code on forums, Q&A sites and elsewhere on the web. Plus, adds Pereira, “we saw that a number of our existing component sellers/partners–as well as other developers and firms out there–have Windows Phone offerings that they are looking to market.”

“So triangulating consumer demand (Nokia, for example, has a very strong presence in the next key markets to adopt smartphones), developer demand, partner demand and Microsoft’s consumer and developer marketing efforts, we connected with Microsoft to compile the comprehensive catalogue of Windows Phone components,” says Pereira. The site now offers 200 components for the platform with more in the works. Some of the new additions include Metro-style icons, a physics engine, and Silverlight UI controls.

Pereira says that added components will help WP developers address the same pain points that others are also now facing when they move to new platforms. “Getting familiar with programming paradigms and UI standards through open source, SDKs, pre-built components and tools like UI templates and icon libraries is very beneficial, regardless of the level of expertise of the developer,” he explains. It also helps to use these types of pieces to speed up the time to market when porting from other platforms to Windows Phone.

To generate the new resource, Verious worked closely with Microsoft, and, in addition, has created business partnerships with many of the established independent software vendors selling Windows Phone components. Microsoft is also promoting the component listings on Verious.com directly from its MSDN AppHub.

As for HTML5, the platform has always been on the Verious roadmap – it was Windows Phone that the company had originally planned for a late 2012 launch. But given the (perceived? real?) demand, the company decided to bump up Windows Phone to coincide with the HTML5 addition today. Now, there are 100 HTML5 components on the site and many more on the way. All of the new additions will also be made available on the Verious Mobile Developer Network, announced earlier this year.

Today, Verious has thousands of listings on its site, but isn’t currently releasing numbers related to registered developers, downloads, licensing agreements or transactions made. The company also teased more “game-changing initiatives,” which will kick off in Q3 this year. Stay tuned.

Do you regularly use your cell phone to coordinate meetings, solve an unexpected problem, decide which restaurant to eat at, look up the score of a sporting event, check traffic, call help in an emergency situation or find information to help settle an argument? These activities make you a “just-in-time” cell user according to the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. According to this report, 70% of all cell phone owners in the U.S. and 86% of smartphone owners have used their phones to perform at least one of these activities over the last 30 days.

The argument here is that our rapid adoption of smartphones is changing our relationship with information and the way we communicate with each other.

Here is evidence the Pew report cites for how this access to information is “creating a new culture of real-time information seekers and problem solvers:”

• 41% of cell phone owners used their phone in the previous 30 days to coordinate a meeting or get-together.
• 35% used their phone to solve an unexpected problem they or someone else had encountered in the previous 30 days.
• 30% used their phone in the previous 30 days to decide whether to visit a business, such as a restaurant
• 27% used their phone in the previous 30 days to get information to help settle an argument they were having.
• 23% used their phone in the previous 30 days to look up a score of a sporting event.
• 20% used their phone in the previous 30 days for up-to-the-minute traffic or public transit information to find the fastest way to get somewhere.
• 19% used their phone to get help in an emergency situation

Overall, none of these results should really come as a surprise to anybody who has ever owned a smartphone. Of course people are using their phones to look up traffic information and check a restaurant’s Yelp reviews. Still, it’s interesting to see some relatively hard data that shows how quickly this easy access to information has become a natural part of daily life for so many of us.

Online and mobile research company comScore just released its newly rebooted and retooled Mobile Metrix report this morning, which examines mobile media usage across both apps and mobile web browsing. According to the new data, Google sites led as the top property on iOS, Android and RIM devices, reaching 96.9% of the U.S. mobile audience, followed by Facebook, Yahoo sites and Amazon sites. But apps dominated in terms of usage, says comScore, with 4 out of every 5 mobile media minutes spent in apps.

As far as which apps led the way, not surprisingly, built-in system apps came out on top, as did Facebook. But Facebook isn’t #1 – depending on the platform, the App Store or the Android Market holds the top spot, followed by either Google Search or Maps.

On the iPhone, iTunes was the top app, with 99.9% reach (what, did someone figure out how to delete iTunes off of their iPhone?), and was followed by Google Maps, at 91.2% reach. Facebook, meanwhile, was in the #3 spot, with an 80% reach. On Android, the rankings were a bit different – the Android Market…excuse me, Google Play store…was #1 (93.2% reach), followed by the Google Search app (84.1%), Maps (74.5%), Gmail (71.4%), and then Facebook (68.9%). Clearly, the numbers show that Android users gravitate towards Google’s own branded apps.

ComScore also looked at social networking properties by audience size, a measurement determined by both app usage and mobile site visitors. In this case, Facebook was an easy winner, with the average Facebook mobile user engaging for over 7 hours via browser or app in March. Twitter saw 25.6 million mobile users, engaging for nearly 2 hours during the month, but this statistic didn’t include usage by third-party apps (of which there are many), so may not be as accurate. People visiting Twitter on their computers spent only 20.4 minutes on Twitter.com, which comScore says highlights the importance of mobile engagement for brands. However, again, Twitter.com metrics are not the only way to account for Twitter users who engage on a Mac or PC – there are dozens of client applications, available both as desktop applications and those which run in the browser, neither of which were counted here.

The newly hot image pinboarding site Pinterest reached 7.5 million smartphone visitors who engaged with the brand for nearly an hour. (And this despite a number of anecdotal and app store review complaints of app bugginess, some of which were only recently addressed by the company through a mobile app update – Imagine what Pinterest could do with a killer app!).

Foursquare trailed Pinterest, with 5.5 million mobile visitors engaging at an average of nearly 2.5 hours. And Tumblr reached an audience of nearly 4.5 million who engaged for 68 minutes during the same time.

As with anything, methodology is an important consideration here. With the new comScore Mobile Metrix 2.0 reports, the company is bringing its Unified Digital Measurement to smartphone devices, which combines both sever-side and panel data to provide a snapshot of mobile web and app usage on smartphone devices. This is combined with census data to determine that the above metrics apply only to U.S. adults, age 18 and up.

Horace Dediu at Asymco has run the numbers and it’s not looking good. Samsung and Apple now control an estimated 99% of vendor profits with HTC scraping in with 1%. BlackBerry and Nokia barely register and, in fact, form a loss.

First, I’d like to note why Dediu believes carriers are willing to cede so much of their profit to Apple and, presumably, Samsung. It’s mostly about lock-in, a sort of bear hug that encourages customers to stay put in the long run. He writes:

With numbers like these, it’s easy to see where things are headed. Although I’ll give Nokia the benefit of the doubt this quarter with the rise of the Lumia line, these numbers don’t look good for runners-up, including LG, Motorola, and RIM.

Arguably, those three manufacturers could pull off a coup – a hot phone like the Droid can push Motorola back into the space and LG is at least popular outside of the U.S. But, like Sony, RIM is an established player with a tendency toward a closed system that serves a dedicated and dwindling audience rather than a general consumer. Buying into RIM at this point, especially with the prevalence of iTunes content and, increasingly, Google’s own marketplace, is akin to a suicide pact.

By this time, there should be few compelling reasons to expect anyone – in the next half-decade say – will be able to unseat Samsung’s dominance. While I’m of the opinion that Apple is in a much more precarious position in the long run, I’d give them the next five years as well. To the rest in the 1% of mobile profits? I’d recommend a realignment and/or moving into something more lucrative.

via TUAW

NY-based mobile web startup bMobilized, which bills itself as a competitor to the well-heeled new Google partner DudaMobile, has just closed its Series A round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. The funding was raised from two early stage European VC firms, Alliance Venture and Investinor.

Like DudaMobile, bMobilized is focused on enabling SMBs to convert their existing websites into HTML5-enabled mobile sites that work on any device, OS, or web browser.

According to CEO Ben Seslija, nine out of every ten small business websites don’t have mobile versions of their sites today – and yet, Americans are poised to spend an estimated $115 billion in goods and services on mobile devices by 2015. So yes, there’s clear market need for services operating in this space.

As for bMobilized, its core offering is a lot like DudaMobile’s, competing feature-by-feature with many of DudaMobile’s key advantages, including automatic sync, templating, speed, customizable widgets and more.

bMobilized says it uses 300 different algorithms to identify and analyze the different parts of the website, and then coverts that site to a mobile-friendly version in under 30 seconds. Also offered are over 30 features designed to improve the mobile experience, including things like a contact bar, maps, social sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn), support for a product promo window on the homepage, and more.

That contact bar is especially helpful, as it can be customized with widgets like “click-to-call,” “click-to-email,” “click-to-SMS” and more, which allows visitors to instantly connect with the business they’re researching.

Support for ad products is available, too, including text, image and video ads from Google AdWords, QR Code, and in-app ads. And again, like DudaMobile, the mobile sites automatically sync with the company’s main website when changes are made.

Pricing is competitive with DudaMobile’s product, for the most part. Although DudaMobile offers a free level of service, bMobilized’s monthly fees of either $5/month or $9/month (with support) are comparable to DudaMobile’s $9/mo. middle-of-the-road plan. So why choose one over the other? Well, obviously each company thinks their own offering is the better choice. Seslija just says customers should try out bMobilized for themselves to be convinced.

bMobilized, now a team of fourteen, was founded in 2005 in Oslo, Norway, but only relocated to NYC in 2010. Prior to this round, bMobilized had taken investment from European and U.S. firms, Tomas AS, Magnus Invest AS (the personal investment company for Birger Magnus, bMobilized chairman), Spring Capital, Redwood Partners, and Ignitas AS.

Microsoft is trying to clean up the Windows Phone Marketplace and as part of this effort, the company just clarified some of its guidelines for developers who want to sell their apps in Microsoft’s app store. Among other things, Microsoft has decided to move to “a more stringent interpretation and enforcement of our existing content policy” for apps that are “‘racy’ or sexual in nature.” This is a problem we pointed out early last month. As Matt Burns put it, Windows Phone has a nasty porn addiction. Microsoft clearly agrees and is thankfully trying to kick the habit.

Microsoft, just like most of its competitors, doesn’t allow apps that contain “sexually suggestive or provocative” images or content. Swimsuits are fine. The company says that it will now pay “more attention to the icons, titles, and content of these apps and expects them to be more subtle and modest in the imagery and terms used.”

According to Todd Brix, Microsoft’s senior director of the Marketplace, the company will contact those developers whose “racy” apps slipped through the earlier approval process and ask them to change their apps. Microsoft says that it is making this change to improve the shopping experience for all of its customers. It will also monitor its customers’ reactions and may remove apps that its users find offensive.

Here are some of the images that would be acceptable under these new rules:

Given all the problems Apple had with its rules for adult-themed apps, it’s probably a good idea for Microsoft to be proactive here.

There are currently about 70,000 apps in the Marketplace and the store is growing nicely, though there have been some complaints about the quality of the apps in the store. In this context, Brix also used this opportunity to remind developers to keep the quality of their apps up.

Developers, for example, aren’t allowed to submit the same app to multiple categories and can’t use more than five keywords per app. Since its launch, developers have also been trying to game the Marketplace by tagging their apps with popular tags (“Justin Bieber,” “YouTube” etc.) that had little or nothing to do with their apps. Microsoft now plans to crack down on this, too.

Samsung doesn’t break out actual unit sales figures for its mobile handset business, but many analyst houses are estimating that it is the brand to beat anyway. The latest tip comes from ComScore, which today released the results of its regular poll of 30,000 U.S. consumers to gauge the state of the mobile market. It found that Samsung accounted for 26 percent of all handsets — smartphone or otherwise — used in the U.S. in the last three months. LG came in second position at 19.3 percent.

And smartphone use continues to grow: comScore found that there are now 106 million smartphones in use in the U.S., a nine percent increase over the previous quarter. Likewise, the services associated with them also continue to become more ubiquitous: a full 50 percent of consumers have now downloaded and used mobile apps.

Samsung’s 26 percent share of the overall mobile market, on the back of popular models like the Galaxy SII (pictured) represents a wider lead than Samsung had in the previous quarter. In the last three months that ended December 2011, Samsung’s share was 25.3 percent and LG’s was 20 percent. Apple increased its share over the period and now has 14 percent of the market (compared to 12.4 percent the quarter before).

And because we are seeing a gradual consolidation as the mobile market continues to mature, others declined. Specifically, Motorola was down to 12.8 percent and HTC to six percent. HTC sells only smartphones so that will impact its overall standing among handset makers making both those and feature devices. RIM, currently showing off its BB10 at its big conference in Florida, didn’t make the top five.

In the battle for platform dominance, Android also increased its lead over iOS as the leading smartphone OS. Google’s mobile OS now has a 51 percent share of the market, compared to Apple’s 30.7 percent and RIM’s 12.3 percent. While both Apple and Google increased, RIM and Windows Phone declined, and Symbian stayed final position with a stable 1.4 percent.

As for mobile content, we love to read about apps and there have definitely been some crazy best-sellers but the most-used feature — again, considering the full range of phones in the market today — is still text messaging, used by 74.3 percent of all U.S. consumers and stable in its usage over the previous quarter.

Apps usage increased slightly and apps are now used by half of all consumers, while the use of mobile web browsers also grew, but not by as much. Still, mobile web remained nearly at parity, with apps usage, with mobile web browsing 49.3 percent compared to apps usage at a full 50 percent. Social networking, gaming and music consumption also increased in usage.

The mobile industry will reel in more than $1.5 trillion in revenues in 2012, with 28 percent of that, $400 billion, attributable to mobile data, according to new research out from analyst Chetan Sharma.

He notes that within the revenues expected for mobile data, non-messaging revenues led by apps, mobile web browsing and streaming media have finally overtaken those of traditional messaging like SMS as smartphone usage continues to grow. Non-messaging, he says, will account for 53 percent of the total: in other words, some $212 billion will come from apps, music and video streaming, games and mobile web browsing.

Still voice is still accounting for a huge part of the value in mobile, and “OTT” services provided by third parties — be they Apple or others — are still only a small piece of the pie:

Sharma’s report also notes in the U.S. smartphones now account for 69 percent of all mobiles sold — the highest rate with the global average at about half that, 32 percent. He notes that some operators are even more bullish than that and expect 90-95 percent of all sales to be smartphones this year (O2 in the UK led that charge last year as you can see in the slides below). In the meantime, the adoption rate will lead the U.S. finally to be able to claim that more than half of all consumers will own smartphones. The U.S. is also, overall, accounting for about 40 percent of all smartphone sales worldwide.

The total worldwide base of mobile subscribers now stands at 6 billion, and while it took 20 years to reach the first billion, the speed at which this has accelerated is pretty remarkable: Sharma notes that it took only 15 months for that number to go from 5 billion to 6 billion.

As you would expect, a lot of the growth now is coming from developing countries but still the numbers are astounding. He notes that together China and India are adding 75 million new subscribers every quarter to the global base, and points out that China alone already has 1 billion mobile subscribers, the first country to reach that milestone, and that India currently has the highest subscriber growth rate.

But India may, at best, be an opportunity for the future rather than today. Sharma points out that India monthly ARPU is an “anemic” $2.50. “Even with a signficant subscriber base, there is going to be a general lack of opportunity in the market for the next couple of years relative to other markets,” he writes.

In contrast, the early adopters of Japan have helped that country remain in the lead for mobile data usage, with some 60 percent of ARPUs attributable to data. And because the U.S. has nearly the same proportion, but is significantly bigger, it is currently leading the world in terms of data revenues as well as overall ARPU revenues.

Still, the tide is turning: A number of emerging nations are now in top 10 mobile nations by subscribers, he says. They include Brazil, India, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Mexico, while Korea, UK, Italy and Germany “have dropped off or slipped in rankings.”

Patents. Although we’ve had a lot of noise about patent acquisitions, purchases and lawsuits around internet and (specifically) social media patents, Sharma points out the mobile continues to lead the field with patent applications, and that mobile companies are filing more in the U.S. than in Europe — on average 1.7 times more. He notes that in the U.S., the biggest patent holders are IBM, Microsoft and Nokia. In Europe they are Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia and Samsung. Nokia also appears in the list for top-three device patent holders, along with Samsung and Sony. And among carriers, AT&T, NTT Docomo and Sprint lead the charge.

That gives pause for thought about what Nokia has and what kind of value the company holds, beyond the cash that has been mentioned several times in the last week as ratings companies continue to downgrade the company.

Full slide deck here:

Just watching TV without also using a tablet or smartphone at the same time seems to be on its way out. Earlier this month, Nielsen launched the first part of its report on primetime TV viewers in the U.S. and today, the analytics company is taking a deeper dive into the demographics of those who simultaneously watch TV and use their tablets. According to Nielsen, 45% of tablet owners watch TV and use their tablet together at least once a day. A whopping 69% say they do so at least several times a week and only 12% say they never do this.

There are some interesting differences between how men and women use their tablets in front of their TV. Women, says Nielsen, are more likely to look up information related to an ad they see on TV than men, while men are more likely to look up general information related to a TV program they are watching than women. Men, on average, are also far more likely to check sport scores on their tablets than women (44% vs. 24%).

Unsurprisingly, younger tablet users are more likely to use their tablet in form of the TV than older ones. The only activity where older users tend to use their tablets more is checking email. Overall, checking email is also the most popular activity for tablet owners while watching TV (61%), followed by visiting social networking sites (47%) and looking up information about TV programs.

Here are a few other findings from Nielsen’s report:

• Teens used a game console for eight minutes a night, on average, during primetime – more than twice as much as the general
• Females spend 61.2% of their timeshifted viewing during primetime watching Dramas.
• Online adults aged 25-54 are 23% more likely than the average U.S. Internet user to follow a brand via social networking and 29% more likely to purchase a product online that was featured on TV.

[Image credit: Flickr user dan taylor]

With the rise of social networks, people are now sharing more information about themselves online than ever before. Sharing is happening at an unprecedented volume, with some calling it … “The Sharepocalypse”. Social feeds now disseminate content in realtime, but the problem of course is that a lot of this sharing gets lost in the noise — and with content piling up so quickly, stuff quickly gets lost. Want to find a tweet you wrote a year ago? Good luck.

A New York-based startup called Gopogo is launching in beta today to address this problem, with a geo-location platform for recording, sharing and discovering connected experiences. The startup launches with $3 million in seed funding from an undisclosed private equity group and has been testing its model with more than 10K people in both NYC and Los Angeles. Gopogo users create “Strings,” what the team describes as sharable social objects that consist of any group of places that have relevance and context for the user.

The startup is today launching its online platform, with an iOS app in the approval process, that lets users capture and record the activities and experiences of their day, linking them together in “Strings” to tell the story of their day, for example. Users might start off a weekend in New York City with a walk on the High Line, followed by some coffee at a cafe, before heading to art gallery. Strings unite those activities in a geo-tagged chronology, with photos, videos, and commentary included, and can then archive them and share on social networks as well as with the GoPoGo community.

At the end of the day, users can then browse the site’s library of user-generated Strings, and discover the experiences of others, by location, theme, or areas of interest. It’s a bit like a more dimensional Facebook Timeline, and reminiscent of what HipGeo is doing with social travel, or a location-based Piictu.

While there are plenty of apps that let users check in, write reviews, upload photos, and write realtime anecdotes, says Gopogo Founder and CTO Jason Snyder, they remain fragmented collections and communities of information, so the team wants Gopogo to be the platform that unites social media platforms, allowing users to record and save their experiences, and then share them across channels, as Strings publish as URLs.

Eventually, Gopogo wants users to be able to make their way to its website or mobile app, and connect their relevant Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Instagram, and Foursquare accounts, so that they can upload content from their various streams and curate them into a String. Though, of course, the goal is to make this a two-way street, in which users can upload photos, write reviews, check-in all within Gopogo, and then push those updates into their various social streams. That will make Gopogo into a big time saver, and more of a social media command center that lets you turn your experiences into a complete story and context based on location.

The first stop for Gopogo is Foursquare integration, using their API to allow users to check-in to Foursquare from Gopogo. Bit.ly integration is also slated to be available soon, and Twitter, Yelp, and the rest will follow thereafter.

Gopogo is in beta right now, and the UX on the homepage is a little buggy, so keep that in mind as you test it out. The homepage definitely needs to do a better job showcasing noteworthy strings right off the bat, so new users have an opportunity to familiarize themselves with how they work, and what they look like. That being said, Gopogo’s Strings are a great concept. As the general web user gains more facility with social networks, and smart mobile applications produce more and more data, the demand for an easier way to contextualize and archive these mobile experiences will continue to grow.

In terms of how Gopogo plans to make money, the business model is still in flux, but the team sees the platform as a way for brands and content creators to better engage with their customers, build brand awareness, and drive traffic into their stores. The goal will be to let businesses create their own branded strings, so if you’re Frank’s Hot Sauce, you would create a String of restaurants, delis, etc that offer food that goes well with your hot sauce. Or users could gift strings to each other, and just show up at the locations, where the experience will already be pre-arranged for you.

For businesses, Gopogo would offer the opportunity to see where they fit into people’s Strings, which are public data once they’re published, so they can dive into this info to see how users connect with other businesses in their neighborhood.

The startup is also working with celebrities to publish their “perfect days,” so that, like Twitter, people of note can use the platform as a channel to leverage their influence and drive traffic to their brands or stores of choice. In turn, Gopogo is also hoping to offer a white-labeled version of its platform to allow ad agencies and the like to create fully-branded, custom versions of its service to create, promote, and manage special offers and events targeting their existing member base.

It still has a ways to go, but there are plenty of opportunities to monetize if Gopogo can get to that critical mass of users. With 10K beta testers, it’s certainly on the way.

For more, check out Gopogo at home here.

Independent mobile ad network InMobi released its Q1 2012 Ad Data report for North America this morning, covering the mobile ad landscape for the first part of the year. Not surprisingly, the report found the top two mobile operating systems were, again, iOS and Android, each with a sizeable chunk of market share and growing. RIM, meanwhile, was still clinging to spot #3, but has dropped 4.6% since Q1 2011, the report found, going from a 11.9% share to 7.3%. this past quarter.

InMobi’s report is not a full picture of the mobile landscape, of course – it’s only a slice of it, pulled from data sourced by ad impressions on its network. Today, the company reaches 578 million consumers in over 165 countries, serving more than 93.4 billion ad impressions each month.

In the new report for North America, InMobi found that Apple’s iOS platform has maintained its lead over Android for the third consecutive month, with total iOS impression share at 37% versus Android’s 34%. However, even though InMobi refers to iOS as “iPhone OS” in its findings (but not its graphics…), it appears they’re also counting iPads and iPod Touches when determining the platform’s totals.

When this so-called “iPhone OS” is broken down, InMobi says the iPhone itself has 19.7% market share, the iPod 12.2% and the iPad 4.9%. Given Android’s fairly small tablet footprint, an apples to apples comparison (groan, sorry) of mobile phone platforms alone would put Android phones ahead if you were only looking at mobile handsets. InMobi did not, so you can claim this data is skewed in Apple’s favor, if you choose.

Anne Frisbie, InMobi’s VP and Managing Director for North America, says that Apple’s position in this market has a lot to do with the new iPad. “Apple maintained its lead over Android and further increased its share of impressions and handset dominance; the new iPad certainly helped its overall position,” she says. “However, we know that fierce competition is created across the operating systems when new devices enter the market, and this time last year Android surpassed iOS globally.”

In other words, things can still change.

But in terms of ad impressions (if not device type), iOS leads globally, too. InMobi found Apple devices claiming the top three positions at a combined 18% global market share.

Globally, however, Nokia devices combined have the highest number of impressions at 35%. This grouping didn’t just include Symbian phones, though – it also included Windows Phone as well as Nokia feature phones that have Internet access.

Meanwhile, as iOS reigned in North America, in the U.K. specifically, Apple’s share was even larger, with 45% of all ad impressions, compared with Google’s Android at 26% and RIM at 16%.

But in all of Europe combined, Google’s Android was most popular, with 36% of all impressions versus Apple’s 28% and RIM’s 13%.

There are plenty of services out there that will let you build simple mobile apps without the need to know how to program. The problem with most of these is that you quickly reach their limits once you want to build more complex apps. Tiggzi, a new cloud-based service by software engineering company Exadel, wants to provide a bridge between the world of drag-and-drop app builders and more complex tools. With Tiggzi, you could build a basic app without any programming knowledge, but the service is really meant for more advanced users who can use it to design complex apps that can hook into virtually any REST API on the net.

Tiggzi lets you build apps for the mobile web, as well as native iOS and Android apps. The company plans to launch support for native Windows Phone and Blackberry apps soon. For a fee, Tiggzi will also submit your apps to the major app stores for you and host your web apps.

The first thing you will notice once you start using Tiggzi is that it offers some support for novice users, but that the team really built the service for a more professional audience. Tiggzi, for the most part, only offers blank templates (beside one template specifically designed for musicians). As it gives you a lot of freedom, it also allows you to make mistakes. In return, though, you get a far more powerful tool and the ability to combine the user interface editor with REST APIs. The company is mostly aiming this service at professional developers and IT departments. For beginners, though, Tiggzi also offers a number of step-by-step tutorials as well.

The “secret sauce” here, Tiggzi told us earlier this week, is that users can save these API connections as plugins and re-use them and share them with the service’s user community. Tiggzi also plans to roll out a library of pre-packaged API plugins soon. The company also hopes that third-party services will create plugins for the service as well. This combination of an app builder with support for third-party resources, the company hopes, will allow it to stand out from its competition.

The service comes in a free version, which is limited to one project with up to three screens. The paid versions start at $15/month, which lets you work on three projects with 10 screens simultaneously and which also includes support for multi-user collaboration. The service’s high-end plan, at $50/month has no limitations and includes unlimited web app hosting (that’s a $10/month extra with the other plans).

A new report from Nielsen this morning delves into the mobile and social behavior of U.S. Hispanic consumers, finding they’re highly engaged in their usage of smartphones, online video, social networking and other types of entertainment. According to the study, Hispanics outpace all over ethnic groups in mobile downloads of music and photos, and are more likely to watch video online and on the their mobile phones than others.

Specifically, Nielsen says that Hispanic video viewers are 68% more likely than non-Hispanic White viewers to watch video on the Internet, and 20% more likely to watch video on their mobile phone.

They’re also heavy phone users in general, sending and receiving some 941 SMS text messages per month – more than any other ethnic group. And they make 13 calls per day on their mobiles, which is 40% more than the average U.S. consumer.

The group is also increasing its access to social networking services and blogs. In February, visits were up 14% to sites like Facebook and WordPress.com, for example. In February, 16.7 million unique U.S. Hispanics visitors headed over to Facebook, which is up 8% year-over-year. Visits to Blogger (+10% YOY), Twitter (+32% YOY), LinkedIn (+52% YOY), WordPress (+27% YOY), and Tumblr (+85% YOY) were up, as well. (See above chart).

They often have a blog of their own, too – Hispanics are 17% more likely than the average consumer to build or update a personal blog, Nielsen found.

Plus, Hispanics are 25% more likely to follow a brand, 18% more likely to follow a celebrity, 21% more likely to post links, articles, videos and website, and 7% more likely to have one or more social networking profiles.

Perhaps the most interesting part to all this data, though, is the part that hints at the “why.” Hispanics are actually less likely to have Internet access at home than the average U.S. consumer (62% and 76%, respectively). Although this is increasing – home broadband use is up by 14% over the past year, which is higher than the 6% growth rate of the general market. So that can account for some of the activity.

However, mobile is a key factor here. Says Nielsen, “mobile presents a significant avenue of opportunity for marketers looking to reach Hispanic consumers,” and the firm also notes that the group has “amassed significant buying power, despite perceptions to the contrary.”

Marketers, though, aren’t the only ones who could successfully target this group, leveraging mobile to do so. If you’re building a mobile app or service – especially a social or entertainment-focused service – you would be lucky to have a group that’s as engaged as this one is to tap into.