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Pew: More Than A Quarter Of U.S. Adults Use Mobile And Social Location-Based Services

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from Techcrunch.

“There’s no doubt that as smartphone usage increases, geo-location is becoming an increasingly important technology in consumers’ day to day lives. The Pew Internet Research Project has come out with a new report showing the growing number of U.S. adults that are leveraging location-based technologies in social and mobile apps. According to Pew, 28% of adults use at least one of location-based service that exist in mobile and social media spaces. The report shows the most popular use case of location-based technology is using mobile phones for maps, directions, or recommendations.

Pew reports that 28% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location (that works out to 23% of all U.S. adults). Only 5 percent of cell phone owners user their phone to check-in to locations using apps like Foursquare or Gowalla.

And 9% of internet users incorporate their location into Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn (7% of all adults). And 28% of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either on a computer or using their mobile phones.

Unsurprisingly, smartphone owners are more likely to use location-based social networks on their phones. One in ten smartphone owners (12%) have used Foursquare, Gowalla, or a similar application and 55% of smartphone owners have used a location-based information service. Almost six in ten smartphone owners (58%) use at least one of these services.

Pew says that younger smartphone owners are more likely to use location-based services in their phone. And Pew says that geosocial services and automatic location-tagging are most popular with minorities. A quarter (25%) of Latino smartphone owners using geosocial services and almost a third (31%) of Latino social media users enabling automatic location-tagging. Pew says that only 7% of white smartphone owners use geosocial services, byt 59% get location-based information on their phones, compared with 53% of blacks and only 44% of Hispanics.

Pew reported nearly a year ago that only 4% of online American adults use location-based services. My guess is that number has increased since last Novemeber.”

Read more here.

 

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Free apps, mobile ad market aren’t adding up

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Many of today’s hot startups are banking on mobile ad dollars to make their business work, but it’s an incredibly small market that’s only likely to support a handful of breakaway winners.

The constraint was underscored late last week, when Pandora Media’s CEO told Bloomberg that the online radio service can’t find enough marketers to fill all the ad slots created by its many mobile users.

Pandora boasts around 35 million dedicated users, who do 60 percent of their listening over smart phones and tablets. The obvious question is: If the 11-year-old Oakland company can’t find enough marketers to make use of its ad inventory, who can?

Other popular companies like Foursquare, Instagram, Twitter and Flipboard are mostly or exclusively free mobile apps that will mostly or exclusively depend on advertising.

So just how much is there to go around?

Research firm eMarketer estimates that mobile advertising will reach only $1.1 billion this year. By way of comparison, Google reported $9 billion in revenue last quarter alone, almost entirely derived from the broader online advertising market.

Will more money move to mobile and will some of these companies emerge as big winners? Sure.

Shifting ad dollars

But new media don’t create new marketing dollars, they just draw them from somewhere else. Advertisers are famously reluctant to shift money from something that’s been proven to work, to an area that’s untested.

The truth is, it’s still unclear to many what ad types and formats will be most effective on small mobile devices – general brand builders, discounts as you walk by a restaurant, ads for other apps?

The one thing that does seem clear is that mobile users are incredibly touchy about ads, resenting anything that appropriates the limited real estate of their screen, arrives as a text that counts against their allotment or interrupts what they’re doing. So marketers are rightfully treading carefully.

Jack Gold, a technology analyst with J. Gold Associates, says mobile advertising is a promising sector that, for now, is just that: promising.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, whether it’s TV or tablets, the biggest outlets with the best return on ad dollars grab the lion’s share of marketing. Everyone else is left fighting for the scraps.

Gold said the phenomenon unfolding now is strikingly similar to the late 1990s, as hordes of companies marched onto the Internet, confident they could garner the traffic (back then they called it eyeballs) necessary to build businesses on ads alone. History demonstrated in brutal fashion that the vast majority could not.

“It’s almost certain that you’re going to see another shakeout,” Gold said. “That always happens. Always.”

Read more here.

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On Twitter (and elsewhere), Instagram Growth Zooms

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Community, Gerbsman Partners, internet, Market research, Marketing, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

I have some news for Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram, a San Francisco-based, photo-oriented, social network: They are the fastest growing photo sharing service on Twitter. I’m not surprised. As you know, many folks take photos and share them via Twitter, thanks to services like Twitpic, Yfrog and even Twitter itself. However, Instagram is slightly different; if you’re an iPhone user, you take a photo, upload to Instagram, then share it on Twitter.

Skylines, a Dutch startup focused on real-time photo search, has been analyzing the Twitter feed and has some unique insights into the market. From May 23 to June 26, 2011, Skylines found Instagram usage has gone up 38 percent: from 538,000 photos shared weekly to 740,000 photos shared each week.

Instagram CEO Systrom had recently observed that only 11 percent of Instagram members were using Twitter and by that metric, Instagram members might be adding about a million photos a day to Instagram. Add those two data points together, and one can extrapolate that Instagram is gathering steam. The service recently passed the five million subscriber mark. This level of engagement is one of the reasons why I believe Instagram has a chance of becoming the mobile social hub.

Skylines also shared some other data for the five-week period analysis.

  • From May 23rd to June 26, 2011, there were 33 million photos shared on Twitter via Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Mobypicture (the four services indexed by Skylines).
  • Twitpic is no slouch. It was responsible for sharing of 3.295 million photos during the week of June 20, making it the largest photo-sharing service.
  • Yfrog was used to share 2.98 million photos during the same week.
  • The growth in the total number of photos shared in the five-week period measured was 17 percent.
  • Only 4 percent of the pictures are geo-tagged, while 15 percent have a hashtag.
  • Not surprisingly, weekends are the most popular days to share photos.

As the data shows, while Twitter might have launched its own photo sharing service via Photobucket, the independent photo-sharing services have not seen any kind of slowdown, though there are some dark clouds looming ahead for the likes of Twitpic and Yfrog.”

Read more here.

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Investors Provide Millions to Risky Start-Ups

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, Investments, Market research, Mobile, Social Networks, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

“What if you threw a $41 million party and nobody came? A start-up company called Color knows how that feels.

In March, Color unveiled its photo-sharing cellphone application — and revealed that it had raised $41 million from investors before the app had a single user. Despite the company’s riches, the app landed with a thud, attracting few users and many complaints from those who did try it.

“It would be pointless even if I managed to understand how it works,” one reviewer wrote in the Apple App Store.

Since then, Color has become a warning sign for investors, entrepreneurs and analysts who fear there is a bubble in start-up investing. They say it shows that venture capitalists, desperate to invest in the next Facebook or LinkedIn, are blindly throwing money at start-ups that have not shown they can build something useful, much less a business that can provide decent returns on investment.

Color, which says it is overhauling its app, is just one of the start-ups that have set tongues wagging about bubbly excess in Silicon Valley. The Melt plans to sell grilled-cheese sandwiches and soup that people can order from their mobile phones. It raised about $15 million from Sequoia Capital, which also invested in Color.

Airbnb, which helps people rent rooms in their homes, is raising venture capital that would value it at a billion dollars. Scoopon, a kind of Groupon for Australians, raised $80 million; Juice in the City, a Groupon for mothers, raised $6 million; and Scvngr, which started a Groupon for gamers, raised $15 million. These could, of course, turn out to be successful businesses. The worry, investors say, is the prices.

They say they have paid two to three times more for their stakes in such start-ups over the past year. According to the National Venture Capital Association, venture capitalists invested $5.9 billion in the first three months of the year, up 14 percent from the period a year earlier, but they invested in 51 fewer companies, indicating they were funneling more money into fewer start-ups.

“The big success stories — Facebook, Zynga and Twitter — are leading to investing in ideas on a napkin, because no one wants to miss out on the next big thing,” said Eric Lefkofsky, a founder of Groupon who also runs Lightbank, a Chicago-based venture fund with a $100 million coffer.

A decade ago, in the first surge of Internet investing, it was not unusual for tech start-ups to raise tens of millions of dollars before they had revenue, a product or users. But venture capitalists became more cautious after the bubble burst and the 2008 recession paralyzed Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, it now costs less than ever to build a Web site or mobile app. So this time around the general philosophy has been to start small.

“By starting out lean, you have the chance to know if you’re on to something,” said Mark Suster, a managing director at GRP Partners. “If you start fat and the product concept doesn’t work, inherently the company will lose a lot of money.”

Two of Color’s photo-sharing competitors, Instagram and PicPlz, exemplify the lean start-up ethos. They started with $500,000 and $350,000, respectively, and teams of just a few people. As they have introduced successful products and attracted users, they have slowly raised more money and hired engineers.

Color, meanwhile, spent $350,000 to buy the Web address color.com, and an additional $75,000 to buy colour.com. It rents a cavernous office in downtown Palo Alto, where 38 employees work in a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp.

Bill Nguyen, Color’s always-smiling founder, has hired a team of expensive engineers, like D. J. Patil, a former chief scientist at LinkedIn.

“If I knew a better way of doing it, I would, but that’s what my cost structure is,” Mr. Nguyen said in an interview last week.

Michael Krupka, a managing director at Bain Capital Ventures and one of Color’s investors, said Color needed to raise a lot of money because it planned to do much more than photo-sharing.”

Read complete article here.

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The Society for New Communications Research and Middleberg Communications Announce Results of The 3rd Annual Survey of Media in the Wired World

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , on May 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article by Middleberg Communications and The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) released the Third Annual Survey of Media in the Wired World, a study detailing journalists’ use of social media.

Don Middleberg is a member of Gerbsman Partners Board of Intellectual Capital.

Journalists’ Use Of Facebook, Twitter, Blogs And Company Websites To Assist In Reporting Surges From 2009/2010 Study.

New York, NY – May 6, 2011 – Today, the Society of New Communications Research (SNCR) and Middleberg Communications announced the results of the 3rd Annual Survey of the Media in the Wired World led by SNCR Senior Fellow Don Middleberg and Jen McClure, president of the Society for New Communications Research. The study, supported by quantitative data gathered from 200 journalists, examined the effects and impact of social media, new media and communication technologies on modern journalism.

The study was released in a keynote address given today by Ms. McClure and Mr. Middleberg before the PRSA Digital Impact Conference.

The goals of the study were to:

– Determine how and why journalists use new media and communications tools

– Examine the frequency of use, preference for, and assess the value journalists place on these new tools and technologies

– Measure the impact new media and communications tools have on the way journalists work and solicit feedback on the perceptions journalists hold regarding the current trends in journalism

Of the 200 journalists surveyed, 90% were based in the U.S., 67% identified themselves to be either reporters or editors and most journalists’ surveyed worked in one of the following outlets: newspaper, radio, or television.

Key findings include:

– 75% of journalists use Facebook as a tool to assist in reporting, a 6% increase from 2010 study.

– 69% of journalists use Twitter as a tool to assist in reporting, a 21% increase from 2010 study.

– 68% of journalists believe that reliance on social media has increased significantly.

– 95% of journalists believe that social media can be a reliable tool for sourcing stories.

– 69% of journalists use mobile technology to search, use social networking apps, and capture videos and pictures for reporting.

Another goal of the study was to provide insights as to how public relations professional can understand these growing changes in modern journalism and how they can provide more value to the journalistic community.

Although social media is changing the profession of journalism by giving journalists new tools to assist with reporting, many journalists still prefer traditional communication and relationship building: 53% still prefer receiving emails and 34% still prefer receiving information via phone. Conversely, one 1% of respondents stated that they would like to be contacted via Twitter or a direct message via a social network.

According to one survey respondent, “New media aren’t ending journalism, but they are changing it. Journalists should no longer expect to be the sole source of information, but rather a guide and curator of content from multiple sources. Journalists will need to develop skills to tend stories long after the ‘deadline’ has passed, since updates are ongoing . . .”

“This year’s study shows that journalists are increasingly using social media in their research, story development and reporting,” stated Jen McClure. “Social media tools and technologies are being used by journalists to monitor issues, stories and content even after a story has been published. The publication of the story is no longer the end result. Today, media organizations and journalists also must serve as curators of content, are looked to to drive conversations, and expected to provide information to keep the conversation going even after the story has been published.”

“This study provided some very important findings for those of us in public relations,” Don Middleberg adds. “It is interesting to see that mobile technology is used as a tool to aid reporting and that journalists are using it to help generate content on the go. Twitter usage is also increasing dramatically.
What it all boils down to is that journalists are communicating in a variety of channels. It is incumbent upon those of us in public relations to know each channel intimately so that we have increased communications enhanced by technology and social media.”

For full survey results, visit http://www.slideshare.net/sncr/how-are-media-journalism-evolving or see the PDF on the Middleberg Communications homepage.

About Middleberg Communications

Middleberg Communications is a full-service, independently owned public relations agency with specialized expertise in the consumer, corporate and financial services, media, and technology markets. The agency focuses on delivering tangible results that help clients grow their businesses. Hallmarks of the firm are smart, creative strategic thinking; targeted media relations; and unbridled enthusiasm for clients’ business goals, all supported by good old-fashioned hard work.

About the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR)

The Society for New Communications Research is a global nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and education foundation and think tank dedicated to the advanced study of new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society. For more information about the Society for New Communications Research, visit http://www.sncr.org.

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