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When his fourth Xbox 360 video game console died in April, Chris Szarek wasn’t surprised.

The Chicopee, Mass. gamer was accustomed to the hardware failures that became known throughout the Internet as RROD, or the “red rings of death” which flash when the console becomes inoperable.

A 40-year-old photographer, Szarek was a hardcore Microsoft fan who spent more than $1,000 on his games. But each time one of his Xbox 360 consoles failed, he had to spend time convincing Microsoft’s tech support that they should send him a new console. Each time he got a refurbished console as a replacement (a machine that had been returned to a repair center in Texas, fixed as much as possible, and then shipped back out). When he complained on the Internet and to the media about the shoddy product and poor customer service, people branded him a cry baby and wrote him off as a statistical anomaly. But by the spring of 2008, Szarek was vindicated. There were at least a million or two other people like him.

Szarek’s fourth machine lasted almost two years, experiencing the same short life that many other Xbox 360s suffered. Microsoft replaced these machines for free under the warranty that it announced on July 5, 2007, for defective Xbox 360s exhibiting what it more politely called the “three flashing red lights.” That warranty program cost Microsoft up to $1.15 billion, but the loss of face and loyalty among gamers in the fierce console war with Nintendo and Sony has been immeasurable. Szarek, who became a spokesman for dispossessed defective Xbox 360 owners, played a part in making Microsoft acknowledge its console quality problem.

This is the unauthorized tale of how Microsoft lost its chance to become the leader in the biggest market it has attacked beyond its twin monopolies in Office and Windows software. Rival game console maker Nintendo out-thought the larger players Microsoft and Sony by designing the Wii game console with a clever, intuitive game controller. Even so, Microsoft could have captured more gamers during this product generation, yet the RROD problem held it back. The Xbox 360’s defect problem will go down as one of the worst snafus in consumer electronics history.

Its own worst enemy

Microsoft knew it had flawed machines, but it did not delay its launch because it believed the quality problems would subside over time. With each new machine, the company figured it would ride the “learning curve,” or continuously improve its production. Even though Microsoft’s leaders knew their quality wasn’t top notch, they did not ensure that resources were in place to handle returns and quickly debug bad consoles. There were plenty of warning signs, but the company chose to ignore them. The different parts of the business weren’t aligned.

It reminds me of the German war machine just before World War I, as chronicled by Barbara Tuchman in the classic history book, “The Guns of August.” The German generals were intent on keeping their trains on time; but the leaders overlooked their chances for stopping the war altogether. The Schlieffen plan called for them to strike first. Once the Russians and French mobilized, the Germans had to move into action. They marched off blindly into tragedy.

Likewise, Microsoft’s strategy depended on beating its rivals to market. It couldn’t afford to stop and delay the launch in order to solve its quality problems, or so upper management believed. What Microsoft’s leaders didn’t realize was that getting to market first with a flawed machine would only win them a battle; and it risked the loss of the war.

“They got enamored with the idea of the Microsoft army rolling everything out at the same time,” said one knowledgeable source who asked not to be identified.

The quality problem negated much of the advantage of going first, and it has delayed the company’s plan to aggressively market the console and slash its prices. (Microsoft disputes this point; it cut the price of all three versions of its Xbox consoles by $50 to $79 on Wednesday. And the company believes it will sell more boxes than Sony will. But prices ought to be lower still during this stage of the console life cycle). That has stopped the company from reaching the broader market of consumers that Nintendo has won over. It has lowered its ambitions, hoping instead just to get a clear edge on third-placed Sony. The future profits that the company once hoped for are now likely to wind up in Nintendo’s pockets.

Microsoft’s top game executive, Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment & Devices group, said at a dinner in July that Microsoft’s own research shows that gamers have largely forgiven the company for defective Xbox 360s. Microsoft has still sold more Xbox 360 consoles than Sony to date. But there is no doubt that the company has lost considerable good will among gamers. Before Microsoft offered free replacements, connsumers grumbled that they had to turn to forums, such as those on Ars Technica, to vent and to find solutions to problems that the company didn’t openly discuss. And for a couple of months now, Sony’s PlayStation 3 has been outselling the Xbox 360 in the U.S. for the first time.

“Fundamentally, their thinking shows that they are a software company at heart,” said one veteran manufacturing executive. “They put something out and figure they can fix it with the next patch or come up with a bug fix.”

The terrifying part of the story is that this kind of problem — where technology fails and no one knows what to do about it — can happen to any company. Read the rest of this entry »

iSkoot, a provider of carrier-friendly Internet voice calling services, has acquired Social.IM for an undisclosed price.

The move takes the mobile company, which we profiled earlier this year, in a new direction. The San Francisco-based iSkoot provides voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VoIP, phone service on mobile phones. It offers services such as Skype on phones with a wireless carrier’s blessings because it uses the carrier’s network to complete a web call.

Social.IM, meanwhile, has a social networking instant messenger client. The deal thus positions iSkoot to move beyond the mobile VoIP market so that it can package a variety of mobile communications services that can be integrated with mobile phones. Mark Jacobstein, chief executive of iSkoot, said that Social.IM’s platform will work well with iSkoot’s own upcoming mobile web push services.

Social.IM’s IM client is customizable for desktops and allows users to get real-time updates, such as notifications from friend activity on social networks. iSkoot said its mobile VoIP services have millions of customers around the world. The 3 Skypephone uses the iSkoot Skype service in eight countries.

Eric Eldon wrote about Social.IM in January. He noted how it turns your Facebook friends into contacts. Investors in Social.IM include Hank Barry, Peter Thiel, and early Googlers Aydin Senkut and Georges Harik.

In another sign that interest in mobile advertising is perking up, Chicago-based mobile marketing company Vibes Media announced $15 million in a first round of funding today. Never mind that it’s still hard to point to a single company that has been able to go public based on mobile advertising. That’s coming, supposedly.

The privately held decade-old company plans to use funding to acquire smaller fish in the market, as well as scale up their own 70-person shop. Fidelilty Ventures is the sole investor. Partner Dave Power join Vibes board of directors.

The company says it has handled over 50,000 mobile campaigns, working for clients like Texas Instruments and Pepsi. Vibes has also worked with television shows to incorporate mobile into their marketing recently running campaigns for shows like Gossip Girl and 90210, as well as working with outdoor concert series Lollapalooza. Their campaigns include techniques like ring tones, text-messaging marketing pushes, and creating Web pages optimized for mobile browsers.

Alex Campbell, co-founder and chief executive, suggests the company will to expand into location-based advertising, which has generated a lot of heat with the growth of GPS units in phones — most notably, of course, of the iPhone 3G.

Campbell and crew have every reason to be optimistic about their business. Vibes has been profitable for years, and recent forecasts of mobile advertising spending range include staggering numbers like $14.4 billion in 2011 from Wireless Week or $19 billion by 2012 as predicted by eMarketer. eMarketer pegs this years total worldwide spending at $4.6 billion.

Still, it seems like since 2006 or so, experts keep predicting mobile advertising will finally break big. What makes this year different? “The biggest sign that we believe in [mobile advertising's growth],” says Campbell, “is that we just did this round of funding. There’s been plenty of interest on the VC front for years. For us to make this change, and bet on the large opportunity that is out there — we’re putting a pretty big stake in the ground.”

Apple’s App Store is filled (some would say littered) with applications that are basically useless. Multiple cow bell applications, multiple fake lighter applications, multiple coin flip applications, etc. The thing is, who’s to say what is useful and what isn’t? Some even tried to argue that about the $1,000 I Am Rich “piece of art” application.

Apparently, Apple has a say in what is useful.

A rejection letter from Apple obtained by MacRumors details why an application called Pull My Finger was not accepted into the App Store. While you might think it had to do with it being mildly inappropriate, the letter actually states that it was “of limited utility.”

But how is Pull My Finger any less useful than the current number one paid application, Koi Pond, MacRumors rightly asks? Pull My Finger is an application that allows you to do just what it says, pull a finger. (Naturally, you get the sound you’d expect to follow.) Koi Pond presents a virtual pond with virtual koi that you can move around. Neither seem to do anything of “utility.”

If Koi Pond could be considered a work of art (or a very boring game), couldn’t Pull My Finger be considered a humorous app? Should either of those genres have more value than the other?

It would seem one of two things is happening within the App Store: Either Apple thinks the application is inappropriate and just doesn’t want to say that. Or, it is realizing that the store is quickly filling up with a lot of useless applications and wants to stymie that growth.

It’s also interesting that Apple suggests the developer spread his app through the Ad Hoc method, which involves someone giving you access to your iPhone’s identification number so an application can be manually transfered. Will we soon see someone set up a listing of applications that can be installed Ad Hoc but that Apple will not allow in the App Store?

Find the video of Pull My Finger below.

[photo: flickr/elisfanclub]

As more location-based services come out, one definite problem I’ve been experiencing is a lack of membership. That is to say, most of them work great, but no one I know really uses them, making them fairly useless. Whrrl, the location-based social network has a new feature today that may up its adoption.

The service had teamed up with Deep Focus which handles the marketing for the cable television channel HBO to promote the hit show Entourage. Entourage follows the exploits of an up and coming actor in Hollywood who has brought his friends along for the ride (his “entourage”).

This promotion isn’t a straightforward advertising campaign however. Instead, all of Entourage’s primary characters now have Whrrl accounts. This means that you can follow what bar Turtle, Drama, E and Vinny Chase (characters from the show) are in. Or find out where super agent Ari Gold is screaming at his assistant Lloyd.

Of course all of this information is fake — as these characters are fake, but it’s still kind of fun. It adds a fictional element to the service and allows for deeper interaction with Entourage if you love that show. This reminds me of how another hit show, AMC’s Mad Men, has its characters on Twitter (though they weren’t actually created by AMC, and the channel tried to remove them before realizing that was stupid). Many users of the micro-messaging service are following the tweets of characters like Don Draper and Roger Sterling while they talk, in character, to other Twitter users.

Whrrl will allow users to add individual Entourage characters as friends, or follow the group as a whole. In addition to location updates, there will be character commentary much like I described above for the Mad Men characters on Twitter.

It will be interesting to see if certain locations in the series (with is primarily based in Los Angeles) become more popular when users start getting updates from the Entourage guys. That could add a whole other marketing layer to this.

Whrrl’s parent company Pelago raised a $15 million second round back in May. Pelago was also the first company in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers‘ portfolio to join Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, the $100 million fund which the firm set up to spur iPhone application development. Its iPhone app launched in July with Apple’s App Store. The service is also available on a wide variety of other mobile devices.

Entourage’s new season starts on Sunday. Find out more about the promotion here.

[photos: HBO]

When I got a chance to meet with events web site Eventful back in July to look at their iPhone application, the company informed me it was working on some interesting ways to incorporate advertisements. Today, it revealed those plans: It’s the first cross-platform partner of location-based ad-targeting service 1020 Placecast.

What this means is that Placecast will be in charge of serving up advertisements on Eventful’s webpages and on its mobile site — including the application built for the iPhone. The mobile element is important because Placecast will have access to the device’s GPS chips to serve up ads based on where a user is. Because of this, these ads will demand higher CPMs (cost per mille, or the cost per a thousand impressions) and should be more relevant to the user, the company says.

Since Eventful is all about local events, it makes sense that it would team up with an advertising partner that targeted local areas. This will work on the service’s website as well by utilizing elements such as zip codes and other page content.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based Placecast was founded in 2005. It received funding from Voyager Capital and Onset Ventures.

Mobile startup FunMobility is releasing a new product dubbed the MoMoney content widget to help bloggers make money by selling mobile content.

Granted, widgets for selling content for your mobile phone like ringtones and wallpapers aren’t exactly new — StartMobile, for example, announced a similar widget more than a year ago. But FunMobility has added some features that should make its widget particularly attractive to publishers. For one thing, it can be branded and customized — see, for example, the mock-up of a VentureBeat-branded widget below. The content is divided into 20 channels, including celebrities, travel, politics and sports. So there’s a good chance there will be something that’s particularly relevant to your readers. And it’s free for the publisher, while adding to their revenue on either a per-click or a per-impression basis.

There does seem to be a lot of noise in both the widget and the mobile content space, and limited ways for companies to stand out. But Pleasonton, Calif.-based FunMobility seems to know what its doing, having served more than 1.2 billion pieces of content since 2001.

As part of an effort to invest in future phone networks, Intel is announcing that it has invested $3 million in Aicent.

San Jose, Calif.-based Aicent has built one of the world’s largest multimedia messaging exchanges for cell-phone carriers so that consumers can get their messages wherever they roam. It does so by building a bridge between the Internet and mobile phone networks so that messages can be forwarded efficiently and at lowest cost.

The Intel Capital money will be used to ensure that Aicent’s messaging technology works with networks built around WiMax, a high-speed wireless networking technology with a longer range than WiFi. Aicent expects to roll out its WiMax technology in the second half of 2009. The company is also working on competing technologies such as LTE (or Long Term Evolution). Intel is clearly on a WiMax tear, investing in other WiMax-related companies such as BridgeWave and Clearwire-Sprint. (Intel’s share of the latter investment was $1 billion).

The company was founded by Lynn Liu, chief executive, and David Zhang, chief technology officer, in 2000. The company serves more than a billion mobile subscribers on 100 mobile networks today. The company has 130 employees.

Aicent raised $24 million in three previous rounds. Past investors include Warburg Pincus, iGlobe Partners and Qualcomm Ventures. The company plans to use the money to expand overseas sales. Competitors include Syniverse and Verisign.

The mid-day charge. It’s a term that iPhone 3G owners are getting to know all too well. You unplug the device in the morning then set out on your day, only to find that sometime in the afternoon you need to recharge the battery again. Many complain about this annoyance and wonder why Apple made a device with such a limitation.

But let’s be honest. The real reason that the iPhone 3G’s battery drains so quickly is that you’re using the iPhone 3G much more than any other phone. And doing complex things on it.

One of those things is browsing the web. It’s not just browsing a text-based mobile version of the web, on the iPhone you get the full-on graphical front and can run web apps that use JavaScript. The device’s web browsing share has doubled in the past few months since the launch of the iPhone 3G, according to new data by analytics company Net Applications.

The data shows that it went from an already high 0.15 percent in April 2008 to .30 percent in August. In the past month alone it’s risen 58 percent. Look at the chart below, growth is exploding. The iPhone is about to pass Windows 98 and is about one third of the way to Linux’s web browsing market share. That’s pretty incredible.

The other thing that has people using the iPhone so much are the applications. With the launch of the App Store, Apple and third party developers have bombarded us with already well over 1,000 apps to use of the device. Many of these are more battery-intensive including games and apps that use the phone’s location capabilities — again, sucking up battery life.

Already, over 60 million apps have been downloaded via the App Store. That’s 60 million new things to do on a device that already was a phone and a web browsing machine. Oh yeah, and an iPod. I probably use my iPhone to listen to music more than anything else.

Sure, my Motorola RAZR had better battery life then the iPhone 3G, but I basically only used it to make calls and occasionally send a text message. I would use it maybe four or five times a day, most of the time for just a few minutes, and as such, the device would last the whole day.

You could use the Internet on it, but it was a joke. The screen was so small and the connection so slow.

Despite some varying results, the iPhone’s new 3G chip makes browsing the Internet and using apps faster and so people tend to use them more. When asked by Apple didn’t include a 3G chip in the first iteration of the iPhone, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs had the following to say at an event in London last year:

“The 3G chipsets that are available to semiconductors work reasonably well except for power. They are real power hogs. So as you know, the handset battery life used to be 5-6 hours for GSM, but when we got to 3G they got cut in half. Most 3G phones have battery lives of 2-3 hours.”

Some suggested Jobs was being disingenuous with that statement and simply made a mistake in not including a 3G chip in the original iPhone. Now, some of those same people are complaining about the iPhone 3G’s battery life. Even though tests have shown that its battery life is actually better than almost all comparable 3G devices.

The iPhone has turned notion of how we use mobile phones on its head. It’s no longer just a device for making calls. It’s a PDA, a gaming machine, a location device, a music player, a movie player, a camera, and Internet browser and a phone.

Its battery “sucks” because we’re sucking its battery dry.

[photo: flickr/CJ Sorg]

With the first mobile devices running Google’s Android coming shortly, the development community at large seems apprehensive about the platform. After all, why develop for something that may or may not work when there is already a hot, new mobile platform out there, Apple’s iPhone, that has proven to be extremely successful? Well, the team behind the life update and emergency messaging application Life360 took the opposite approach.

“It was clear Android was going to be open,” Chris Hulls, a part of Life360’s core development team told me today. That openness and the fact that no details about Apple’s iPhone software development kit (SDK) were known at the end of last year when development of Life360 began led them to choose Android as a “concept car,” as Hulls puts it.

The bet paid off — literally. Life360 was chosen as one of the 10 winners of the first Android Development Challenge. The app, chosen from 50 finalists, won the team a $275,000 prize. Money which Hull says will go back into the development of the application.

You see, Life360 is far from complete. While it won the prize for its Android app, the service’s goal is to be on a variety of platforms serving as a backbone for messaging in times of crisis or for families hoping to keep track of one another. If someone is injured in an accident or a natural disaster occurs, Life360 wants to be your lifeline to people that can help.

For example, if you’re in an emergency, you could push a panic button that you designate on your phone and have it place a pin on a map using your GPS coordinates, and send out an alert to your emergency contacts to let you know where you are and that you’re in distress.

This sounds a bit like how some people have been using the micro-messaging service Twitter in times of need. In fact, one man had the idea to try and build an emergency network with Twitter as its backbone.

But Life360 may be better suited for such tasks, because that would be a primary focus. But it’s not all about emergencies — the team is working on ways for families to keep track of one another more reasily. For example, you could send your child out and know where they are and that they are safe. That starts to create privacy questions, but many parents would like such functionality.

The team likes to think of what it’s creating as a “passive social network.” That is, a network that is continuously running in the background, but only used when you really need it.

The whole “running in the background” element is exactly why Life360 works on Android, but would not work on the iPhone. The iPhone currently does not allow any application to run in the background. But that’s how Life360 needs to work — Hulls knows that no one will want to keep it open 24/7, and it’s not meant to work that way.

He says he is intrigued, however, by Apple’s upcoming Push Notification Service, which will give at least some background operations to applications. It’s still not clear how well that will work, but Hulls is optimistic that Life360 will comes to the iPhone soon.

Perhaps the most surprising things Hulls revealed in our conversation though is that Life360 won the Android Developer Challenge despite never having seen a phone running Android or even a prototype! The entire thing was built and tested using the computer emulator.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last.fm, one of the truly great online music sites, has an iPhone app, but I find it somewhat lacking. It seems to have most of the features it needs, but for whatever reason the app just doesn’t flow well. Loading time seems to be a constant issue and site navigation is clumsy.

That looks to change with new version of the application, as you can see in the video below leaked out by Digg founder Kevin Rose onto Twitter. (He claims it’s version 2.0 but it’s clearly labeled in the video version 1.1 — the current version is 1.0.2.) It’s not clear when this version will be out, but when it is, it’ll likely compete with Pandora and AOL Radio for my online music time with the iPhone.

LastFM2 from MG Siegler on Vimeo.

Tap Tap Revenge held the mantle as the most downloaded application on Apple’s App Store for a while. It’s a solid Guitar Hero-like music game that utilizes the iPhone and iPod Touch’s touch screen with the right price: Free. A new update out today could push it back to the top.

Version 1.2 contains the option to download a brand new song by the popular artist Everlast. The song, available for free, shows how artists can utilize games such as this as promotional tools. We’ve already seen it with the hit console games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, now we’re likely to start seeing it on the iPhone as well.

I’m playing the game with the new song right now. It’s the actual version of the song, not a cover. It’s great.

Alongside the new version and song, Tapulous, the parent company of Tap Tap Revenge, is launching a contest for players. A few rounds will take place this weekend, with the final round coming on Monday (Labor Day) with an event that will be streamed live on uStreamTV at noon PST. The winner will receive $1,000, and the finalist will get a signed Everlast CD. (A CD? What?)

This Everlast release is the first of what Tapulous is calling “Tap Tap Thursdays” (though yes, today is a Friday). “Each Thursday we will launch a hot new track by a major artist,” Tapulous owner Bart Decrem explained over email.

The other big news is that version 1.2 of Tap Tap Revenge brings with it advertisements. These ads are being served by the mobile advertising startup AdMob.

AdMob’s vice president of marketing Jason Spero told us recently that the iPhone will showcase how powerful mobile ads can be. Now comes a big test to prove if he’s right or not. When I talked to Decrem a few days ago, he was very excited about the prospects of monetizing the application with AdMob ads.

The ads are relatively unobtrusive, showing up on the bottom of the menu screens and, as far as I can tell, not during the actual gameplay itself.

Here’s more about the contest from Tapulous’ site:

Starting at midnight tonight, California time, so that’s 12AM PST, start playing to Stone In My Hand by Everlast, on Tap Revenge 1.2. Submit your score at the end of each game. For each game where you score at least 100,000, you’ll get one contest “entry”. Each time you submit a score of at least 200,000, you’ll get two contest entries. The more you play, and the better you play, the more entries you’ll have. This part of the contest ends Sunday evening at 5pm, California time, so you have almost two full days.

Shortly after 5pm on Sunday evening, we will randomly pick 20 semi-finalists from among all the entries and send email to those semi-finalists, using the email address associated with your Tapulous account. Make sure that you have access to a PC with a webcam, know how to use uStreamTV, and that you’re available at noon, Monday, California time, in case you’re one of the finalists. So if you don’t have a webcam, and you want to be able to participate in the finals, make sure to connect with a buddy who does have one! This may be the perfect excuse to finally buy that Mac you’ve been oogling.

Then, Monday at noon, PST we will do a live tournament, broadcast on uStreamTV. First, we will winnow the list down to 10 finalists, who will each receive an autographed copy of the new Everlast CD. Then, over multiple rounds, we will select a grand prize winner who will win the $1000 cash prize. Semi-finalists will need to show up on time, subject to a 5-minute grace period. Be there, or be square! We will also have some provisions for dealing with technical problems during the live contest.

An application called NetShare was the talk of the App Store back in July. The app, made by Nullriver, allowed users to connect their computers to their iPhone 3G to use the device’s unlimited data plan to surf the web. Unfortunately, this process, known as “tethering,” was apparently not approved by AT&T. Thus, NetShare was pulled from the App Store.

Today however, there may be hope of using the iPhone for tethering purposes once again. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs reportedly responded to a customer request asking for the functionality by saying the following:

We agree, and are discussing it with ATT.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

Now, obviously anyone could have sent that email, or it could be a lie all together, but the gadget blog Gizmodo (which handles a lot of Apple news) claims that it’s “pretty legitimate-looking.” Jobs has been known to send out brief email responses like this. (Though I don’t think he normally does so from his iPhone, which adds a nice layer to this.)

Specifically, the customers asked for an AT&T data plan similar to the one it offers BlackBerry users that allows for tethering. AT&T charges an extra $30 a month for the privilege, but that easily beats the price of buying a stand-alone data streaming plan from them, which is at least double that.

[photo is of a tether ball by flickr/jillclardy]

Earlier today we learned about the Android Market, Google’s way to get third-party applications on phones running Android. It sounds a lot like Apple’s App Store for the iPhone, but claims to be more open. Now we know some of the applications that will be offered on it.

Google has just announced the winners of the final round of Android Developer Challenge I, a challenge that started last November to spur Android app development. Fifty finalists from the first round were whittled down to 10 applications that received a $275,000 prize, and 10 that received a $100,000 prize.

The “winning” 10 followed by the creators’ descriptions of the app (in alphabetical order):

• cab4me: “Ever been looking for a cab? cab4me is the answer. Anywhere. Anytime.”
• CompareEverywhere: “Shop smarter using your phone. Compare prices, read reviews, and connect with local stores.”
• Ecorio: “Ecorio automatically tracks your mobile carbon footprint, suggests transit and carpooling alternatives and lets you stay carbon neutral by offsetting your trips easily.”
• GoCart: “Scan a product’s barcode with your phone’s camera and view all the best prices online and at nearby, local stores.”
• Life360: “From major natural disasters to little things like your child wandering away at the mall, there is a lot you might worry about. Life360 can help.”
• Locale: “Locale is an advanced settings manager that automatically changes your phone’s settings based on conditions, such as location.”
• PicSay: “Easy to use image editor that enables you to quickly personalize your pictures and share them with friends or photo sites.”
• Softrace: “Turn your workout into a thrilling race and challenge the world in real time.”
• TuneWiki: “TuneWiki Social Media Player, is an advanced player, featuring synchronized lyrics for audio or video, translation, music maps and a social network.”
• Wertago: “The mobile application nightlifers have been waiting for. Find the hottest parties in town and connect with friends and others all night long.

You’ll notice that unlike quite a few applications found in Apple’s App Store, you’ve probably never heard of most (or any) of these. In fact, of the 50 finalists, the only app that jumped out at me as immediately recognizable was The Weather Channel Mobile. That could be a good thing or that could be a bad thing for the Android platform.

Perhaps we’ll see some truly innovate new things come to the platform — applications that couldn’t exist on anything but a mobile device that become must-have items. On the flip side, some of the best apps on the iPhone are ones that tie into corresponding web services. I’m thinking of Evernote, Eventful, Instapaper, Urbanspoon, Yelp, Last.fm, Pandora, Facebook and any of the Twitter clients, just to name a few.

I’m sure some of the bigger name apps that are found on the iPhone will come to Android once first phone launches later this year (and I realize that some probably don’t need to enter a contest for a monetary prize), but many developers that I’ve talked to about it — including ones from from some very big name apps, are hesitant to do anything for the Android platform until they see how much traction it gets.

That could be why we’ve been seeing an explosion of Android leaks and hype as of late. As the first devices draw near, if there is a lack of developers writing apps out of the gate, that could be problematic. Think about it in terms of a video game system launch — people tend to flock to the systems that have the most good content ready for them to use. Other developers tend to flock to those systems as well. It just makes sense.

Right now, in the mobile world, that is the iPhone. Android will need to prove itself.

Find a full list of the winners as well as more information about all 50 finalists here.

[Editor's note: This is a piece by Russell Buckley, managing director of mobile advertising company AdMob's European operations. He is global chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association and blogger at MobHappy.com. He’s spent nearly 10 years working on mobile marketing, overseeing thousands of campaigns for both large and small advertisers. This is the first of a series of posts about mobile advertising coordinated by mobile expert and VentureBeat freelancer Matthäus Krzykowski.]

Marketers have dabbled in mobile marketing for nearly 10 years now. Early experiments included “text and win” type of competitions, location-based coupons and outbound SMS campaigns, but at best, the results were variable and at worst, unimpressive.

Then, about three years ago, almost unnoticed, consumers started to access the web on their mobile phones in significant numbers. Today, consumers visit billions of mobile web pages every month in the US and throughout the world. This opened up an opportunity for a new phase of mobile advertising, as banner campaigns were possible and soon everyone from mobile content owners to big brands, including Ford, Jaguar, EA, Coca-Cola, BBC and Adidas, were getting impressive results and returning with more campaigns and more dollars.

While this has been happening, many of the traditional barriers to entry have fallen, making mobile advertising easier to implement than ever before. One such barrier cited by new advertisers in mobile, including even those experienced in buying digital media, is that they find it difficult to work out how to effectively plan and buy a mobile web campaign. In practice, the basics are pretty simple, once you understand the principles and the value chain.

The industry landscape

Broadly speaking there are two main players in mobile that marketers need to know about, which we highlighted in orange in the following value chain diagram we created.

First, there are the mobile carriers who provide the voice and data plans to consumers and who often have their own mobile web portals. These portals are sometimes made available to advertisers and if this type of media interests you, you need to check with individual carriers in the markets you work in. Currently, there is little consolidation, which means that separate arrangements need to be made with each carrier and in each market.

Ad networks are the other way primary method of booking a campaign. Ad networks work with mobile web publishers to create a consolidated marketplace of ad inventory, giving advertisers access to many millions of mobile web pages – sometimes even on a multi-market basis. My company, AdMob, for instance has 4.6 billion mobile web pages available every month on a global basis and offers a platform that makes it easy for advertisers to target and reach consumers in real-time. The number makes Admob the biggest ad network with closest competitor Buzzcity reaching 1.7. billion web pages. Please note the other selected advertising networks in the diagram.

The other piece of good news is that most major carriers and ad networks have implemented the standard banner sizes and specifications recommended by the Mobile Marketing Association industry trade group. This simplifies the production of mobile advertising, as well as reducing the costs involved.

The effect of better analytics

The other major barrier often mentioned by advertisers is that traditionally it has been difficult to measure and track results of campaigns. It took players in the mobile industry time to develop robust technology to track campaigns accurately and it wasn’t an area that carriers looked like solving – although there are signs that this is changing now in certain markets. There are a number of analytics companies now, broadly split into paid-for services (like Amethon) and free ones like those offered by AdMob and Bango. These tools are free and don’t require that advertisers work with either company in order to be used, which means that mobile advertising is becoming increasingly accountable and measurable.

Analytics packages allow the two major players in the value chain – mobile publishers and advertisers – to more effectively measure what’s happening in real-time and with minimum set up and installation. Mobile web publishers can start to understand just what consumers are doing on their sites in the same way they do in the PC web environment.

But it’s advertisers who are expected to really benefit from these new tools. Mobile has always provided richer data than traditional media, in terms of measuring results and interactions. But, as described, these new analytics products take measurement to a level further. There’s enough hype in mobile, so I don’t propose to add to it, but these new tools give us a view into the sophistication and potential power of mobile as an advertising medium in the future. One thing is for sure; it brings to the end of an era closer when potential advertisers used the excuse of being unable to measure results as a reason not to experiment in mobile.

BuzzCity, a Singapore-based mobile advertising company, has picked up an additional $10 million for its combination approach of an ad network and social site, myGamma.com

The company is aiming to expand in the United States, but chances are, you’re not in its target market. Its idea is to reach out to audiences everywhere that are on a similar economic level. In India and Indonesia, the countries with the most BuzzCity users, that means the growing middle class. For a developed country like the US, that means all the users without iPhones, BlackBerries and all-you-can eat data plans.

Still, it’s positioning itself as a competitor to AdMob, the mobile ad network that has been going gangbusters worldwide, but especially in the US. Back in May when we first wrote about BuzzCity, AdMob had a daunting lead at home, with 1.5 billion impressions served per month in the US, while BuzzCity looked like it was ahead abroad. Today, AdMob is ahead with 4.6 billion impressions a month globally, while BuzzCity is reporting 1.7 billion, most from overseas.

Expanding myGamma is also a focus for the company, which has about 2.7 million registered (but not necessarily active) users on the social network. It features chat, groups, games and blogs (a horrible thing, by the way, when done from a mobile phone). There’s also an online store for users to purchase media or gifts for other users.

The $10 million funding came from Naspers, a South African media company.

Update: BuzzCity has given us their latest impression counts by country, and they’re up significantly from May. Here they are:

Indonesia : 1.21 billion (85%)
India : 669 million (16%)
South Africa : 578 million (36%)
USA : 190 million (45%)
Kenya : 156 million (99%)
Tanzania : 88 million (53%)
Bangladesh : 78 million (47%)
Romania : 71 million (26%)
Brunei : 63 million (80%)
Philippines : 55 million (86%)

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