Amplify is Twitter’s name for partnerships with media companies that focuses on the second-screen experience: fans talking about events and issues on live TV shows. Ninety-five percent of “live TV conversation” currently happens on Twitter, the company said in a recent blog post, and the goal for media companies is explicit in the name of the program: to amplify their message, drive more viewers, and generate more user engagement with their content and events.

And yeah, it’s ultimately all about money. And advertisers.

“The VMAs virtually pioneered the social-TV moment, triggering a demand among marketers to tap into the fan conversations and trending topics that Viacom networks create every day,” Viacom’s head of sales Jeff Lucas said in a statement. “Through this partnership, we’re allowing marketers to insert their brands seamlessly into the torrent of fan activity and engagement around our networks on Twitter.”

I’m not sure that fans like brands being inserted — it sounds violating, in a way, even if they’re not hot — but they certainly seem to like the second-screen experience. So much so that Forrester says that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. check social media while watching TV, and some are collapsing the first screen into the second.

The 2012 Video Music Awards drove massive Twitter activity, with 52 million tweet-votes cast to the most sharable video and a peak of 98,307 tweets per minute for One Direction’s Best Pop Video award. This year, with Amplify, Viacom property MTV will share backstage access, highlights, interviews, and top performances via Twitter.

Twitter Amplify partners such as Turner Sports and the NCAA offer real-time highlights of the best action via tweets, and the NBA has offered free instant replays in tweets. Other partners include A&E, Bloomberg, MLB, the PGA Tour, Warner Music, and, of course, World Wrestling Entertainment.

How are brands “inserting” their messages “seamlessly”? Here’s an example:

Roy Hibbert’s BIG block. One of the nicest you’ll see #NBARapidReplay –
http://t.co/aAJmjhQugM

— NBA (@NBA) May 19, 2013

Twitter is doing a very neat three-way deal between the NBA, which gets its highlights promoted, and in this case, the movie After Earth, which gets publicity and the chance to increase its Twitter audience via the embedded Follow @AfterEarth account.

Perhaps not seamless, but certainly inserted.

photo credit: pietroizzo via photopin cc

For years, it’s been a truism: online advertising is cheap. For pennies or fractions of a dollar, you could reach thousands of consumers, paying only for those who clicked and, sometimes, only for those who buy.

Those capabilities aren’t going away, but for the first time in years, the prices you pay for online ads is going up. The core reason?

Google’s new “enhanced” campaigns.

Google’s enhanced ad campaigns are certainly enhancing one thing: Google’s revenue. After seven straight quarters of decreasing prices for clicks, Google ad prices rose 6 percent over the last three months — and they’re expected to jump another 5-10 percent in the next quarter.

Source: Adobe

Google cost-per-click ad price increases, early 2013.

Why?

Google announced enhanced campaigns very quietly in February of this year. The enhancement that Google added was simple: baking mobile ads right in with desktop ads. It was a significant change that Larry Kim of search marketing firm WordStream called “the biggest change to AdWords in five years.” It’s a simplification for advertisers, and it’s a recognition on Google’s part that mobile is now core to the web.

It’s also a massive cash cow.

“Up to last year you could target desktop, tablet-only, or smartphone-only mobile ad campaigns,” Adobe’s Sid Shah explained. “Now you have one campaign, one bid, and you can give it a mobile adjustment factor to adjust it up or down for mobile.”

Source: MoPub

Regardless of the platform, tablet ads cost more than smartphone ads — because they convert better.

The problem is that costs per click (CPC) and return on investment (ROI) have historically differed tremendously from desktop to tablet to smartphone. In general, desktop ads are the most expensive, smartphone ads are the cheapest, and tablet ads offer the best ROI. That’s because desktop ads convert well, smartphone ads don’t, and tablet ads cost like smartphone ads but convert like desktop ads.

Google knows this, of course, so when it launched enhanced campaigns Google added a “mobile bid adjustment” factor that enables advertisers to make their mobile ads 20 cheaper, for instance, than their desktop ads, or vice-versa. But advertisers are not using the MBA wisely.

“What Google recommends is a -20 percent to 0 percent MBA,” Shah, who is the director of business analytics for Adobe’s digital marketing division, told me yesterday. “But we found that MBAs should range all over the spectrum. Which makes sense – if you’re mobile-only, mobile does well for you, and the MBA should be positive, but if you’re doing mortgages, mobile won’t do well for you.”

Which means that although the CPC of mobile ads — particularly smartphone ads — should be a significantly small fraction of your desktop ads, they’re getting artificially boosted by Google’s bundling. This isn’t necessarily because Google is boosting the rate, but because the MBA that advertisers choose based on Google’s recommendation is not representative of the actual cost variations.

And because Google is the gorilla of the online advertising world — with about 50 percent market share of online ads and 56 percent of all global mobile ads — what it does affects the entire industry.

“Over the last three months, for the first time in seven quarters, CPCs went up,” Shah told me. “In the next quarter, CPCs will go up another 5-10 percent, year-over-year.”

Source: Adobe

Adobe’s algorithm for optimizing online/mobile ad spend more closely approaches a fully optimized ideal, the company says.

Adobe, which bought digital advertising firm Efficient Frontier in 2012 to build its online, mobile, and social advertising solutions, says that one solution is to work with independent agencies — such as itself — which can help advertisers optimize their spend better than Google, Facebook, or other major ad vendors do directly. The company’s Adobe Media Optimizer technology can help maximize ROI, Shah says, basing its bid and spend parameters on actual conversion and engagement data for your specific campaign.

[Editor's note: We'll be discussing mobile monetization at our MobileBeat event in SF next month, where we're bringing together many of the top players including Google, Millennial, Facebook, Flurry, MoPub, Tapjoy and more.]

“Our algorithm is actually working better than Google’s mobile bid adjustment,” Shah says.

In other words, I asked him, Adobe’s algorithm is working better for advertisers, while Google’s algorithm is working better for Google?

“You said that, not me,” Shah laughed.

Last year costs per click fell for the second year in a row, but the overall digital ad spend went up. It’s reasonable to assume, Adobe says, that the spend trend will continue, even while the costs trend has reversed.

Which means more money in Google’s fairly fat wallet, and perhaps a little less in yours.

Unless you get smarter with your spend.

photo credit: x-ray delta one via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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I’m sure you’re happy to know that deep neural networks perform significantly better than shallow networks. But you might be thrilled to learn that Microsoft has doubled the speed at which it can translate what you say into text … while also improving accuracy.

What do the deep neural networks (DNNs) have to do with it?

Microsoft says that DNNs, which function more like a human brain than a traditional computer, can detect tiny variations in speech that stay the same even when your voice changes. In other words, even when you speak faster or yell, or when you’re winded from running up the stairs, those variations remain stable. Even better, they remain stable from individual to individual as long as you’re speaking the same language.

The result is that a message that takes 1.06 seconds to render into text with Microsoft’s old technology now takes .53 seconds. That may not seem like much, but in the video below it feels almost instantaneous. To skip the theory and see the goods, fast-forward to the 1:08 mark:

The best part is that the error rate is now down as well — from 16 percent to 13.5 percent — and that the technology is resistant to background noise interference. All of which — as we use more and more voice-recognition technology to control our mobile devices, our gaming systems, and to dictate our texts and messages — is a great help.

The update is currently rolling out to Microsoft data centers in the U.S.

Image credit: Microsoft

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Myspace is unveiling its latest version today with some new features and an iOS app designed to pull in users despite the multitude of other music-focused services already vying for their attention.

As anyone who has used the Internet in the last decade already knows, Myspace’s descent as the top social network led to it being sold off by News Corp. last year to Specific Media, which rebranded it as a destination for music artists and fans. It launched a public beta version of the site back in January with help from minority investor Justin Timberlake. Rather than competing with social giants like Facebook and Twitter, the new version of Myspace focuses on cultivating new users, providing better music discovery, and appealing to artists who seek more listener analytical data.

“What we launched in January was a good first [example] of our vision of making Myspace the best place to listen and share musical interests, but [today's launch] is us taking what we’ve learned from our users and applying it,” Myspace chief executive officer Tim Vanderhook told VentureBeat.

Essentially, that means Myspace is putting a greater emphasis on mobile usage. The company’s new iOS app basically carries over the functionality of the website and adds a few exclusive features. One of those is a tool to create and share animated GIFs, which seems interesting, but I’m unsure how it’ll further Myspace’s goal of being a music destination. And for those without an iOS device, the company is also releasing a new mobile website.

In terms of new features, Myspace now provides artists with a way to curate their own radio stations using the site’s library of over 50 million songs from major labels, smaller indie labels, and artists without representation. “Letting artists curate their own radio is going to give fans that extra level of access to see what inspires and shapes their own music,” Vanderhook said, adding that users can also access this functionality.

There are also new analytics tools that let artists manage their digital presence, build an audience, and upload and distribute content — all from a single location. However, the company is assuming that artists will only use a single platform and doesn’t integrate activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Yet Vanderhook did tell me that’s something the company may explore at a later time.

The new Myspace site is available now to all users, as is the free iOS app. Check out the gallery of screenshots below for a closer look.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Life360 says it has figured out how to provide always-on location services without draining your smartphone’s battery.

That’s a significant step forward, because most GPS services are power-hungry. Location services aren’t a problem if you’re tracking an hour-long run, but if you want to use an app that tracks you throughout the day, you’ll probably find your phone runs out of juice far earlier than usual.

Life360 lets you keep tabs on the whereabouts of your family members. You can set up geofences around a variety of locations, such as your home or work, and it will automatically alert family members when you enter or leave one of those places. With this service, Life360 could replace those ubiquitous “Where R U?” texts, allowing parents to  know where their children are, and allowing children to get on with their lives uninterrupted, gosh.

“Does it drain my battery?” is always one of the first questions Life360 hears from potential users, and in the beginning, the answer was yes. In fact, it was so bad that in the first year of availability, Life360 got only 5,000 users, was turned down for venture capital funding, and got a bunch of bad reviews in the app store.

That may have been a discouraging way to start a business, but it lit a fire under the founders.

“We raised money back in 2009 when things were really, really tough. There were a lot of people there that were like, ‘Oh you know your acquisition is nothing … you’ll be gone in a couple days, like, look at Formspring, look at X random hot company. It’s been fun to outlast them,” said Alex Haro, Life360′s chief technology office in an interview with VentureBeat.

The biggest reason always-on location apps drain your battery is because it takes power for GPS to get an accurate read on your location.

But Haro, together with Chris Hulls, Life360′s chief executive, figured out that you don’t always need to have GPS on to know where someone is.

The company’s technology looks at a number of data points in addition to GPS to determine where you are: Wi-Fi signals, cell tower signals, and the geofences users set up. It takes data to know when you’re inside a geofences, but once you’re there, the company can use that information to make sure the GPS doesn’t get turned on.

The same process happens when you’re in any known place. If you’re sitting at work, it will shut off GPS and listen for signals that you’re changing locations. Once you’re in motion, it will flip the GPS on — the only time your phone will actually take the big battery hit that comes with using GPS.

The system is smart, too. For example, it figures that at 2 a.m. you’re likely sleeping and at home, so it ignores spurious location readings based on cell tower signals, which are notoriously inaccurate. If your phone starts rapidly connecting to a bunch of different Wi-Fi signals, it concludes you might be driving or on a train, and thus on the move.

But that leads to one stipulation: the location technology simply doesn’t work as well if you don’t have Wi-Fi turned on.

“When people turn Wi-Fi off, the performance is really bad. People do that for whatever reason,” said Hulls in an interview with VentureBeat. “Wi-Fi in San Francisco is critical.”

However, Wi-Fi isn’t always Life360′s best friend. The app gets tripped up if you’re connected to a mobile hotspot. Because the Wi-Fi is moving with you, it makes the app believe you’re sitting in one place, but you really could be connected while on a moving train.

Hulls would not otherwise elaborate on how Life360 knows when and where you are when not in a geofence, saying the technology is proprietary. But if you’re a mobile developer, take heart. The company is likely not going to keep this one under lock and key. Hulls says the company is toying around with the idea of licensing the tech to those who don’t want to spend the time figuring out how to do it on their own.

“It’s the high level idea now, people approach us all the time. We’ve been offered even a few million dollars to do stuff with it,” said Hulls. “We did not mean to be a geo-company it was just kind of built out of necessity.”

In our tests, we found the battery life actually did last while running Life360 in the background. However, there were some glitches with Android phones, in particular the HTC EVO. Life360 acknowledged these issues, saying a bug was being fixed soon.

Aside from bug fixing and location-conquering, Life 360 has gone back to those VC non-believers from when it first launched. Hulls says VCs have short memories. While Life360 could barely get through the door of VC firms in 2009, it has now taken on $12 million in funding, with its most recent $3 million round coming from BMW and others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Apple is hosting one of the most important conferences of its existence this week in San Francisco, California. And the $412 billion multination juggernaut opened with a poem.

A poem.

But not just any poem. This poem is Apple’s answer to Android, probably the greatest threat to Apple’s new post-PC incarnation. And it’s Apple’s shot across the bow of anyone who — like just about everyone on Wall Street — thinks that Apple’s days of ascendancy are over, that Google is our new pied piper of technology, and that Apple is no longer on the ascendancy.

In essence, this poem is Apple’s haiku to itself … to it’s own emotional and spiritual sense of who and what Apple is:

If everyone

is busy making everything …

how can anyone perfect anything?

we start to confuse convenience

with joy

abundance with choice.

designing something requires

focus

the first thing we ask is

what do we want people to feel?

delight

surprise

love

connection

then we begin to craft around our intention

it takes time …

there are a thousand no’s

for every yes.

we simplify

we perfect

we start over

until every thing we touch

enhances each life

it touches.

only then do we sign our work.

“If everyone is busy making everything” is a pretty clear reference to the massive market activity on Android, with more developers building more apps for more phones from more partners for more users. And “how can we perfect anything” sums up Apple’s view of Android as a copied, cobbled-together operating system that despite Google’s best efforts, still does not approach iOS in sophistication and elegance.

As does, of course, the line about confusing “abundance with choice.”

And then Apple showcased where its heart lies — in crafting emotions like surprise, delight, love, and connection. (The first is, of course, the reason that you cannot delete Apple’s own Newstand app for digital magazines: Surprise! Here’s an app you can’t delete!) A little more seriously, delight, love, and connection is certainly a valid, if partisan, description of what chief designer Jony Ive is attempting to create in iOS 7.

A thousand no’s for every yes is perhaps yet another reference to Android, with its millions of user-configurable options and open development environment which, one could argue, translate into a thousand yeses.

Which other global company, I wonder, would start its developer conference with a poem? None, I suspect. Which is probably why we both love and hate Apple.

If the message was being sent thousands of miles east to New York, it fell on deaf ears. Apple stock is down a few dollars on the day.

Wall Street, apparently, just doesn’t have an ear for poetry.

Image credits: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Pew Research today released a new study indicating about 34 percent of Americans now own tablets.

Tablets’ explosive growth began in early 2010 shortly after Apple’s launch of the first generation iPad. Since that point, the percentage of tablet-owning Americans has nearly doubled every year, thanks in no small part to the popularity of lower-cost tablets such as the more full-featured versions of Kindle and Nook.

The exponential ownership growth, the report said, is mostly among households earning more than $75,000 per year, college graduates, and adults ages 35 to 44.

“One of the things that is especially interesting about tablet adoption compared to some of the patterns of other devices we’ve studied is how these technologies’ growth has played out between different age groups,” research analyst Kathryn Zickuhr said in a statement on the report.

In 2012 younger adults ages 18-29 were equally as likely to own tablets as people in their thirties and forties, according to the study. But that changed in 2013 with the 30-49 group now significantly more likely to own a tablet.

The study also indicated that parents with a minor living at home are also tablet adopters, the study said, with about 50 percent, an increase of 24 percentage points from 2012.

Men and women were equally likely to own a tablet, the study said, as were people from various ethnicities.

The study did not break down tablet ownership by the device’s brand.

Image credit: Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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High-profile venture firm Sequoia Capital has appointed Admob‘s founder Omar Hamoui as its newest partner.

Hamoui’s focus is early-stage investments, including mobile, the firm tells me, and he’ll be based in Silicon Valley. He’ll be working closely with other partners in that area, Tim Lee and Jim Goetz.

Hamoui has been on VentureBeat’s radar for years. He won the startup competition “Innovation Showdown,” at VentureBeat’s inaugural MobileBeat conference in 2008. His first speaking gig as a Sequoia investor will be at our upcoming MobileBeat, which takes place on July 9-10 in San Francisco.

Sequoia’s new hire, Omar Hamoui.

This “follows a pattern at Sequoia of hiring operating partners who we’ve previously backed,” said a Sequoia spokesperson. Previously, the firm hired Alfred Lin, the number two exec at portfolio company, Zappos; and Aaref Hilaly, CEO of Clearwell.

The firm has had a long-standing relationship with Hamoui. The entrepreneur incubated Admob at Sequoia in 2006, and within three years, Google had acquired it for a $750 million. Hamoui also founded startup accelerator Churn Labs, which was shut down in May 2012 after the entrepreneurs left for various startup jobs.

Hamoui sold his most recently company, a social polling startup called Maybe Inc., to LinkedIn. While building Maybe, he also made some strategic investments in early-stage startups such as Gigwalk and Card.io.

The promise? Tweet a photo in under six seconds.

Get your stopwatch ready:

Tweet a photo in under six seconds with our new mobile update! vine.co/v/bY5dEjLxeJd

— Twitter (@twitter) May 29, 2013

In my tests, I wasn’t nearly that fast, mostly because I wanted to choose a half-decent photo.

But the changes also ensure that you’ll see a full preview of your photo, not just the small, cropped version. In addition, now there’s a dedicated button to go straight to your phone’s photo gallery, instead of first going to the camera, then to the gallery.

That’s probably not a big deal to most people, but it is faster and easier, and it fits with Twitter’s focus on continuing to become more visual, more media-centric than its long-gone text-only origins.

Interestingly, the update for Android also includes better notifications. The Notifications Drawer not includes more detail — you can swipe the Twitter update to expand it and get more details (in fact, almost the whole tweet).

And one more update for iOS now has tweets filling the full screen horizontally, as Twitter removed the borders around the timeline view.

photo credit: purplemattfish via photopin cc

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — Sheryl Sandberg thinks women still need to step up and take charge — even if people call them “bossy” or “aggressive.”

“I wrote Lean In [published by Knopf in March] because, it turns out, men still run this world. And I’m not sure how well that’s going,” said Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, speaking on stage today at the All Things Digital conference.

The problem is that, in business, gender is such a polarizing issue that no one is willing to talk about it — or even use gendered words.

“Men never say the word ‘woman,’” Sandberg said.

Worse still, the more successful a woman becomes at work, the less others like her. The reverse is true for men: The more successful, the more well-liked they become. Few men have been called “too aggressive” at work, while many women have — a reflection of early gender norms, Sandberg said, where little girls with a take-charge attitude get called “bossy.”

“We don’t call little boys ‘bossy.’ We expect that little boys will lead.”

Sandberg suggests an easy intervention: During performance reviews or in other situations when a woman comes under criticism, simply ask: “If a man did exactly those same things, what would you say?”

But gender issues weren’t the only thing Sandberg addressed today.

On her possible political career

Are you running for President? “No.”

On her relationship with Mark Zuckerberg

“It’s like any relationship. We don’t take it for granted.” The two executives sit next to each other at the office and frequently send Facebook messages to each other. They’re in constant communication and give each other frequent feedback.

While Zuckerberg is the CEO, and she reports to him, they’ve divided up responsibilities. Zuck prefers to spend his time focused on product, engineering, and design. Sandberg helps run the company, oversees sales and marketing, and works on business development deals.

On Facebook Home

People either love the company’s new Android app, or they hate it. “It’s very bimodal. We get 5s and we get 1s — there’s very little in the middle,” Sandberg said.

People who don’t like it don’t like the way it takes over the phone, but, she said, they do like the core features: the news feed and chat heads. Facebook is taking that feedback to heart.

On Facebook’s mobile usage

Facebook gets 1 in 7 of the minutes people spend on desktop PCs, and 1 in 5 minutes on mobile devices. So mobile usage is up — and the company is making 30 percent of its revenue from mobile now (up from zero at the time of its IPO.

Because people use Facebook on mobile devices and at home or at work, the company is capable of reaching people — and delivering ads to them — almost any time of day.

“We are both a mass medium and very targeted,” Sandberg said.  ”We have a Super Bowl every day in the U.S.,” meaning advertisers can reach 100 million or more people.

But they can also do very targeted ads, reaching, for example, 12 million likely car buyers, or 23 million heavy soda drinkers.

“Now, we can do it all day, because you’re checking Facebook on your phone all day.”

Every team at Facebook is now “mobile first,” Sandberg said.

On Google Glass

She tried Google Glass last week. “It took me a minute to figure out how to look at it, but once I did, I really liked it.”

But will the company make its own Facebook-branded wearable device?

“We’re not working on a wearable device, but we are one of the first apps to launch on Google Glass,” Sandberg said. ”Never say never, but we are not a device-making company.”

On teenagers

There are 1.1 billion users of Facebook now. As it reaches into every other possible demographic, are teenagers using the network less?

No, Sandberg said — though she acknowledged that they are trying out other social platforms, such as Tumblr and Twitter. However, she said, they remain highly engaged with Facebook, and she cited Pew Research numbers released last week that show teenagers’ usage of Facebook has stayed roughly level over the past couple of years, growing from 93 percent to 94 percent.

On Instagram

“I think it’s looking like a very good deal,” Sandberg said.

When Facebook bought the photo-sharing startup, for a price tag that wound up being more than $700 million, it had 34 million users. It now has 100 million, Sandberg said.

“We have a great working relationship,” she said of Instagram founder Kevin Systrom.

On anonymity and revolutions

On Facebook, pages are allowed to be anonymous: “That’s really important. People start revolutions. We need that.”

But individuals are not anonymous, which helps provide accountability in comments, Sandberg said.

The final word: Bossy

Sandberg closed with a note for anyone who has a young girl in their lives.

“Next time you’re about to call your daughter bossy, say instead ‘My daughter has executive leadership skills.’”

Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Zalora, the Zappos-like fashion and beauty store for Southeast Asia, announced this morning that it has closed a $100 million financing round.

That’s a lot of lipstick and high heels.

Zalora focuses on 10 countries in Asia: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The year-old startup says it has already achieved “annualized double-digit million USD revenues.”

“Our company is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia and has bright prospects,” said managing director Michele Ferrario. “It is an honor for us that investors of such great repute have invested into an e-commerce company as young as Zalora”

It is indeed an honor when a year-old startup with two or three million dollars in annualized revenue scores a $100 million investment. And it’s an unusual honor as well. But there’s method behind the madness.

The investment was secured by the German holding company that owns Zalora, Rocket Internet, which claims to be “the largest, fastest and most successful international online venture builder.” Founded by the infamous Samwer brothers — who Jason Calacanis has called “despicable thieves” —  its modus operandi has been to take successful models from American startups and apply them globally.

Genius, perhaps, if not very original. And very, very successful.

Rocket Internet sold Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for $126 million in 2010 and eBay clone Alando to eBay for $50 million, among many other lucrative deals. That history is undoubtedly part of what led the investment group, led by Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, and the Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group, to participate in this $100 million round.

Source: Rocket Internet

Rocket Internet’s impressive portfolio of companies

A big chunk, 25 percent, of Zalora’s revenue comes from mobile commerce, and the company says its app is the top lifestyle app in all the countries it serves, and the top app overall for Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.

In other words, Rocket Ventures saw an opportunity to take a big slice of an emerging market, and is moving rapidly — and with massive investment — to own the space.

The capital will be used, Zalora said, to scale up operations and grow the number of local and international brands it carries.

The company has just delivered its millionth order.

photo credit: AehoHikaruki via photopin cc

Everybody’s talking about the m-commerce boom, but if you look past the sophisticated surveys, app owners are struggling to figure out why their conversion rates fall short of expectations.

It’s not surprising if you consider the fact that mobile shopping cart abandonment rates are around 97 percent. Many frustrated developers have asked me how they can decrease these huge numbers that just don’t fit their business model.

I’ve tried to look at this challenge differently, not as a payment expert but rather from a psychological viewpoint, exploring our users’ needs and expectations throughout the checkout process.

Many influential payment companies in this ecosystem have introduced backend solutions that address merchants and developers’ needs. So as a developer you can now enjoy easy APIs, friendly onboarding, methods with reduced processing fees, all of which make their lives easier. The one factor that’s left out of this equation is the user, who somehow seems to be neglected, even though they’re the only one who controls the transaction.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a psychological theory used to understand human motivation. The hierarchy is based on five levels of needs. In order to reach the next level, a person must first satisfy the lower level of needs.

Even though it’s a little far from the original framework, some of its principals can actually be applied to understand the influence of users’ needs in reference to mobile conversion rates.

Basic needs: keep it simple

Twenty-nine percent of mobile shoppers who abandoned the checkout process did so because they were required to register before buying.

Mobile commerce is here to stay. We’re not just targeting early adopters anymore. However, in order to achieve mass market adoption the basic process needs to be clear and simple.

Many app owners require that their users create an account, even for a one time purchase. Yet people need to get their feet wet before jumping in the water. Forcing users to register and remember yet another password can be a huge barrier for someone who still has concerns about their purchase.

Every complication along the way gives the user a chance to stop and rethink their buying decision, while chasing away most impulse buyers among your users. This is obviously less basic than the need for air or food, but it’s probably the key factor to increasing conversion rates.

Main takeaway: Facilitate a simple checkout, avoid forcing the user to create an account or use a password.

Safety: Give them peace of mind

Forty-two percent of consumers have stopped or abandoned a purchase on a website because of a safety or security concern.

Security concerns are probably the #1 barrier to online shopping, and things don’t improve on mobile. However, it’s a matter of perception rather than facts. The level of security available with today’s range of technologies is high. Financial risks exist in the physical commerce world as well, but whenever there’s a mobile payment involved, the fear factor kicks in and users becomes more alert. Delivering a secure process isn’t enough; our biggest challenge is to make users FEEL that the process is secure.

One of the problems in most checkout experiences on native apps is redirecting to the PSP’s web page to complete the transaction. At that very point where your user has finally grown to trust you, you pull them away to a different site and bring them back to square one in terms of their attitude towards the purchase. This triggers many doubts about this unfamiliar external page, about its level of security, and what could go wrong while trying to return to the app. Creating a full native experience will ease those concerns and give your users more piece of mind.

Main Takeaway: Maintain a native in-app payment; avoid redirecting to an external web page.

Belonging: create a familiar environment

Forty-nine percent of mobile shoppers don’t shop more on their smartphone due to an awkward shopping experience.

A sense of belonging is triggered in a familiar environment. The beauty of Amazon’s checkout is that you can buy a book, a pair of sneakers or a laptop, but the checkout process is the same. By creating this payment standardization process the consumer feels like they are in a familiar place.

Your payment page doesn’t have to win a design contest; it has to look like a place where people pay, with a reliable look and feel, aligned with the standard payment conventions.

Another way to maintain familiarity and continuity is by enabling users to pay without re-entering credit card details. Make sure you keep security in mind and meet the standards of PCI compliance; if you need a reminder, go back to level 2 of the pyramid.

Main takeaway: Deliver a seamless experience without asking for details that the user has already given in the past, and don’t get too creative with design and special effects.

Esteem: let them run the show

Seventy-nine percent of decisive consumers said they would be more inclined to make online purchases if given easier and more secure payment options than credit and debit cards.

People like to believe they have freedom to choose. When you limit users to one payment method, you send a message of “my way or nothing at all.” By offering multiple options, the user becomes actively involved in the process, they’re the one calling the shots.

If you’re a global player, multiple payment methods are a must. In some countries credit card penetration is very low and other methods are essential.

Main takeaway: Offer your consumers multiple payment methods suitable for your geography and business model.

Self-actualization: keep up with them

Sixty-three percent of consumers prefer mobile commerce because they can do it while multi-tasking.

Today’s consumer has a lot on her mind. Mobile shoppers want to be a savvy consumer, one who gets things done, gets the best deal and wastes as little time as possible, because time is money. By giving shoppers an efficient experience, they’ll feel like they made a smart choice.

Users are often faster and smarter than us, and expect vendors to keep up. Without unnecessary friction, they’re left with more time to concentrate on the big decisions that makes each of them unique.

Your users are smart. Give them real benefits; they’ll appreciate it.

Main takeaway: Stay up-to-date with the latest innovations to help you tailor your consumer focused checkout.

Noam Inbar is vice president of business development at ZooZ, a consumer-driven checkout platform for e-commerce and mobile, enabling developers and retailers to boost conversion rates.

Top image credit: zizzy/Flickr

The mechanics of the innovation are simple and have already added the lexicon of gestures that most mobile users have already become familiar with: Pull the user interface down to force the app to refresh its current view.

But thanks to Twitter’s innovator’s patent agreement (IPA), the business and legal ramifications are just about as easy.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s mobile app on iOS uses a version of pull-to-refresh

As The Verge notes, Twitter’s IPA was released as a 1.0 spec today as releasing it in draft form early in 2012. And the IPA is in full effect for this most recent Twitter patent.

Loren Brichter, the developer who created pull-to-refresh — which Twitter acquired in 2010 when it bought Tweetie — was concerned about how Twitter would use his patent. So concerned, in fact, that he asked Twitter to agree with him as part of the terms of the sale of his company that it would never use the patent offensively.

This means, according to the IPA, any company that has not initiated offensive patent litigation in the past decade is safe. Defensive use of the patent, however is permitted by the IPA if the following terms are true:

1. If a company “has filed, maintained, threatened, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against Assignee or any of Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”
2. Or, if a company :has filed, maintained, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against another in the past 10 years.”
3. And finally, “to deter a patent litigation threat against Assignee or Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”

There’s one more loophole for offensive patent action if the above do not apply: if the company that owns the patent asks the engineers responsible for creating the intellectual property for written permission.

Overall, however, this is a significant step to making patents better and reducing the impact of patent trolling and patent lawsuits — if other companies adopt it in large numbers.

“We hope the adoption of the IPA will spur constructive dialogue on making patent system work better for companies, inventors, and policymakers alike,” Twitter’s Ben Lee wrote today.

Image credits: Twitter icons

July 9-10, 2013
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China’s speedy growth in fast-mobile subscriptions — and increasing mobile competition among the giant Chinese mobile carriers — will be key factors in driving Apple’s moldering stock price to unseen heights of over $800, one analyst said today.

With over three quarters of net new mobile growth in emerging markets, if Apple is ever to get its stock back to the $700 heights of summer 2012, it needs a less expensive and more carrier-friendly product suite. That’s coming this summer, according to Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets, and just in time.

The three major Chinese carriers reported subscriber growth for April 2013 today, and wireless subscribers rose 13 percent year-over-year to 1.16 billion. Fast wireless subscribers using 3G connection speeds rose 84 percent to 293.1 million.

And that’s the critical number.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dailysublime/6814011513/

Competitor Samsung will have something to say about Apple’s success — or lack thereof — in China.

The major competition right now between China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom will drive China Mobile, the grandaddy of mobile in the Middle Kingdom, to finally adopt the iPhone … and offer Apple’s iDevices to its 730 million mobile subscribers. That’s a deal that Apple and China Mobile have not been able to consummate since 2009, and it could be the deal that kickstarts Apple into massive growth outside its U.S. market once again. Especially given the fierce competition between carriers in China.

And the competition is all over the 293.1 million 3G subscribers, who are projected to grow to between 375 and 400 million by the end of 2013.

China Mobile’s 730 million mobile subscribers includes 120 million of the higher-end 3G subscribers, meaning China Mobile, which has historically trailed Unicom and Telecom in the more lucrative segments of the mobile market, leads the race for 3G subscribers in raw numbers. Unicom and Telecom, however — both of which sell Apple’s iPhone — have a much higher percentage of users on big contracts, giving them better per-user margins.

China Unicom has 254.6 million mobile subscribers, including 91.9 million 3G subscribers, and China Telecom has 170.2 million users and 81.1 million 3G users.

Cue the lower-priced iPhone, which White believes is coming this summer.

That will help Apple finally ink a deal with China Mobile just as the bulk of its 730 million subscribers are starting the switch to faster 3G connections. Which could mean tens of millions of new customers for Apple in Asia, and — with growth in other countries as well — set up a sales growth recovery for Cupertino that, White believes, can bring AAPL back to its $700 heights, and beyond, up to his price target of $888.

That’s a lofty target, of course, and a lot will have to change between the ears of Wall Street analysts and institutional investors for that to become a reality. Morgan Stanley, of course, has also published an analysis that Apple could triple sales in China with a lower-cost iPhone.

Since Apple sold $8.8 billion worth of product in China in the second quarter of this year, out of $43.6 billion in total sales, tripling that could be $26 billion quarterly, and perhaps as much as $100 billion annually.

Those are big numbers, and whether Apple can accomplish that or not, no one knows. But if it did, that would certainly have a major effect on Apple, its stock, and the mobile markets.

Major competitor Samsung, which sold 400 million phones last year and captures 95 percent of all profits in the Android device ecosystem, will have a few things to say about it too.

photo credit: wZa HK via photopin cc

Today, not that much has changed.

After debuting close to $40 and cratering to just under $18 in August, the stock has somewhat stabilized in the $25 region, down 30 percent from its opening-day high. And along the way, the story emerged of how Facebook tried to hide some of the mobile risk inherent in its business and how the company panicked and botched its IPO by using vague positive language in its public prospectus and, apparently, specific negative information about slowing revenue growth to institutional investors privately.

Not to mention the $100 million paid to banks to stabilize the stock — on top of $176 million in IPO fees — for efforts that ultimately failed. And technical glitches that cost the NASDAQ $62 million in compensatory fees.

All of which negatively affected the overall IPO market.

That all said, however, Facebook has seemingly nicely recovered from the disaster — at least from a business fundamentals perspective. Revenue growth was strong in its latest quarterly earnings release, with the company booking $1.46 billion in revenue for Q1 2013, compared to about $1 billion a year ago. More importantly, mobile was significantly up, accounting for 30 percent of ad revenues, and Facebook singlehandedly accounted for 6.5 percent of all online ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty good nevertheless.

And the company has massively beefed up its advertising options. It’s now posting retargeted ads right in the news feed, once sacrosanct territory. And in a move aimed directly at advertising giant Google, Facebook has launched a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to target its users based on what they actually buy and want to buy offline … which is a significant move to targeting the intent graph that Google hits so well by virtue of being a search engine, but Facebook has often missed since its visitors are on the site to meet and greet people. In addition, as soon as July, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads in the news feed, a product that it will be charging major brands millions of dollars for.

All of which is having an effect.

The consensus recommendation for Facebook is currently a buy, with a price target of $34. Most analysts are in the Strong Buy category, with few or none in the dreaded Underperform or Sell slots. And in the past four weeks, analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward by a factor of 6 to 1.

So there’s a lot of positive in Facebook’s future, and there’s a ton of potential. But it’s still challenging when analysts compare Facebook stock with other internet high-fliers like LinkedIn or Yelp, which rose 148 percent and 48 percent in their first years, respectively.

But at least it’s better than Groupon and Zynga, both down around 75-80 percent.

And, I would argue, while there are a ton of challenges and many very significant competitors — primarily Google — the future for Facebook is bright.

Even if the public start was a stubbed toe.

July 9-10, 2013
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Biz Stone’s under-the-radar startup has raised money from some very well-known people.

In a blog post today, the Twitter founder announced closing a funding round led by Spark Capital with participation from SV Angel. An elite group of individual investors also contributed, including Jack Dorsey, Bono, Reid Hoffman, Steven Johnson, Evan Williams, Al Gore, Greg Yaitanes, and Roya Mahboob.

Not much is known about Stone’s startup beyond the fact that it is called Jelly, involves mobile technology, and has something to do with promoting social good.

“As mobile devices have taken an increasingly central role in our lives, humanity has grown more connected than ever — herein lies massive opportunity,” Stone wrote. This financing will support advancing Jelly beyond the prototyping stage through hiring and product development of “what we think of as the natural next step for our connected society.”

Jelly has hired former Twitter engineering manager Ben Finkel as CTO and the man behind Twitter music, Kevin Thau.

News leaked that Stone was working on a new startup in March 2013. He and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams left Twitter and founded the Obvious Corporation, which launched in 2011 as a startup incubator and investment vehicle. In August 2012, Obvious announced a new publishing platform called Medium that encouraged medium-length, thoughtful content and was intended as a “better place to read and write about things that matter.” Williams said this would be his main focus. Now with Jelly, Stone has his own pet project and there is speculation about whether this means Stone is leaving Medium/Obvious.

Until we know more about Jelly, we must be content with details about jellyfish themselves. Perusing Jelly’s blog yields interesting information, like the fact that jellyfish brains are decentralized and “more ‘we’ than ‘me’” and a group of jellies is called a bloom.

July 9-10, 2013
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Windows Phone is now the third-leading mobile phone platform, more than tripling its market share year-over-year and more than doubling unit sales while pushing past a slumping BlackBerry.

And Windows Phone could jump into second place quicker than you think.

While they’re not Android or iOS-style numbers, Windows Phone sold 7 million units in the first quarter of 2013 for 3.2 percent market share, according to the latest IDC report. Meanwhile, BlackBerry sold 6.3 million units, down a third from the previous year, for 2.9 percent market share — less than half of its share just a year ago. Market leader Android took its customary massive 75 percent of the market, and Apple’s iPhone slipped from 23 percent global market share in 2012 to 17.3 percent share.

“Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia,” the IDC’s Kevin Restivo said in a statement. “Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alterative to Android or iOS.”

Those further gains are possible over the next year or two as Microsoft’s primary phone parter, Nokia, transitions to an all-smartphone lineup.

Part of Apple’s quarterly weakness was the company’s lack of any new hardware or significant new announcements. That made Apple slip to its lowest global smartphone market share in years, now less than a quarter of Android’s size, with only 37.4 million iPhones sold to Android’s 162.1 million. But systemically, Apple is falling out of the race for smartphone supremacy. And that puts Apple at risk of being in Microsoft’s sights for the number two position in the global smartphone market share battle.

How?

Nokia is going all in on Windows Phone — mostly by necessity — and now accounts for 79 percent of all Windows Phone sales. The Finnish company has sold over 20 million Windows Phones to date, which is not bad, considering the challenges of Android, iOS, and Microsoft’s stutter-stepping from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8.

Source: IDC

Global smartphone market share, Q1 2013

But the real opportunity for both Microsoft and Nokia will come as Nokia continues its transition from feature phone sales over to Windows Phone. The company still sold something like 55 million feature phones in the first quarter of 2013, and while those cheap phones are going largely to developing nations, they will transition at some point to Windows Phone.

Those feature phones sales are decreasing, and the transition from cheap feature phone to somewhat more expensive Windows-based smartphones will decrease them still more, but they will be higher-value sales.

And, they might just be high enough, depending on what Apple does in the region of a cheaper iPhone, to catapult Microsoft to number two.

Image credit: Microsoft

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Apple’s countdown (err, up) to 50 billion apps ended today with one lucky winner, as yet unannounced, bagging $10,000 in iTunes money for apps, media, and more.

It’s a good thing Apple hit the number today, because if they waited even another week, the Cupertino company might have been second-best to Google’s Android. At Google’s developer-focused I/O conference today, Google’s Hugo Barra announced that Google Play has just passed 48 billion app installs — and had a massive 2.5 billion just last month.

Just as Apple has done before for major app store download thresholds, it’s giving away the $10,000 gift card to a lucky iOS user who downloaded the 50 billionth app. In addition, 50 lucky people who where the next to download an app have won a $50 gift card — even if they don’t know it yet.

Don’t go rushing to try to be one of those 50, of course … there are about 1,000 app installs on iOS each and ever second.

This is probably the last major app install number that Apple will trumpet to the skies, as Android will be making the big news from now on. At the same Google I/O conference, Android chief Sundar Pichai said that Android has now reached 900 million device activations — far more than Apple.

July 9-10, 2013
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Less than two weeks after its acquisition by Facebook, Parse is announcing a new product. Parse is adding Parse Hosting to its suite of products that developers can use to be “server-free from beginning to end.”

Parse simplifies the process of mobile app development by providing “mobile backend-as-a-service.” Basically, the company takes care of the server side of things so developers can focus on areas like user experience and design. Now, mobile developers that need a web presence can host that content through Parse.

“Combined with our JavaScript SDK and Cloud Code, developers can now host their entire web presence on Parse and there is no need for a third party to host the static assets like HTML, JavaScript, or CSS,” said CEO Ilya Sukhar in an interview. “We always dog-food our own platform and found it annoying that we had to use another party to host the web component even though the heavy lifting was done by Parse. Externally, we heard the same thing time and time again from our customers across the spectrum of size and use case.”

Parse Hosting will join Parse Data, Parse Social, Parse Push, and Cloud Code as available services. Developers will be able to host landing pages to support their mobile app and data from that app will be accessible through the Parse API. Parse’s platform powers more than 80,000 applications and tapped into a wide community of developers (and consistent revenue stream), which contributed to Facebook’s interest in buying the company.

The acquisition marked Facebook’s first foray into paid business-to-business services and an emphasis on growing its relationship with the developer community. During an interview with Sukhar about the deal, he said that while Parse could offer developers infrastructure, the startup could not offer distribution and monetization. He said the partnership with Facebook will bring “huge reach” in terms of developers and raw users and make Parse a “one-stop shop for all your application needs.”

However, whenever a smaller company gets scooped up by a larger company, there are concerns about the smaller company getting snuffed out. Sukhar said that Parse will continue to exist and innovate, and Parse Hosting builds off the momentum from the acquisition.

“This announcement goes to show that both parties are committed to continuing development on the Parse platform,” he said. “We’re going to expand the Parse product offering, not contract it. Platforms that are going away don’t significantly expand their product offering a week after announcing an acquisition.”

Parse launched in 2011 and participated in Y Combinator. It raised $7 million before the acquisition, which is rumored at $85 million.

July 9-10, 2013
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Apple announced a countdown to 50 billion app downloads today, signaling that iOS downloads are north of 49 billion already.

“Apps have revolutionized the way we play video games, consume news, do business, educate, communicate, create art, and so much more,” Apple says.

And as Apple has done before for major app store download thresholds, it’s giving away a $10,000 App Store gift card to the lucky iOS user who downloads the 50 billionth app, plus a $500 gift card to the next 50 people to download an app.

Currently, the countdown is at 49,216,610,939, and increasing by about 1,000 every two seconds, so there’s perhaps two and a half days until the download counter crosses the 50 billion mark, assuming the rate stays the same.

In addition, Apple revealed the top 25 free and top 25 paid apps of all time. Facebook owns three of the top 16 free apps, and Google has four of the top 25. The original Angry Birds is the most downloaded paid app of all time, and an astounding three more editions of Angry Birds — Seasons, Space, and Star Wars — are in the top 18 downloaded apps of all time.

Image credit: Rovio

July 9-10, 2013
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FeedHenry is yet another company that wants to help you, the modern developer, quickly build mobile apps for iOS, Android, and mobile web.

But it’s such a profitable, popular space that even in a crowded market, this startup managed to secure a healthy $9 million round of investment capital.

FeedHenry offers enterprise-grade mobile development solutions as well. The company says its platform lets devs build HTML5 and web-native hybrid apps through a web-based “studio.” Then, the apps can be deployed to iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone devices, as well as mobile web. The company also supports tools for native iOS and Android development.

In addition to pure development tools, the startup offers backend-as-a-service features like security and storage; analytics and user management; and cloud deploy options.

Oh look! A video case study!

Today’s funding was led by Intel Capital with participation from existing investors Kernel Capital, VMware, and Enterprise Ireland, and new investor ACT Venture Capital. A previous seed round of around $1 million or less took place in mid-2011.

FeedHenry is based in Waterford, Ireland, with offices in Burlington, Mass. The startup was founded in 2010.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Facebook has for some time been focusing on getting its network into the hands of all Earthlings, be they tech sophisticates in urban centers or nomadic herdsmen in South Sudan.

“We want to give everyone in the world the power to share,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the company’s quarterly earnings phone call today. “The big question for us is, which areas are growing the fastest? … Whatever the form factor is going forward, we’ll be able to deliver.”

This has meant a big push to put usable Facebook applications on all kinds of phones, including feature phones, and today we learned a bit about the payoff.

As part of its earnings presentation, Facebook rolled out a new statistic that shows how well it’s doing on this front. It said it’s got a grand total of 189 million “mobile-only monthly active users (MAUs),” a number that’s been on the rise for a while:

According to Facebook, these users “are mobile MAUs that accessed Facebook solely through mobile apps or our mobile website.”

In all likelihood, if you go a full month as a Facebook user without touching Facebook.com on the desktop, it means one thing: You don’t have access to a desktop/laptop computer, and your phone is your sole connection to the web.

That means that nearly 200 million people are on Facebook every month without using a computer. These probably aren’t all super-hip young folks who are too cool for laptops; we’re likely also talking about people around the world who may never have access to desktop computers due to their prohibitive costs.

“We’ve sent a team of people around the world to see what they use, and we care about everybody, not just you guys,” Facebooker Peter Deng said to a room full of tech press and analysts in a recent chat on the company’s approach to mobile apps and the mobile web.

“Faebook really represents an opportunity to connect over 900 million people,” said engineering director Doug Purdy at the same event, “but we hope one day for it to be the entire world.”

July 9-10, 2013
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“The world around you is not what it seems,” says Ingress, the virtual game that uses the real world as its gamespace. And, perhaps, when Google’s semi-independent division Niantic Labs is finished with its mission, we humans won’t be, either.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and usable. Note carefully that Google says nothing about the Internet in that statement.

In the last few eye-blinks of human history, we’ve created virtual worlds: cyberspace, virtual reality, the World Wide Web … places that exist in our devices, on our computers, in our servers, on the internet, and in our heads. But there’s also a space in which we live and walk and eat and breathe. Realspace. Meatspace. IRL. The real world, so we say, that we can touch and taste and smell.

Google’s trying to bring those world together, partly through the work of Niantic Labs.

Augmented reality is nothing new, of course, with marketing-focused companies like Layar building connections between physical and virtual reality and Ikea’s most-downloaded branded app of 2012 doing similar things. Other startups have explored AR capabilities as well, such as Caterina Fake’s Findery, which invites people to leave geo-tied notes that others can discover and read.

But when a company with the resources of a Google tackles the problem, and has a tool in Google Glass that seems destined for significant developer (and probably user) penetration that can actually create interconnections between the real and the virtual perhaps more efficiently than any other previous product, you’ve got something interesting. And potentially huge.

So a couple of weeks ago, I chatted with the man who’s leading that effort.

John Hanke: the missionary of mapping

John Hanke is vice president of product for Niantic Labs, the year-old Google-but-not-Google division of just a few dozen engineers that brought us Field Trip, the app to explore the world around us with a virtual docent. And, of course, the virtual/real game Ingress.

Source: LinkedIn

John Hanke

Before Niantic, Hanke ran Google Maps, Google Earth, and other geo areas, and before Google, he was the cofounder and CEO of Keyhole, the innovative geo-mapping and visualization company. Google bought Keyhole in 2004, which brought Hanke in the search engine’s fold to lead the its maps, earth, street view, and local divisions.

Now, he told me, rather than let him leave to scratch his entrepreneurial itch yet again and do another startup, Google gave him a semi-autonomous group to, as his LinkedIn profile suggests, experiment at the “intersection of mobility, real world, and the Internet.”

“We set up Niantic as a group that could explore new types of mobile apps with ubiquitous always-on features,” Hanke said. “And we’re set up to act like a start-up.”

Virtual + physical = field trip

Field Trip was one of Niantic’s first creations, and while on the surface it’s an app that helps you find cool stuff, ultimately it’s a tool to merge metadata and data and then present them together. While you’re in the physical world, Field Trip pulls data about that experience from digital sources, feeding you that information, and changing — deepening, enriching — your experience of place. Layering with with history, perhaps, or science, or culture.

Because, after all, one rock is very much like another rock, but if this is the precise rock where Geronimo attacked Mexican soldiers armed with only a knife and his courage, that changes our experience of this particular place. And the merging/melding/layering of virtual and physical makes it more real, in a sense — hyperreal.

Source: John Koetsier

Google’s Field Trip app helps you explore “reality.”

Enabling that, of course, requires extensive virtual enhancement of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get world.

“One of the things that we’re trying to evangelize is the concept of geo-tagging everything,” Hanke told me. “I would have expected eight years ago that it would be ubiquitous now, but it’s still not. But I think we’ll get there.”

Geotagging everything digital is a key intersection point between virtual and real. If this blog post is written here, and not there, that adds flavor and nuance to the information. And if a particular historical fact is geotagged to a specific mapped location, that adds depth and dimension to our experience of that place.

“We’re applying some of the same techniques we currently use in standard web search, and the same kind of discipline, to pull really interesting, really good places up from everything else,” Hanke says. “The model is that you’re walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, but with a friend who is telling you the best things around you. You enjoy it just like before, but you’re a little more informed.”

AR + MMO + IRL

Depth and dimension are definitely core components of Ingress, another Niantic Labs app/experiment/game. Ingress is a — take a deep breath — augmented reality massively multiplayer online video game.

The real world is real, but it’s fought over virtually by two shadowy groups: the Enlightened and the Resistance. Niantic has filled the Earth with virtual portals, usually coincident with actual physical landmarks or monuments, that players need to capture in order to gain territory. Capture territory with large numbers of people (aka “mind units”) and your faction gets more powerful.

Clearly, the massive integration of Google mapping technology with a sophisticated gaming engine is required. And the result is another intersection between the real and the virtual.

“Ingress is a massively multiplayer online game designed for mobile, with real location-based connections,” Hanke told me.

You play with everyone in your faction, and you might meet up with other players in real life, or you may just know them virtually as team members in another area. Along the way, Google learns an awful lot about how you use your mobile devices, about mapping physical locations, and about overlaying cyberspace on meatspace.

Source: Google

Ingress’ field of play is the world, layered with virtual data.

All of that knowledge is going to come in very handy with Google Glass.

Endgame: Google Glass?

Hanke is cautious when speaking about Google Glass, as is the PR handler who is copiloting our conversation. Even already public information is a question mark as we chat: Google is definitely being Apple-like in the control and distribution of Glass and its future.

But something tantalizing tidbits do come out.

“We definitely kinda had Google Glass in mind when we started work on apps at Niantic,” Hanke says. “We need mobile devices that are less intrusive than the phone is.”

Source: Google

A model demonstrates Google’s new Project Glass technology.

And we need devices with different input/output modalities, he says. After all, it’s not easy to play Ingress running around holding an expensive and fragile device in front of you like a window ripped from its frame. And yet you need that portal from the physical to the virtual. For instance, while Field Trip is great to open the doors on human context for the world around us, it threatens to detract from our experience of the world by redirecting our eyes from the ultimate big screen of reality to the small screen of our mobile device.

Google Glass, on the other hand, sits unobtrusively on our foreheads, leaving our hands free and providing data as an overlay on top of the physical world rather than an alternative to the physical world. That model of layering, mixing, and intersecting is top-of-mind for Hanke.

“It just can’t be the case that people are walking around heads down tapping on a screen,” he says. “That just can’t be the future of the human race.”

Cyborg me now

Which, of course, is exactly what’s at issue: the future of the human race. Or, at least how we ingest, consume, and reconstitute digital data. And analog data. And meld the two into one harmonious whole of knowing.

That’s perhaps a little metaphysical for a small division of Google that focuses on maps and games and apps.

But the web has rewired our brains in a decade or so of virtually ubiquitous Internet access, and the smartphone has rewired our behavior in five years, taking us from creatures who look up to to see others to beings that look down at any opportunity to see small bits of plastic and glass and metal in our hands.

So is it really too much to expect from a transformation that brings us from clear divisions between what is real and what is virtual to an elegant blend of the two?

“This is not psychosis or some cognitive break, but an actual takeover of the mind,” Google’s introductory video for the Ingress game says ominously.

Art imitates life, I suppose, and life, in turn, imitates art.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Naveen Tewari is the CEO and founder of mobile advertising company InMobi.

When I co-founded InMobi in 2007, we took a novel “east-to-west” approach to our growth, starting in India before moving into other developing markets, then finally into more traditional “Western” markets as well.

Because this method of expansion didn’t have any precursors, and mobile advertising was at the time still a very new field, we had to chart our own course and set our own example. And as a corollary, we would have to deal with a number of challenges as we discovered that the mobile landscape was different in each geography we entered, and learn to quickly recover from mistakes.

I’d like to talk about some of the challenges we faced and how we dealt with them, as I believe it will be of relevance to other businesses that are trying to build a global footprint:

Learning while doing

Because we were experimenting with a new business model, we often had to rely on intuition as we calculated our next moves. When you are trying to expand across multiple geographies at a rapid pace, you are bound to slip, and we were no exception. For example, our first forays out of India into other geographies, starting with Indonesia and South Africa, did not yield initial success, and we could not gain a strong foothold in the market. Our lack of understanding of the ways in which brands, advertisers, and consumers communicated and interacted in these markets, and incorrect hypotheses about the overall advertising ecosystem, led to delayed revenue streams. But we learned how the ecosystem worked and began expanding our reach in these emerging markets.

Likewise, when we had to extend the capabilities of our platform to serve multiple regions/countries, we almost ran the risk of jeopardizing existing business in India by shifting focus away from it.

We learned quickly from such wrong moves, and this helped us templatize our forays into new countries, and that is the key takeaway:

An experiential learning approach works well if you can recover from your mistakes quickly and identify patterns and models from within a few iterations.

Recalibrating world view frequently

Working with an evolving technology and business model, and one that had numerous dependencies on the moves of key players in the mobile device and platform platform markets, brought with it another set of challenges: frequently making informed decisions on the roadmap of our technology platform, which was the pivot of our business.

In addition, our geographic expansion plan also compelled us to be agile and flexible.  Once we had tasted initial success, we laid out a plan to simultaneously expand in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore), Western Europe and Japan. Each of these markets had its own characteristics and was very different from one another. Western Europe was developed, and so was Japan, but the latter is a contained market with little in common with the European market. The emerging markets, on the other hand, were evolving and needed a totally different approach.

Clearly, we had to tailor our approach to suit each market, and this meant that we literally had to revisit our assumptions and plans every quarter.

In all of the above, our overall commitment to speed — in thinking and in action — helped, and our approach of trying out and making course corrections, rather than waiting and watching, stood out. To me, the key takeaway from this experience is staying committed to a strategy for the future, while adapting the tactics to the present.

Shaping Management Mindset

While the first two sets of challenges emanated from the market, the third was more internal and had to do with adopting the right mindset.

As a startup with global ambitions, we had several mental hurdles to cross. Learning to think big while being small was one of them. Some of us had a tendency to want to do one thing very well as opposed to developing broader competencies and skills, which is a prerequisite to build scale. Another issue was balancing our short-term needs with our long-term goals. Nowhere was it a bigger challenge than when we opened offices in new geographies and set out to hire the regional anchors. How much to pay, how long to wait for the right candidate, what profile should we opt for?  These were real questions we had to find answers for. We made a few errors of judgment here as well, like hiring candidates about whom we were not completely convinced, before we made the tough call to wait for the right candidates and pay them the right compensation.

The last thing we had to do, of course, was to transform our thinking, speaking and actions to reflect those of a truly global organization, and make the transition from being part of an “Indian” team to a cross-cultural one. This entailed creating a consistent corporate culture with frequent interactions between teams based in India and those in the other markets. By encouraging two-way travel, we ensured that teams from India understood market and cross-cultural nuances early on.

In sum, we learned to be open, introspective and aware of the consequences of your behavior and actions.

Thinking back, what allowed us to surmount the challenges we faced and mold our thinking and actions to suit the purpose was our total commitment to our vision and the excitement of creating an innovative and valuable business model.

That is the overarching message I’d like to leave you with: clarity of vision and purpose is the glue that binds a team together and acts as a lubricant to mitigate the friction caused by obstacles along the way.

For more information on InMobi’s East-to-West strategy, see Naveen Tewari’s first post, here.

Naveen Tewari is InMobi’s CEO and founder. He graduated from Harvard Business School and worked at Charles River Ventures and McKinsey & Company before starting InMobi. InMobi, based in Bangalore with offices in Singapore and San Francisco, currently employs more than 900 people and has taken $216 million to date in venture funding.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Last week I bought 13 laptops from WalMart.com. All were pretty cheap, between $500 and $700, but 13 of them added up to a rather hefty $8,000 bill on my MasterCard.

There were only two problems: I didn’t buy them, and they weren’t being shipped to my house.

I’d been hacked. Somehow, somebody in Sacramento, Calif., was going to get 13 Dell Inspirons at my expense. Lucky them … and unlucky me.

But not only unlucky me — a staggering one in four Americans report being a victim of identity fraud, according to a new study by Jumio, a leading credit card validation service for web and app-based commerce. And 83 percent of us worry about identify theft.

Source: John Koetsier

Fraudulent WalMart.com orders charged to my account

That’s a problem, because commerce is increasingly going mobile. Two-thirds of us own a smartphone and/or a tablet, and most of us plan to use them to buy things in the near future. A full 48 percent of us use our mobile devices to check something as sensitive as our bank balances. But as we do, we’re opening ourselves up to even more avenues of fraud and scamming.

“Users may be willing to accept risk now in favor of convenience, but this tolerance will weaken as fraud continues to grow,” Daniel Mattes, founder and CEO of Jumio, said in a statement. “The industry needs to get on board to protect our customers as much as the customers themselves need to take greater precautions.”

Investigators in my case suspected a phishing attack, in which you get an email purportedly from an online store that leads you to a fake but real-seeming site that then takes your credentials, but I had not clicked on any real or fake WalMart emails.

And so the only greater precautions that would have been useful would have been perhaps using unique passwords for each e-commerce site I use.

The problem of online and mobile security is a growing one. According to VISA, mobile commerce fraud was $2.7 billion in 2010, $3.4 billion in 2011, and $3.5 billion in 2012. And Cybersource says almost a third of all retailers experienced mobile fraud in 2012.

So what’s the solution?

Perhaps biometrics. Apple is said to be building a fingerprint sensor into the next iPhone model, the iPhone 5S. And Jumio’s survey says that 74 percent of us don’t feel that simple username/password security is sufficient. It certainly didn’t protect me — I was only fortunate enough to notice 13 thank-you-for-your-order emails from Walmart.com.

But biometrics won’t be available on every device, and won’t be an industry-standard smartphone feature for some time to come, if ever.

Meanwhile, according to Jumio, 69 percent of us would feel more comfortable sharing our personal information online, and buying via mobile, if there were more secure ways of storing that data online.

Source: Jumio

Mobile purchasing and banking activity

“For mobile to reach its full potential, the industry needs to adopt more consistent and accurate ways to identify and authenticate consumers,” Mattes said. “Only then will we be able to truly combat fraud.”

The question remains: How exactly that should be done?

The mechanisms for catching fraud after the fact, and protecting consumers from the consequences, are mostly in place. MasterCard canceled my credit card, WalMart canceled the transactions, and no harm was done. And big data solutions that the big credit card issuers including VISA and American Express employ to track consumers’ spending habits and suspend cards if odd or suspicious spending patterns start to emerge limit losses when the fraud proceeds successfully.

But that’s not the case every time: web and mobile security has a last-mile problem that isn’t going away any time soon.

photo credit: ToastyKen via photopin cc

Denzel is 13 years old and running from the police. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the cops thought he was part of the riots that rocked London in 2011.

That’s the concept for Denzel, the new game from developer LabPix Studios. It’s due out this summer on Android and iOS for free, though it does have in-app purchases. It’s a pretty serious subject that the developer explores using … well, endless-runner mechanics.

“The gameplay is a lighthearted 2D endless running game that is set in a 3D world,” LabPix chief operating officer David McGuire told GamesBeat. “There are countless obstacles to jump over or slide under and numerous enemies that will chase Denzel, such as the local bully, police, security guards, dogs and grannies.”

LapPix worked to re-create the streets of London to give authenticity to the innocent Denzel’s desperate attempts to evade law enforcement.

“There is a deeper message at [the game's] core,” said McGuire. “The disenfranchisement of the youth in U.K. toward adults and the fact that the London riots were inevitable. Consequently, innocent youngsters who haven’t quite found themselves got caught up in the mess.”

McGuire claims the gameplay mechanics represent the ever-present pressure that someone like Denzel would feel in this situation.

“We hope the game mechanics will tell the story effectively opposed to using cutscenes,” said McGuire.

I haven’t played it yet, but it seems unlikely that an endless runner can convey a serious message. Still, I’m glad that LabPix is trying.

Apple, on the other hand, might prefer that the company didn’t try. The iPhone company has a history of blocking and removing games that deal with real war (Endgame: Syria) and child labor (Sweatshop HD) from its App Store.

LapPix isn’t interested in making waves.

“We enjoy games with real-world subjects as long as they are tasteful,” said McGuire. “Games that often use real-world subjects can come across as if they sensationalize an issue or even make the issue seem blasé. We don’t condone targeting any race, culture, real government, or corporation.”

That last bit comes directly from Apple’s app submission guidelines, so you know that LabPix is paying attention. Now, the studio just needs to prove it can follow through with a game that has a real message as well as it follows corporate-mandated guidelines.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Gizmox, a startup making HTML5 and mobile web tools for business applications, has closed a $7.5 million round of financing and selected a new CEO.

The startup offers what is says is a streamlined solution to help companies shift from a traditional client-server to mobile web and HTML5 technologies. Although many consumer applications have already implemented a move to mobile web and HTML5, complex business apps have faced a harder transition.

Gizmox provides an enterprise-class HTML 5 platform using two components: VisualWebGUI, a mobile HTML5 framework for enterprise applications, and InstantCloudMove, which creates cloud-based HTML5 from existing client-server code.

The financing round was led by Atlas Ventures, with participation from Citrix, Consolidated Investment Group, and Maayan Ventures.

With the announcement of the financing round, Gizmox has also named a new CEO, Eugene Kuznetsov, and transitioned co-founder and former CEO Navot Peled to president. Kuznetsov brings a deep background to Gizmox; he was a founder and president of DataPower, a startup that was acquired by IBM. Kuznetsov completed a stint as an IBM executive and also co-founded Abine, an online privacy company.

The addition of Kuznetsov is expected to accelerate the company’s sales and marketing efforts as the transition of business applications to mobile and HTML5 becomes more prevalent.

The $7.5 million of financing brings the total funding raised by Gizmox to $18 million.

Gizmox was founded in 2007 and is based in Cambridge, Mass.

Image credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

A 1,713-strong survey of North American consumers says that 19 percent of us want a shiny new iDevice that doesn’t even exist yet. Or, at least, isn’t public and isn’t purchasable.

Yep, that’s the Apple iWatch.

The iWatch, which has been rumored for months but never confirmed by Apple, is potentially a roll-up flexible display wrist device that connects to your phone to relay alerts, function as a remote, and potentially much more. Rumors about the new device were conveniently leaked to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg within the space of a few days in February, possibly because Samsung is also building a similar device.

ChangeWave’s recent telecom report shows that, sight unseen, one in five consumers want an iWatch, mostly because of Apple’s track record of “delivering ultra-convenient, easy-to-use, innovative products with a perceived ‘cool factor.’”

I guess that’s what brand will do for you.

One in five may not sound like many, but if one were foolish enough to believe that prerelease product surveys accurately predict product demand, it would mean that 63 million Americans would buy one. Or at least be tempted to.

Don’t hold your breath.

Image credit: iWatch mockup by VeneStudio; Hat tip: Cult of Mac

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Today, Yahoo has rolled out two new mobile apps — improved versions of Weather and Mail, old-timer apps that have gotten huge improvements to make them, as a rep said via email, “a little more fun and beautiful.”

We think “little” is an understatement.

The new apps are Yahoo Mail for tablets (iPad and Android tablets, specifically — sorry Surface!) and Yahoo Weather for iOS. Check out the high gloss on these bad boys:

For the Mail app for tablets, Yahoo built in some swiping gestures, some full-screen viewers, and a few other touches appropriate for the larger form factor and the lean-back user experience. The end result is pretty and functional.

But it’s the Weather app that really blows us away. The team at Yahoo took advantage of one of the company’s most-used applications — Flickr — to give the app a modern magazine aesthetic. By using images from the Flickr community to show weather conditions around the world, the Weather app can now illustrate in glorious, full-screen color, the weather that’s happening outside your doors.

The result is amazingly fresh and very much in stride with the apps mobile-first companies are releasing right now.

For months, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been promising us a new focus on mobile for this aging, uncool company. That promise has been percolating for the past year or so while Mayer steered Yahoo toward a string of acquisitions — young designers, hot startups, buzzy mobile apps. We’re guessing the new apps released today are part of Mayer’s bigger plan to revamp not just Yahoo’s mobile app lineup but also its image.

That Weather app has all the charm and aesthetic appeal of Facebook Home, one of the coolest apps on the block. If Yahoo can keep up that design standard, it might get its groove back sooner than we expected.

Image credit: TheTechBlock

Facebook has just unwrapped the latest version of its mobile SDK for iOS as well as some new features for its mobile tools. Reps for the company are calling these changes “the next evolution” of the company’s mobile-first strategy.

The new tools should, the company says, make it easier for mobile developers to play around with Open Graph features on smartphones and tablets. The SDKs also bring better tools for implementing Facebook Login.

Also, the company has announced a new program to help and promote the building of Facebook-integrated mobile apps. Called the Facebook Technology Partner program, it contains a list of SDKs and other developer tools built by Facebook and its partners — companies like Kinvey, Corona Labs, Parse, Sencha, and Adobe’s PhoneGap.

The Facebook SDK for iOS 3.5 is available today. It includes a new API for handling Open Graph objects without having to host webpages with Open Graph tags, a new Sharing dialog that works more smoothly with Open Graph actions, and an improved native login UX.

Finally, stats! Facebook reps told us via email that 81 percent of the top grossing 100 iOS apps and 70 percent of the top grossing 100 Android apps use Facebook in some way. For games, those numbers are slightly higher at 82 percent for iOS and 75 percent for Android.