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via StumbleUpon Hits 1 Billion Stumbles Per Month.

Ask any marketer about trends for 2011 and you’ll undoubtedly hear the phrase “location-based services.” However, among Foursquare, Facebook Places, SCVNGR, Gowalla and many others, marketers have a lot to choose from.In this article we’ll cover the two major players—Foursquare and Facebook Places—and see how they stack up.

via Location-Based Services: Foursquare vs. Facebook Places | Social Media Examiner.

In this video I interview Amber Naslund, co-author of the new book The Now Revolution and VP of social strategy at Radian6.

Amber shares why social media monitoring is so important and what you need to monitor to get the most value out of your social media activities.

You’ll find out why social media is the new phone and what this means to your business. Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

via How Social Media Monitoring Can Grow Your Business | Social Media Examiner.

Apples unveiled its suite of software for crafting its iAd advertising apps, promoting rich media experiences that use HTML5. Its an unashamed attempt to snatch some of Adobes business.

Apples iAds have been gently or not so gently, if you believe some reports attempting to shake up the online mobile advertising business since being introduced in April. The most recent effort, aimed at promoting the new Tron: Legacy movie is a sophisticated hint at how adverts may be pitching to us in the future–with higher value user experiences prized above the mere eyeballs-on-ads metric that current web ads use.

Until now iAds have been the providence of Apple itself and a select group of advertisers, a move which has caused creative tensions. But Apples just revealed the iAd Producer platform which should change all that: Its a sophisticated suite of code that lets advertisers build their own iAd experiences. Glancing at the screenshots, it seems Producer comes with Apples traditional high design ethic even in its simple interfaces, and the emphasis is definitely on ease of use. As Apples blurb puts it “iAd Producer makes it easy for you to design and assemble high-impact interactive content.” It “automatically manages the HMLT5, CSS3 and JavaScript behind your iAd” so that “creating beautiful, motion-rich iAd content” is as simple as “point and click.” Theres also a package of clever JavaScript editing and debugging code for “advanced developers” so Apples trying to have all the bases covered.

iAd producer is a necessary part of Apples plan, of course–it cant go on curating each and every iAd at executive team level forever if it wants to turn it into a multi-billion dollar business. But its also the latest play in Apples battle against Adobe. Remember this? It started as a spat over Flashs inefficiencies on Mac OS X, turned into a pitched battle in the press about iOS ditching Flash which even garnered government attention and then fizzled into a war of words as neither side was prepared to move on the matter. Now a significant proportion of web video is in Apple-friendly format, driven by the wild successes of the iOS devices, but it doesnt seem to have hurt Adobe too much as the companys just posted a record-breaking profit.

Now theres iAd, designed to eat some of Adobes lunch, since Adobes creative software packages are often used to craft simple and rich-media online adverts. And Adobes already actively promoting its own digital publishing suite, which includes a system for outputting magazine-style layouts to iPad.

But HTML5 is at the heart of iAd Producer, and it therefore represents another swipe at Adobes Flash technology–Apple is, in comparison to Adobes proprietary systems, promoting iAd as “standards-based web development.

“The question is, will this hurt Adobes business, or at least help Apple capture significant chunks of the online ad business? Its tricky, but given Adobes recent financial success it would seem insulated against Apples onslaught–at least for now, particularly since iAd is such a young system. But with many commenters expecting the iPad, boosted by the imminent iPad 2, to dominate the tablet market until 2012, and with the iPhone still surging in sales around the world, Apple is certain to convert some of its iAd efforts into serious cash. If it can pull off a de facto change of web tech from Flash to HTML5 at the same time, then its all the better.

via Apple Launches iAd Producer Pack to Steal Adobes Business | Fast Company.

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — The recession officially ended in June 2009, and the media business began a modest recovery in first-half 2010.

Ad Age Annual 2011

Key stats and rankings from Ad Age DataCenter reports

Reported revenue for the nation’s top media firms climbed 6.1% in the first six months of 2010, according to Ad Age’s analysis. U.S. media employment has added 4,600 jobs since hitting its downturn nadir in May 2010.

Measured-media spending turned north in first-quarter 2010, marking the first year-over-year quarterly gain since first-quarter 2008, according to WPP’s Kantar Media.

What a far cry from 2009, when net U.S. media revenue for the 100 Leading Media Companies fell for the first time since Ad Age began ranking media firms in 1981.

Media 100′s decline in 2009 revenue — 3.8% — would have been far worse were it not for cable. Video and broadband providers — cable systems, satellite, telecoms — managed a 4.3% revenue gain in 2009, reflecting their ability to hike prices and upsell consumers on premium broadband and video services.

Media revenue held up comparatively well during the recession because of the diversity of revenue sources. Subscriptions and fees, for example, fared better than advertising.

The year just ending marked a sea change: The internet (including mobile) passed newspapers in 2010 U.S. ad revenue, making the internet the second-largest ad medium behind TV, according to Interpublic Group of Cos.’ MagnaGlobal.

So just how rough was the media recession? Remarkably, 14 members of the Media 100 went through bankruptcy reorganization in 2009 and 2010, with creditors trading debt for equity.

The latest three filed for Chapter 11 in November 2010: American Media (National Enquirer, Shape, Star); Local Insight Media Holdings, the third major U.S. yellow-pages publisher to go through a recent bankruptcy; and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a storied movie studio swamped by debt.

via Advertising: Internet Is New No. 2 Ad Medium – Advertising Age – News.

If you live in San Francisco, you may have noticed the conspicuous arrival of 72-inch interactive LED screens at your neighborhood bus stop. And if you have taken the time to play with them, you may also have noticed that the screens allow you to play games against people waiting at other bus stops in the city. It’s all part of Yahoo’s Bus Stop Derby, a massive marketing campaign for the company’s mobile apps.

The Bus Stop Derby, produced in partnership with Clear Channel, began this past November with 20 interactive screens scattered across select city bus stops. Most of the bus stops are downtown, but users can represent their neighborhood by selecting it on the screen and playing jumbo-sized version of Yahoo’s mobile games against other bus stop lingerers. Games include Chatter Scatter, Snap Happy, and Sport-a-Pult.

So far, North Beach is winning with 160,750 points, and the Mission is trailing close behind with 143,175 points. Neighborhoods can continue to rack up points until the games end on January 28. The winning neighborhood will score a concert from the band OK Go!

But Yahoo has much more in mind than just tallying up points.

“We’re going to evaluate [the Derby] based on backend data–how many mobile apps were downloaded in the area, participation, and enthusiasm,” says Penny Baldwin, Yahoo’s Senior Vice President of Integrated Marketing and Brand Management. “It’s going really well. Over 60,000 people have produced over a million points of gameplay.”

If all continues to go well, Yahoo hopes to roll out similar interactive touchscreen ads across the country. But in the end, it’s all about the numbers, Baldwin says. “We’ll march it out across the nation if it’s proven effective for our business impact.”

via Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby Pits San Francisco Neighborhoods Against Each Other | Fast Company.

A/B testing isn’t a buzz term. A lot of savvy marketers and designs are using it right now to gain insight into visitor behavior and to increase conversion rate. And yet A/B testing is still not as common as such Internet marketing subjects as SEO, Web analytics and usability. People just aren’t as aware of it. They don’t completely understand what it is or how it could benefit them or how they should use it. This article is meant to be the best guide you will ever need for A/B testing.

What Is A/B Testing?

At its core, A/B testing is exactly what it sounds like: you have two versions of an element A and B and a metric that defines success. To determine which version is better, you subject both versions to experimentation simultaneously. In the end, you measure which version was more successful and select that version for real-world use.This is similar to the experiments you did in Science 101. Remember the experiment in which you tested various substances to see which supports plant growth and which suppresses it. At different intervals, you measured the growth of plants as they were subjected to different conditions, and in the end you tallied the increase in height of the different plants.

Complete article here: The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing – Smashing Magazine.

The smartphone market may start to copy the e-reader’s “race to the bottom” business model next year, with commoditization leading to low profits. The one exception: the iPhone.

Needham & Company’s Charlie Wolf noted to his investors today that the smartphone market is at a critical point at the moment, driven by the flood of Android devices and the recent arrival of Windows Phone 7. Wolf feels the Windows Phone 7 will gain greater marketshare in 2011, at the expense of Android. As he says, Android moved “into a vacuum created by the implosion of Windows Mobile” a few years back, and Microsoft has a long history of winning marketshare with late-arriving products.

Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 on several handsets at once. Android smartphones are available from a huge list of makers, each with subtle differences, offering different power and performance at different price points–which suggests that the Google platform will become horribly fragmented.

Ultimately, says Wolf, “commoditization, accompanied by deteriorating prices and gross margins appears inevitable for licensees of the Android and Windows Phone 7 operating systems.”

This argument is something we’ve discussed before in relation to e-readers. While Amazon led the way into this new market with the Kindle, a host of other makers arrived and the price of e-readers quickly tumbled in a race to the bottom. The fast followers tended not to have as powerful an ecosystem as Amazon’s, though in some cases their technology may be better. Amazon has failed to radically innovate the Kindle, which now finds itself facing strong competition from the iPad. 2011 may see the e-reader quickly relegated to fringe-device status.

Wolf’s prediction for the smartphone business is similar, with one important difference: He thinks Apple may be the “last man standing” in the profitable smartphone game. Apple has continually innovated the iPhone since its arrival, and has made no effort to shift its premium device status (though it has kept last-generation technology on sale to entice lower-budget consumers).

As a result, the iPhone’s marketshare has remained pretty stable for nearly two years, despite the sudden rush of Android and other competitors like Palm OS. With the “growing brand equity” and supposed Verizon iPhone in 2011, Apple could well stand firm while everyone else scrambles to compete with each other.

To read more news on this, and similar stuff, keep up with my updates by following me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

via Analyst: Smartphones in “Race to the Bottom,” Except for Apple | Fast Company.