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Smaato Mobile Advertising Award 2010! VC Partners and Nominees shortlist 2010 announced

SMAATO — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:45:36 +0000

Smaato Inc., the leading mobile ad optimizer and mobile advertising company, is delighted to announce the VC partners and first set of nominees for the Smaato Mobile Advertising Award 2010. Publishers have time until end of day, August 20, to add their cool app or website to the growing list at www.smaato.com/award.

Frank Boehnke (Wellington), Tim Chang (Norvest Ventures), Niall Davis (aeris CAPITAL), Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), Jörg Sievert (SAP Ventures) and Frédéric Veyssière (Innovacom) will meet the Smaato Award winner.

Here is a first look at some of the nominated mobile apps and websites from leading companies:

4Square Labs, AccuRadio, AccuWeather.com, aka-aki, Aloqa, AroundMe, audioBoo, Barcode Scanner, Brightkite, Bubble, Bump, Buzzd, bWeather, Cellfire Grocery Coupons, City Sense, Compass, cooliris, delivr.com, Doodle Jump, eBay Mobile, eBuddy Messenger, Evernote, Facebook, Fandango Movies, FishLabs, Flirtomatic, Foursquare, Fring, Google Sky Map, Gypsii, Handmark Pocket Express, iCarly: Sam’s Remote Lite, ICQ, iheartradio, imeem Mobile, itsmy, Jumbuck, Kyte, Last.fm, Layar Reality Browser, Liquid Air Labs, Lufthansa, MapQuest 4 Mobile, Meebo IM, Mobiluck, moblr, Moco Space, moTweets, My Tracks, NearbyNow, Nimbuzz, NYTimes, Orbster, pageonce, PandaHome, Pandora Radio, Qeep, Qik Video Camera, RadioTime, RjDj, Rummble, Seesmic for Twitter, Shake, Shazam, Sherpa, Shozu, Skyfire Mobile, SMS2.0, Smule, SPB Mobile Software, Spotify, Squace, Tonchidot, TuneWiki, TV.com, virtual, Twidroid for Twitter, Twikini, unlike networks, USA TODAY, Venista m-Joy, Waze, The Weather Channel, Worldmate, Yelp, YomoMedia.

“Since the success of last year’s Smaato Award, the mobile market has truly blossomed with innovative apps and websites. The introduction of Apple’s iPad and the explosion of Android have given developers further scope and opportunity for innovation and the nominations we’ve had so far are a testament to this. It’s going to be an extremely tough job trying to pick the finalists for each category, let alone an overall winner!”, stated Ragnar Kruse, CEO & Co-Founder of Smaato.

The Smaato Award jury members are:

Andy Favell (mobiThinking), Bena Roberts (GoMoNews), Carlo Longino (WIP Mobile Jam), David Murphy (Mobile Marketing), Derek Kerton (Kerton Group), Frederic Lardinois (ReadWriteWeb), Giselle Tsirulnik (Mobile Marketer), Heike Scholz (Mobile Zeitgeist), James Cameron (Camerjam), Jim Cook (MobiAdNews), Kei Shimada (Infinita, JP), Lubna Dajani (Mobile Monday, NYC), Mark Wächter (Mobile Monday Germany & MMA), Matthäus Krzykowski (VentureBeat), Matthew Snyder (ADObjects), Michelle Sklar (bnetTV), Peggy Anne Salz (MSearchGroove), Ragnar Kruse (Smaato), Rudy De Waele (dotOpen/mTrends), Tim Green (Mobile Entertainment).

Read the entire PR here.

Smaato @SXSW 2010 – Refreshing Spring Break for Mobile Marketers

SMAATO — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:55:31 +0000

Reported by Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato Inc.

Coming down to Austin Texas in the middle of March is a great break from the usual trade shows – and especially the weather lately in New York, Europe or the Valley.
Greeted by a refreshing 77° F (25° C) the City of Austin is kind to its regular and newbie visitors and reveals an upbeat, young and vivid scene of creativity. The SXSW (South-by-South-West, or “South-by” for the regulars) festival for interactivity was started 13 years ago – added to the foremost music and film festival founded 24 years ago.

This year, 14.000 people flocked to Austin for a long weekend with a conference program running from Friday to Tuesday in the Convention Center plus adjacent hotels and music venues. Social Media is the overarching umbrella and is examined in lots of parallel tracks of panels and keynotes. Lots of online and mobile’s leading CEO’s and founders are present and share their visions and new product releases on stage with their peers.

Is Twitter Old School?

Twitter CEO Evan Williams officially announced the highly anticipated Twitter ad platform in a chat on stage by with Omair Haigue, who is the head of the Havas Media Lab. That did not go well with the real-time twitter community in the Ballroom and the additionally set up simulcast room – many left early.

The @anywhere named ad platform was presented with a short video and with underwhelming features. It does serve a purpose of make life easier for publishers and authors to set up “follow me” buttons on websites that we know already from Facebook. In addition a keyword feature has been introduced, where websites can set up links to twitter accounts of editors, brands or trending topics. There was no involvement of any big brand marketers presented – only some known publishers that will set these links up on their side. Those include the New York Times, CNN, Yahoo and the Huffington Post – there was no mobile screen and no mobile marketing initiative present, other than the availability of location published with every tweet. Within the hour 2.500 people signed up to follow @anywhere.

A much more energetic keynote was presented by New York Times bestseller Gary Vaynerchuk, Author of “Crush it”) as he emphasized heavily that brands need to open up and engage via twitter and social media with their target group and have authentic conversations. “Every meaningful conversation will lead to sales and a loyal brand community,” he proclaimed. When he said “Big brands don’t get it, a marketing person from P&G protested heavily – but Gary V. made clear that hiring agencies to do the dialog might not be the ideal way, but sometime necessary.

Training in-house teams to get involved on all levels will make big companies fitter for a much more educated and knowledgeable customer base that have a clear “bull shit detector” to filter out plain marketing messages from meaningful invitations to engage and provide feedback.

Geo Apps – the cool kids on the block

As anticipated the new rock stars of mobile location based apps made a big splash and were working the panels and presentations: foursquare (of New York) and Austin based Gowalla. They where even going head to head in party mode on Monday night – out doing their rivals with bigger, better events. The 13th annual SXSW Web Awards, sponsored by Adobe, rewarded Gowalla over Fourquare.

Foursquare founder NN spoke on a panel and emphasized, that mobile advertising in geo-apps is happening and evolving into local offers and targeted values to people checking into a new location, e.g. restaurants, businesses or event venues. Businesses can profit from the micro feeds of the foursquare crowd through viral marketing as word of mouth is getting blended with conversational, branded messages.

A new start-up entered the fray with an official launch at SXSW: stickybits based in New York and founded by Seth Goldstein is a pioneer in social media in the online space – and the founder and Chairman of Social Media Inc. – one of the fastest growing ad platforms for the Facebook platform. Now, he is at it in the mobile space: stickybits is a crossover of foursquare and Flickr – all around mobile barcodes. The interesting concept got of to a great start as SXSW visitors added coments, pictures and videos to provided barcode stickers attached to name tags and products such as coke cans and energy bars.

Big brands come out and play with social media

In a big local presence, some big brands came out to Austin and engaged in branded conversations with their audience and the local community of the festival.
Pepsi organized a clever initiative that invited the people to vote for one of three charities with twittering about the selected initiative by a specific hashtag. Refresh Pepsi provided then the “Refresh Zeitgeist” on lots of flat screens locally and online to show what is going on locally. In included maps of happening locations, quotes and tweets that related to SXSW and the campaign. The Pepsi Refresh Project is a groundbreaking effort to foster innovation in social good, and will award more than $20 million this year to fund great ideas that “refresh the world”.

Other brands onsite included Miller Light, AOL, GM and Microsoft among others. The expo floor has a focus mainly on tools for creativity and was a showcase of new startups and creative agencies to showcase their product or service.

Big telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent featured a developer and publisher lounge to present a solution of total access open API bundles. The set of technologies enables developers much faster to monetize services provided by operators (like advertising, virtual goods, anonymous demographic data, text messaging) within their app. Smaato was selected to be the mobile ad platform for the launch, other partners included Motally(analytics) and Billing Revolution (payments).

What can Marketers learn from this leading Interactive Festival?

Spending a few days in the atmosphere of this busting college town with all the start-up and social media energy one can only wonder how fast the mobile marketing train is coming out of the gates. This hotbed of alpha geeks, leading bloggers and influencers of old school media id the breeding ground for a new generation of creative ideas, discerning audiences that no longer want to be target groups.

If mobile marketers what to stand out from the crowd, find the engaging consumers that can spread the word about new products and services, then brands need to start digging deeper into new formats of mobile engagement and messaging.

Pure banner ads are challenged to add value to geo-location apps, social media and user generated news sites. Especially the hyper local advertising to targeted audiences of one on this personal device needs new ways to evolve – fast.

Mobile Marketer Daily MWC News – Reported by Smaato CMO

SMAATO — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:46:00 +0000

DAY 1
“Nearly 50.000 visitors are expected to visit the GSM Association’s Mobile World Congress and Expo with 1,300 exhibitors spread across 130,000 square meters. It was raining yesterday, but I am sure everyone is relieved to be out of the snow in for a couple of days.

The much anticipated App Planet, having evoked a fantasy of a real huge scene event, is hosting real cool exhibitors. But the physical architecture of the “planet” is not more than standard fair boxes – beg your pardon, booths. Hall 7 is where mobile advertising networks such as AdMob, Mojiva and Smaato are situated, as well as Skype, serving the best coffee at MWC by far.

The Mobile Premier Awards (twitter tag: #mpa10) were presented yesterday by Rudy deWaele and hosted by dotopen in the wonderful venue, Palau de la Musica.

It was the fifth time the awards were hosted at MWC in Barcelona.

In total, eleven awards were presented in a five-hour ceremony in seven categories: entertainment, innovation – early stage startup, female entrepreneurship, marketing, innovation – emerging startup, user experience and social change. (…)”

Read the entire article at MobileMarketer

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DAY 2
Many exciting things happened yesterday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“Queen Rania of Jordan explained in her amazing keynote how the mobile industry can contribute to make this world better, providing education for everyone.

Her Majesty introduced 1GOAL, a global campaign she is chairing with support of singer Bono, President Clinton and the FIFA for the Soccer World Cup 2010 in South Africa.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Mobile First!
The afternoon keynote of Google CEO Eric Schmidt was titled “Mobile First” and transmitted live on http://www.mobileworldlive.com.

Google is now shipping 60,000 Android phones per day, Mr. Schmidt said. He said cloud computing was going to be key Google’s future.

Mr. Schmidt also announced that Google is working on new technology to improve security and enhance authentication to better protect data. He concluded his session by saying, “Mobile is pretty much the answer on everything,” announcing a major shift in strategy.

Puma launches solar-powered smartphone
Global sports marketer Puma yesterday issued a branded phone. The Puma Phone is the first phone designed to reflect the values of a global brand from the inside out.(…)”

Read the entire article at MobileMarketer

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DAY 3
“The Android developer community seemed to have tripled within hours yesterday at Mobile World Congress. When rumors spread that Google was giving away Nexus One phones for free, hundreds of businessmen pulled their pride aside for a moment and stood in line for an entire hour and a half. Why? Well, just to attend an Android developer session.

And why would non-developers want to attend such a session? The answer was easy. Because at the end of the session, each attendee got a brand-new Nexus One phone – or Motorola Droid, if you asked for it- for free. Google gave away 1,000 Nexus One phones in ten sessions. A clever and focused way to create buzz with the right people.

The Android-phone giveaway made waves across the hall, where Sony Ericsson also showed off new devices and hosted its developer day with creative workshops.

Meanwhile, GSM Association CEO Rob Conway said in his opening speech that the demand grows constantly while innovation continues to surprise.

Actor Stephen Fry, a known technophile, echoed Feb. 16’s words of Queen Rania of Jordan, calling this the “best time in history to care about how we share and communicate.”

Mr. Fry introduced the GSMA awards with a summary of the happenings in the mobile world.

“What does an Italian say when using a Samsung phone running Microsoft OS?” he asked. “Bada bing!”(…)”

Read the entire article at MobileMarketer

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DAY 4
“The Mobile World Congress 2010 closed its doors with a big fanfare about mobile applications and a total of 49,000 visitors from 200-plus countries. An upbeat industry gathering, sunshine in the end – and from where I sit, we are right in the middle of the high-tech tornado of a hyper growth mobile market.

The last day of the show found strong competition in a sunny and warm spring day, and some show visitors might have preferred the sun’s glare over the brightest AMOLED display in Samsung’s Wave, exposed in Hall 8. Not only competing with the spring light, the Samsung Wave and the new Windows phone, Motorola Blur and others should not be underestimated as major game-changers in mobile advertising.

You need no app for that – oops, where can I place my banner?
One major challenge comes from the industry’s stronger focus on user experience, which leads to a decline in the usage of applications for everything.

Personal status updates, pictures and messaging from various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and MSN are converging into so-called social hubs where all of these updates are being placed around the user’s contacts, instead of being scattered across several applications. (…)”

Read the entire article at MobileMarketer

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SEE ALSO GOMONEWS BLENDER PHOTOS AT SMAATO FACEBOOK PAGE HERE.

“How many apps do you think will hit the app stores in 2010?” Smaato Facebook Fans Answers

SMAATO — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:38:04 +0000

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Smaato Mobile Advertising Award 2010! VC Partners and Nominees shortlist 2010 announced

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