It took Draw Something just five weeks from launch to land a recommendation by Miley Cyrus on Twitter, sending the mobile game into orbit and racking up more than 50 million downloads.
Zynga was impressed and acquired the app’s developer OMGPOP for $180m last month, adding the title to its portfolio to join the likes of Facebook favourites Farmville and Cityville. Read More
“Sorry, thatʼs it for mobile apps. It’ll only last about three more years, or less,” I said to a client who was consulting my company on developing new mobile apps. I didnʼt mean to turn them down on this new business opportunity, nor did I want to cool off their fleeting passion to be part of the heated fad of apps-building.
My only intention was to stop them from spending a fortune on building apps that will not give them any ROI from their very limited marketing budget. Read More
A few weeks back everyone was talking about Highlight. A great networking tool that seems to have been the most talked about app at SXSW. (More on that later)
I’ve been playing with some Social Networking apps for a while and wanted to give some thoughts and show you some of the stand out ones.
Facebook’s Timeline feature has the potential to be as dramatic a change to the network as when the company controversially launched the now irreplaceable news feed. Unsurprisingly, brands are determined to cash in. There is quite a variety of companies using these apps too, it’s not just social networks and newspapers. Brands as diverse as Vevo, Foursquare, Nike, The Onion, and Pinterest have all launched new Timeline apps at South by South West in Austin, Texas.
Techcrunch point out that the data from the apps is of huge value to advertisers, and therefore Facebook. The data is structured, so instead of knowing the things that people merely ‘Like’, which is not always an accurate reflection of preferences or actions, these apps store what you have actually watched, done, or eaten.
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It goes without saying that social and digital media are now one of the main business channels available to us as marketers. But one of the questions we are all asking is how do we use these platforms to not only gain trust from our fans but to convert them into advocates?
In the last year usage of social media has sky rocketed. In fact it is estimated that one in every nine people in the world is using Facebook, with the average user spending 15 hours and 33 minutes a month on the site. Twitter has also seen massive growth and now averages 190 million tweets per day. Read More
You won’t need your wallet to go shopping on UK high streets in 2016, according to a new report by PayPal.
Yup, in four year’s time, UK shoppers will be able to use their mobile phones to pay for things with digital money rather than cash or cards.
If fact, it’s already being done. The report follows the launch of Pizza Express’s iPhone app, which allows diners in the UK to pay their bill at their table using their smartphone. Read More
For those keeping track at home, the value of a Facebook fan can vary wildly— depending on who you’re asking. It has been put as high as $136 a head, to $3.60 (as I blogged last year) or well according to some it is zilch.
I like Jim Edwards from Business Insider’s take on it. He said calculating the ‘value’ of a Facebook fan to an advertiser has become the social media equivalent of asking “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
Two of world’s biggest corporations have launched a joint web-venture that will allow users to search store-specific promotions across Walmart’s 3,500+ US retail locations through a customizable Facebook app.
Walmart’s 9.4m Facebook fans will be able to search the store nearest them and find deals on everything from LED TVs to Halloween candy. Promotions will be at store-level, so local events will dictate “rollback alerts” sent to app users, from football matches to inclement weather. Read More
Here’s some research that throws up a dilemma: consumers are more likely to be interested in brands that have good apps. But it’s really hard for app makers to make their apps ‘discoverable’.
GetJar: infographic
The research was carried out by an app store called GetJar, so is suitably pro-app and pro-Android app, to boot.
Is it that time already? Yesterday, Gartner said that mobile application revenue will nearly triple in 2011, to $15.1bn ($5.2bn last year) and much of that growth will come from 18 billion app downloads 60,000 of which are designed for the Apple iPad, which has seen sales beat expectations.
The iPad, almost a year old now, had racked up sales of almost 15 million (14.8 million by the end of 2010) and about 7.33 million of those sales came in December. That growth is set to rocket this year as this infographic shows. Read More
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