Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
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mSpot stores your music* in the cloud, makes it available anywhere**
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Whoa there, vaquero -- don't get too excited just yet. As with just about every other gratis backup service on the web, there's a catch you should know about with mSpot's latest endeavor. The free limit is right around 2GB (exact size is TBD), so if you've got more than a second generation iPod's worth of audio, this here service will only serve as a tease. For those who fall under that threshold, there's plenty to love, and if you're down for ponying up, you'll be able to secure 10GB for $2.99 per month or 20GB for $4.99 per month. Launched today at Google I/O, this "freemium" music cloud service essentially syncs your entire music library (either in iTunes or a user-designated arrangement of folders) with mSpot's servers -- provided your library is less than 20GB, of course -- and then makes it available anywhere. Phones and other computers should have no issue tapping in (though only Android will be supported out of the gate), and the app itself runs quietly in the background in order to check for new additions / subtractions and mirror said changes in your online library. For now, the service is available by invitation only through mspot.com, with public availability slated for next month. Size limits aside, the service worked well for us in our limited testing, though that first 20GB upload is a real pain over Time Warner Cable's obviously capped Road Runner internet. Oh, and if you're bummed about not being guaranteed an invite today, you shouldn't be. Hit that source link and enter "engadget" as the password -- the first 500 get immediate access, but once they're gone, they're gone. *20GB tops, buster!
**Only on Android, Macs and PCs at first, chief!
Continue reading mSpot stores your music* in the cloud, makes it available anywhere**
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Mocapay Chosen To Bring Mass Mobile Marketing To New York Restaurants
The NYSRA will leverage the embedded marketing engine within Mocapay’s unique mobile platform to generate and distribute targeted mobile marketing campaigns for the New York City Chapter, and to inform its members about pertinent legislative issues, industry news, seminar and event updates and additional relevant information.
Mocapay will also provide detailed campaign analytics including full customization of campaigns and promotions through an organization-specific dashboard. The dashboard platform provides tools that will allow the NYSRA to build targeted campaigns and monitor real-time feedback to help track the effectiveness of specific campaigns.
Probably most important to the partnership is Mocapay’s ability to offer the NYSRA the only mobile solution in the marketplace that enables a secure, patented mobile payments solution. Mocapay offers its end-to-end mobile platform solution to merchant issuers of closed-loop loyalty, gift, and private-label credit, as well as financial institutions that issue open-loop prepaid, debit, and credit.
“Mobile is becoming one of the restaurant industry’s more effective tools to communicate with customers and drive traffic to restaurants,” said Andrew Rigie, director of operations, Greater New York City Chapters, NYSRA. “Our relationship with Mocapay reinforces the trend the industry is seeing regarding the need to adopt and integrate mobile technologies including mobile marketing campaigns to support customer acquisition and retention.”
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Velti Files For $200M IPO To Advance Mobile Marketing Technology
In a move that would mark the first IPO from a sole mobile marketing provider in the U.S., Velti plans to use the net proceeds to repay its outstanding indebtedness and to fund its strategic plan for global expansion. The company also plans to bolster its newly released mGage platform.
Velti has been trading on the AIM stock exchange in London for four years now, and the company said it expects to trade under the symbol VELT on the NASDAQ. The company has been posting impressive revenue numbers as well, indicating in the filing that its annual revenue has grown to $90 million in 2009, a year-over-year increase of 45 percent from $62 million in 2008.
“We believe our integrated, easy-to-use, end-to-end platform is the most extensive mobile marketing and advertising campaign management platform in the industry,” said Velti in the F-1 form filed with the SEC. ”Our platform further enables brands, advertising agencies, mobile operators and media companies to plan, execute, monitor and measure mobile marketing and advertising campaigns in real time throughout the campaign lifecycle.”
Velti has worked hard to integrate its platform into the heart of the mobile value-chain which lies with mobile operators. The company says 14 out of the top 20 global mobile operators are using its platform, with over 450 total brands, agencies and carriers using its technology in 35 countries.
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Google Takes On Mobile Location & Social, Launches Latitude API
Since the beginning, Latitude has failed to catch on with users due to the fact that it hasn’t quite catered to what most users want in an LBS service- which primarily means the ability to “check-in” and other social functions made popular by the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown.
With its new API, Google can now allow third-party developers to come up with their own apps that take advantage of Google’s immense location services- which could end up spelling trouble for similar startups that have had to build their location database from the ground-up.
As many have noted, an inhibiting factor to Google Latitude since the beginning is the fact that it’s continuously updating a user’s location instead of basing it around the concept of checking-in, which users (and developers) seem to be much more keen on. Through the new API, Google allows this to change if a developers wants it to.
“We’ve also learned that making your phone’s continuous location available in the background is tricky to do accurately and efficiently — just imagine your phone’s battery life if several apps were continuously getting your location in different ways,” Google explained in a post on the matter. “With this in mind, we built a free and open Latitude API that lets the third-party developers you choose start using your updated location in new ways without reinventing the wheel.”
What’s interesting is that Google is using the new Google Places API that assigns IDs to individual places, which positions itself perfectly for check-ins. As TechCrunch notes, this could be an early indication that Google is for building a unified place database that so many have hoped for.
It’s apparent that Google has more up its sleeve in the world of mobile location and social networking, as it definitely won’t tread lightly once it gets the ball rolling. It should be interesting to watch what happens, that’s for sure. As a glimpse into what Google envisions for its new Latitude API, it gave some pretty cool examples during the announcement;
- Thermostats that turn on and off automatically when you’re driving towards or away from home.
- Traffic that send alerts if there’s heavy traffic ahead of you or on a route you usually take based on your location history
- Your credit card accounts to alert you of potential fraud when a purchase is made far from where you actually are.
- Photo albums so your vacation photos appear on a map at all the places you visited based on your location history.
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Mobile Local Search Users to Reach Almost 1.5bn by 2014, According To Juniper
Juniper attributes much of its projection to the advancement of GPS technology in not only smartphones, but in feature phones as well. “While technical advances in handset screens, user interfaces, processors, memory and graphics handling technologies had previously contributed to the launch of high spec, but relatively high cost, mobile devices from leading vendors, their features – including GPS – were gradually migrating into mass market devices,” the report states. “At the same time, GPS unit prices and form factors had improved considerably making integrated GPS much more cost effective and design friendly.”
The debate between the mobile Web and mobile apps come into play as well, as Juniper predicts that while browser-based services will dominate the local search market, applications purchased via app stores will take a growing portion of the information services market, particularly template apps providing city guides and entertainment guides.
“The sharing culture of Web 2.0 is increasingly shaping the way many location based services and location enabled apps develop,” explained Dr Windsor Holden, author of the report. “Social networking application usage has continued to grow at an explosive rate, while mobile driven apps such as Loopt and Brightkite have extended the Web 2.0 concept further with the introduction of geotagged content”.
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Google TV is on The Way
Never a stranger to grand ambitions, Google may be ready to outdo itself.
It’s been formally announced that Google is teaming with Intel and Sony to create Google TV, a bold effort to integrate its Android software into TVs, Blu-ray players, and a Google TV-top box simply called a “Buddy Box.”
If it sounds like an endeavor aimed squarely at Apple TV, you would be correct.
Google TV, however, is poised and ready for battle with entities beyond Apple. In many ways, Google is taking on the cable and broadcast television industries with a new – and potentially revolutionary – effort that will link the Internet with televisions in a manner never before seen in the digital age.
“With Google TV, consumers will now be able to search and watch an expanded universe of content available from a variety of sources including TV providers, the web, their personal content libraries, and mobile applications,” Google gushed in a statement about the launch.
“The Google TV experience is complemented by the ability to watch streaming video from leading content platforms, including Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, and YouTube. Google TV will also have the capability to run apps from the Android Market.”
The arrival of Google TV could be a significant development in both the worlds of entertainment and advertising, as content providers and mobile marketers must now challenge themselves to address a new way in which millions of users may soon absorb content.
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