NextWidgets Blog » Mobile

Advertising industry reaction to iAds

alexsavic — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 07:54:19 +0000

Some very interesting comments by Marc Ruxin, head of innovation at Universal McCann, on Apple’s new iAds advertising system found over on Beet.tv. Probably just like everyone in the mobile advertising industry, Marc wonders about the openness of the iAds system and to what extent competitive systems will be allowed to emerge. What is great for NextWidgets is that it seems that through the iAds announcement, more and more people within the advertising industry are coming to the conclusion that dispaly ads are not effective in their current form, with “abysmally low click-through, message recall and purchase intent rates” and that the solution, once isolated and simplified, is in “giving the consumer the best (ad) experience without interrupting the content experience the user has selected”. That’s spot-on ! Marc goes on to say that “the ability to have an ad experience that isn’t disruptive to content – that’s the right answer.” We couldn’t agree more, not just for mobile apps, but for web advertising also.

And here a few figures posted by TheNextWeb on the success of iAds for one developer over traditional mobile advertising. Looks like that in-app interaction really is model really is more interesting for consumers.

eBay CEO discusses multi-device shopping

alexsavic — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:33:52 +0000

A good explenation by eBay CEO John Donahoe on how consumers are adapting usage patterns to a mobile, mutli-device world. Interesting times ahead for e-commerce:

Awesome Apple tablet interface concept

alexsavic — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 07:29:43 +0000

Here is a great concept demo for the Apple tablet which seems to show an advanced e-commerce application in action. Looks awesome.

Competition heats up between Amazon and PayPal for mobile payments

alexsavic — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:19:32 +0000

Payment processing integration is one of the most important aspects of e-commerce application development because a smooth checkout process can make all the difference in decreasing the number of ‘abandoned carts’. Luckily things have steadily been improving as companies like PayPal and Amazon have injected innovation into the market with products like PayFlow Pro and Flexible Payments respectively.

Over the past weeks the battle for becoming the premium payments processing provider entered the next round with Amazon announcing the launch of Mobile Payments Service and PayPal launching PayPal X. The importance of both of these products is significant for everyone, the developer community, consumers and ultimately the two companies themselves. This fun report by The Next Web shows just how committed PayPal seems to be to the project.

Although these services will surely be successful and we’ll explore how we can best integrate both into NextWidgets, the ultimate winners in mobile payments may be the mobile carriers themselves. There is nothing easier and cheaper than being able to have a purchase charged straight to your mobile monthly bill. Carriers such as Vodafone and Swisscom are already experimenting in this direction.

Amongst these giants, there are also smaller companies offering innovative services. Zong has been pioneering the possibilities of making payments through the mobile phone for years, having created the first self-service solution for bloggers to charge for web content through mobile phones.

From a developers perspective, it becomes rather tricky to decide which services are best implemented in which markets and allocating resources accordingly, but overall the pace of change is a very positive thing for consumers who will enjoy the benefits of streamlined shopping through numerous mobile payment options.