brand-e

By Simon Fuller. The increased take-up of smartphones is resulting in a slew of services utilising a user’s location to provide info or make recommendations. It’s no surprise that brands are interested in how these location-based gizmos can help them, and with plenty of seemingly similar services out there – Foursquare, Gowalla, etc – there’s a lot of choice.

iPhone and iPad users are trending young and are high earners, according to Nielsen Company mobile research.
Only about 15% of iPad users are more than 56 years of age, compared to one thirds of all mobile subscribers. And affluent 25 to 36 year-olds are fertile ground for Apple products – around 20% of mobile subs report earning more than $100,000, but almost 40% of iPad owners fall into that category.

Welcome to the ‘social magazine’. It goes by the name of Flipboard, it lives on the iPad, and it brings print media layout to social media. That means no more scrolling through long lists of posts and links, nor jumping between websites, Flipboard says.
In short, it connects to users’ social media accounts — primarily Facebook and Twitter – grabs the information and puts it all together to look like a magazine.
“With over 1 billion messages posted every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web,” says Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO.

Smartphones, and iPhones in particular, are leading advertisers to make big investments in mobile advertising, while close to one-third of advertisers say that mobile is the focus of their interactive spend, according to the STRATA quarterly survey of major US ad firms.
Respondents say almost 90% of their clients are interested in advertising on the iPhone, way ahead of the BlackBerry and the Droid. The iPad ranks lower than all three with only 26% interested in the device for their marketing.

Don’t repurpose smartphone or web creative for in-app iPad marketing. And don’t overload landing pages either. But do build mobile-specific landing pages for in-app ad campaigns.
It’s all about best practice in tablet advertising, as advocated by the IAB in the US in its Prevailing Mobile In-Application Advertising Formats report, which is full of sound advice.
There’s the practical, for instance. “A number of publishers have described scenarios where advertisers have launched in-app ads that link through to pre-existing websites that require Flash to view or navigate,” says the report.

By Hugh Jordan. England’s woeful performance in the World Cup so far is enough to turn anyone to drink. Luckily, the team at tech agency Caffeinehit are on hand to help, having designed a real-time drinking game iPhone app for World Cup games.
So, how does Drinking World Cup work?
“There are set forfeits for things like corners, free kicks, cards and penalties,” says Andy Ashburner, part of the Caffeine Hit team which developed the app. “And there are additional forfeits for unexpected real-time events.”