We’ve long looked at the online-offline gap. This comes down to the challenge in connecting the dots between increasing levels of online research and the sheer volume of offline spending (95 percent of U.S. retail). This is ROBO: research online to buy offline.

Now we’re not only seeing things like retail inventory feeds (i.e., Milo), mobile shopping and payments start to connect those dots, but they’re even starting to reverse the flow. In other words, flipping ROBO on its head: using offline research to facilitate online buying.

This is also known as “showrooming,” essentually using physical stores as showrooms for product research before buying from a more price-competetive online marketplace like Amazon. And of course smartphones, shopping apps, and cameras (read: barcode scanners) empower this.

This will be an ongoing area of research and analysis in the days to come. In the meantime, you can check out my column over at Street Fight, which introduces and starts to bat around the concept. Read some below and stay tuned for much more to come on this topic.

In the ever expanding universe of tech & media parlance, we’ve recently been given our newest term: ‘showrooming.’ Tied to the emergence of smartphones and shopping apps, it refers to the act of using local stores as showrooms for more price-competitive online purchases.

What’s interesting is that it essentially reverses the ‘research online to buy offline’ (ROBO) phenomenon, we’ve been talking about for years. Just as e-commerce players were relegated to research tools under ROBO, the tables have now turned on their offline counterparts.

Amazon has even gone as far as offering discounts on purchases scanned in stores (using its app), to further push its vested interest in this trend. And lots of local physical stores have retorted with futile lobbying and letter-writing, rather than competing head on.

But to what degree is showrooming actually happening? One indication was offered this week through a new report from Pew. During the holiday shopping season, it found that 52 percent of adult mobile users relied on their devices while shopping in local stores.

38 percent called a friend for advice, 24 percent looked up reviews, and 25 percent looked to see if they could find a better price elsewhere (both online and offline). And the numbers tend to skew higher for users 18-49, urban, and college educated.

But when asked what was the outcome of this in-store mobile research, 35 percent made a purchase at that store. That’s good right? Perhaps not, if you consider that this mobile activity drove 65 percent of shoppers away (glass half full or empty, etc.).

But here’s the kicker: many of those mobile price shoppers were driven straight into the arms of competitors. Specifically 37 percent didn’t purchase at all while 19 purchased the product online and 8 percent did so at another store. That’s a full 27 percent that bought somewhere else.

Read the rest here.

In an effort to get “back in the game” for briefings with interesting mobile start-ups, this week I had the chance to catch up with Trover cofounder and CEO Jason Karas about some new features.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, Trover is a local discovery app built around geotagged images. It was founded by Karas, Andrew Coldham, and Expedia (and Zillow) founder Rich Barton. Backing comes from General Catalyst, Ignition and Benchmark Capital.

The app falls in line with the social sharing trend that has caught fire lately with apps like Instagram and Soundtracking (see our 2012 predictions). Like Instagram, it puts photos at the center, but is less of an artistic tool and more for local discovery, says Karas.

It’s also a differentiated experience when compared with the sea of listings or map-based local search apps. The interface is images, ranked by proximity to anyone who opens the app. Conversely, images are automatically geotagged when taken and uploaded.

Interestingly, Trover has decided to tag content around lat/long readings, instead of by merchant listings (a la Foursquare, Yelp, etc.). This opens up the use case considerably, he says, for tagging things like public art, or any items of interest not tied to, say, a Starbucks.

Its newest function launches today to boost its utility. It will be a “list” feature, meant to bring the entertainment and discovery aspects one step further in letting you save items. Karas agreed that this could lead to push alerts when near saved items or locales, a la Foursquare Radar.

Longer term, as the company continues to build these functions and monitor their usage, it will be in a better position to use the data to deliver relevant content. According to Karas, this could be the basis for how it develops a revenue model.

“As we grow, so does our ability to serve awesome content,” he says. “Some of that could be sponsored content: If you’re a wine lover, it’s a natural extension to hear about nearby events or venues that feature wine.”

As part of the information overload that is Facebook’s long awaited S-1 filing, the company announced it is up to 845 million active global users (defined as monthly users). That’s a 39 percent year-over-year jump.

That total has slowly been creeping up; can you remember the user count on “The Social Network” movie poster? Also creeping up is the mobile share of active users. It was about one-third a few years ago, and now it’s already up to one-half, as the company today announced 425 million.

This likely skews higher in developing nations that have leapfrogged fixed line telephony in favor of mobile. And Facebook’s growth potential in such countries suggests that its mobile share of overall users could keep on rising.

The opportunity this signals — as we discussed in our 2012 predictions — is to flip the monetization switch for mobile ads. It hasn’t done this yet, but we’ll likely see it soon. This will probably happen in the form of “sponsored stories” rather than display ads.

Some other notable stats the company announced today: There are 100 billion total friend connections, and 2.7 billion Likes and Comments made per day. Get ready for a tidal wave of Facebook related news, financial analysis and commentary in the coming days.

In the immediate wake of our report on Google mobile ad revenues, TechCrunch reports today that the search giant saw a 2x year-over-year increase in mobile search ad requests (the largest source of its mobile ad revenues) in 2011.

Our friend Surojit Chatterjee, Google’s lead product manager for mobile search ads, attributes this growth to the improved quality of search ads. This results directly from the new search ad formats that we walked through one by one, on stage with Chatterjee at ILM West.

In addition, mobile Web optimized sites are now ranked higher, resulting in not only more relevant results (in the traditional sense) but also ones whose links point to actual mobile pages. This has led to a 50 percent jump in AdWords advertisers with optimized sites since August.

Click-to-call also continues to grow since we first covered its introduction two years ago. Specifically, Chatterjee now reports more than half a million active advertisers and 10 million calls per month for click-to-call ads.

Next up is developing unique ad formats and metrics that are specific to a tablet-based search experience. We touched on this during the ILM West interview, but there is clearly a lot more to come, and to be examined. We’ll be all over it…

Throughout 2012, we’re beefing up our editorial pipeline to get more reports out, on a more frequent basis. This is especially true in mobile, where there is such a great deal of activity and data coming out of the quickly growing space.

It’s also a New Year’s resolution of sorts to do a better job summarizing these reports here on our blog. With that backdrop, this week’s report from the Mobile Local Media camp looks at Google’s estimated and projected mobile ad revenues.

Because Google has such a large and influential share of the U.S. mobile ad market, its revenues are a key input in the market forecasting models we employ (further described in this report and here). This report looks at a few estimates.

It’s a valuable exercise in the run-up to our next mobile market forecast, which will publish in March and begin work over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, BIA/Kelsey clients can check out this shorter report by logging in to access it.

The report summary is below.

In early March BIA/Kelsey’s will publish its next U.S. mobile ad forecast, projecting revenues through 2016. Because Google is such a large and influential player in mobile advertising, this document examines the company’s past and estimated future mobile revenues, including projections made by others. Leading up to our own forecasting process, this will be a key piece of the puzzle.

Key Takeaways

● Google’s roughly 60 percent share of U.S. mobile advertising makes its periodic revenue disclosures important in sizing and forecasting the market.
● The company’s $2.5 billion revenue run rate announced in September lines up with BIA/Kelsey�s mobile forecast, and its growth rate will be a key input for our next forecast to be published in March.
● Additional market sizing and forecasting methodology are examined in this document.

Who Should Read This Advisory?

● Senior leaders interested in sizing the opportunity in mobile advertising
● Mobile developers and publishers looking to monetize their products through ad support
● Anyone interested in the trends and direction of mobile communications and advertising

More to come.

As you probably heard, Apple today announced first-quarter earnings (its first fiscal quarter is Sept.-Dec.). And you probably also heard that it was a blowout quarter — beating even the most aggressive analyst estimates.

Here are the main bullets. More important, I’ve included below a few factoids put together by MG Seigler at TechCrunch that put these numbers into perspective. Some of them are simply mind blowing.

The main points:

– Revenue: $46.3 billion
– Profit: $13.06 billion
– Gross margin: 44.7%
– Cash or cash equivalents on hand: $97 billion
– Revenue from Retail Stores: $6.1 billion
– iPhones sold: 37 million
– iPads sold: 15.4 million
– iPods sold: 15.4 million
– Macs sold: 5.2 million
– Total iOS devices sold to date: 315 million

Now for some context, a few notes of comparison to other companies, industries and historical earnings announcements:

– Apple added $38 billion in cash to its reserves just in the past year alone. Apple’s cash hoard alone is worth more than all but 52 companies on Earth

– Apple earned more money last quarter than the entire company was worth (in terms of market cap) just eight years ago

– Walmart has more than double the revenues of Apple, but Apple has more than four times the profits of Walmart.

– Apple’s profits place them on this exclusive list of the most profitable quarters among corporations. You’ll note that Apple is the only company on the list that’s not an oil and gas company.

– Microsoft’s most recent quarter saw record revenue of $20.9 billion. Again, Apple came in at $46.33 billion. Microsoft’s net income was $6.62 billion. Apple’s was $13.06 billion.

– The iTunes Store alone generated 50 percent more revenue than all of Yahoo did last quarter

– The amount Apple paid to third-party developers via the App Store last quarter ($700 million) is more than double Yahoo’s overall profits.

– Apple’s profits for the last quarter exceed Google’s entire revenue for the last quarter. Apple’s profit for the entire year now beats Google’s revenue for the entire year.

– Apple’s stock popped nearly 10 percent from where it closed at the end of the day. Since then, it has settled back into the $450-a-share range. That surge also pushes Apple well beyond the $400 billion market cap — and once again past Exxon as the most valuable public company in the world.

– At over $400 billion, Apple is now worth more than Greece.

– Apple’s profit last quarter was $3 billion more than all of Hollywood’s gross box office receipts for all of last year.

– With 37 million iPhones sold last quarter, Apple is now the largest smartphone marker, besting Samsung’s (guesstimated) 35 million.

Simply remarkable

I just heard from our friends at WillowTree Apps about their most recent iPhone app, “Likes.” Utilizing the growing number of Facebook Likes out there, it will look at your friends’ and friends of friends’ activity and make local recommendations accordingly.

It’s an interesting idea, and well within the growing trend of social sharing that we discussed in our 2012 predictions. But it does so in a more passive or automatic way, scanning and using all of those past likes to discern what might be most relevant to you.

WillowTree CEO Tobias Dengel tells me that there are enough likes out there among first level and second level (friends of friends) networks, that the data are very useful. Among 400 test users, in fact, they were able to scan more than 20 million likes.

“The concept is basically to turn Facebook Likes into your personal directory,” Dengel told me. “As Yelp and other sites get more and more gamed and over-run, we feel there is a strong need to restrict recommendations to your direct relations — among whom you know exactly [and] whom to trust.”

There have been different versions of this concept for the past five years, but many were before their time (i.e., Grayboxx). By that I mean that the time is likely right now that social sharing is kicking into high gear with check-ins, likes, etc.

Add the new open graph verbs (watched, bought, ate, etc.) and this could get really interesting. This could really unfold as correlations are drawn from a “big data” approach to all of this sentiment data. It won’t just be local info, of course but all kinds of potential applications.

Meanwhile, Likes looks to be a solid local discovery app that should get some traction. Full test drive to come, and you can find out more about the app here and download it from iTunes here.

Following Peter’s post about the developing lineup for our upcoming ILM East conference, we recently shot some video to give a little more color on what we’re in the process of building.

Below are the first two. We’ll shoot more videos over the coming weeks that feature perspectives of more analysts and local media coverage areas. They’re short and (we hope) sweet, by design.

Stay tuned for more.

Foursquare announced today that it has partnered with SinglePlatform to add Menus to its Explore tab. The Explore tab, as many of you know, allows users to discover places around them — as governed by check-in history, social behavior and other data Foursquare continues to beef up.

Menus is a logical step and makes Foursquare more of a discovery engine. It also brings it closer to competitors like Yelp, which works with MenuPages. But in addition to a cool utility to find not only restaurants but also what they serve, this could eventually deepen the check-in experience.

In other words, check-ins, tips and the general local discovery paradigm previously happened at the merchant level. Menu information could be a step toward getting more granular. I’m not talking about just seeing what to eat, but reviewing, sharing and even “checking in” to individual items.

This would greatly deepen Foursquare’s data sets — something it highly values and utilizes (i.e., 1 billion check-ins) in Explore tab recommendations and its newer Radar feature. It’s also in line with a trend toward social sharing of more than just location (images, video, songs, dishes, etc.).

That of course includes rapidly growing mobile start-ups such as Instagram and Soundtracking (see our 2012 predictions). But in the context of local fare, what could result is some version of what we’re seeing from newer products like Kevin Rose’s Oink, or Stamped.

Of course most of this is speculation. For now, consider it a nice addition and utility to the Foursquare user experience. Next up in my mind will be OpenTable integration. More to come as we talk to both companies (including possible additions to ILM East).

Millennial Media has become the latest to join the recent resurgence of tech IPOs. Or at least it has taken its first big step in that direction by filing its S-1 with the SEC, according to an email I just received from my contact there.

As the filing states, Millennial’s revenues were almost $70 million in the first nine months of 2011, a 138 percent year-over-year increase. It continues to operate at a loss, but net losses decreased from $5.4 million to $417,000 during the same period.

This is big but not suprising news. Millennial has been growing quickly as a major player in the fastest growing advertising medium on the planet. It’s the second-largest mobile ad network (16.7 percent market share, according to IDC) after AdMob (23.8 percent).

Even if you aren’t intimate with the mobile space, you may recognize Millennial for its monthly reports on mobile trends — as all media outlets out there (including us) are hungry for these data.

Notably, its past few reports have focused on the growth of location targeted mobile ads — one of many supporting points behind our our own forecast for location targeted mobile ad revenues.

Many pegged Millennial as the next acquisition target in the hot mobile ad network space, following Quattro (Apple) and AdMob (Google). That isn’t ruled out but is probably less likely now that it has indicated its intentions (not to mention inherently raising its acquisition price).

That “next in line” designation now likely falls on Jumptap or perhaps inMobi. And likely suitors could be Yahoo, Microsoft or perhaps looming giants entering the mobile realm such as Amazon or eBay (can you say shopping spree?). As they say, we shall see.

Meanwhile, Millennial is valuing itself at at $305 million. This comes after three rounds of venture funding that total $64.5 million.