Mobile app analytics provider Flurry is out with its most recent data dump, showing that mobile has a disproportionate imbalance (when compared with other media) between usage and ad dollars.
Specifically there is a 23-to-1 difference in the share of time spent with mobile and its share of ad dollars. That far outweighs any other media …

Mobile local ad network xAd just released its Q4 Mobile Insights Report, detailing the activity seen on its network. Like its Q3 report (covered here), it further supports the growth and the opportunity in mobile local search.
XAd, for those unfamiliar, hangs its hat on in-app search and display ads. That’s opposed to browser-based search where …

After some time passed since we last covered Fanminder, we caught up with CEO Paul Rosenfeld last week in advance of yesterday’s announcement of new funding and its 2.0 release.
First, for those unfamiliar, Fanminder is a “freemium” SMB marketing and campaign management tool that counts simplicity and one-stop-shop appeal among its differentiators. This is of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

During a late morning panel on Day 2 of ILM West, local video providers batted around the opportunity in bringing video advertising to the “other 99 percent” of small merchants.
“We know it’s evolving,” said moderator Steve Passwaiter of this democratization of video ads. “Once a television-laden experience has migrated to desktop and is now going …

In the midst of ILM West happenings, call measurement ad provider Telmetrics announced today that it’s bringing its m.Call platform to iOS.
M.Call gives local search publishers and app developers the ability to capture data around the phone calls they’re generating. Notably it does this without the need for traditional call tracking numbers.
This works with both …

Day 1 at ILM West came to a close with a session on how SMBs are using Facebook and social media. This most notably culminated with “3 big ideas” for driving social commerce, from Oodle CEO Craig Donato.
These are derived from Oodle’s work powering Facebook’s own Marketplace, and other things the company has done that are tantamount …

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s ILM West conference, prolific Wall Street Journal tech blogger Kara Swisher acknowledged many of the challenges for local media, but was quick to point out that none of these is new.
Some of the sleeping giants moving more and more into local — like Facebook, eBay and Amazon — she argues aren’t sleepers …

In the run-up to any given BIA/Kelsey conference, I’m continually asked about the makeup of our typical audience. This is a good question from both attendees and speakers trying to devise the proper tone for their presentations or prepared panel fodder.
The answer is that it’s a rich bus dev environment with lots of high-level decision …

There’s a growing crop of mobile ad networks specializing in local ad inventory and location-based ad placements. This is a subcategory of larger, more broadly defined ad networks like AdMob and Millennial.
The idea is that this targeting provides better relevance and performance, which lead to higher ad premiums and eCPMs. We see evidence everywhere, and …

As we do every year across BIA/Kelsey’s coverage areas, our analysts put their heads together in cross-disciplinary fashion to handicap the 2012 local media space.
It’s a solid exercise and great preparation for our ILM West conference less than two weeks away. Many of these predictions will come out then, and extensive category-specific reports are …