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 …

Constant Contact, an email marketing company, announced its acquisition of mobile app developer CardStar this week. CardStar developed a mobile app where consumers are able to store all of their existing loyalty cards, rather than having to carry multiple, physical cards. Constant Contact will continue to operate CardStar’s free mobile loyalty application, which is available …

ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of doers and innovators who are transforming and redefining the local space. Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon vice chair/AmEx board member/sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and …

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 …

Apple can thank the high-profile launch of last fall’s Apple iPhone 4S for iOS closing the gap on Android as the leading platform for new smartphone purchases.
According to research released this week from Nielsen, 45 percent of new smartphone owners surveyed in December said they chose an iPhone. Only 25 percent chose an iPhone a …

John Donahoe, eBay CEO and interim PayPal CEO, projected soaring numbers for new mobile payment forecasts. During his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Association, Donahoe predicted that eBay would reach $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume (GMV) this year, almost double its $5 billion GMV we reported from last year. Reasons for the …

A few years ago, the location of businesses became a big question mark, as well as a strategic issue, as people wanted to shop or dine nearby. These “geo-fencing” issues were especially important for Yellow Pages companies.
Since then, search has become more the norm, along with GPS-based phones, which have location baked into them. What …

AT&T Interactive is launching a contest today to encourage online and mobile application developers to use its APIs to build new uses for local business data. ATTi is trying to tap into the collective creativity and brainpower of the developer community to extent the reach of its online and mobile advertisers.
ATTI’s main products are its …

Call measurement ad provider Telmetrics released its 2012 local search trends today, with a heavy focus on the role mobile is playing in local search and ad performance management. Here are Telmetrics’ top four trends/predictions this year in mobile innovation:
1) Pay Per Call Goes Mainstream With Mobile: An increase in mobile adoption rates has lead …

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 …

For newspaper publishers and newspaper readers, iPad apps tend to be nice to have but not especially important. Given the choice of rich newspaper apps like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I actually opt for the browser versions over the apps: I can see a lot more at once, they’re updated …

The last act at ILM West was a panel on the future of “SoLoMo” (Social/Local/Mobile). Moderators Mike Boland and Jed Williams tag-teamed a panel of four:
-David Courtney, CEO, JiWire, a location-based media channel connecting advertisers and mobile consumers via public Wi-Fi or location-based mobile apps
-Steve Espinosa, founder and CEO, AppStack, a developer of mobile apps
-Ankit …

Moh Ok, Chief Scientist at PayPal, and Bo Fishback, CEO and Founder of Zaarly, talked about the integration of social, local and mobile to close the loop on driving consumer purchases during a morning dedicated to SoLoMo here at ILM Asia.
Ok and moderator Mike Boland talked extensively about mobile payments, and whether the market will …

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 …