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Smartphone Phone Users Want More Freebies

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Here’s another interesting statistics from comScore, this time regarding the behavior of smartphone users. According to the report,  smartphone users’ behavior has been changed, whereas before smartphones were used to access email, calendar and contacts while on the go, now more smartphone owners are using their devices as much for personal productivity as for entertainment purposes.

Around 74% of smartphone owners are using their mobile devices for personal use. And when asked how much time they spent using their smartphone at various times of the day, the result showed that smartphones are being used practically all through out the day.

So, what’s the point of these findings?  It is definitely very important if you are managing a brand campaign or even if simply running mobile advertisements. This opens up a huge audience base for your product and could result to sales if you can handle it pretty well.

But of course, businesses wanting to engage in mobile advertising would want to know how much of these smartphone users will be potential customers. In other words, how perceptive are they with mobile ads.

Surprisingly, comScore found out that there are quite a number of smartphone users who are willing to partake of what’s being offered on mobile ads.  Smartphone users are more than willing to take on grocery coupons, barcodes that can be scanned by the smartphones, savings offers on consumer products, movie theater offers and more.

Given this fact, if you’re planning to take on the mobile ad space for your products, be sure to make your ads engaging enough to merit a click or tap on your link from smartphone users. The mobile ad industry is still young and is bound to grow leaps and bounds in the coming days.

Despite the Criticisms, Apple iPad is Selling Like Hotcakes

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We have to give credit where credit is due. And in the case of the ongoing success being reaped by Apple at this early pre-order stage of its “magical and revolutionary” iPad, it’s just but natural to commend Apple for coming out with a great promotional. This is what Apple does best – introduce a new product, excite would-be customers, open it up for criticisms and then later on, offer the product for sale.

Once again, Apple has proven its marketing prowess. This early, the iPad is reportedly selling like hotcakes. An estimated 50,000 units were reportedly sold in the first two hours after the pre-order process started.  Stocks are dwindling down, affecting those who are still in the process of pre-ordering and choosing the pick-up option.

And while everybody else are busy, it was found out that the iPad filing has just passed through the FCC.  This heightens the excitement so more. So, it’s true – the magical product is indeed coming. I’m pretty sure when the FCC news broke out, more people started clicking on that pre-order button.

So, have you wondered why despite the criticisms that were hurled against the Apple iPad, many customers still purchased it?  Call it Apple consumerism. A disease that has inflicted me and the rest of the thousands of Apple fans who have pre-ordered the Apple iPad and who will pre-order it until supply lasts.

In case you’d want to ask, yes I’m pretty excited and couldn’t wait for April 3 to come.

Foursquare Ties Up with Starbucks, Free Barista Badges for Every Check-in

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Foursquare continues its quest for media hype dominance with yet another interesting feature. It just launched a new promotional gig that ties it up with Starbucks. So, on Thursday, the next time you visit a Starbucks outlet and check-in to your Foursquare account, you will be rewarded with a barista badge.

The Starbucks barista badge can be earned if you’ve checked-in to five Startbucks outlet. Although, there’s no physical reward yet is given if you earn the barista badge, I’m pretty sure Starbucks and Foursquare will come with something to give out some form of physical rewards in the future. A free tall Cappuccino perhaps for every barista badge earned? This may sound appealing for frequent Startbucks customers, but Starbucks’ Chris Bruzzo, vice president for brand, content and online said that the company is eyeing different rewards set, not just free Starbucks drinks.

This is a rather unique gig and both companies stand a chance of getting positive gains from this deal. Starbucks can use Foursquare to gather feedbacks from clients and perhaps gain new clients as well since Foursquare members can easily share their feedback to their network of friends on Foursquare.

For Foursquare, it already gained from the deal since Starbucks is planning to use the Foursquare business analytics tools that it recently launched.

So, the next time you visit a Starbucks outlet, don’t forget to check it in to your Foursquare account. You might be the first person to earn that “prestigious” barista badge.

AOL Gets Serious with its Social Aggregator – Lifestream

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AOL wants to spoil the Google Buzz party with social lifestreaming service of its own, dubbed Lifestream.  This was previously launched as part of AOL’s platform but due to the success it gained in terms of users AOL decided to launch it as an independent platform.

Basically, Lifestream is just like Friendfeed, aggregating your updates from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and online real-time updating services. It lets you follow other Lifestream members and see all of the content they published on those online sites.

Lifestream also lets you filter out content from specific networks to reduce noise and cluttering in your own Lifestream “stream.” Reversely, you can auto-publish your updates from various social networks to your Lifestream account. Lifestream also has a location feature similar to Foursquare.

For checking out your account, Lifestream offers several methods. You can sign in to your Lifestream account via Adobe AIR interface, on the web, on your iPhone or Android phones. When you access Lifestream on your mobile phones, it automatically notes your location.

In other words, AOL’s Lifestream service is a pretty much full-featured lifestreaming service and it’s a good decision from AOL to launch it as a separate product. With the popularity enjoyed by real-time, lifestreaming services Lifestream can carve its niche into this market.

While it is a pretty solid service, it will also nice if Lifestream would open up to currently popular lifestreaming services such as Google Buzz and Twitter and would not thread the path towards becoming their rival.

You may check out AOL Lifestream at lifestream.aol.com. If you do, please share with us your opinion about it.

MySpace Gets Serious with Its Social Gaming Platform

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Trying to revitalize itself as once a major force in the social networking arena, MySpace is beefing up its social gaming service in an effort perhaps to catch up with the popularity of social games on Facebook. At the Games Developers Conference, MySpace has launched a new MySpace Games experience – creating a more social gaming environment with new set of tools and functionality for both users and developers.

MySpace launched its new game site at myspace.com/games. For MySpace users, the new MySpace Games Gallery offers more features including game notifications, personalized game recommendations, discover new games from their friends’ Stream, and popular game charts. MySpace users can also rate the games to enhance search results and recommendations.

For game developers, MySpace is providing a simple and user-friendly platform for independent game developers as well as robust support for premium games for its partner major development game developers.

MySpace games engagement will also be improve as games are to be merchandized in more areas and shared easily among users.

MySpace also announced the new Neon for  iPhone application. This application will provide users access to their MySpace games while on the go as well as make it easy for them to interact with games on their iPhones. All the other things that users can do on MySpace Games on the web are carried over to the iPhone app plus the ability to install games remotely.

So, what do you think? Can MySpace bring back its glory days through social games? Or is Facebook already deep into the game that it will be difficult for MySpace to rock Facebook’s dominance? Will you be using MySpace games?

Google Adds Street View to Google Map Marker Edit Option

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As if the edit features recently introduced by Google which lets you modify a marker for specifica places that you happen to know was entered incorrectly is not enough, Google is adding a new feature which will make things easier. Starting today, Street View is now part of the handy reference that you can use when editing place markers on Google Maps.

This means that if you see a place marker which was incorrectly placed on Google Maps and you want to edit it, you can now use Street View to take a closer look at a particular place. Of course this will lead you into mark a specific spot better and more accurate since you are actually marking the exact spot as displayed by  Street View.

By introducing this feature, Google is encouraging Google Maps users to mark places at the entrance of the place and as much as possible avoid marking in the center of a street block. This can now be easily done through the Street View. But this is applicable only for places with available Street View. As you all know not all the known places mapped by Google maps would have corresponding Street View. In this cases, the marker can still be placed at the center of a block.

So, in case you find a specifically marked spot on Google Maps which you believe is incorrect you can edit this by clicking on the marker to display the infowindow. Click on the “more” link and then click the “Move marker” link in the drop down menu. Then you can drag the marker to the right spot on Google maps.

Pretty cool, right? So, have you used Google Maps before? Do you find the place markers useful or utterly useless?