This week, the team at Tapjoy announced a new Integrated Attribution Program to enable app marketers to optimize their ad campaigns using independent, third-party attribution data.

The company says its initial partners in the program include AppsFlyer, a leading mobile advertising measurement platform, adjust, a mobile attribution and analytics company with comprehensive business intelligence services, and TUNE, the enterprise platform for mobile attribution and measurement.

“Today’s mobile marketers face an incredibly competitive landscape from which to identify, attract, retain and monetize the best customers for their apps, and they need comprehensive tools to power continuous improvement of their customer acquisition efforts,” said Paul Longhenry, SVP business and corporate development, at Tapjoy.

Longhenry says the addition of customer acquisition channel data form these leading attribution tracking partners “introduces a powerful new optimization input that should be immediately impactful for developers utilizing the Tapjoy platform.”

To learn more about what Tapjoy is up to, click here.

The post Tapjoy Rolls Out Integrated Attribution Program for Mobile Tracking Partners appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

For starters, we’re looking at a $4 billion market (or more) by 2018.

The overall market of technology installations is forecast to break the 25,000 mark in 2014, while handsets capable of supporting indoor location will be in the hundreds of millions within two years. As a result, the major companies will start to make their moves.

In fact, they already are.

Today, the indoor location focus is on the retail space, but the potential in enterprise, corporate, and public venues is just as large, albeit with different drivers and inhibitors.

In ABI Research’s latest report, “Indoor Location for Commercial and Business Verticals,” key drivers such as corporate wellness, legislation, employee analytics, low-cost tags, BYOD, and security are all considered across 11 non-retail verticals.

“In the non-retail space, the current RTLS market is largely focused on tracking high-value or important items using high-accuracy and dedicated tags,” writes senior analyst, Patrick Connolly in a report summary. “But the ability to track connected devices and low-cost BLE tags will open up opportunities around staff analytics, visitor management, meeting scheduling, staff enterprise applications, building layout optimization, etc.

There is also huge potential in public-facing buildings like hospital, hotels, airports, schools, etc., resulting in over 40,000 installations of indoor location technologies in non-retail environments by 2019.”

The anticipated growth, not surprisingly, will be driven by new technologies.

ABI practice director, Dominique Bonte, says new technologies will, indeed, “give this market a major jolt in the arm.”

“Quuppa’s BLE technology and advances in Wi-Fi and small cell location will all better enable low-cost and high-accuracy across large buildings. IoE, wearables, and BYOD means there will be many more ways of tracking in the future, while the onset of low-cost BLE tags makes accurate asset tracking cost effective for all verticals, even consumers,” Bonte adds.

The post Enterprise Market Shifting Focus to Indoor Location Mobile Tech appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the Carrier IQ software is what’s known as a rootkit that is installed at a carrier’s request on mobile phones. Carrier IQ raises user privacy concerns because it runs in the background and monitors and logs user activity. Carrier IQ is known to be installed on well over 100 million devices around the world.

As of today, however, Sprint Nextel says Carrier IQ software is effectively erased from devices across its network. The move was achieved in part by Sprint’s partnership with HTC, which yielded a firmware update targeting Carrier IQ.

“HTC can confirm that we’re working with Sprint to provide maintenance releases that will remove Carrier IQ and provide security enhancements and bug fixes beginning in January,” HTC admits, according to The Verge.

Until now, carriers like Sprint and AT&T previously claimed that the Carrier IQ software and its collected data have only been used as a means to “improve service performance.”

Do you feel more confident about your mobile usage now that Carrier IQ has been dumped by Sprint?

The post Controversial Carrier IQ software Erased from Sprint, HTC Phones appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Earlier this year, Apple found itself on the receiving end of comparable complaints and potential legal threats.

In this particular instance, plaintiff Rebecca Cousineau alleges that tech giant Microsoft is proceeding with the development of a targeted location-based advertising system and, as a result, continues to “map the locations of cell towers, wireless routers, mobile phones, and computers to do so effectively.”

The complaint alleges that Microsoft chose to collect this information from Windows Phone users rather than go through the expensive and laborious process of collecting the information itself.

“Microsoft’s scheme is executed through its camera application, which comes standard with a mobile device running the Windows Phone OS,” the complaint states, according to a published report from InformationWeek.

“Microsoft brazenly continues to collect users’ location information, regardless of whether or not the individual chooses ‘cancel’ so as to not allow such information to be tracked,” the complaint adds. “Thus, Microsoft surreptitiously forces even unwilling users into its non-stop geo-tracking program in the interest of developing its digital marketing grid.”

The post Microsoft Targeted in New Windows Phone Tracking Lawsuit appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Flurry estimates that, worldwide, over 600 thousand apps are available for over 350 million iOS and Android devices.  On average, consumers have downloaded over 65 apps per device.  For its report, Flurry focused on the size and growth of available advertising inventory within iOS and Android applications, using data from over 100,000 applications tracked by the company’s analytics platform.

Flurry tracked the number of ads shown per mobile app use-session and found the average to be roughly 4.3 ads per session, with the average session lasting 4.2 minutes.  For comparison, the average session length of a website is just under 1 minute.

In comparing this inventory with the net spend on display advertising in the US,  it was found that the market currently spends a little over $12B per year on Online display advertising.  This translates to a conservative CPM of roughly $2.50 for mobile application inventory.   As a point of reference, a typical 30 second video on a large video streaming website such as Hulu has a CPM of $10-$15.

The bottom line is that in-app mobile advertising continues to grow at a staggering rate.  Flurry gives four reasons for the massive uptick:

• Smartphone growth – over a million smartphone devices are currently being activated on a daily basis
• Publisher growth – The App store now has over 400,000 apps in the market and Android, with over 200,000, is catching up quickly
• Session use growth – Flurry has previously found that smartphone users now spend more time in mobile apps per day than the average Internet users spends online.
• Publisher integration of ads – with larger screens, targeting, and increased adoption of mobile applications, more publishers are integrating ads into their apps

The post In-App Mobile Advertising Set to Overtake Online Display Ad Spend By Year’s End appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

This morning, South Korean police raided Google’s Seoul offices. The raid was reportedly promoted by concern that Google is collecting private user information without informed consent from users.

Reuters reports that South Korean police have been investigating Google’s AdMob advertising division and the findings prompted the sudden search.

“We suspect AdMob collected personal location information without consent or approval from the Korean Communication Commission,” an official with the South Korean police stated.

Google confirmed the raid but will offer no comment beyond pledging cooperation with investigators.

“Every technology has a flip side. Location-based services benefit customers by helping them find nearby restaurants, gas stations and other places with their smartphones,” Kim Kwang-jo, a computer science professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, tells Reuters. “But it could potentially violate consumer privacy. There are loopholes in location-based services, and companies should get consent from customers to collect location data.”

Apple is currently preparing a remedy for the iOS tracking bug and will release iOS 4.3.3 later this month with updates to accomplish a resolution to the tracking controversy.

At this time, however, it isn’t clear what – of anything – Google has done wrong or how it might address the suspected but not confirmed user privacy violations.

The post Google’s Offices Raided by South Korean Police Following AdMob Investigation appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.