I-COM worldmeasurementnews

In US, Groupon Acquires Location-Based Tech Firm Hyperpublic

- Start-up provides technology to websites enabling users to post locations online and search for other things nearby
- Terms of deal not disclosed
- Hyperpublic CEO says "select" members of his 10-person team will join Groupon as employees

Posted by John Letzing of Dow Jones Newswires at The Wall Street Journal: SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Groupon Inc. (GRPN) has acquired Hyperpublic Inc., snapping up the two-year-old location-based technology start-up amid a growth spurt at the daily deals service.

"It's a great outcome for everybody," Hyperpublic Chief Executive and co-founder Jordan Cooper [pictured],  said in an interview Friday. "We built our relationship with Groupon over a number of months, and it just continued to strengthen." More...

In US, MomentFeed Establishes Partnership with Foursquare

Companies collaborate to streamline venue claiming and optimization

Santa Monica, California (PRWEB) January 31, 2012. MomentFeed. Inc., the first location-based marketing platform for the enterprise and a leader in the SoLoMo space, today announced a partnership with foursquare to claim venues on behalf of its clients, providing an interface to efficiently manage hundreds or thousands of locations.

“Our goal is to make it that much easier for brands to market through foursquare,” said MomentFeed CEO and Founder, Rob Reed [pictured, left]. “The MomentFeed platform offers the added benefit of Venue Optimization™, which increases the likelihood of discovery and customer engagement at the point of sale.” More...

“We’re psyched to see the tools MomentFeed is building on top of our Merchant Platform,” said foursquare Director of Business Development, Jake Furst [pictured, right]. “Optimizing the venue management process from claiming venues to managing foursquare campaigns will allow brands to increase both sales and engagement metrics through the MomentFeed dashboard.” More...

In US, PlaceIQ Gets Funding To Nano-Target Local Context

Steve Smith of Mediapost writes: Understanding the context of users as they move through the day will become a key challenge for mobile media and advertising. PlaceIQ, a start-up that just received $4.2 million in Series A funding, says that “context” is more than just a DMA or a map of nearby businesses.

Mobile technology does not just allow marketers to target people in a given spot -- the same platform is also rendering massive amounts of data from people about what they are doing there. “We analyze all of the place data being created,” says Duncan McCall [pictured], CEO. Some of it is the static data about a geolocation -- but much is what people search for on their mobile phones in a given spot, and the ads click on mobile ad networks, etc. “We do it in 100-meter tiles. So we can understand the type of audience that is present and their affinity to behaviors, events or even an IAB segment,” he says.  More...

In US, xAd Secures $9 Million in Funding From Emergence Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Palisades Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank

New Funding to Support the Expansion of xAd’s Ad-Serving Technology for Mobile Search and Display as Well as Enhance Its Publisher and Advertiser Tools

Dec 13 · 2011. San Francisco — xAd, the largest mobile-local ad network in the U.S., announced today that it has raised an additional $9 million in financing led by Emergence Capital Partners, with participation from existing investors SoftBank Capital and Palisades Ventures as well as funding from Silicon Valley Bank. The additional capital will be used to enhance xAd’s existing tools for both publishers and advertisers, as well as further build its patent-pending, ad-serving mobile technology that effectively factors in user-, contextual- and location-based relevance for optimal mobile performance.

Dipanshu Sharma [pictured], CEO at xAd, said about his company’s rapid climb, “Our growth is a reflection of what is happening in the industry. As consumers increasingly migrate to smart devices, businesses will be unable to ignore the potential in mobile-local advertising. Our ability to offer unparalleled accuracy and real-time targeting down to the most-intricate local level, including latitude, longitude and ZIP code, allows us to help businesses of all sizes unlock the potential in their local marketplaces. That truly is a testament to what we’ve achieved and will continue to achieve, thanks to our financial supporters and those inside xAd.” More...

Carrier IQ downplays 2010 patent request

Jaikumar Vijayan writes in ComputerWorld: The company applied for a patent for the so-called Service Intelligence Module Program Product in March, 2010. The patent application asserts that the technology would let carriers "configure a processor to read content selection, read location data, read application activity, and determine presentation/deselection of advertising messages."

In an interview yesterday, Carrier IQ marketing vice president Andrew Coward [pictured] downplayed the claims in the patent application and emphatically contended that none of the company's current products offer the capabilities described.  More...

Location-Based Advertising: Privacy

Darren Yan [pictured], Assistant Vice President (eBusiness), Consumer Banking Group at DBS Bank writes: There are clear and measurable propositions for advertisers to consider location-based advertising (LBA) as a medium to reach the increasingly out-of-home and mobile customers.

The legalistic approach to mitigate users’ likely frustrations as they receive unanticipated advertising messages is to ensure that they categorically accept to receive such messages.

Since the objective of an LBA campaign is to deliver a marketing message near an actionable location where buyer behavior can be most immediately influenced, it is therefore important that the users’ “buying psychology” is not negatively impacted by untimely LBA messages and risk non-conversion of a potential sale. More...

Location-Based Analytics, Carrier IQ and Your Mobile Privacy

Linda Rosencrance writes at TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog : If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve heard the buzz about an invasive Carrier IQ software that’s likely installed on your smartphone. Now that security experts have discovered this apparent spyware, privacy and security alarms are sounding off.

And as much as we tout the importance of analytics for collecting and analyzing pertinent data to help businesses be more competitive, tracking people’s movements via their cell phones – or by any other means – to collect that information, without giving them the opportunity to explicitly agree to it, isn’t the right thing to do, according to a number of privacy groups including the Electronic Privacy Information Center.  More…

Mobile advertisers paying 4x more for location-based impressions

Ryan Kim of GigaOM writes: Mobile advertisers are increasingly prizing location-based ads, according to real-time bidding exchange Nexage, which said mobile publishers and developers are getting 3.8 times more for eCPMs, or ad impressions, that include location data in the last three months.

I talked with Nexage CEO Ernie Cormier [pictured] and he said the rising value of location-based advertising is driven by growth in local deal providers, who want to push out very targeted coupons, as well as brand advertisers looking to hit specific regions or metro areas. And there are advertisers who want to confine their message to specific latitude and longitude locations or zip codes to hit only local consumers.  More…

In US, Kenshoo and Omnicom Media Group’s Annalect Form Global Partnership

San Francisco (19 September, 2011) – Kenshoo (www.kenshoo.com), a global leader in digital marketing software, and Annalect (www.annalect.com), the digital data and analytics organization within Omnicom Media Group, today announced it has formed a strategic global partnership.

“Mobile is the key connection point between Social and Local,” added Alon Sheafer [pictured], Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder at Kenshoo. “Working with Annalect, we’ll be able to give advertisers an edge with unique targeting data to reach consumers at the right time with the right message.” More..

Laurie Sullivan, Editor at MediaPost writes: Kenshoo and Annalect will support the mobile services through a variety of metrics driven by search, not just clicks and sales. The idea to pull in search data with social and mobile marketing will enable advertisers to track the impact of local online and offline ads by consumers.  More...

In Canada, Telmetrics Launches Mobile Call Tracking Solution for Mobile Local Search Publishers and App Developers

Patent Pending m.Call™ Will Enable Detailed Mobile Call Intelligence Without Call Tracking Numbers

September 19, 2011/TORONTO/ With mobile local search continuing to explode and more than 80 percent of SMBs including mobile marketing in their budgets, Telmetrics, the leading provider of advertising call measurement solutions, today introduced m.Call™ (pronounced m-call). This patent-pending, first-of-its-kind call measurement solution allows mobile local search publishers and application developers to capture valuable call data without traditional call tracking numbers.

“Local mobile publishers rely on monetizing the calls their apps deliver and need a scalable measurement tool with deep caller data. This additional call detail goes beyond click to call tracking and is crucial to growing the mobile marketing model,” said Bill Dinan [pictured], president, Telmetrics. “Calls are the de facto ’it’ metric for local mobile search, and m.Call revolutionizes the industry by providing complete transparency on mobile call data at a fraction of the cost of traditional call measurement.” More…