We hear from varioussources that the FTC may be preparing a challenge to Google’s acquisition of AdMob. Like many in the industry, we believe this would be a serious mistake. There are much better places for the agency to focus its attention.
As an independent development shop with apps on several platforms, we’ve been tapped by the FTC to provide expert witness testimony on the matter. We’ve spent several weeks giving testimony, helping the FTC understand mobile technology and the mobile advertising space as a whole. It is apparent to us from these discussions that the FTC is not in a good position to understand - let alone regulate - the mobile ad market.
It sounds like science fiction - but as mobile devices make more and more computing power available on the go, cyberspace and physical space are beginning to intersect in some very interesting ways. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the trend toward Augmented Reality. AR aims to make the entire world digitally interactive - and this opens up some fascinating possibilities.
Our friends at Google contacted us last week to invite us into the AdSense for Mobile beta program. AdSense is one of those subtle technologies from which Google derives most of its revenue. I’ve always been curious about its inner workings, so I signed us up right away.
After some discussion, we settled on Astronomy Picture of the Day for iPhone as the best candidate for the program. Google is looking for high traffic applications from which it can derive usage metrics before going live with the new system. APOD for iPhone generates millions of screen views from around the world, with the majority coming from North America.
The term “Web 2.0″ returns nearly 100 million search results on Google. But what is it really? Can you look at something and say definitively that it is Web 2.0? And does it matter? In this post we explore these questions in some detail - but to properly frame the discussion, we must start with a related question. What was Web 1.0?
Nearly everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web these days, but imagine if you could tie those together with a wiki - and then add real-time playback functionality, on-the-fly language translation and drag-and-drop file sharing. Google Wave does all this and a lot more.
Not surprisingly, there are several ways to answer this question. One way to think of the size of the Internet is to count its users. China recently announced that they have reached 298 million users - a number just shy of the entire population of the United States. Using this same methodology to count all Internet users, we can estimate that there are about 1.6 billion Internet users - or put another way, about 24% of the world’s population.
We attended Google I/O this year and were pleasantly surprised to see that it’s fast becoming a playground for innovation and a place for serious collaboration among developers. I attended a number of interesting sessions, and of course the Android lightning talks. I left the conference this year very excited about some of Google’s initiatives, particularly Google Wave.
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