Friday, March 4, 2011 at 9:00AM 
Google recently announced that the mobile sector is growing faster than they ever predicted. CEO Eric Schmidt told the audience at the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership meeting keynote that YouTube is seeing 200 million mobile playbacks a day.
Friday, December 17, 2010 at 2:19PM 
Twitter has had an extremely good year. In four years the microblogging site has gone from niche to mainstream. It’s difficult these days to find a website that doesn’t have a Twitter
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 4:20PM 
In the United States, Thanksgiving is this Thursday, November 25. It's a holiday that is rife with overindulgence, football, and family (and all the unhealthy dynamics that family represents).
Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 3:00PM 
Remember what it was like in the old days (circa 2000)? You needed multiple arms to juggle the myriad of electronic gadgets and accessories we all carried around. You had your laptop, cell phone, PDA, and other bright, shiny accessories.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 3:51PM ;)
We’ve been watching and writing about Twitter for over a year now and a recent Mashable article highlights some of the concerns we’ve seen with recent Twitter developments
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 4:00PM
Location-based apps are the hottest thing going right now. Leading the pack is Foursquare. Foursquare isn’t the first location-based app on the market, nor is it the biggest, but what it does have going for it is that it’s the current media darling. The star of this year’s SXSW, this app is proving it’s not just for letting people know where you like to eat and shop.
The system is simple: you check-in to a location, earn badges for multiple check-ins and score points which, in some instances, can lead to real-world rewards from retailers. Local restaurants and bars have started offering free drinks, appetizers and discounts to the person that checked in the most to their establishment. Now you’re seeing the likes of Bravo, Virgin Airlines and Harvard University taking advantage of app to further reward customers. We searched the web to find examples of companies using this simple app in ingenious ways and found four great examples.
Harvard University has teamed up with Foursquare to create a campus-based game that rewards students who check in to locations with badges and helpful bits of information. The idea is to encourage students to connect with others and explore more of the campus. It’s a brilliant way for freshmen to learn about the university and connect with more people.
During New York Fashion Week, fashion designer Marc Jacobs created a “Fashion Victim” badge. It allowed customers during the week to check-in at any Marc Jacobs store to unlock the badge. Four people who unlocked the badge in New York received passes to attend the Marc Jacobs fashion show.
Shoe phenom Jimmy Choo has established a treasure hunt around London using Foursquare. A pair of Jimmy Choo trainers check-in at a location somewhere in the city and whomever checks-in and says, “I’ve been following you” to the pair of trainers before they leave the location will win a pair of Jimmy Choo training shoes. People can track the trainers through their Foursquare user page and their Twitter profile.
Desperate to stay relevant, The Wall Street Journal has created special badges that provide interesting facts about New York City and reviews of local business and movies. It’s always great when a print giant like the WSJ embraces new media instead of fighting it like so many other print outlets.
Hopefully you now feel inspired to craft a location-based campaign of your own. Feel free to share any bright ideas.
Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 4:00PM
The smartphone app battle has heated up with legitimate rivals to the iPhone hitting their stride. Apple’s App Store continues to overshadow the competition with downloads in the multiple billions, but Google’s Android Market has emerged with a strong collection of its own mobile apps, along with the advantage of having multiple mobile phone brands running the OS. With around 300 million downloads under its belt, Android Market is building up steam.
Seeing that Android has a prominent place in the future of mobile devices, we picked up an HTC Desire to discover firsthand what it’s capable of. First order of business: finding the best Android app to run our Twitter accounts. What we found was there is no app that truly stands out as the best overall, but there are apps that excel at meeting specific needs. Below you’ll find 5 of the best apps out there and which type of Twitter user they best serve.
More often than not with mobile apps, having loads of features means sacrificing at least some speed. Seesmic manages to offer a host of functionality without getting bogged down. Some of these features include geotagging, lists, search and multiple retweet styles. Seesmic also gives you a widget for your desktop. There are a lot of features in there for free that usually only come with the premium version of apps. If we had to pick an over all best Twitter app for Android, it would be Seesmic.
Twidroid – For the user looking for the maximum amount of features
Twidroid boasts a wide array of functions, including the fan-favorite slidescreen integration. It also allows linking up with other services like TwitPic, Posterous and bit.ly, among others. But for the full experience, including multiple accounts and customizable themes, you need to upgrade to Twidroid Pro. Even the free version is far ahead of most other apps in the range of features, so if you’re looking for the app with the most flexibility, this is it.
Hootsuite – For the professional user with multiple accounts and tweeters
Touiteur – For the user looking for the prettiest interface
Touiteur (which we eventually realized is supposed to sound like Twitter, but more French) has by far the slickest and most polished interface of any app we looked at. With animated menus and transitions in a compact, streamlined design, Touiteur is a dream to use. But the glitz comes with a couple catches. The features are quite limited in the free version – you’ll have to pay get link shortening, widgets and multiple account support. And if it’s speed you’re after, this isn’t the app for you, it’s noticeably slower than most of the others. But we’re almost inclined to say it’s worth it.
Developers are starting to put serious effort into creating apps for Android, as these great options showcase. Do you have a favorite Twitter app that we missed? Let us know.
Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 3:00PM
With the explosion of smart
phones over the past year, more and more companies are moving beyond websites
and social media to embrace the mobile revolution. This year looks to finally
be the year of the mobile phone that people have been predicting for the past
five years. Last year, if you didn’t have a Twitter account and a Facebook Fan
Page, you weren’t in the game. This year’s must have property is an iPhone app.
iPhone apps are a great way to enable brand/consumer interaction and building brand equity. Most businesses think an iPhone app is financially and technically beyond their means. The good news is both of those issues are no longer true. I looked around the web and noticed there are several sites that allow you to create your own iPhone app and publish it either for free or for a small fee.
I set out to discover what options non-developers have for creating iPhone apps without spending too much. I sat down with my co-workers and created a wish-list of qualities that businesses might want in an iPhone app-creating-tool. We wanted:
The evaluation method was simple. I visited each site and registered. I took a screenshot of a relevant part of the interface and then spent some time playing around with it. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After using the application, I rated each site against my wish list.
Pros: Multiple platforms (iPhone, Blackberry and Windows
based), easy to use
Cons: Too basic, no RSS, no natural way of integrating social media
Price: $7.99/update, $19.99 to post to Apple app store
Rating:
Kanchoo is rich in content management and text formatting
tools, making the app well suited for news distribution. Graphics like button
icons, backgrounds and splash pages are pretty much the only things you can
customize, which is a shame since it’s an excellent way for a company to
present themselves. Kanchoo takes some time to get the hang of and the
interface is overly complex. To preview your app before you submit it, you need
to download software.
Pros: Very useful if you’re working in the news industry
Cons: Takes time to learn, expensive
Price: Initial submission fee 88$. Hosting is 28$/month.
Rating:
MobileRoadie creates apps for the iPhone and Android phones.
The tool is highly customizable, allowing the creator to integrate the most
popular social media assets, a store, RSS, a wall for user/brand interaction,
geo segmentation and stats on number of downloads and what excerpts are most
popular. A fun and easy app well worth checking out – if you’ve got a chunk of
change to burn.
Pros: Easy-to-use, social media friendly, rich features
Cons: Too expensive
Price: setup fee $499. Hosting is $29/month.
Rating:
Mobbase is an app positioned for musicians and their fans,
but this web-based service includes many features applicable for brand
promotion as well. The app is extremely customizable, allowing you to define
all the graphics including individual backgrounds on every page, the design and
layout of the buttons, splash pages, bottom bars, etc. The service integrates
most of the desirable social media tools such as Twitter (sorting by username,
@mentions and #hashtags), videos (YouTube: entire channel, specific video or
tags), photos (“sets” if you’re using Flickr or Albums with Picasa), blogs and
RSS (two streams) in a natural way, along with a few other interesting features.
Pros: Highly customizable, easy-to-use, social media
friendly
Cons: Can’t change name of buttons, analytics only tracks number of downloads
Price: $20 activation fee + $5/month for first 500 downloads, $1/month for
every 1000 downloads after that.
Rating:
Swebapps is a rich app-creating tool intended for companies.
Choose whether you want 4, 6 or 8 buttons and select among more than 30
features, including Facebook, a portfolio, Twitter and podcasts. There is an
extra analytics feature called app-tracker that measures not only the numbers
of downloads, but what buttons are used the most. The service is very intuitive
and simple while still offering a lot.
Pros: Intuitive and easy-to-use, good analytics, client signup, many RSS feeds
Cons: Rather expensive, can only add one Twitter account
Price: $50/button, $10 app tracker, hosting fee $25/month
Rating:
All the app creating apps tested were useful, but it comes down to what your ambition level is, how much you’re willing to spend and who your target is. The most social media friendly were Mobbase and Mobile Roadie. These were also my personal favorites, as they enable a great deal of customization and have loads of interesting features to get my creative juices flowing. The other apps had some great features – especially the analytics with Swebapps. But Mobbase takes home the gold as Mobile Roadie and Swebapps are priced much higher without offering a whole lot more.
