We’re a third of the way through the year already, and after a quiet start to the month, things heated up a little towards the end of April. It was month in which Apple celebrated the 1 billionth application download from its App Store, in less than nine months. Who said people don’t download apps to their phones. They do now.
Mobile transaction network mBlox announced that it was moving into the mobile advertising market with the launch of an ad insertion pilot, while one of the established players, JumpTap unveiled tapMatch, a pay-per-click (PPC) performance mobile advertising marketplace, in which brand and performance marketers bid on keywords and categories to run ads that appear on mobile web pages, above search results and in applications.
There were contrasting views on how the mobile market might be affected by the recession, with mobile social network operator BuzzCity declaring that the global recession is having little to no effect on mobile advertisers, while on the following day, Juniper Research released a report saying that the recession will cut mobile entertainment growth by almost $13 billion (£8.9 billion) over the next five years.
There was more bad news from comScore, which released the results of a study of US Internet usage via mobile PC data cards, which show that the subscriber base, which has previously been growing strongly – began to decelerate noticeably in Q4 2008.
Buongiorno unveiled peoplesound, a mobile-centric social network. peoplesound is specifically designed for the mobile phone, with a closed network of friends. Ad-funded mobile games company 123play.com announced a deal with free newspaper Metro that will offers readers free mobile games. And text query service AQA 63336 announced the launch of AQA2U, which enables anyone with interesting content to keep in touch with their followers, and make money from texts sent to subscribers to alert them to new content.
The European Parliament took action to end what EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding called “the roaming rip off in Europe,” by capping the price of a text message sent from abroad in the EU at a maximum of €0.11 (£0.10) as of 1 July, instead of €0.28 currently. The cost of making and receiving mobile calls abroad is to come down too.
Vodafone was named as the UK’s most valuable brand in a study prepared by brand research company Millward Brown Optimor. It responded by offering a day’s free mobile web browsing for its customers (today), and launching a daily flat-rate fee of 50p for unlimited mobile browsing and email.
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