Mobile Groove

Evolution, not revolution. That is what I witnessed first-hand as I walked around South By Southwest (SXSW) , the festival and conference hailed as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies.

In 2010, the Next Big Thing was location-based social networking, a mobile-megatrend CNN reminds us was led by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. Last year it was all about group messaging services such as GroupMe or Beluga. And this year the excitement is all about “ambient location” and “social discovery” — a new category of interaction that brings together all the GPS-enabled mobile apps that run in the background on our devices and alert us when like-minded people are nearby.

Mobile is fast becoming the device we reach to for advice and assistance throughout our daily routine, so it’s little wonder that verticals such as Health & Fitness and Finance ­ are stepping up mobile advertising activities and spend.

It’s a massive mobile advertising trend that marked 2011, and sure to gain additional momentum in 2012, according to the 2011 Year In Review SMART report (Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting).

At m-pulse we kick off a month looking at the App Economy and what developers need to know to turn building apps into a viable and thriving business. To set the stage for a discussion of wider industry trends we go to the ‘go-to’ market analysis and strategy firm VisionMobile and its founder Andreas Constantinou.

VisionMobile, which consistently delivers the industry actionable insights and definitive reports on all things mobile, just last week released the Cross-Platform Developer Tools 2012 report. This ambitious work analyzes the complex cross-platform tools landscape and — more importantly

Facebook and Twitter advanced their mobile strategies this week, each with an emphasis on providing brands a means to reach and engage with people who use the social networks to connect and communicate.

Twitter’s “news’â€� comes nearly two years after the company introduced the concept of Promoted Tweets. The approach effectively introduces advertising into tweet feeds, an experience that we mostly know from online.

To understand the importance of this week’s announcement, Twitter reminds us that Promoted Products have already been a part of our mobile experience. In fact, Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets in search have been available on Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Android and the mobile web (m.twitter.com) for some time. Additionally, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets in the timeline have been available on the mobile Web for several months.

Should we brace ourselves for a new battle as companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance) jockey for position to control the voice interface and our personal search/assistance experience? We continue our look at the opportunities and competition around mobile voice with Roberto Pieraccini, industry veteran and author of The Voice in the Machine.

In other segments we discuss the wider issue of personal privacy, following the news that social app Path has been uploading user data to its servers without our consent. Rob Woodbridge recounts a checklist of things to consider when building privacy into your minimum viable product. And we both find a perfect fit with a brilliant presentation— whose time has come (again) — from Jonathan MacDonald, a thought-leader and entrepreneur in digital media perhaps best known for his passionate views on the 3Ps (Permission: people will decide what brand messages they interact with; Privacy: people will decide where their data is collected and how it is used; and Preference: people will decide what content they find relevant). More about that further down in this post.

The holiday numbers are in, the mobile user surveys are done, and the implications for brands, retailers and marketers are profound. Mobile has become an integral part of the shopping routine, with the vast majority of consumers admitting to using their mobile phones to search and purchase gifts. John Stevens examines this mobile megatrend and shares eight tips for creating and executing a successful mobile strategy.

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Shopping will never be the same. A number of reports show that people rely on mobile every step of the consumer journey. Equally mobile search continues to play a huge part in our lives. A recent Performics survey of 502 U.S, residents who use mobile phones to search the web at least once a week revealed that a whopping 75 percent of consumers report mobile search makes their lives easier. Specifically, 63 percent said access to mobile search has changed the way they gather information, and 32 percent said they use search more on their mobile devices than they do on their personal computers.