My physician will describe how to age gracefully during my annual physical exam and I figure if I continue to jog during lunch and have an apple a day, I’m doing the right thing.  In the growing smartphone market, Nokia is probably not aging gracefully as is evident by Apple’s growing market share of global ad requests as measured by AdMob network.  Nokia lost 15 percent points from 2008 Q4 to 2009 Q4; while Apple grabbed 24 percent during this period

I can attribute this to the iPhone going global and of course the Apple App Store’s treasure trove of applications running on the iPhone.  There are simply many more developers embracing the Apple’s OS versus the Nokia backed Symbian OS.  We all understand that the secret sauce in the mobile advertising niche will be unearthed by an application, probably not yet developed.  Having said that, one would think attracting developers is a prerequisite for a successful mobile advertising platform.  Gartner is projecting 4.5 billion mobile app downloads for 2010, with 82% of the apps free! So how will those developers monetize their apps, if eight out of ten downloads are free?

Developers can earn their money from mobile advertisers, and the various banners, embedded video, overlays, animated gifs, ad bugs and so forth added to their content.  An important piece of this income relies on knowing the location of the smartphone, in order to provide timely advertisement of goods or services.  After reading an article in the Apple App Store tip section of their developer center, I became confused and began to wonder how Apple can continue to attract developers if they are disallowing the use of their Core Location Framework, “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store”

So, Apple is protecting their valuable customers from unwanted advertisements, or are they flexing their muscles and attempting to leverage their newly acquired Quattro Wireless mobile advertising division? Hmm, first the threat to replace Google with their past adversary Microsofts’ Bing as the iPhones’ default search and now this constraint on app developers

It will continue to get heated as these industry giants juggle for position in the race for your mobile advertising dollars. Our team at MoreVisibility is here for you and will be keeping abreast on the ever changing climate of the mobile advertising niche. Just yesterday at the Mobile World Congress 2010, Google’s Eric Schmidt gave the keynote speech in which he proclaimed “Mobile First”. Websites must take heed and be prepared to present their content on mobile devices, or possible miss opportunities to present their goods and services to the rapidly growing mobile users. Stop by our Mobile Websites Knowledge Center first to learn more or call us and let us explain how we can guide you in all your internet marketing needs.

I speak with many clients on a daily basis with lead generation sites. Clearly, the most integral component of a lead generation site is obtaining leads. This typically occurs through an online form, which should qualify the visitor as well as possible. For example: Which specific service is your visitor interested in learning more about?

One of the biggest mistakes I see (unfortunately way too often) is an online form that has an excessive number of fields, which can be downright overwhelming. This is bad enough; however, some forms take it a step further and require that all of the fields be filled out before visitors can click to submit the form. This is a huge no no. You want your form to be brief, user friendly and with as few required fields as possible. If you require too many fields, you may lose potential leads. Reason being, the average person will not take a liking to being forced to tell you their entire life story (I am exaggerating a bit here) in order to obtain the requested information.

So what should the required fields be? Well, every company is different and it depends on the specific action item you are asking your visitor to take. I can give you my 2 cents….With a Newsletter signup, the only requirement I would have is a valid email address. You can then reach out to thank the visitor for their interest and see if they would like to speak with someone from your organization in more detail. For a Whitepaper download, you will want to know which particular whitepaper they are interested in; a drop down menu usually achieves this task. On our Website, one of the action items is to request a Free Search Engine Visibility Report. In order for our team to complete the requested report, we must have a website. Therefore, that is field is a requirement.

I encourage you to take a look at your online forms. Are they clean and professional looking with as little required fields as possible? If the answer is no, now is the time to make some modifications to improve your overall intake of leads.

Ever since Google established itself as the Big Dog in online search with 35% of the market share in 2001, whenever there has been a new search engine or search technology brewing there has been an expectation (by someone somewhere) that it will be a “Google Killer”. 

Here are a few of the more buzzworthy Google-killers from the last few years:

• March 2006:  Microsoft Live Search
• January 2007:  Wikia Search (Wikipedia’s Google-Killer)
• October 2007:  Yahoo Search Assist (Yahoo’s Flickr Integration )
• July 2008:  Cuil
• March 2009:  Twitter search
• May 2009:  Wolfram Alpha
• June 2009:  Bing
   

In 2010, expect to see even more “killers” in the online world.  Its no longer about who is going to try to overtake Google in search market share…there have been tons of attempts, but nothing has taken hold up to this point. 

Now we are seeing more “killers” in the social media space.  But history has taught us not to attack Google where they dominate – search.  Social Channels play nice with Google when it comes to search.  While many social platforms have developed their own search engine – they still rely on the big  3; make that 2 engines to power the results.  However, there is opportunity to attack Google in other places that can be damaging, like email / Gmail.  Have you heard about Facebook’s webmail that is in development? 

But Google is always ready to pull something from their arsenal – and it is not Microsoft, Facebook, or even Twitter that seems to be on the radar – despite the rollout of Google Buzz, called a Twitter-killer by some.  Rather, we are seeing Google penetrate and gain momentum in other areas like mobile with the Nexus phone (iPhone killer) and Chrome OS Tablet (iPad killer).  This crossover into retail mobile should help Google continue to dominate in the online world. 

Even more interesting to watch will be Google’s foray into broadband with their 1-gigabit-per-second broadband networks.