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Verizon takes 12 percent of iPhone market share in just a month

The battle for market share is on between Verizon Wireless and AT&T. In just one month, Verizon took 12.7 percent of the iPhone market, according to ad tracking firm Chitika.

That shows that Verizon probably sold a lot of phones in its first month working with Apple and AT&T is going to have to offer better services to users to hang on to them.

Chitika can measure the number of AT&T and Verizon devices registering on its network. Just one day after the device launched to Verizon customers on Feb. 10, Verizon iPhones accounted for 3 percent of the U.S. iPhone base.

Apple also debuted the second-generation iPad with Verizon as well as AT&T last Friday. While AT&T and Verizon slug it out, Apple is sitting pretty and could very well be gaining market share on Android.

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Study: Mobile Ad-Tracking Systems Are “Blind” To 80 Percent Of Apple iOS Devices

Apple mobile iOS devices (iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches) are used by 130 million people, but they present a huge blindspot to advertisers. All Apple mobile devices use the Safari browser, as do millions of Apple laptop and desktop computers. Safari blocks third-party cookies by default, which is good for privacy and good for consumers. But it is bad for advertisers who rely on browser cookie tracking to measure the effectiveness of their ads.

Marin Software, which offers a way to manage paid search advertising, conducted a study it provided to TechCrunch which shows that 80 percent of the time iOS devices don’t count paid-search conversions (i.e., clicks) because cookie-tracking is turned off. On the Mac, the undercounting occurs 50 percent of the time. All told, when you count all browsers, 38 percent of all paid-search clicks are not being counted.

These numbers are for so-called third-party cookies, not first-party cookies which come only from Websites you visit. Third-party cookies are served from various advertising networks or monitoring tools, and they are required for any type of retargeting across multiple Websites. While Marin only looked at paid search ad conversions, the numbers should hold true for display ads as well.

Not only are ads not being tracked properly on most Apple devices, but if they were tracked properly, Marin suggests that Apple devices actually perform better. As part of the study, Marin compared actual ad conversions to Windows computers as a baseline. While the perceived conversion rate of search ads is 56 percent lower because of the undercounting, the actual conversion rate is 23 percent higher.

Following the maxim that you don’t get paid for what can’t be measured, this blindspot poses a growing challenge to the online advertising industry, and Google in particular. (And you thought Apple was just doing this to protect consumers). The way around the blindspot is to use first-party cookies served from the Websites people visit, or to come up with better ways to measure the performance of online ads. But that’s the topic for another post.

Doodle Jump scores 10 million mobile downloads for two brothers

Doodle Jump, an enormously popular game on the iPhone built by two brothers in New York, has been downloaded more than 10 million times across the iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile devices.

That’s quite an achievement, but one that is becoming more and more common in the age of mobile apps. Indie developers who were virtually unknown are now becoming famous and fabulously wealthy because they created a game that resonated with millions of mobile users.

The company isn’t sitting still. In January, it announced a marketing deal with Universal Pictures, which plans to cross-promote the app in promotions for its upcoming live action and computer-animated comedy, Hop.

Doodle Jump comes from humble indie roots. Croatian immigrants Igor Pusenjak and his brother Marko (their company is called Lima Sky) created the app two years ago, and it has become a sensation, particularly in my household. Igor got the idea for it and sketched the game on a pad in his living room. Marko did the programming.

Lima Sky says it will soon launch multiplayer gaming for iOS (Apple iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and iPad 2 devices), Doodle Jump on the iPad, a Doodle Jump line of toys, a Doodle Jump comic book, and a Doodle Jump game for the Kinect motion-gaming system on the Xbox 360 video game console. In all of these extensions of the Doodle Jump brand, Lima Sky is pursuing the same kind of strategy as Rovio, which has had 100 million downloads of its Angry Birds mobile game.

In the movie deal, Lima Sky let its Doodle Jump users unlock a secret Easter level within the game and play as the film’s leading character. Hop is the second film from Universal Pictures and filmmaker Chris Meledandri, producer of Despicable Me, at Illumination Entertainment. The film, which features Russell Brand as the Easter Bunny, will be released on April 1.

In Doodle Jump, players guide Doodle the Doodler on a journey up a sheet of graph paper, using the tilt controls of the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Since its release, the game has risen into the cultural stratosphere, getting plenty of play and mentions from the likes of Jimmy Fallon, The Big Bang Theory, Rainn Wilson, the Jonas Brothers and others. Lima Sky was founded in July 2008.

In my panel at the recent Digital Life Design conference in Munich, Igor Pusenjak said the game has stayed popular thanks to frequent content updates. The company has also licensed the game to GameHouse, which has published it on Android phones.

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Zoove: We’re ready to dominate SMS advertising

zoove suzukiMobile marketing company Zoove has been around since 2004, but president and chief executive Joe Gillespie said this is the year the company’s brand advertising campaigns will take off.

The Palo Alto, Calif. company just announced deals with Sprint and T-Mobile. It’s already partnered with AT&T and Verizon, so it now has more than 95 percent carrier penetration in the United States, Gillespie said.

Zoove operates a registry of what it calls StarStar Vanity Numbers. These numbers take the format **BRANDNAME, and they can be used for SMS text message campaigns. The problem, Gillespie said, is that each carrier has to agree to support the registry, and without all the major carriers on-board, the campaigns weren’t very appealing to advertisers. Asking consumers to dial **LATTE to receive a coupon is a cool idea, but if you have to add, “Only works on AT&T and Verizon,” that ruins some of the magic.

This sounds like a compelling and easy way to connect advertising in other media to mobile phones. To use a hypothetical example, the studio behind the latest Shrek movie could release a poster asking people to send a message to **Shrek, and then those fans will get a link to the movie trailer. Or, to cite a campaign that Zoove has actually run, The Early Show on CBS can ask viewers to use the StarStar Vanity Numbers to vote in different polls.

Advertisers should get more response from Zoove than from normal text message campaigns, because consumers don’t have to memorize a random phone number. And unlike the QR codes that smartphone owners can scan to access additional content, Zoove isn’t limited to device with QR code readers — it works on any phone that supports SMS.

Gillespie said Zoove has created a pricing plan that accommodates large and small companies. Basically, the longer your vanity number, the easier it is to remember and the more Zoove will charge you.

Zoove’s most recent funding was a $13 million round in 2009. Investors include Cardinal Venture Capital, Highland Capital Planners, and Worldview Technology Partners.

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