With so much information available on the web, it’s hard to distinguish between fact and fiction. And as avid internet users, we’re typically weary of blogs and individual sites as valid sources of information but when it comes to major publications we—for the most part—tend to believe what we read. The following is our own retraction/correction and an example of why we should not always believe everything we read.
Recently our in-house start up, Crowdbeacon was written about in Entrepreneur Magazine.
Even though it is an honor for our agency and the product, it was unfortunately inaccurate in naming the mobile application’s creators. Crowdbeacon was actually the brainchild of start-up expert, Robert Boyle, Anthony Del Monte and a skilled Sardinian developer named, Luca Columbu. Scott Wells was misquoted as the co-creator because he was the one who conducted the phone interview. Scott is one of our lead strategists and was important in launching Crowdbeacon’s social media and marketing efforts.
For the most part, the other details of the article are true but in publishing this correction, we wanted to highlight Luca for all his hard work and dedication in developing Crowdbeacon. They may have neglected to mention you Luca, but we know how hard you worked; all the hours you put in and we are glad to have an intelligent developer such as yourself on the Squeaky team.
Grande Opera!
Near Field Communication. Three words you may or may not be familiar with but this technology will soon be the vehicle upon which mobile payments will ride. If you didn’t know, NFC is a short-range wireless communication technology built into some mobile devices. So when will this quasi-new technology become embedded into our already digitally saturated lives?
Continue reading →
As an interactive agency, we at Squeaky know that our industry is constantly changing and being aware of what’s trending and what’s popular is an important contributing factor to how we go about producing great work for our clients. So we have put together a killer presentation that takes an in-depth look at vital statistics surrounding mobile marketing.
The mobile platform—as you may already know—is growing at an extraordinary rate in terms of users and more people are purchasing smartphones each day. Mobile devices are everywhere we look and have become embedded within our society so much that many of us have grown dependent on them in terms of storing our information. Think about it. How many phone numbers can you recall by heart?
Last year Apple blew everyone away with their new tablet and 2010 was appropriately dubbed the year of the iPad. This year however we can see an emergence of new tablets and mobile devices to compete with it (see 2011 The Year of Mobile). This is good news for marketers and advertisers because it creates a whole new interactive platform on which to engage your audience. These aren’t the—dare we say—lame, barely functioning devices of the Zack Morris era but rather devices that help to create a richer experience for the user as well as provide new ways for marketers to reach their audience and gather data.
Check out the presentation above and stay tuned for more in the near future.
Last week Facebook unveiled their all new, unifying mobile presence. With mobile usage on the rise (set to surpass desktop usage by 2014), Facebook knew they had to revamp their mobile presence. They’ve now rolled out mobile versions of the site that are accessible from just about any mobile device—smart or not.
Not only is mobile internet usage steadily increasing but an astonishing 91% of all mobile internet access is used to socialize. Of the 600 million registered users on Facebook, 1/3 of those users access the site via a mobile device. Now that Facebook has opened up the digital doors to allow more devices to more readily access the social network, we predict these numbers to skyrocket.
Of all the mobile devices out there (4 billion) only 25% of them are smart devices. This means that the rest consists of feature phones and mobile devices that likely have limited browsing capability and more than likely no type of Facebook application available. Keeping that in mind, now that roughly 3 billion people can have easier access to the mobile version of Facebook, odds are they will visit it more frequently than they did before. (Statistics provided by Microsoft Tag, Check out the infographic here)
Last year was the year of the iPad. It was the hottest gadget out but it lacked competition. This year, manufacturers will be striking back with their own tablet PCs.
Now the mobile market consists of not only phones but these tablets and their toned down cousins, the e-readers (which have vastly evolved from the primordial Kindle). In 2010 85% of American adults owned a cell phone while about 4% owned a tablet PC or e-reader.
With further competition between manufacturers, these devices will continue to be improved in both performance and price and we predict they will continue to grow in ownership throughout the country as well. After all, when cell phones first came out only rich kids like Zack Morris could afford one but eventually they took off and became a huge deal.
What does this mean for marketers? It means there will be plenty of new mediums on which to market your product or brand. Developers can already include advertising within applications they develop for Apple’s lineup of products and we are certain there will be more of that to come with the release of these new devices.
Overall, the mobile market is a virtually untapped resource but continues to expand which means exciting new opportunities for us marketers to develop creative and innovative ways to reach consumers.
