The latest from TechCrunch
- iPhone Developers Get An Open Ad Management Platform From .App/Ads
- An In-Depth Look At Pivot, Microsoft's Newest Data Visualization Tool
| iPhone Developers Get An Open Ad Management Platform From .App/Ads | Top |
| As the ecosystem around iPhone apps continues to explode, the opportunity for advertising and monetization grows simultaneously. There are been an abundance of mobile and specifically iPhone centric ad-networks that have emerged, like AdMob (which was acquired by Google a few weeks ago), Greystripe, InMobi and others, to help developers make money from advertising on aps. And ad exchange startups such as AdWhirl ( acquired by AdMob a few months ago) and MobClix help developers optimize ad placement by dynamically choosing so serve ads from ad network that bidding the highest to reach the users of that particular app. A new kid, .app/ads, has stepped onto ad platform block today, hoping to provide the most open, and appealing ad platform for iPhone developers to optimize their app ads. While .app/ads serves a variety of purposes for developers, one of the startup’s primary functions is as a completely open iPhone app ad exchange. Like the other players, .app/ads provides a uber-simple dashboard for app developers to create mutiple ad slots within their apps, list their apps, and implement advertising through a variety of ad-networks/exchanges. But what makes .app/ads different is that its fully open to developers can run any ad network or any ad exchange whenever they want. And developers can pick and choose to integrate the ad code they need from the companies they want vs. a pre-selected loaded SDK. And there’s no limit to the number of SDKs developers can add. It’s like ordering from an a la carte menu. Apple recently rolled out the ability to implement in-app purchases for free apps, which was a boon to developers. .app/ads will power in-app purchases for developers for free, allowing developers to run in-app purchase ads easily. Once a product is setup, developers can create an add with text and images, and simple add the advertisement to the rotation. The site will automatically rotate in the in-app purchase add with other ads. .app/ads also lets developers tweak the content of ad slots. For example, developers can import Twitter feeds to fill an ad slot. When an app user clicks on a particular link in the Tweet in the feed, he or she is taken to the source of the link within the app. So if the link was from TechCrunch, the user could browse TechCrunch from within the developer’s app. .app/ads also will allow developers to import RSS feeds into the slot as well as promote other apps, contests, updates and more. While this content will be mixed in the rotation with ads, the basic idea is to give developers the option of engaging with their users in other ways besides advertising. And the platform lets developers set the frequency of appearance of certain ads or content. Another compelling feature of .app/ads is a developer to developer marketplace where developers can barter with each other for ad space, set pricing terms and eventually sell ad space directly to each other. Currently this is the only feature where .app/ads. is monetizing; the platform is taking 10 percent of each transaction on the marketplace. As of now, .app/ads caters solely for iPhone developers and apps. The startup’s founder Evan Rifkin told me that the open platform has been optimized for the developer, and aims to level the playing field for developers to have a fully transparent app ad management platform. Openness on ad exchanges has been an issue in the past, when AdMob announced its decision earlier this year to cut off ad network aggregators like AdWhirl and Tapjoy, claiming it had been hearing of complaints of technical glitches related to ads served by such "ad net mediators.” The company later announced a delay in this decision in August. Of course, the ad network and marketplace arena is crowded. But the newly launched startup has experience on its side. Rifkin is a seasoned entrepreneur, who sold startup Flux (formerly Tagworld ) to Viacom last fall. He also helped start Adconion and co-founded Traffic Marketplace (sold to Uproar/Vivendi Universal). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| An In-Depth Look At Pivot, Microsoft's Newest Data Visualization Tool | Top |
| At Microsoft’s PDC event a few weeks ago, Microsoft Live Labs introduced a new technology, called Pivot, to make sense of interconnectedness between objects on the web. The underlying premise of Pivot is to view relationships between “collections” of individual information on the the web. Many of the connections between items on the web aren’t necessarily tangible, but Pivot helps crawl massive amount of objects on the web and produces sleek visualizations of all that is connected. We sat down with Microsoft Technical Fellow Gary Flake, who created Pivot, and Microsoft evangelist Brandon Watson to take an in-depth look at the application. While Pivot is currently in private beta, we have 500 invites for TechCrunch readers who use the code “16FC 2946 0C4C 4CCB” when downloading the app here. Pivot is itself a standalone application, but it relies heavily on Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. The best way to understand the importance of Pivot is through a real-world example of how this technology would work. So let’s say I wanted a visualization of all the Wikipedia links to TechCrunch, Pivot would essentially crawl all of Wikipedia and create a map of the Wikipedia pages that are connected to TechCrunch, such as Michael Arrington’s Wikipedia page. Another real-world use of Pivot is extracting data from Facebook. For example, you can use Pivot to crawl Facebook and break down friends by various data points like relationship status or college. Microsoft has an interesting example of Pivot being used to sort through Sports Illustrated covers, where you can break down covers into verticals by type of sport, team, athlete and more. On the backend, Pivot is a rich media application that is built on top of the .NET framework and is powered by Seadragon, which also is integrated with parts of Silverlight, Microsoft’s version of Flash. Seadragon contributes to the advanced zooming and movable interface of Pivot. The application also includes an Excel plug-in that lets you import data into Pivot. When turned on, Pivot can also make sense of your own browsing history (if you are using Internet Explorer). Pivot hosts a portion of IE within the app, and will get a sense of your browsing history over time and then will slice and dice your history based upon various verticals. You could even integrate Pivot with our own data base CrunchBase so users can visually break down all of the data within the site. Pivot is definitely a cool toy to play around with and its scalability and results are impressive. Not only does it allow for deep-data dives from the web, but its visualizations are sleek and the rich-media features from Seadragon make the app easy to navigate. Pivot isn’t the first compelling technology to come out of Microsoft’s Live Labs. Photosynth, a graduate of Live Labs, is an impressive photo viewing project that stiches together images to create pseudo-3D worlds. Here’s a nifty screencast of how one developer used Pivot to mine data from Facebook: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
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