Medialets

LEADING PUBLISHERS LOOK TO MEDIALETS FOR MOBILE RICH MEDIA ADVERTISING SOLUTION

The Associated Press, NPR, CNN, Variety and others integrate Medialets into their mobile apps

New York, NY: February 18, 2010 — Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad and analytics platform for mobile, today announced that The Associated Press, NPR, The Washington Post, MenuPages.com, CNN, CNN Money and Variety have integrated Medialets’ into their mobile applications. These publishers can now reliably deliver engaging rich media ads into their mobile apps while measuring usage and driving real mobile ad revenue.

“Publishers are turning to Medialets for our ability to provide them with the most engaging rich media ad units in mobile,” said Eric Litman, Medialets CEO. “Through their relationship with Medialets, these publishers can now give brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones and delivers the highest return for their media spend.”

Medialets’ ad technology enables publishers to serve rich media ads into mobile applications, whether those ads are sold in-house or come from an integrated advertising sales partner. The unique ad formats offered by Medialets let brands and agencies create engaging ads that utilize the power of a mobile app with the intimacy and exceptional measurability smartphones provide. The advertisements can include video, animation, sound and other advanced functionality.

Examples of the rich media ads created, served and tracked by Medialets for these publishers can be found at the Medialets blog.

About Medialets:

Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. Our clients include The Washington Post, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com and more than 17,000 others who use Medialets to measure their audience and serve award-winning, high impact ads that outperform online rich media by an average of 2.5 times. Medialytics, our mobile app analytics platform supporting the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, delivers in-depth views into both application and ad performance while providing the industry’s only solution for guaranteed post-click ad reporting. We are a privately held, New York-based company with marquee investors and a world-class team. Visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com, email us at connect@medialets.com, or follow us on Twitter @medialets.

Good news… real time data processing within our Medialytics platform is back. Kudos to our dev team for getting this functionality up and running, enabling Medialets to provide the industry’s only real-time analytics platform for rich media ads within iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps.

We’ve crunched the adoption numbers for last week’s release of iPhone OS v3.1.3 and found that among the developers’ apps we track 14% of their users installed v3.1.3 between 2/1 and 2/6, with adoption growing steadily each day.

We also saw a drop of 13% in installs v3.1.2, meaning 87% of the upgrades to v3.1.3 came from users that already had v3.1.2.

The other interesting data point is that roughly 13% of these users are slow to upgrade their iPhone OS and are using a version prior to 3.1.2.

More exciting news today…. Wizzard Media, the world’s largest podcasting network, has integrated our  advertising and medialytics platform into their iPhone App framework through which they will be posting  podcast related apps.

As Wizzard CEO Chris Spencer talks about in the release, Medialets is helping Wizzard overcome the biggest obstacle for podcast advertising which is “the lack of interactivity (the ability to click on an ad and be taken to an advertiser’s web site) and the accurate measurement of the delivered advertisement…”

More big news from Medialets in the coming days….stay tuned.

Headed to iPhoneDevCamp 3 on July 31st? Then we have a special treat for you!

Medialets is proud to bring you BT as the special guest performer for the opening night events. This outdoor performance will be held at Yahoo! and is only available to registered attendees of the conference.

BT has a long standing history with Apple, from using their equipment to performing at WWDC 2006, and now releasing his first iPhone app called Sonifi . If you haven’t had a chance to hear BT before, you can check him out here.

There’s still time to register for iPhoneDevCamp 3 where VP of Marketing Rana Sobhany will be discussing iPhone Marketing 101, a session you don’t want to miss. Click here to register.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Apple has made claims that the iPhone OS 3.0 yields significant performance gains on the 3G model, and that the new 3GS can accomplish the same tasks up to twice as fast as its predecessors. Anecdotally, the new 3GS definitely “feels” faster under certain conditions. But how do Apple’s devices and OS versions really compare to one another? And perhaps of even greater interest, how does the latest hardware from Cupertino compare to smart phones recently released from other vendors?

“Objavectaweb-C” OS?

One of the key challenges in conducting an objective evaluation of software performance across devices that utilize different operating systems lies in accounting for the fundamental differences in the various OSs. While the iPhone 3G and 3GS could potentially run the same app on the same Objective-C-based operating system (making direct comparisons relatively straightforward), Android apps are Java-based, and the Palm Pre runs the entirely new Web OS. Given these divergent OS implementations, is there anything that come close to a standard unit of measure for judging performance of this growing breed of “superphones?”

Finding Common Ground

The common thread between these three OS’s is JavaScript execution in WebKit—the open source project that, in varying degrees, powers web browsing technology for these three disparate operating systems. With the exception of certain browser plugins (e.g., Flash), web rendering technology installed on today’s premiere mobile devices makes almost all—and in some cases even more—features of their ubiquitous desktop web browser counterparts available. Therefore, given the global commonality of JavaScript and WebKit-based web browsers, it becomes possible to compare the performance of these “pocket computers that make phone calls” to the performance of desktop machines.

The Yardstick

The WebKit Open Source Project provides a JavaScript test Suite dubbed SunSpider. According to the description on the SunSpider home page, “this benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other.” We at Medialets have found it to be one of the best attempts to measure real world JavaScript performance in a balanced and statistically sound way.

Medialets ran the SunSpider test suite in the following environments:

1. Safari 4.0.1 on a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo White MacBook.
   The MacBook results were used as a baseline for relative comparisons.
2. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v2.2.1
3. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v3.0
4. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3GS with iPhone OS v3.0
5. The “Browser” app on the T-Mobile G1 with Android OS v1.5 (Cupcake)
6. The “Web” app on the Palm Pre with Web OS v1.0.2

Each device was fully restored and rebooted immediately before running the test suite. Every attempt was made to assure that no atypical background tasks were executing while the tests were running. The SunSpider tests automatically run five times sequentially and the mean average from all five tests are reported. Network speed and latency have no effect on the results of the test.

Results

The results of the iPhone-based tests alone are rather astonishing and seem to indicate that many of Apple’s claims about the performance gains of their 3.0 OS and the iPhone 3GS may hold some water. Using OS 3.0 on the same iPhone 3G yields nearly 3X the JavaScript performance in Mobile Safari vs. using iPhone OS 2.2.1. The iPhone 3GS ups the ante by another factor of 3, bringing JavaScript performance on the iPhone 3GS to just 12X that of a full-powered desktop machine that has well over four times the raw processing muscle alone. The T-Mobile G1 running the “Cupcake” version of the Android OS completed the test suite in about 91 seconds. This makes it about a third faster than the iPhone 3G running Apple’s previous OS (2.2.1). The Palm Pre came storming out of the gate with speeds that closely rival the iPhone 3G running Apple’s latest iPhone OS.

Do any of these numbers really indicate which phone might be the best choice for a given individual? Absolutely not. At Medialets we use all of these devices, and love each one for many reasons. The fact that these tests can even be performed across this many device/OS combinations is a testament to how far mobile technology has come in such a relatively short time. We are looking forward to seeing an even greater variety of advanced mobile devices and OS revisions enter the market and we’ll keep you posted as we test more devices in our lab. Subscribe to our feed, leave a comment below, or reach out to us directly if you have any questions.

Just 18 days after the launch of the Palm Pre, their App Catalog has hit its first major milestone, 1 million downloads. On launch day, Palm sold 50k devices and their App Catalog experienced 100k downloads – that’s an average of 2 apps downloaded per device and 5,500 downloads per app (with a low of 600 and a high of 20k). 18 days later and they’ve tripled the user base to 150k units, averaging 6+ apps downloaded per device and 33.3k downloads per app (with a low of 2.4k and a high of 114k).

A Perspective: Apples To Palms

The iTunes App Store is the most successful app store in the mobile market today, so it makes perfect sense that analysts and critics immediately compare the two. Unfortunately, there really is no common ground for the two app stores based on the numerous factors involved. So instead of a comparison of the two, we’ll just use the precedent the App Store has set to put things in perspective.

The App Store hit the 1 million download point about 17 days earlier than the App Catalog, housing more than 16x the amount of apps and was accessible by more than 26x the number of devices than the App Catalog. Looks pretty bad for the Pre, right? Well, that’s until you take a look at the downloads themselves.

Still comparing at the 1 million mark, the average Palm Pre user had downloaded 26x the number of apps that iPhone users had, and the average app in the App Catalog experienced 16x the number of downloads that apps in the App Store had experienced. Funny how those numbers look so familiar.

So congratulations Palm! The Pre is an amazing device with lots of potential and we’re looking forward to what a public SDK will offer both consumers and developers alike. And just like my father told me on my millionth download “Learn from the mistakes of those who came before you.”

Early this year our partner, OMD’s Ignition Factory, approached us for help in crafting a groundbreaking mobile experience for their client Levi’s Dockers. We took them through the capabilities of our rich media mobile advertising platform, brainstormed through a number of concepts, and together with creative agency Razorfish launched Pants Dance, the world’s first Shakable Ad™.

This ad was built by the Medialets team and served via our ad server into several top iPhone apps including iBowl, i.TV, SGN Golf and iBasketball. It is currently running – as of the date of this post – as a full screen interstitial, and includes stop motion video (a very cool effect done by our creative director Theo Skye), sound, and the ability to shake the ad to move between dance sequences.

Forbes, Mobile Marketer, Silicon Alley Insider, Advertising Age and a host of others have given their praise for this campaign. Special thanks to John Haber and Jamie Wells at OMD for their creative vision and support.

If you would like Medialets to help you with rich media ads on iPhone, Android or BlackBerry, drop us an email at connect@medialets.com and we’ll create a plan to shake up the market together.

Milestone indicates maturation of market and mass uptake of publisher tools and reporting by iPhone developers

NEW YORK, New York. – April 15th, 2009 – Medialets, the leading analytics and ad technology platform for next-generation mobile applications, has today announced reaching the milestone of processing one billion events through the company’s free analytics product, Medialytics.

Medialytics, launched on July 11th, 2008 – the same day as Apple’s App Store – has been installed over 60 million times across more than 13 million unique devices to date. Medialytics measures behaviors in many of the top 20 highest downloaded applications on the iPhone platform based upon data released by Apple last week. Medialets works with developers and media publishers who look to Medialytics as a business intelligence tool to help them make informed decisions around improving app strategy and performance.

“Knowing and tracking key metrics are an important part of any successful business’ operations. With Apple nearing a billion downloads, there’s now meaningful scale from which every developer on the platform can draw insights to drive their product and marketing decisions,” says Eric Litman, CEO of Medialets. “We give our customers the tools they need to collect the data and metrics that are important to advancing their business.”

The most powerful insights to come from 10 months of data relate to engagement time with content and functionality-rich applications.  Engagement time across all Medialets applications falls between 3.5 minutes and 7 minutes on average per session.  The company sees ad click-through rates range from 1% on the low end to 8% on the high end for both advertiser content as well as cross-application promotion.

“It is still a young market, but developers and publishers alike on the platform are quickly learning what to track and how to adapt to the data they see.” remarks Litman. “Analytics are a competitive tool. Knowing more about your audience than your competitors do in this exceptionally competitive space is an important part of staying ahead.”

About Medialets

Medialets is a New York City-based rich media advertising and analytics platform for native applications on devices such as iPhone and Android.  Medialets works with agencies and brands to define and deploy innovative ad campaigns that tap into all of the capabilities of the iPhone. Medialytics, Medialets’ free analytics and reporting solution, is the leading analytics and advertising solution for the world’s most downloaded iPhone applications. Medialets is a privately-held company with offices in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA. Email us at connect@medialets.com, visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com and follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/medialets.

Press Contact:
Rana Sobhany
VP Marketing, Medialets
rana.sobhany@medialets.com
Phone: 703.203.2508

Google’s Android Market has been officially live for 24 hours. Here are some early observations and comparisons with the iPhone App Store’s first 24 hours.

There are myriad similarities between iPhone and Android users:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users 

During the first 24 hours of Android Market, 62 apps were available to consumers, all free.  This is less than 10% of the number of apps we saw at the launch of Apple’s App Store. Although Apple allowed both free and paid applications to be distributed when the App Store launched, paid downloads for Android will not be available until Q1 2009.

Observation #1 – The average application has 7,800+ downloads.

Android Market is providing some detail on downloads per application –  in contrast to Apple’s embargo of this information after the first 15 hours of launching their App Store.  Rather than displaying exact figures, Android phones show download ranges for a given application, with the smallest range we observed being 100-500 and the largest 10,000-50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads/app, just north of the middle of the 5,000 – 10,000 range.

Observation #2  - Nine apps made it to the 10,000 – 50,000 downloads range.

If we use ratings and number of reviews to differentiate, unlike the iPhone platform, games are not in the top three.  Of the nine apps in this range, only three are games.  ShopSavvy is at the top of the list factoring in ratings and number of reviews, followed by The Weather Channel, and Shazam, an app that helps people identify a song they are listening to.  During the early hours of the iPhone App Store, while Apple was still publishing download data, only two apps broke the 10,000 download mark – Remote and AIM.  Remote, the leading app, was downloaded ~16,000 times. Although the ranges for the top Android apps are similar, it is still too early  to assert with confidence that a trajectory similar to Apple’s App Store is occurring.  Other factors over time need to be considered, including the total number of apps in the market.

Observation #3 – 24 hours into the launch, it appears that either Android users are generally interested in the same types of application functionality as iPhone users, or possibly, that Android developers are generally interested in creating the same types of apps as iPhone developers.

We compared our observations of the iPhone App Store 24 hours after launch with Android Market, and found that once we normalized the names of categories between the two platforms, the categories have similar distributions of applications. We had to make some assumptions and groupings to make our best apples-to-androids comparison and noted those in the table below the chart.

As always, we love hearing from anyone who is interested in learning more about, or sharing their experiences about this new platform. Feel free to contact us at connect at www.medialets.com or follow us on twitter at @medialets.