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SPUN, our favorite new app for local urban discovery - Untapped New York. Here are our picks for the Best of the Untapped Cities Photo Pool: the 1964 World’s Fair Pavilion in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens. Here’s what the Untapped staff is reading today: 5 Things You Need to Know About the Brooklyn Bloody Mary Festival, Savant of the Subways. In a small town of Pennsylvania, this seemingly abandoned drive-in movie theater is still in use after 60 years, a reminder of a bygone American suburban life Art School Cute Weirdo is a definite “type,” but they come in infinite variations and color varieties. Kit Mills illustrates an example of this curious species. Matt Felson, a student at Parsons Design + Technology will set up classic binocular viewers in different parts of NYC showing historic photographs.

Just How Much Money Can Free iPhone Apps Make? Quite A Bit. Earlier this year Pinch Media released a report on the state of the App Store, describing some of the trends it had seen as developers tried to monetize their apps. The verdict: advertising on free applications simply can’t match the payoff from even the least expensive ‘paid’ applications, and would require an unobtainable $8.75 CPM to reach the same income per install. AdWhirl, the iPhone advertising platform formerly known as Adrollo, begs to differ. Since launching last month, the company has signed on over 10% of the top 50 applications in the App Store and is serving 250 million ad impressions per month. And their data tells a different tale. According to co-founder Sam Yam, one of the fundamental flaws in the Pinch Media report is that it assumes that applications only show a single ad impression per user interaction (in other words, every time you open a free app, you only see one ad). As for AdWhirl, it seems like the startup is off to a great start.

Location-based marketing - fad or the future? By Caroline Parry, contributor, UTalkMarketing How many times over the past five or six years was the year of mobile predicted? And, how many times did that prove to be a false dawn? Now the mobile era has arrived, thanks to smartphones and near universal 3G, the focus has now moved on to the trends within mobile marketing, and which of these will prove to be fads and which will have longevity. Perhaps the biggest question mark over long-term potential currently hangs over location-based marketing, including both check-in based services, such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, and localised search.

Mooted as one of the key trends of 2011, so far location-based services have failed to live up to their predicted hype with advertisers and brands, with many still uncertain as to how to integrate it into their campaigns and questioning whether offering a free product in return for a check-in amounts to a meaningful strategy.

This Infographic Explains What Native Advertising Is. Native advertising is hot right now, even if nobody seems to know exactly what it is. Solve Media, a digital advertising firm, has attempted to solve that problem with this infographic, which takes a stab at a standard definition: "Native advertising refers to a specific mode of monetization that aims to augment user experience by providing value through relevant content delivered in-stream. " Actually, that's pretty good. As the rest of the graphic shows, native advertising is clearly where the money is going in the industry.

At the very least, when ad execs are throwing the term around at Christmas parties, they can be on the same page. Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, Owenwbrown. As Android hits 75% market share, can anyone tell me why this is not Mac vs PC all over again? The latest IDC numbers are out, and Android is by far the undisputed heavyweight champion of the smartphone world. If Android was Mike Tyson, iOS would be Peewee Herman, and everything else is dust on the floor. That is, if shipping numbers are all that matter. Manufacturers — mostly Samsung — shipped 136 million Android-based phones in the third quarter of 2012, capturing 75 percent market share.

The only other growing phone ecosystem, iOS, shipped 27 million units, taking 15 percent market share. After that, it gets really nasty. BlackBerry captured 4.3 percent, which is, let us remember, more than double the percentage of Windows Phone — not bad for the embattled RIM, but both down and going downer. Symbian desperately clung to 2.3 percent of the market, and Windows Phone had two percent.

Above: IDC’s numbers in all their glory But the real story is Android and iOS, Google and Apple. I know that shipping numbers aren’t everything. Above: iPhone 5 Image Credit: John Koetsier/VentureBeat. Mobile Ad Revenues Will Top $11.4 Billion In 2013, Up 19% On 2012. India, China And Display Fuelling The Boost. The growing popularity of free mobile content — largely in the form of apps — is having a big impact on mobile advertising, the route that many developers and publishers are taking to monetize that content.

Gartner has released its forecasts for mobile advertising today, and it predicts that this year, mobile ads will collectively bring in $11.4 billion in revenues, a rise of 18.75% on 2012′s $9.6 billion. With that growth will also come an evolution in what kind of ads are doing best: display ads will grow faster than search and eventually overtake them, says Gartner. But other things will not change. The Asia Pacific region will keep its dominant position in mobile ads in 2013, and for the next three years, as the global market for mobile ads grows by a further 400% between now and 2016 to $24.5 billion. Gartner, it should be pointed out, first published these projections in November 2012, but has actually revised them up.

But this does not mean search is disappearing — far from it. Free App Friday: SPUN: City News. Posted 11/30/2012 at 1:04pm | by Cody Cardarelli Attention, all residents of metropolitan areas: your previous methods of finding the hip new spot for drinks, the latest news in your neighborhood, and upcoming events are now completely obsolete. SPUN: City News hopes to be your one-stop feed for all things about the city you're in, and it does a hell of a job. While the app is currently only live in a handful of cities (New York, Boston, DC, Philly, Miami, Chicago, Austin, Portand, Seattle, Los Angeles, and good old San Francisco), SPUN is the first true mobile attempt at organizing the local content we all normally cull from the web into one attractive package. Navigating the blogosphere from sources like Gawker Media, Gothamist, the Huffington Post, and local papers, news and cultural stories are framed in the app, and given a location on a map so you can determine where the story is in relation to you.

Download SPUN: City News for your iOS Device 5 of 6 SPUN: City News Screens. Is the iPad Really the Savior of the Newspaper Industry? Even before the iPad was revealed, analysts, pundits and the publishing industry were already heralding the tablet as the platform that would save the industry from declining readership and dropping revenue. The iPad's high-res display, large screen, digital delivery and interactive capabilities were lauded as the next generation of tools that print publishers could use to woo their readers back into the fold.

Now, six months after the iPad's launch, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at which newspapers have taken advantage of the digital platform, and the state of the market today. We recently tested the apps ourselves and spoke with content creators and industry experts to get an overview of where newspaper iPad apps are — and where they might be headed in the future. Adopting a New Way to Consume News In order for the general public to consume their daily news on a tablet device, they have to own one. As far as the wider market goes, Apple is far from the only player. Where People Get Information about Restaurants and Local Businesses. People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source. Newspapers, both printed copies and the websites of newspaper companies, run second behind the internet as the source that people rely on for news and information about local businesses, including restaurants and bars.

And word of mouth, particularly among non-internet users, is also an important source of information about local businesses. Some 55% of adults say they get news and information about local restaurants, bars, and clubs. When they seek such information, here are the sources they say they rely on most: Some 60% of adults say they get news and information about local businesses other than restaurants and bars. When they do: People who seek out information and news about local businesses and restaurants are a diverse and somewhat upscale group.

The survey was conducted on January 12-25, 2011. How People Get Local News and Information in Different Communities. In January, 2011 the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the Knight Foundation, conducted a nationally representative telephone survey of U.S. adults exploring local news consumption habits. Overall, the survey indicated that most adults follow what is happening in their local communities and that the local news ecosystem is complex. Rather than relying on one or two main sources of local news, most adults use a wide variety of both traditional and online sources depending on which local topic they are seeking information about.[1] This report reexamines those data with an eye toward how local news consumption practices vary by community type. Specifically, it focuses on the ways residents in large cities, suburbs, small towns and rural areas compare in their levels of interest in local news, the topics they are most interested in, and the sources they rely on to learn about those topics.

Footnote: Geo-location-white-paper. Springwise: IPhone App Delivers Geo-Targeted And Personalized News. Several years back we saw two separate efforts to deliver hyperlocal news in printed form – first The Printed Blog, then a similar effort from The New York Times – and recently we came across something similar in digital form. Now taking advantage of today’s mobile geo-targeting capabilities, SPUN delivers city-specific news and information via an iPhone app. Created by the Brooklyn-based makers of Broadcastr, another location-based app, SPUN is “the easiest way to keep your finger on the pulse of your city. It’s a constantly updated urban guide, insider tip sheet, and local news on steroids,” its makers explain. Specifically, the app curates stories from hundreds of news and lifestyle sources – including new restaurant openings, fashion boutiques, and concerts, for example – and “spins” them into mobile form for local users. SPUN users can follow topics they’re interested in; they can also get reminders when a local show is about to open.

The Broadcastr Team Launches Its ‘Next Evolution’: Spun, A Local News App That Connects Content To Real-World Locations. Here’s an app with a more local take on personalized news — Spun, which aggregates a mix of content relevant to your city. Spun was created by the same startup behind Broadcastr, an app allowing users to create audio content and pin it to real-world locations. Broadcastr is still available, but co-founder and President Scott Lindenbaum said the new app represents the “next evolution of the company,” particularly because it was built with many of the lessons that the team learned from Broadcastr in mind. For example, he said that while Broadcastr’s big selling point was the ability to consume content about your specific location (say, listening to something about the Brooklyn Bridge while you’re walking across that very bridge), only 7 percent of users actually listened to content located within 200 feet of them.

However, 76 percent of users listened to content that was within a 50-mile radius. The team sounds pretty proud of its design, and deservedly so.