From 3GSM, it was clear that EVERYBODY is trying to make applications that will run on advertising. Social networks are a good example of apps that spend half their time developing something that makes you waste a huge amount of time and the other half on creating the framework for delivering ad revenue through monitoring usage.

Sadly for us, the media buyer's interest in location apps on mobile devices is proportional to their share in that market. About 2%. So we won't be seeing localised LBS financed purely from advertising tomorrow.

However, I thought the one thing localised apps were doing well was the behaviour log. After all, for an advertiser, behaviour plus location is worth a lot more.

So I was surprised to read this feedback from a session of a Mobi Ad conference where Media planners talked about their needs:

"One of the biggest issues around measurement is that the data – if it is available at all – it is not provided in a way that is easy to use. “We have access to the data, but it is not provided within our tools, so in fact we can’t use it. Sometimes we just receive a pdf file – and really you can do nothing with it!” said one panelist. Another added “Just collating information is a full-time job in itself, before you even start analyzing it. It makes it very inefficient from a time and cost point of view to operate in mobile.”

Funny how it mirrors what fleet managers say about telematics data …
Clearly there is more work to do on data integration everywhere!