Apple preventing 3rd parties from using location based ads. Saving the spoils of visual nuisances for themselves?

Ads. Consumers hate them with a passion, though they’re a necessary evil. Consumers like free stuff. Developers, producers, and manufacturers like money. Advertisements help to bridge the gap between the two, giving end users free or greatly reduced access to products and services while those making said products/services still get paid.

With the big push to the mobile internet, manufacturers and developers are struggling to find ways of making money on this new medium. Again, ads swoop in to save the day. In the instance of the iPhone and App Store, mobile advertisements allow apps to bare it all for low cost/free while still bringing in some moola for the devs. Geolocation makes mobile advertising even more effective as it allows ads to more specifically cater to the end user which in turn increases click-thru. Well, it used to anyway.

On rumors that Apple is planning to launch their own mobile advertising service, the California based fruit company has begun sending out notices to developers warning them not to use location based advertising and to instead use the embedded GPS chip for “useful content”. If the rumors turn out to be true and Apple is simply kicking out competition so they can have the whole mobile advertising realm to themselves, “the pot calling kettle black” is hardly strong enough.

To be clear however, it’s all speculation for now as Apple — in true Apple fashion — is tight lipped about any upcoming mobile advertising plans (if any). Think they’re pushing out the competition to better their own position?

MacNN

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Ads, ads, and more ads coming to a cellphone near you.

Love your cellphone/smartphone because it gives you relatively ad-free hours of internet exploration and usage? I’ll admit it’s not my first praise for using a smartphone for getting around the internet, but it’s certainly one of my top reasonings. That’s all set to change for the worse in the near future. The impending doom is coming to us thanks to AdMob and their new “Interactive Video Ad Units” which more or less translate to “pain in the ass” for you and I. Ads make freemium models possible and allow end users to enjoy many fruits at free or reduced cost. So ads certainly have their place. But AdMob’s new “Interactive Video Ad Units” are anything but pleasant. The first category of IVAU consist of your typical manually activated video ads in which the end user has to initiate playback. But the second category is the one that really has me not looking forward to the day these arrive — automatically activated videos.

Navigating the web (as often as I do) has me wasting minutes upon minutes per day sitting, waiting, and watching stupid video ads that I can’t skip or even “look around”. My smartphone is the last frontier if you will as it is unbound or polluted with this digital filth. Such joys won’t be enjoyable much longer. Gee I can hardly wait, sitting on the train/bus/walking around town trying to read a quick review on a restaurant only to be greeted with an un-skippable 60 second ad seems like a blast. /sarcasm.

Mobile ads are good in certain instances. Automatic, forced video ads? Not so much. Are you dreading the day?

Internet Evolution

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Microsoft bringing the heat – Laptop Hunter ads now showing on an iPhone near you

Microsoft as of late has been really pushing the whole “value” mentality when comparing Windows boxes to Apple powered ones. More or less, the gist of Microsoft’s latest “Laptop Hunter” ads were that Microsoft is more affordable and gives you more for less. They portray Apple computers as overpriced with the consumer paying a premium for a simple fruit logo on the machine. Microsoft while still very much having a majority of the computer market by user base percentage isn’t lying down and is pushing their offensive right into Apple’s home turf. As you can see above, the animated Laptop Hunter ads on that particular mobile site give Apple and iPhone users a chance to “see what kind of PC they are”. While Apple can’t really do anything about the ads as the site isn’t owned by Apple and last time I checked site owners can display whatever they want, I’m sure Apple is a bit uneasy having people classify their PC persona on their device. Granted, these ads can appear on any mobile platform software and hardware and aren’t exactly a direct assault on Apple by team Redmond. Still, it’s a bit amusing to see this particular combination…don’t you think?

Source: Alley Insider