Location-based ads & Apple exclusivity

by greg on February 5, 2010

Apple recently published a developer tip that said applications accessing location information primarily for advertising targeting would be rejected – applications had to provide users with ‘beneficial information’. Gizmodo picked up on it, and claimed – referencing a tweet from Craig Hockenberry – that Apple would be keeping location-based advertising for itself, no doubt [...]

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Implications of Ghostery acquisition

January 21, 2010

A couple of days ago, the regulatory compliance firm Better Advertising announced that it had acquired the web-bug-tracking Firefox addon Ghostery. It got mentioned in a couple places but was under-discussed, given its potential importance.
Ghostery as a Firefox extension is important because it has an opt-in database of web bug usage, collected from its [...]

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Since people asked

January 5, 2010

A few friends have asked what I thought of Apple’s purchase of Quattro, so here it is. Personal opinion only, and worth what you pay for it.
I believe the acquisition is primarily about iPhone and iPod Touch applications. Linking this to adware OS patents, as some commenters have done, is a mistake. [...]

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Layers of trust

November 17, 2009

On the CPM Advisors blog, Rob points out that IFRAME ad calls are worth less to the advertiser than JavaScript calls: there’s no referrer and therefore no insight into the location of the inventory, no ability to do contextual analysis on the page, and no ability to serve expandable or coordinated ad units. Rob [...]

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Location markets

October 28, 2009

I don’t use services like Foursquare because you can usually guess my location, and if you can’t, I probably don’t want to share it with you. I’ve been told that location-based services with granular privacy-controls are perfect for me, because you can determine exactly who has access to what.
Maybe, but location data [...]

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