Millennial Media wins two at the Mobi Awards
It was a big week for the folks over at Millennial Media who ended up taking home two awards from the annual Mobi Awards.
Millennial Media was approached by the MediaVest ad agency to create mobile creatives for Coca-Cola’s Fanta drink line, and it ended up netting them the awards for “Best in Show” and “Best Mobile Creative”, as well as making them a finalist for the “Best Mobile Branding” Award.
Fanta was reintroducing an old staple of its advertising in the form of the four female group, “The Fantanas”. The program not only won Millennial Media the two awards, but the campaign ended up seeing new records for user engagement. While awards are always nice, there can be no better award than knowing your work had the desired results.
AdMob adds support for nine more languages
As mobile phones such as the iPhone continue to spread to even more countries, application developers are going to need support for more than just English language ads, and that is exactly what AdMob is doing.
Seeing as AdMob already has offices in London, Mumbai, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Singapore, San Mateo, New York and Los Angeles, and that they serve ads in 160 countries, it only makes sense that they would add more languages. According to their blog, you can now find the following support:
Chinese (Simplified): 现在，AdMob.com 可提供简体中文版本了！
Chinese (Traditional): 現在，AdMob.com 可以提供繁體中文版本了！
German: AdMob.com ist jetzt auf Deutsch verfügbar!
French: AdMob.com est maintenant disponible en francais!
Indonesian: AdMob.com kini tersedia dalam Bahasa Indonesia!
Italian: AdMob.com è ora disponibile in italiano!
Japanese: AdMob.com を日本語でご利用いただけます!
Portuguese: O site da AdMob.com agora está disponível em Português!
Spanish: ¡AdMob.com ahora está disponible en español!
With the amount of market share the iPhone alone is gaining in places like China and Japan, this couldn’t have happened at a better time for app developers.
The Google Voice app denial story heats up with Google’s side of events
Google’s version of the story of how and why the Google Voice application became public this week, and as much as it cleared up some aspects of the story, it really left us with no real conclusive answer.
After trying to keep things quiet, Google finally gave up the ghost this week and made a blog post about their response to the FCC in regards to the questions over the Google Voice app not being approved for the iPhone App Store. As we all know, Apple has been saying again and again that the denial was not their doing, but if you follow Google’s version of what was submitted to the FCC, it was very much their fault.
Google says that numerous in-person meetings were conducted leading up to the rejection, and that every thing points very firmly to it being Apple’s doing. The final rejection was delivered by Phil Schiller, Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, to Alan Eustace, Google Senior Vice President of Research & Development, during a phone conversation on July 7th.
The continued supposition is that the rejection was the result of Google Voice duplicating core functions of the iPhone, but that always brings every one around to the Skype app being approved.
It’s anyone’s guess how this whole thing will wrap up at the end of the day, but it sure does seem to get odder and odder with each piece of information that comes out.
Google releases Android SDK 1.6
Google announced its newest Android SDK, 1.6 Donut.
It seems that there is a lot of new tools in the 1.6 SDK, so many in fact that it may make any app developed before its release feel like it was built in the stone age. Here is just some of what you can look forward to if you haven’t downloaded it yet (from the Android SDK site):
Quick Search Box for Android
Android 1.6 includes a redesigned search framework that provides a quick, effective, and consistent way for users to search across multiple sources—such as browser bookmarks & history, contacts, and the web—directly from the home screen.
The system constantly learns which search results are more relevant based on what is clicked. So popular contacts or apps that have previously been picked will bubble up to the top when a user types the first few letters of a relevant query.
The search framework also provides developers a way to easily expose relevant content from their applications in Quick Search Box.
Camera, Camcorder, and Gallery
An updated user interface provides an integrated camera, camcorder, and gallery experience. Users can quickly toggle between still and video capture modes. Additionally, the gallery enables users to select multiple photos for deletion.
Android 1.6 also provides a much faster camera experience. Compared to the previous release, launching the camera is now 39% faster, and there is a 28% improvement in the time from completing one shot to the next.
VPN, 802.1x
A new Virtual Private Network (VPN) control panel in Settings allows users to configure and connect to the following types of VPNs:
- L2TP/IPSEC pre-shared key based VPN
- L2TP/IPsec certificate based VPN
- L2TP only VPN
- PPTP only VPN
Battery usage indicator
A new battery usage screen lets users see which apps and services are consuming battery power. If the user determines that a particular service or application is using too much power, they can take action to save the battery by adjusting settings, stopping the application, or uninstalling the application.
Accessibility
Users will be able to download new accessibility services built on the new accessibility framework and enable them in Settings.
Some other new things you can look forward to are:
- Text-to-speech engine
- Gestures
- Expanded support for screen densities and resolutions
- Telephony support for CDMA
- New version of OpenCore
In short, if you haven’t downloaded this yet, it sounds like a must have. 
Microsoft Advertising launches behavioral targeting for mobile
Microsoft has launched a new tool for targeting mobile ads based on anonymous behavioral data.
The tool is the same one Microsoft uses for its standard online display advertising, but now it is being ported to help out mobile advertising buyers. While it isn’t exactly brand new, it still should help with making sure your unused inventory is targeted more accurately, and hopefully increase the ROI for the advertisers. According to Microsoft, it works by gathering anonymous data for multiple sources:
- PC Web keyword search behavior from Bing Search
- PC Web Site visits to various sites across the Microsoft network
- Microsoft network data (i.e. Hotmail newsletters, Xbox subscription data)
- Profile data from Windows Live
There are some other factors that are worked in to the calculations, but the ones listed above are the most important ones. There are over 100 sectors you can choose from — Automotive, Financial Services, Health, Lifestyle, Life Stages, News and Entertainment, Retail, Technology and Travel — and you will be more able to make sure ads that your users aren’t receptive to won’t be displayed in your apps.
At this time, the new tool is only open to U.S. advertisers.
[Editor’s Note and Disclosure: Millennial Media is a sponsor of SiliconANGLE. –spa]
[...] Mobile Monday: Mobile App News for Week of September 14th [...]
[...] the assortment of apps is impressive already, you can take special notice of the application for the Millennial Media application for Fanta that won them two Mobi awards a little while back. Whenever you click on the images for the various programs, you are taken to a details page [...]