IoT is taking off, and in a big way, evidenced by the massive amount of IoT solutions and applications shown at MWC.

The rapidly falling costs of key IoT building block sensor technologies combined with creative mobile software development is enabling new innovative IoT solutions in literally all use cases, from personal to business and across fixed and mobile networks and devices.

At the same time, the expected phenomenal growth in devices connected to the internet through either direct or mobile connections will drive up the level of “background noise” on the internet. IoT solution providers and Operators need to plan for managing the increases in network loads to ensure capacity requirements are met while providing an optimal user experience to customers and subscribers.

Opportunities will be plentiful for solution providers and Operators to target certain application areas, and to find ways to create smooth user experiences and minimize network traffic load.

Some of the most interesting that we saw this year at MWC included:

The area of IoT will certainly continue to be a hot topic for the mobile industry, and we expect to see even more focus next year at Mobile World Congress 2016.

Campaign Objective:
The eBay motors app aims to bring eBay’s Motors marketplace into your pocket allowing you to browse and shop for vehicles and vehicle parts while on the go.

Description:
The app includes all the classic features that one would associate with shopping on eBay but also ads some extra ones to make life easier for the motor vehicle enthusiast.

For example the app includes free vehicle history reports, an easy seller contact option in order to find out more about the vehicle and social media integration.

MobiAD Comments:
Our favorite feature is the Garage feature, which allows user to store information about their vehicle thus making it easy to search for parts and accessories that are made to fit your particular vehicle.

Screenshots:

Millennial Media has released their latest Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting Report (SMART), which provides some very interesting information about mobile users who are interested in automobile content.

The report also looked at what objectives car manufacturers had in mind when launching mobile campaigns. Based on information from May 2011, the top goal was Product Launches and Releases (36%) followed by Increasing Foot Traffic (29%) and Sustained Market Presence (21%).

When it came to targeted campaigns, the report found that 1 in 2 campaign where targeted using either Demographics (36%), Local (33%) or behavioural targeting (31%).

Another very interesting report looks at what types of “post-campaign” actions were included in the campaigns.

The most popular by far were Site Search, Store Locators and Viewing Maps, which were included in about 67% of all campaigns.

Greystripe – one of the biggest mobile ad networks in the US – has released the results of a survey of touch-smartphone owners to see how well the mobile channel works for this category.

The first part of the study examined how people might use their smartphone during the process of buying an automobile.

Overall, over three quarters of the people looking to buy a new car within the coming year said that their mobile would play a role in the purchase process. This role can vary from product research to price comparison to locating the closest dealer.

The second part explored how attractive a market touch-based smartphone owners would be for automobile advertisers. They found that:

• fully one half of all owners planned on buying a car sometime within the next 2 years;
• smartphone owners are roughly three times as likely to buy a new car within the coming year as the general population (15% vs 5%);
• smartphone owners consider both domestic and foreign cars almost equally.

You can download the Greystipe report here.

These campaigns where delivered for national gas stations and restaurant brands throughout the US and performed 3 to 5 times better than the industry average. Click through rates ranged from 0.49% to 2.68%.

“The campaign results exemplify the power of location when combined with search,” said Christopher Rothey, vice president, advertising, Navteq. “LocationPoint is the way to reach consumers when they’re in a mindset to buy.”

Separately Navteq has announced that Peugeot is launching a campaign on LocationPoint which will feature call to actions such as “Click to Map” in order to drive traffic into one of Peugeot’s 428 retail locations across France.

This is the first Automobile brand to use LocationPoint in order to entice consumer to make a detour to their local dealer in order to test drive the Peugeot RCZ.

“The choice of medium reflects the technological spirit of the brand and the campaign complements the overall communication plan for the RCZ,” explained Marc Giulioli, Marketing Director Peugeot France. “The ability of NAVTEQ LocationPoint to generate traffic into the dealerships by targeting and engaging people on-the-go as they near points of purchase is a very powerful marketing tool.”

Finally Navteq also announced that Poynt a location based app available across most platforms has become the most recent publisher to join the LocationPoint network. Poynt works by connecting consumer to local businesses at the moment that they want to make a purchase.

“The combination of location and contextual search proved extremely effective in this series of campaigns,” said Andrew Osis, CEO, Poynt Corporation. “The results underscore the value to our users as well as to potential advertisers.”

But what if you could see a new car and explore its features without going to a dealer?

This is exactly what this innovative Augmented Reality campaign does, enabling British car shoppers to see and play with the new Ford C Max car – in the palm of their hand!

When Ford of Britain launched their new 7 seat Grand C-MAX car, they wanted an innovative way to engage prospective customers. So rather than a standard outdoor poster campaign, they decided to create an interactive outdoor campaign using the latest Augmented Reality technology. Trublutint can provide you more details.

The basic premise of the campaign is to allow people to handle and explore minaturized 3D virtual models of the new C Max cars on the screen and in the palm of their hand.

In addition to allowing users to interact with the car simply by holding their hands up to the screen, virtual buttons let the user choose the colour of the car, open doors, fold the seats flat, turn the car 360 degrees and select demos of the car’s key features such as Active Park Assist.

The campaign was created by Ogilvy & Mather in London along with digital production company Grand Visual and technology provider Inition. The campaign was planned and booked by Mindshare and Kinetic, and ran on JCDecaux screens in shopping malls across Britain.

In order to make the interaction as natural as possible, the team decided not to use any special “markers” or other symbols as a point of reference to trigger the AR. Instead, they would simply use a camera to observe people standing in front of the screen and the user interface would be based on natural movement and hand gestures, thus allowing any passerby to immediately start interacting with the screen content.

The team claims that this is the first outdoor augmented reality campaign to use 3D depth imaging technology in the UK. A special camera was used to measure the real-time spatial and depth information, and this was used to merge real life images with the C-MAX images.

A key challenge was as no markers could be relied on, the system had to be good enough to ignore passersby while allowing precise control and selection from the user interface.

Mark Simpson at Ford said: “Using live interactive outdoor campaigns is a great way to really engage with the audience in a way that is not possible with static posters. This has enabled us to create a targeted and tactical campaign that is relevant and fun to use.”

Here is a short video that shows the campaign in action.

Dan Dawson, Digital Director at Grand Visual added: “Digital outdoor enables advertisers to get closer to consumers. Ford’s clever use of the latest technology is a great fit for the next-generation C-MAX cars. Customers can get a real feel for the cars before stepping foot in a showroom”.

Stuart Cupit, MD of Inition said: “Developments in 3D and interactive technology, such as depth sensing and gestural interfaces, now enable advertisers to deliver ever more personal experiences to the consumer. This is the era when the customer has taken control of the technology.”

For more about augmented reality, read these MobiAD stories:

• Mobile Augmented Reality Builds Deep Consumer Engagement

• Mobile Apps Score At Wimbledon

• Ebay Shoppers Use Augmented Reality To Find Local Deals

The new service has received a lot of media attention and has been predicted to be a big hit. According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Apple has developed iAd to “help developers make money through advertising so they can keep their free apps free.”

Some of the key features of iAD include:

• iAd will allow advertisers to deliver interactive ads to consumers without them leaving the original app
• easy to implement, as it is built into the iPhone OS
• very interactive, providing full access to all the special features of iPhone prouducts

(for more information on iAd, see MobiAD artile A Big Month For Apple: The Future of iPhone & iAd

And these benefits do not come cheaply; earlier reports have suggested that Apple is charging about $1 million to the first advertisers across the network. This has not stopped major brands from signing up with companies such as Walt Disney, Citigroup, Nissan, AT&T, Unilever, Target, Best Buy, and many more already committing around $60 million for 2010.

One of the first iAd ads which has actually been seen is one for Nissan’s new electric Leaf car. As demonstrated in the video below, clicking on the banner ad from within the app brings up an ad that is fully interactive. Here are a couple of images from the Nissan ad, plus a short video that shows it in action.

Another example of one of the early iAd adverts is for Unilever’s Dove brand which stars US major league baseball stars Albert Pujols and Andy Pettitte. The iAd includes interviews with these athletes, provides a virtual tour of their homes, plus various other content and a sweepstakes.

Below is a short video from ClickZ that demonstrates the Dove Men+Care iAd advertisement.

Keith Weed, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer, who led the trip to the West Coast said, “Unilever has always been an innovator in advertising – from the first black & white and color advertising on UK TV, to Dove ‘Evolution’ being the first online ad to win the Lion d’ Or at Cannes – and we are now leading marketing into the digital age where the key will be to unlock the potential of mobile.”

Babs Rangaiah, Unilever’s Vice President Global Communications Planning and the person who put together the iAd deal said, “We know that 25 percent of the world is online now, but the next 75 percent will mostly get online via mobile – and mostly in D&E markets. This partnership will offer us the ability to work within what we believe will be the future of the mobile internet – APPS.”

Given that Apple has mandated that they be involved with the iAd production process, it is not surprising that these first iAds seem quite high quality. What will take some time to determine however is whether or not over the long term they can provide such a compelling consumer experience that they are worth the price to the advertiser.

The Comprar cialis generico barato en españa latest game, called Volkswagen Touareg Challenge, has been downloaded over 1 million times in the first 10 days after its launch.

According to the game’s developers, Fishlabs, consumers are spending an average of 8 minutes playing the game.

And, very importantly for VW, the game has been great at generating direct sales leads:

• over 3,500 consumers arranging test-drives after playing the game
• over 50,000 consumers haved used the applications dealer search functionality

“We are overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of time players are spending with Volkswagen Touareg Challenge. But we are especially pleased that Touareg fans are eagerly using the dealer search and that the opportunity to arrange a test drive is doing so well,” says Cornelia Lenz from Volkswagen’s eGames team.

It is interesting to note that VW’s previous adver-game, VW Polo Challenge, managed 500,000 downloads in the first 10 days. The fact that this most recent game doubled that performance suggest that the consumer appetite for this type of adver-games is still growing rapidly.

Also see the MobiAD article on Green Marketing: VW Launches Fuel Efficiency iPhone Game

In keeping with today’s greater awareness of environmental impact, the game aims to promote the fuel-saving capabilities of VW’s Polo and Polo BlueMotion cars.

Contrary to many car games, which involve going quickly around a course, this game involves players being rewarded for driving in a fuel-efficient manner as fare as possible.

The application includes an online ranking, which allows you to compare your score to that of others and an option to upload your best performance to Volkswagen’s eGames Facebook fan page.

The application also comes with all the standard commercial material that you would expect including VW dealer locator, product brochure, and the ability to book a test drive.

“Fishlabs has implemented the concept of fuel economy not only creatively, but also in an entertaining fashion,” says VW’s Cornelia Lenz. “It shows that fuel economy can also be virtual fun.”