Yesterday I was talking about the effect smartphones were having on internet subscriptions and how companies like Fandango and Nationwide had developed mobile applications in order to simplyfy the lives of their current and potential customers .

Today, as I was checking in on the important people group on my Tweetdeck account, GetConnected announced that CanPages had introduced My Nearest;

My Nearest helps you locate various businesses near you (within 10km) such as banks/ATM’s, office shops , restaurants, malls, and much more. The app does work on the iPod Touch via WiFi but it uses the iPhone GPS to find locations near you.

The huge benefit of this app is you are getting information results from the national Canpages database which has more than 1 million business listings and growing. Needless to say, this app knows what it’s doing.

The only issue I can see with this free download is CanPages database of businesses. Other YP companies have tried voice powered search apps to locate businesses that are “near” you, however, they only provided businesses that were paying for advertising.

Still, let’s give CanPages credit for forward thinking and providing a free app to help consumers and build their brand.

I have never been a serious cell phone enthusiast but I am beginning to love smart phones.

On a recent trip to drop my daughter off at the University of Texas, I was able to scout out the beautiful city of Austin with my IPhone Maps application. Not only could I get directions from one address to another, I could see how long it would take me to walk, drive or bus it. The app even showed me the number of the bus I needed to take!

Smartphones provide an amazing user experience whether you are using  IPhone apps, Blackberry Apps or any other web enabled device application.

It’s No Wonder that Gartner Expects Smartphones:

to account for 45.5% of all mobile phone sales in 2013, up from just over 9% in 2008. The embrace of smartphones — especially the iPhone — coupled with a rise in flat-rate data plan pricing, signals that a fundamental change is underway in how consumers interact with high-end devices.

Smartphones are expected to drive mobile internet subscription growth to 134.3 million in the US by 2013 according to eMarketer.

The adoption of Smartphones is forcing web publishers to provide a better user experience by developing user friendly websites for consumers and in turn,  better user experience is driving more consumers to purchase smartphones.

Businesses Need to Develop Mobile Advertising Strategies

eMarketer predicts that mobile advertising in the US will hit $1.56 billion by 2013.

Is Your Website Ready for the Mobile Internet?

Building Applications

Fandango is an online service that allows consumers to purchase movie tickets  in advance. They realized that many movie goers prefer to purchase tickets closer to show time and when they don’t have access to their PCs.  They developed their own application for the IPhone so consumers could purchase tickets whenever and wherever they are. The app has been downloaded 2.5 million times since its inception in March 2009.

Here are a few tips regarding building an application for mobile enabled devices from Ted Hong from Fandango as told to  WebProNews

• Have a clear purpose for developing the app
• Be prepared to support it properly
• Make sure measuring capability in place
• Build awareness of the app

Nationwide Insurance developed their own app that can :

• GPS locate you in case of an accident
• Call 911
• Submit a claim form, including photos
• Direct you to the appropriate auto shop

and it is not exclusive to Nationwide, it will email your claim to your own insurance company!

Portable Websites

The growing popularity of web enabled devices; smartphones, GPS systems, cameras and mp3 players is forcing  companies to develop portable websites that are “device independant”.   Cindy Krum of RankMobile  makes the point that mobile algorithms will get smarter at recognizing the device that you are searching from and personalize the results.

Web designers will have to anticipate  a broader range of devices, with each device carrying a specific demographic.

Our Take on Mobile Search

We are still a year or two away from driving serious traffic to your website through web enabled devices. The issue as always is that when traffic does start to come, you ‘d better be ready or you will be left behind. Turning your current website into a mobile friendly site is not an difficult task.

In their continuing effort to provide users with the best possible search results, on August 10th, Google announced the launch of their new caffeine (search engine) infrastructure:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search”

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Mike MacDonald from WebProNews discusses Caffeine with Google’s Matt Cutts at about 1:25 into the following video:

SEOBOOK’s Aaron Wall’s Take on Caffeine

* an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text
* perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names
* perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms
tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

Mashable’s testing of Caffeine concludes:

New Google is FAST: It often doubled the speed of Google classic.

New Google relies more on keywords: SEO professionals, your job just got a lot harder. The algorithm’s definitely different. It has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results.

Search is moving into real-time: Being able to get info on breaking events is clearly a priority for Google and Bing. With both Twitter and Facebook launching real-time search engines, they needed to respond.

It’s partially a response to Bing: At least, that’s how we feel. This new search has a focus on increasing speed, relevancy, accuracy, and the index volume, things that Microsoft really hit on when it released Bing. It feels as if Google “Caffeine” is meant to shore up any deficiencies it may have when compared to Microsoft’s offering, though it’s been in the works long before Bing launched.

Should you Be Worried About Caffeine?

If you are building your website consistently with unique and valuable content that your visitors are sharing through social media or by linking to it, I wouldn’t be concerned about it. Just keep in mind that it is an ongoing process. If Google is spending the time, money and manpower to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy (and) comprehensiveness,” you should be doing the same with your website.

You can check out the differences in search results using Caffeine or compare current Google search results using the Google comparison tool.

In an effort to avoid the painful experience that Facebook went through when users  misinterpreted their new terms of service to mean that Facebook would own the rights to their content,  Twitter announced its new terms of service were announced on Thursday and translated the legalese on the Twitter blog.

Here are the highlights:

Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

APIs—The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We’re also working on guidelines for use of the API.

For twitter users, a number of concerns arise but the big issue is advertising and how it will affect your Tweets. The last thing you want attached to your tweet is a  pop up ad. It dilutes the credibility of your tweet.

For the most part, Twitter has made all the right moves in the social media and real time search marketing arenas, no reason to believe that that will change in the short term.

Social media has become pervasive in Canadian society. You can’t turn on the radio or television these days without hearing a reporter ask you to “Follow me on Twitter” or “Become a fan on Facebook.”

So when an seo company tells you that social media is still in its early stages, it may seem hard to believe but all the signs are there:

• New social media companies are popping up everywhere, most of them clueless on how to put together a co-cohesive online marketing campaign.
• Spammers are flooding social media sites with garbage content on blogs, social media and social book marking sites.
• Still no return on investment (ROI) to be found for the majority of social media marketing efforts.

So Y Should Big Brands Get Involved in Social Media Now?

As Baby boomers decline as a percentage of total Canadian population over the next 20 years from 30% to 20%, Generation Y will emerge as the significant demographic (27%) for marketers.

According to Paul Steep of Scotia Capital;

One development over the past year that is worth monitoring relates to advertising campaigns targeting Gen Y utilizing social media sites/networks, as evidenced by the number of firms that are now seeking to leverage mainstream social media sites for advertising and customer relations. A key trend over the past year has been the use of social media strategies and software by traditional media segments, most notably directories, radio, newspaper, and television

Social Media Sites are Now Mainstream

According to Emily Riley at Jupiter Research, 43 – 51% of Generation Y have created or updated a personal page on a social network while 23% are reading comments posted on a mainstream media website or portal.

Today, Generation Y uses social media for entertainment and communication with friends and family. Understanding how Generation Y will use Web 2.0 tools when they graduate or move higher up the corporate food chain will become invaluable to advertisers.

Companies that understand how to use social media  as part of a online marketing strategy will have a significant competitive advantage. This will not only bring  the immediate benefit of brand awareness, it will bring improved search engine rankings though the next major search engine ranking factor, Influence.