Mobile ad server [tag]AdMob[/tag] has raised $15M in funding in a second round led by Accel Partners, leading to anticipation of a tipping point in mobile advertising. According to Venture Beat, AdMob alone has served 1.6 billion ads in the past year, while competitor Third Screen claims to serve 350 million ads per month. While Third Screen serves enterprise clients like Ford and Fox, AdMob focuses on smaller businesses, serving a network of 1200 publishers in 160 countries. Advertisers can purchase ads across a range of mobile content channels including news, entertainment downloads and special interest communities.

The race for dominance among startups in the mobile ad market also includes [tag]Enpocket[/tag], Ad Infuse, Millenial Media, Rhythm New Media. Their business strategies range from a focus on the reach of their network, to a focus on the added value technology and services they provide to assist advertisers. Enpocket, for example, offers a range of creative services and technologies to create and target ads.

To end a trademark infringement case brought on by Amazon’s Alexa, best known by marketers as a web traffic rankings site, Alexaholic has changed it’s name to Statsaholic, but continues to provide a direct interface onto Alexa data.

Alexa has long provided one of the most popular traffic ranking databases, aggregating behavioral data from millions of users who have downloaded its browser toolbar. Alexa serves up statistics on site traffic, Internet reach, and visitor demographics, ranking the top 100,000 sites on the Web. Other Web site traffic ranking sites include Quantcast and Compete.com, while Technorati provides traffic stats and rankings for blogs.

Statsaholic offers a simplified Ajax interface on Alexa data, offering comparative graphing for up to 5 domains, with slick controls for shaping the data to compare site reach, rank and page views according to an array of date ranges. It’s a useful tool for marketers who want to measure traffic statistics, alone and against competitors. Statsaholic founder Ron Hornbaker, commenting on TechCrunch about the name change, mentioned that additional sources of data, such as Compete.com, are the focus of future improvements to the service.

Meanwhile, many experts in the traffic and search space continue to debate the accuracy and reliability of traffic ranking services, and the methods in which the data is gathered. So don’t spout your Alexa numbers in mixed company. Andrew Goodman from Traffick.com has a good roundup on the issue, and SEOmoz has an exhaustive, if narrowly focused, study and analysis of Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics in measuring visitor traffic.

If you’ve ever tried tuning a blog for business, you know how hard it can be to accomplish some of the basic requirements businesses take for granted. Blogging platforms are primarily focused on content delivery, and not on building, cultivating and understanding customers. If you want to customize your blog to match your branding, you have to get down and dirty with template coding. If you want to monitor your performance, you’re limited to traffic and subscription stats with a package like FeedBurner, or you have to aggregate a number of seperate point solution tools.

[tag]HubSpot[/tag] is developing a platform designed to make the management and tracking of business blogging a lot easier. The platform promises to bring together simple blog management for non-technical users with a suite of built-in business tools, including “automatic” Search Engine optimization, surveys and questionnaires for customer research, integrated Web analytics, and basic CRM tracking to follow customers through engagement on the site.

The HubSpot product is currently in beta, and appears to be privately funded by its founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who met at MIT’s Sloan Fellows Program, and who share extensive backgrounds in enterprise software and technology.

I’ve signed up for the beta to get a closer look at the platform, and if it lives up to its billing, I would strongly consider it for my agency, MotiveLab. I’m currently running a heavily customized version of WordPress, which honestly does all of the site management functions HubSpot offers, but at the cost of a lot of hard work and coding. But the real attraction is the integrated customer engagement tools and analytics, which still feel like a big blindspot on most blogging platforms. If Hubspot is truly built for business, then it will be a great step forward.

[tag]txtNation[/tag] is on a tear. As one of the fastest growing technology companies in the UK, txtNation is spinning off products and partnerships across an impressive array of platforms, industries and regions. One day they’re announcing a partnership to stream video to mobile devices in Europe, the next day they’re announcing a mobile chat service in Africa, or an interactive voice response system in Nepal. They build a wide array of innovative mobile solutions including payment systems, messaging systems, and, of course, marketing systems.

txtNation’s marketing platform, mFusion, enables a wide variety of messaging and promotion campaigns based on txtNation technology, including bulk messaging, tickets and coupons, contests and quizes, newsletters, auctions, subscriptions, and location based services. They also have a mobile marketing services group with a lot of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 clients, including McDonald’s, AOL, IBM and Red Bull, so they’ve got a lot of experience to draw on in building mobile marketing programs. But I suspect the main attraction for their mobile services group is that they’re joined at the hip to the technology group, so they can build new components to enable innovative campaigns, leveraging their billing and messaging tools.

The case studies on the mFusion site are pretty weak, but click through the solutions descriptions on the side navigation. It’s a good overview of mobile marketing capabilities, and a good nest of ideas to spark a creative brainstorming session.

After hosting a videocast explaining the fundamentals of RSS in an interview with [tag]SimpleFeed[/tag]’s Mark Carlson, SimpleFeed deserves their own profile as one of the leading companies improving the utility and adoption of RSS as a marketing tool.

RSS makes the syndication of all kinds of content easy over the Web, enabling users to subscribe to blogs, videos, music, news, even product sales and coupons, and have that content delivered directly to their desktop. The attraction of RSS for consumers is they don’t have to trawl all over the Web for the stuff they like, and they can subscribe anonymously without fear of giving up personal data just because they want to view a video or blog post. But raw RSS provides significant challenges to marketers. If users can anonymously subscribe to content and unsubscribe on a whim, how can you gather information and metrics to refine your marketing programs and retain subscribers?

SimpleFeed solves many of the challenges of leveraging RSS for marketing. They have the ability to customize RSS feeds to retain brand image; they individually code each subscription so behavior can be followed even without an identity; they provide metrics so subscriptions and click-throughs can be monitored; and they dovetail with broader Web analytics tools so cross-channel campaigns can be managed and tracked.

RSS provides a significant alternative to email and Web marketing–one that an accelerating number of consumers embrace because it’s more relevant, less intrusive, and allows them to control their connection. SimpleFeed provides a suite of tools to help marketers make the most of this new channel, without limiting the benefits for consumers. They have targeted solutions for media publishing, financial services, ecommerce and Web marketing, and they’re constantly innovating new tools and techniques to improve RSS capabilities for marketers. For example, Mark mentioned in his interview the notion of secure RSS feeds in the future, which would open up a lot of new possibilities for RSS services and transactions.

The video below is a short demo showing the consumer experience of SimpleFeed’s templated RSS feeds in a desktop RSS news reader. The examples are Sears, Consumer Reports, and EMC.

[flv:http://www.marketingrev.com/wp-content/videos/SimpleFeedDemo.flv 352 240]

On a personal note, and I guess a disclaimer: I’ve known SimpleFeed for a couple of years. I met them when they were leasing space in the same building, and I’ve been following their progress ever since. They’re a very sharp group of engineers with a strong understanding of marketing. I don’t have any business connection with SimpleFeed, but I do hope to use their technology with my agency in the future.

RSS is one of the most important Web technologies for marketers to understand. It’s a way to syndicate and distribute all kinds of content easily over the Internet, and with RSS readers embedded in just about every browser, as well as the new versions of Outlook and Windows, consumer adoption of RSS is accelerating. Users can choose their own content from any publishing source, and aggregate it for viewing in their own reader, on a device of their choosing, on their own terms. It’s no longer enough for marketers to know what it takes to drive traffic to their Web site. Marketers must learn the opportunities and challenges of leveraging RSS to syndicate their content and distibute it to viewers.

In this inaugural edition of MarketingRev videocasts, dubbed RevTube with sufficient irony, I sat down with Mark Carlson, CEO of [tag]SimpleFeed[/tag], to define the fundamentals of RSS, and what marketers need to know about this mission critical technology. SimpleFeed is at the forefront of helping marketers leverage RSS technology and we’ll profile them later in the week.

[flv:http://www.marketingrev.com/wp-content/videos/SimpleFeed.flv 352 240]