On April 8th 2010, Steve Jobs made another jaw dropping presentation on the iPhone platform and its new features at the Apple's iPhone OS 4 event. I was amazed at the rate with which new apps are being developed and more amazingly the rate at which people are downloading and using them. All the new features specially multi-tasking, VoIP and folders are great and will make iPhone platform even better, but the biggest one that caught my eye is iAd. Check out the slides at 10:49AM and 10:50AM. Assuming Steve is giving the correct data the three slides that show the numbers game are very very powerful. They show the enormous opportunity that lies in front of advertisers to use the iPhone platform as the next gen in online advertising. It provides them with a perfect platform for targetted and focused advertising. I feel it is much more commanding than web/Internet advertising since in case of mobile advt, the advertisers can actually identify their users. They can know about their habits, usage patterns, geo-locations and routines by placing their ads on specific apps. These ads will also have a better ROI since the platform they run on will be with the users all the time, Internet ads cannot boast of that. The only problem I have with iAd is that is is tied to the iPhone OS. I would have loved it to be platform agnostic so that one could utilize it on Blackberry's or Palm OS or Windows Mobile. But going by Apple's history, that would have been a total departure from their strategy of having everything Apple :)
But overall, I give it a big thumbs up and am sure that advertisers will be quick to grab this huge marketing opportunity.
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