Posted by: Micah Pratt

Smart phones are becoming more and more popular and advertisers have begun using them as a tool to reach large audience with the use of applications. Here is an article from mashable.com about how people are welcoming advertising with smart phone applications.

Consumers Embrace Mobile Advertising

Advertisements on mobile devices are both welcome and effective, a recent study from mobile audience media company JiWire revealed.

This is especially true of advertisements that appear in apps. Of the roughly 1,000 smartphone users surveyed, 52% claim they have acted on an advertisement in an app and 18% have made a purchase directly from an ad in an app in the last month.

In addition, 53% said they were willing to share their location to receive more relevant advertising and a full 76% said they would prefer to download a free, advertising-supported app instead of paying an upfront fee for the same app.

This is great news for social gaming apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, which enable users to unlock special deals from advertisers based on their locations. It’s also great news for Apple, whose mobile app advertising platform, iAds, will debut this summer with the iPhone 4.0 OS.

Posted by: Micah Pratt

Have you ever wondered how much time the average person spends on the Internet? And have you ever wondered how much of that time is spent on social networking sites? Thanks to Neilsen, we now know that people spend more time on sites such as Facebook and Twitter than on any other site. Here is an article from mashable.com by Adam Ostrow about the Neilsen findings.

Social Networking Dominates Our Time Spent Online [STATS]

Social networking now eats up twice as much of our online time as any other activity. According to new stats from Nielsen, sites like Facebook and Twitter now account for 22.7% of time spent on the web; the next closest activity is online games, which make up 10.2%.

The stats also show the degree to which social networking is displacing other forms of communication, with e-mail as a percentage of online time plunging from 11.5% to 8.3% from June 2009 to June 2010. Instant messaging also saw a significant drop in share, with a 15% decline from last year.

However, e-mail use on mobile is still on the rise – from 37.4% to 41.6% — presumably as users continue to migrate to smartphones from feature phones.

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Posted by: Micah Pratt

As the world becomes a more global place, businesses are increasingly building relationships with international clients, which can often be difficult. I would like to share an article from mashable.com about six ways to manage international relationships online.

6 Ways to Manage International Relationships Online

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Sometimes the hardest part of having international clients is finding a way to connect with them. Small businesses often have to worry about different time zones, different languages, and even different customs and traditions.

While there’s no catch-all, golden resource that can solve every problem a small internationally-minded business could have, there are some easy ways to keep your business up-to-date and in the overseas loop.

Here, we’ll help you through the basic steps of interacting with overseas clients, from translating pleasantries to tracking shipments to making sure you don’t accidentally call them in the middle of the night.

1. Basic Information
Before you even get started, it’s important to know the basic information about your client’s country. Usually the most thorough and reliable way to bone up is through the country’s official webpage. England, for example, has a good site with lots of information. Unfortunately, most of these sites are geared towards tourism and less so the time-pressed businessperson.

Wikipedia can actually be a great, quick and comprehensive alternative. Wikipedia pages exist for most major countries and include a helpful info bar on the right side of the page (usually just below the country’s flag). This information includes official languages, government make up, population estimates, GDP, currency, time zone, and calling code.

Also check out The World Factbook, maintained by the CIA. It includes “information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities,” according to their website.

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Posted by: Micah Pratt

With the World Cup just a day away, I would like to share an article from mashable.com about how the World Cup is taking the Web by storm.

Web Goes Wild for World Cup [STATS]

The World Cup doesn’t start for another 10 days, but it’s already blowing up the Web, particularly in the UK.

According to the trend-watching analysts at Hitwise, at least 20% of all searches in the UK last week contained the words “world cup.” Altogether, the World Cup was the subject of around 25,000 individual search terms.

In web search terms, this interest from searchers is nothing short of explosive.

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