If you were planning on popping a lot of location-based ads into your upcoming killer iPhone app, you might want take a peek at the latest update from Apple for developers. A rather stern note on the site reads: “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.” Is Apple doing this to prevent abuse from advertisers, so that users won’t end up with advertisements from stores all around them? There isn’t any real explanation as to why this isn’t allowed, but it’s certainly worth taking note if you’re building an app with the intention of putting advertisements in. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend your precious time building an app only to find out that it will be rejected by Apple, right?

Interesting little tid bit. Somewhere else folks have been wondering out loud if this has anything to do with Apple's purchase of Quattro or some other secret juicy soon to be released nugget? Unfortunately I don't recall where or who was doing this wondering...

It certainly can't be about diluting the App Store right? It is already flooded with loads of sub-quality apps... so what is this about?

Or I may be wrong. Perhaps they are just trying to clean up and tighten control to prevent users from being spammed with ads...

Regardless of the underlying reason why Apple is doing this it is for the good of the industry. It does make one feel protected and looked after doesn't it?

The name pretty much says it all. Webtrends Mobile Analytics allows anyone working with mobile content and marketing programs the ability to determine how customers are engaging with both mobile websites and applications:

Webtrends Mobile Analytics screenshot

Here's the sort of stuff users can do with the tool:

• Create and track any number of metrics specific to the business
• Understand, measure and influence all drivers of traffic to mobile sites, including paid advertising, other web properties and social media tools and networks
• Enhance customer experience based on precise monitoring of mobile navigation patterns
• Prioritize site design decisions based on detailed insight about the mobile devices customers use
• Understand how mobile investments contribute to broader marketing programs by integrating mobile, standard web and other online data

"Business on the web is synonymous with business on a mobile device and Webtrends will help you measure and optimize your mobile assets and applications alongside the rest of your customer intelligence data," explained Webtrends CEO Alex Yoder.

Webtrends will be added to the Mobile Analytics Provider List (http://bit.ly/2l6uxz) over the next few days. I just need to catch up. Lots of movement and action happening and we will see some investment announcements this year (or perhaps acquisitions).

Seattle-based Ground Truth, which has been operating in stealth mode for about a year, has quietly been collecting data from carriers and other infrastructure companies to see the real traffic logs of the mobile internet. Without that kind of access, the industry has been operating blind, relying instead on customer surveys, analyst estimates, or other third-party reports. If the data is all that it cracks up to be, there’s a chance that mobile can gain credibility and rival other great advertising mediums like the internet and TV. Ground Truth’s Founder and CTO Michael Libes: “This is the first time we have actual numbers, not surveys or estimates on what people are doing on the mobile internet.”

Here’s some of what can be learned:

—Google did buy the largest mobile ad network, by far, Libes said, and Apple bought Quattro Wireless, the second-largest.

—More than half of the top 10 websites in mobile are mobile-specific brands, and not high-profile internet brands. The are: MySpace, Facebook, Google, Mocospace, FunForMobile, AirG, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Cellufun, Mbuzz and Myxer.

—64 percent of all mobile page views are for social networks.

—The carrier decks/portals are only generating 9-10 percent of the mobile internet’s page views, despite the presumption that carriers can influence where subscribers go.

For Libes, the information is a gold mind. Having worked at several mobile startups, including co-founding mobile search firm Medio Systems, he was always looking for data points to make decisions. But mobile was at a disadvantage because it doesn’t use cookies to track users’ behavior, like the wired internet. Up until now, anecdotal evidence has indicated that the mobile internet is growing rapidly. Just ask Libes if this is true: “It’s not a tiny little market. Browsing on phones is picking up dramatically….My guess is that we are somewhere before the knee of the curve and that’s with things doubling year-over-year. Soon it will hit and then we will be growing by five or six times.”

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes at Ground Truth to make this happen. It had to convince the carriers and others that it was in their best interests to share such sensitive and proprietary information. In order to do so, Ground Truth promises to make the data “non-personally identifiable.” That means it will never be used for immediate actions, such as using a subscriber’s location to send them an ad. Instead, they aggregate the information. For example of the millions and millions of data records Ground Truth receives, it picks a sample size of 2.5 million subscribers.

For now, they are tracking five key metrics about the mobile internet, including number of unique visitors, page views, sessions, session length and advertising clicks. In the future, they’ll track other aspects of mobile, like video, applications, data cards and shortcodes. The information is updated weekly, not monthly or quarterly like other reports. 

The carriers bought in to the idea because they may have all the data, but it has never been easily accessible. Sterling Wilson, who was brought on in February as president and CEO, said carriers have never been great marketers. “Much like the publishers, they need a tool. It’s very valuable to them,” he said. Previously, Wilson was president of Qpass, a back-end infrastructure company that was purchased by Amdocs (NYSE: DOX) for $275 million.

Ground Truth will sell access to their database to publishers, who want to learn more about how their mobile websites and their competitors’ are doing. That database will be limited to the 2.5 million sample set, but Ground Truth will generate detailed reports for carriers that are based on their entire subscriber base. Wilson would not say how many partners they currently have, but that they “have a broad variety of data providers who have a diverse group of subscribers using multiple handsets.”