Mobtown Labs

Introducing Brom.ly

bromly

A good friend of mine and former Ad.com and AOL colleague, Greg Skipper, has been working on a startup. It’s a really cool app that they describe as a personal concierge service. Basically you find yourself in a new city (or even your own neighborhood) and you open the app on your mobile device and it recommends things that are going on around you and as you choose things it learns more of what you like i.e. I don’t care for sports so the more I pick non-sports related events the less it recommends sporting events.

Obviously, the success of this depends on the accuracy of the app learning what you like but so far I’ve been impressed. I also think the business model around this to possibly integrate with the daily deal world or start connecting individuals and start mobile tribes of recommendations for like minded people could be really cool and lucrative for the Brom.ly team

Here are links so you can try out the app:

o http://brom.ly

o http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brom-ly/id444067080

o https://market.android.com/details?id=ly.brom

Here is some great press about them:

Tags: bromly aol greg skipper chaz gallahan concierge mobile apps app

Adserver Options

Image via CrunchBase

The more I learn about adservers and how different companies use them the more I realize there is to learn in this space so hopefully this will be a series of posted and I hope to get input or posts to re-blog from Mike Treon and Greg Skipper in the future, both of whom I know have a lot of experience in the space.

Full Service Solutions.

I’m beginning to learn that this can mean several different things. A couple years back this was a distinction between self hosted or third party hosted ads. OpenX (Open Ads) at the time had a solution and was known for being an open source free piece of software that helped you segment and cookie out areas of your site where you could build into your infrastructure an ad strategy. We used this on Socialroster and it was a fairly painless experience just dropping tags into the PHP code and deciding how we were going to group, target, or set up behavioral segments for them later.

OpenX was also a good base solution for us to plug other adservers in later so we were never dependent upon one fee based solution, however we knew there would be scaling issues related to hosting your own adserver.

In advising and later getting advice from Yardbarker, I learned how full service really had expanded to back office operations, billing, and front end planning tools. Adify offers a great solution for this where you can really work with them (for a fee or %) to set up an ad network literally overnight. (well maybe in a couple weeks)

Doubleclick, however is clearly the leader in this space. They offer Mediavisor and Donovan planning on the front end and agency side and back office support on the publisher side. That said, I am told that they do not offer the individual network accounts payable that an ad network would need to pay publishers. Especially, if you are a small network or a network hybrid vertical based setup as the fees would be through the roof and you would still do a lot of the work yourself…I believe Adify is still ideal for this but would love to hear commentary and feedback.