The Associated Press will start helping publishers build mobile apps for a wide variety for platforms, including Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia, Palm Pre and Windows Mobile. The white-label solution was developed by Verve Wireless, which built the AP Mobile platform, notes Paid Content.
It enables faster and cheaper mobile content for publishers that typically don’t have the resources to build their own smartphone apps.
The Verve Dashboard provides publishers with a means to manage mobile executions in one place. It offers controls for use by editors, advertising, marketing, sales, and content creators. Publishing options include mobile Web, and client applications (all platforms), as well as video. Advertising options include display, messages, interstitial, video, and national geo-targeting, with the ability to manage one campaign across all properties utilizing the national network. Reporting and analytics are also provided through the dashboard.
Under the terms of the service, Verve will handle the set up and launch of a publishers’ branded app, providing opportunities for media companies to deliver relevant local news to mobile users through a highly customizable interface supported by existing and in-network advertisers. Verve will not charge for the apps, rather there will be a minimum amount of advertising revenue required in order to maintain the applications.
The announcement marks a shift in Verve’s primary business, which up until now has focused on building mobile web sites for newspapers, like the Sacramento Bee, The News & Observer and The Miami Herald.
The AP, which is an investor in Verve, is offering the white-label service as a benefit to members. Members will be able to add AP content to the app if they wish. The first apps are expected to roll out next month
The Associated Press also announced this week that it is launching AP Mobile América Latina through AP Mobile. AP Mobile en Español is available in the U.S., and AP Mobile América Latina caters to Latin American consumers, offering regional, national and world news from AP and more local Latin American and Caribbean news from participating news providers.
Portland’s Rick Turoczy reviews 40+ iPhone apps developed in the Silicon Forest.
The Android mobile operating system currently runs on less than 2% of all smartphones, but Gartner predicts the Google-backed Android mobile operating system will surge to 14% of the global smartphone market in 2012 — ahead of the iPhone, as well as Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones.
Last night on Charlie Rose, Peter Kaplan, former Editor-In-Chief of the New York Observer, expressed optimism for newspapers, implying it’s all about platforms. The industry could be waiting for right hardware/software to come along — and he has a good idea what that is.
I believe once there’s a new toy in American life, then it’s the same thing as the invention of television in 1950. There will be a new economy set up. You will start to have a ten inch screen.
And it will be an iPhone on steroids. The display advertising will be beautiful and pristine and you’ll be able to charge for subscriptions.
I’m a big believer, I know this is a hop ahead because the thing doesn’t even exist yet, but my guess is in a year or two years we’ll all be carrying them and stuffing them into our briefcases…
I think what we’re going have is these living newspapers and it’s going to be a combination of text, reporting, information, movies, video. They’re going to be very nonlinear. It’s going to be a new kind of newspaper that doesn’t exist now and that you and I are going to have to pay for.
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