Industry Views: Will Yahoo’s Flurry acquisition help it face down competition from Google and Facebook?

Last week's news that Yahoo has acquired mobile advertising and analytics firm, Flurry (rumoured to be somewhere between $200 and $300 million) sharpened the focus on the mobile advertising space, which, according to figures from eMarketer is set to reach $32.71bn in 2014, up 85% from 2013’s total.  No doubt Yahoo is keen to achieve a bigger slice of the advertising pie.  Indeed, with Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer, continually referring to the company as *mobile first*, its intentions are quite clear yet to date its mobile revenues have done little to support that description. We asked the …

Industry Views: Amazon Fire – a shop with a smartphone or a smartphone with a shop?

Last week Amazon launched its first smartphone - the Amazon Fire. What's interesting is how the company has bundled free Amazon Prime as part of the phone package, signalling its intent to take more ownership of the m-commerce and streaming media space by guaranteeing free and speedy fulfillment of mobile purchases, free ebooks and access to a large library of films and TV shows. It's a bold move and shows how, by creating its own mobile ecosystem, customer value can be derived from the mobile service and user experience level rather than differences in the device OS. Here we've asked MEF …

The Next Mobile Frontier: Global Vs Local Brands [Infographic]

Amazon is rumoured to be planning extensions to its existing mobile content offering that could include a music streaming service and even a dedicated Amazon smartphone. However, the global online retailer is losing ground to its 'Big 3’ key competitors Apple, Google and Microsoft in emerging markets, according to research from mobile marketing expert and MEF member Upstream. The latest installment in the ‘The Next Mobile Frontier’ report shows that over half of those surveyed (52%) said that Apple is the brand that they currently spend money or would like to spend more on in the future. …