The opening event of the annual developer conference, Google I/O included quite a few interesting announcements and services. Here are few of Google’s announcements from the first day of the conference:

At last year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ​​Google went all out. They dedicated a huge area for the Android brand, company representatives handed out green Android pins and gave journalists and visitors ice cream sandwiches — named after the (then) latest operating system. However, at this year’s event, the Android swag and Google promoted representation was nowhere to be found.

For those following Google’s mobile marketing moves in the past two years, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Google has been trying for some time to focus Android the brand primarily on the application developers, gadget freaks and technology journalist demographics. It seems, to Google, that Android is similar to, “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” The Android app store has been changed to Google Play and even Google itself omits the name of the Android OS from its hardware products (Nexus devices series) — what enables many hardware manufacturers producing Android phones to promote their own brands.

Today, Samsung announced at the Mobile World Congress that they are releasing Wallet, an Android ticketing and coupon app to compete directly with Apple’s Passbook.  Users will be able to store things like concert tickets, coupons, membership cards and boarding passes in one centralized application.

Location based services will also be enabled, sending push notifications to alert users when they are nearby where their stored passes could be used.  Imagine walking down the street and being notified that your favorite restaurant nearby is having a special for card members at that moment.

Retailers and service providers can simply scan the barcode screen of the device for users to redeem their services.

The API is open, which means you can almost guarantee that there will be an large amount of brands and stores available to use in the app in the near future.  They are already beginning their launch with a sizable stable of brands, including Walgreens, Expedia, Hotels.com and Lufthansa among others.

Throughout the blogosphere there is already criticism of the app as being too similar to Apple’s Passbook.  Comparisons have been made to the logos of both apps as well as the user interface.  What do you think?  Does it matter that their similar?  Leave your comments below.

I had the pleasure of attending Appsworld North America last week, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Appsworld North America is one of two conferences that Six Degrees organizes every year.  The first one is in February in San Francisco, and the second is in October in London, each has its unique offering and new possibilities.

It’s not an easy task, but this year Six Degrees was able to fill up (almost) an entire floor of Mobile Apps professionals on the second floor of the Moscone Center. Dozens of exhibitors had rolled in from near and far to meet and greet the industry’s finest.

Six meetup locations brought together listeners interested in various mobile related topics such as mobile payments, app monetization and the future of mobile. Managing partners and executives from Blackberry, Facebook, Groupon and Getjar presented their companies, giving tips and hints that will help developers and partners optimize their marketing efforts.

Dozens of booths and thousands of visitors had made the conference the hub it was for anyone interested to learn about the latest trends in mobile advertising, mobile apps and technology.

We had the pleasure of meeting veteran developers and novice programmers, who came to mingle and learn.

Ariel Shimoni, our Director of Publisher Relations had participated in a panel about App Monetization alongside representatives from ZooZ, Taptica and Aqua.  Throughout the 90 minute session, various suggestions and tips were given to listeners as to what would allow them the best ROI on their app marketing efforts, which was very interesting and helpful.

This year, we had a great big promotion going on which we gave away a brand new Nexus 7 Mini Tablet. In order to win the device one needed to guess the exact amount of Jelly Beans we kept in a big plastic jar presented …

We are very happy and proud to announce that we are nominated to The Europas People’s Choice award.

The Awards

The Europas are the premier awards for early, mid, and late stage

technology startups, as well as leading investors and media in the EMEA regions. The Awards celebrate the most forward thinking, progressive and innovative tech companies across over 20 categories. Startups can apply for an award or be nominated by someone else, and winners are selected by a panel of judges, with public and peer voting for certain awards.

For the last three years The Europas have grown and grown under the guidance of TechCrunch’s fantastic European Editor Mike Butcher. Mike is now taking a back seat and the Web Summit team are going to bring their experience running the 4,000+ Web Summit to bear to create an incredible event on the evening of Tuesday 22nd January 2013 in Berlin.

Read Mike’s post on TechCrunch about the Europas here.

The awards have been expanded to include over 20 categories. A fun and fantastic awards ceremony will be followed by an after party in one of Berlin’s hottest venues. The Europas is a chance for you and your team to celebrate a year of hard of work alongside Europe, the Middle East, and Africa’s leading startups, investors and media over one incredible night in Berlin.

Why Should You Vote For Us?

StartApp publicly launched just over a year ago and have achieved remarkable success in that time. We are currently monetizing over 5,000 apps and generating 1.5 million SDK downloads per day. With this amount of daily downloads and traffic, StartApp also generates over 2 billion monthly ad impressions offering a range of unique ad types. In acknowledgement of our achievements we would like to …

Hey There Android peeps. My name is Yinon. I’m an Account Manager at StartApp and I am writing to you from San Francisco, California where I just finished representing StartApp at the Android Developer’s Conference last week.

AnDevCon IV

The conference, which took place at the Hyatt Regency, held some very interesting events, from keynotes by Google, Facebook and Amazon to technical workshops and classes. During the four days of the conference, over 1,200 Androiders of all types attended the conference. There were developers from the companies and corporations, all the way down to the single developers who write code in their garage. And let’s not forget the ones like me, the Androiders on the marketing side of this great industry.

Giving out a Galaxy Tab…

As part of the StartApp booth at AnDevCon we decided to bring back a contest which was a great success at our last conference in October in London, but this time we decided to change it up a bit.

Everyone who came to our booth took a guess of the amount of Jelly Beans inside a jar. You should have seen the different ways people guessed; picking it up trying to weigh it, trying to count them by rows, using calculators and so much more. The lowest guess we got was 450 jelly beans and the highest was 100,000. The winner’s guess was off by only 16 jelly beans, writing 1,385 on her ballot; we had 1,401 inside. Congratulations Julia!

After announcing Julia from App Annie as the winner, I had to get ready for my session speaking titled “Ways to Monetize Your Apps,” a nice change as opposed to all technical sessions all day. I spoke about the challenge of monetization and the different options available, …

Last week, StartApp exhibited at Ad-Tech last week at the Javits Center in NYC and even hurricane Sandy couldn’t stop the world’s biggest brands such as MasterCard and Jaguar Land Rover from attending the conference.

Networking

Day 1 was all about networking in the exhibition hall, going around the conference meeting new people from the ad-tech community, learning about their business and feeling their enthusiasm. There were many spectacular booths with high end decorations like eZanga.

Keynote Sessions

Day 2 included keynote sessions which included leading speakers from a powerhouse stable of companies. During that day we also had many business meetings and interesting brain storming with colleagues from the industry about the future of mobile advertising.

Competition

There was also a startup spotlight series competition where startups competed to win the Ad Tech Innovation Award, congratulation to Placed, Inc. on winning the Unilever Mobile Commerce Challenge, and to Idomoo for winning the Target Social Video & TV Challenge at ad:tech NY!

All and all AdTech was a powerful New York combination of two leading industries: advertising and technology. To show all the amazing things you can learn by attending AdTech, here are the Top 10 illuminating quotes from ad:tech’s greatest luminaries.

See you at AdTech NY 2013!

StartApp will be making an appearance for the next two days in New York City! Marina & Guy have traveled to the Jarvis Center in NYC for 2 days for this years
ad:tech New York conference. They are going to be attending all the awesome presentations and exhibitions that are happening.

Ad:tech NY, happening today and tomorrow, is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition.
We are here to showcase the StartApp ad network, as well as explore all the amazing things that this conference has to offer.
According to ad:tech, it is the only event that covers the entire digital marketing ecosystem.

With guest speakers like Mark Cuban and amazing exhibitions planned at the
Expo Theater, this is a conference not to be missed.

We will be Pod 10 in the Mobile Marketing Zone, located near the Marketing Masters Theater. Come say hi and take home some amazing giveaways.

I attended Droidcon UK, a 2 day conference packed full of amazing android experiences! We had a great time meeting developers and networking with others in the Android community. We hope you enjoyed Droidcon UK as much as we did – and just in case

you missed out on the fun, I wanted to share my impression with you.

Android Atmosphere

It all happened last Thursday and Friday – October 25^th and 26^th, at the Business Design Center in Islington, London. More than 1,000 attendees visited over the two day exhibition, including active Android developers, aspiring developers looking to start developing their own app, companies offering hardware, such as Sony and Alcatel. Other companies offered platforms and solutions for developing and enriching the apps, like immersion and Yandex).

Amazing Presentations

There were so many presentations on multiple tracks – ensuring each attendee could be exposed to the information they were most interested in. My favorite presentation featured the launch of a brand new device by AD. There were also demo camps where developers could showcase their newest developments. The whole StartApp team was honored to have our very own Ariel represent us on the panel on monetization.

The StartApp Booth

Not only were we a part of the presentation, we also had our own booth on the conference floor. Our booth had a great attraction for all attendees – we gave out a Galaxy tab to the person who guessed the number of jelly beans in our jar!! It caused quite a stir at DroidCon. People were picking the jar up to try and guess by weight, others were taking pictures …