Press Release
Friday, 25 December 2009 02:57
Cirius USA is on a roll! Just 15 days after shedding the Beta label from its AdLocal platform, and launching a new and improved UI, we are announcing that we are ready to support Android developers. This being Christmas Eve, we consider this a "gift" from our tireless and talented developers.
We already support publishers via API and an AdLocal SDK for iPhone platform, allowing them to monetize their location-aware applications. Several publishers have already integrated with us. Now we have prepared a Beta version of AdLocal SDK for Android platform which is currently available by invitation only. We support Android 1.5, 1.6, and 2.0.
If you are an Android developer and/or own an Android application, and are interested in showing location-based ads in your application, please send us an email at support-us@adlocal.biz with an overview of the application, and we will get back to you within two business days of receiving your email.
Stay tuned! We will announce general availability of AdLocal's Android SDK in the near future.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Josh and Mark from the AdLocal SDK team
Blog Entry
Tuesday, 08 December 2009 18:00
I am delighted to announce that today Cirius USA has officially launched AdLocal - the world's first self-serve, location-based mobile advertising platform. Over the past several months, while we were in Beta, we have been gathering feedback from our advertisers as well as publishers, and have already incorporated some of their brilliant suggestions in our platform. We have emerged from Beta with a platform that is unmatched in this space and offers a very user-friendly, Web-based interface (www.adlocal.biz) for advertisers and publishers who want to manage their accounts and campaigns by themselves.
We are taking this opportunity to extend our hugely popular $50 Free Trial promotion for advertisers interested in trying out location-based mobile advertising. Just go sign up at www.adlocal.biz, and when you log in to your account, you will see a starting balance of $50, courtesy Cirius USA!
AdLocal provides easy & affordable advertising solutions for local merchants (which includes small and medium-size local businesses, as well as national brands with local/regional presence) to deliver their marketing communication more efficiently by pin-pointing a selected geographic region or market area (e.g. target neighborhood of retail store) where they want to show their ads. Our platform leverages the popularity of iPhone, and we have signed up several iPhone publishers with multiple applications. iPhone users using such applications in or near the location of advertisers in our network will be able to see highly relevant, hyper-local ads.
Speaking among his peers at the Plug & Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California, the President of Cirius USA, Hiroshi Ogawa, said, "The mobile phone is recognized as a personal, highly interactive and measurable medium that has the potential power to deliver a marketing message more effectively – anytime, anywhere. Our mission is to provide the capability and opportunity for local businesses to take advantage of mobile as a new advertising medium, as they have done in the past with traditional advertising like local directories, local newspapers, flyers and billboards. Especially for small businesses that are short on money and sensitive to ROI, AdLocal is dedicated to providing easy and cost effective solutions to its advertisers."
I would like to echo our President's statements and add that we feel that the AdLocal platform will redefine the way local businesses create their marketing messages and ad campaigns, and also how application developers can open up and monetize their location-based ad inventory.
For some of my future entries, I would like to share some success stories, hints and tips on how to effectively run your mobile advertising campaigns in order to reach your target audience. In the meantime, please follow us on Twitter and on Facebook. Also, stay tuned for more exciting announcements from us, especially our expansion into additional smart-phone platforms.
Bye for now!
Tomi
Blog Entry
Monday, 26 October 2009 18:07
Great news for local advertisers! We, at AdLocal, are announcing the availability of a promotion, $50 Free Trial promotion, for new advertisers. This promotion is available through December 15th, 2009. You can sign up for a new account today at www.adlocal.biz, and start advertising within minutes!
Every new advertiser account created while the promotion is available, will be credited with a starting balance of $50. Absolutely free! All you have to do is to spend that money on your local ad campaigns. You need to act fast; the promotion money will expire at the end of 2009. That means that any portion of the promotional $50 that is unused as of January 1st, 2010, will be removed from the account. However, we are offering a way to avoid losing those funds; just add your own funds to your account (the minimum is $50) and we will let you keep the promotion money to use on ad campaign spending, at your own pace. Some even refer to this promotion as 100% ROI; we will let you decide whether you agree.
Recently, a few well known iPhone publishers have joined our ad network and have released high-value ad inventory on their iPhone applications for our local advertisers. This is the perfect opportunity for businesses to advertise their products and services to their local community of iPhone users. Our existing base of local advertisers has experienced click-through-rates (CTRs) which are two-to-four times versus their other ad campaigns. We believe that the new advertisers will see similar, if not better, results.
Our self-serve interface is designed with both, mobile publishers and mobile advertisers, in mind. Publishers can list their mobile applications where they want to receive mobile ads (ie, create and manage ad units). Advertisers can create and manage mobile ad campaigns for ads they want to show to iPhone users in or near their location. The interface offers simple and intuitive location targeting and for those advertisers who do not have a mobile website, we have a very simple utility to create a simple page that the users will see when they click your ads. Such a page can have your business name and logo, contact number, address, business hours, and even a short description of your products and services. Make it appealing! Users can click the phone number on this page to generate a call to your business! We are confident that this will probably be the least expensive lead or referral for you.
Now, go ahead and give it a try. You have $50 to gain!
Blog Entry
Monday, 20 July 2009 11:03
Despite Japan's mobile phones are very advanced and offer higly innovative functionality, there's always the question on why they haven't expanded globally. Here's a good article on New York Times which gives you a reasonable understanding.
Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global By HIROKO TABUCHI
Japanese handset makers’ rush to innovation in the last 15 years has put them so far ahead they can’t find a niche to expand outside their networks.
Blog Entry
Wednesday, 13 May 2009 20:59
Thanks to Michael Boland from Kelsey Group, he has introduced AdLocal's location-based advertising platform on his company's public blog today. Their blog includes good analysis on local media both online and off, local search, social networking, video, mobile, vertical search, yellow, pages, newspapers, television, radio, and more. I would highly recommend anyone who is interested in the mobile local market to bookmark their blog.
About The Kelsey Group
The Kelsey Group, a division of BIA Advisory Services, LLC, is the leading provider of research, data and strategic analysis on directories, small-business advertising, online local media, vertical market advertising and mobile advertising. As the premier analyst firm covering the directory publishing community and the emerging local search marketplace, The Kelsey Group provides advisory services (The Kelsey Report(R), Interactive Local Media, Marketplaces and Mobile Local Media), publishing (Global Yellow Pages(TM)), consulting (more than 400 individual assignments) and conferences. For more information about The Kelsey Group, visit www.kelseygroup.com. The Kelsey Group's Local Media Blog is located at http://blog.kelseygroup.com and the company can be found on Twitter through http://twitter.com/TheKelseyGroup.
Blog Entry
Wednesday, 25 February 2009 19:23
SoftBank Corp. just announced their new FREE iPhone campaign, starting from Feb.27, 2009. Customers pay zero yen for new subscription contracts for the iPhone 8GB model. (also needs to be 2-year plan.) iPhone sales were stagnating in Japan. According to research firms, Softbank sold about 200,000 phones in Japan in the first 2 months, but since then demand has been falling.
Softbank does not disclose their iPhone handset subscriptions (you can imagine why), but my research suggests that it is unlikely the phone sales have reached 400,000.
A survey conducted by MCF (Mobile Contents Forum) suggests that approximately 2.2% handsets of Softbank are iPhones. Softbank has 16,061,000 subscribers according to TCA as of Dec. 2008, which would mean approximately 350,000 iPhones could be possibly sold.
One of the big challenges Softbank and Apple has is that the Japanese users already have access to some the most advanced technologies and mobile content like, live TV-viewing and IC-wallet integrated phones.
Hopefully this new campaign of Softbank will help iPhone sales grow.
Blog Entry
Thursday, 12 February 2009 01:35
As we all know, the mobile content market in Japan has been rapidly growing due to extensive penetration of 3G phones and flat-rate data plans in recent years. So how big is the Japanese mobile content market?
A previous report from MIC (The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) projected 423.3 billion yen for 2007, a 16% gain compared to 2006. The e-book market had been rapidly growing, as well as the markets for fulltrack music downloads and mobile games. Meanwhile, the markets for ringtone melodies and standby screens had declined in 2007.
MIC has not yet revealed studies for the 2008 market, but assuming that it will grow at least 16%, we can estimate that it will be over 490 billion yen for 2008.
So what are the some the actual trends for mobile content usage?
A survey conducted by MCF (Mobile Content Forum) indicates the most frequently used content among mobile subscribers in Japan.
Referring to graph above, 67.8% of mobile subscribers access news and weather information, followed by real tones and navigation / transit as the top categories in 2008. Also in contrast to 2007, social media (SNS) and location-based services for restaurant search were the two most growing categories for content usage.
Blog Entry
Thursday, 22 January 2009 23:53
MobileMonday, the global community for professionals in the mobile industry, announced Cirius Technologies as one of the 42 nominees for its annual Barcelona Peer Award. 
The MobileMonday Mobile Peer Awards Barcelona are among the most influential events in the mobile industry and, with over 1000 attendants, the point of reference in startup innovation during the Mobile World Congress.
For the next step, Cirius will be reviewed by an international jury that will choose the 20 finalists that will present at the event in Barcelona, Spain on February 16, 2009. The finalists chosen to present in Barcelona will be announced on January 26.
Blog Entry
Monday, 05 January 2009 06:00
A recent article on Digital & Direct News describes that Japanese fast-food chains have actively adopted mobile promotion methods in 2008. Mos Food Service, one of the top fast-food restaurant chains in Japan, has emphasized on reducing the number of its TV commercials and reallocating its budget towards mobile advertising. Through trials with different advertising and promotion methods, the company has recognized advertisements to mobile phones are well targeted and cost effective compared to its older strategies.
Lotteria, a rival fast-food chain, is also planning to emphasize sales promotion targeting to mobile phones. According to Keita Kojima, Product Promotion Team Manager of Lotteria, "We focus on our mobile phone site as a new sales promotion method and provide customers with three major contents; coupons, store locator, and food menu. We find mobile to be more effective in targeting desired market segments rather than delivering the message to a large indefinite number of customers."
McDonald’s Japan having over 10 million user subscriptions to their own mobile site, are also keen in studying the possibility of allowing customers to order meals online, redeem coupons, and pay for purchase via mobile phones. Currently customers can download an application to their phones, allowing them to choose coupons they wish to purchase. When making a purchase, the coupon is redeemed by simply placing the phone near the RFID reader, and instantly adding the item to the order. Furthermore, the payment can also be completed using NTT Docomo’s iD mobile wallet payment system.
Eikoh Harada, CEO of McDonald’s Holdings Japan describes the advantages of this new method: 1.) Distributing E-coupons are more cost efficient compared to print advertisements. 2.) Payment process is faster, where a 30 second reduction in processing time will increase sales with 5%. 3.) Mobile campaigning also allows for more targeted marketing according to the user profile and location and the effectiveness of promotions can also be directly measured through user ID recognition and feedback.
Blog Entry
Monday, 22 December 2008 17:00
This is the first entry for our new blog which will primarily focus on differences between the Japanese and global mobile market including trends, forecasts and other informative data.
Also, this blog intends to cover some of the following topics:
As you may have read through our website, Cirius Technologies is a location-based mobile advertising solution / service provider based in Silicon Valley with headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. We've developed Japan's first location-based mobile advertising platform called "AdLocal" which enables the delivery of precise-location-targeted advertising to mobile phones within applications and on mobile web sites, via GPS and Cell-ID location data.
We just launched our new subsidiary in October 2008, where we are focused on deals and business development for the international market. Remember not to forget that our international AdLocal product will be ready in spring 2009 for our global customers, so don’t miss it.
Always feel free to contact us if you have any inquiries or interested in partnering with us.
Hope you’ll enjoy our upcoming blog entries!
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