Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you see the evolution of video in that context? I agree with you about what you said about long form content – reading an article while at a doctor’s office makes a lot of sense. But presumably there is also a video element to this, right?

John SanGiovanni: Totally. Video in our mind takes a few different stages. We do a lot of video advertising inside the brand experience. We are always trying to think about how to present the content in a way that is respectful to the user and organic to the presentation. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Alex Bratton, CEO of Lextech (Part 1)

Alex Bratton is the chief executive officer of Lextech, a company that creates custom mobile apps for organizations to optimize their workflows. Alex has a BS in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He founded and lead several successful companies in the past, including EmailRx, The Net Squad, and WebRPG. In this interview he provides several use cases of how Lextech adds value to businesses and their processes by designing customized mobile apps, and he gives us his views on the mobile app space and what entrepreneurs should be focusing on to be successful.

Sramana Mitra: Alex, let’s start with introducing Lextech to our audience as well as giving them some of your background. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi (Part 4)

John SanGiovanni: That is a great question. That was an interesting snapshot of how you are using Facebook. But I would characterize that style of marketing in many ways as an inversion of what we are doing. What we would do is figure out a way to bring brand-specific content and present it organically to the presentation of your blog itself, instead of syndicating your content out in that way, ingesting content that is being written by the brand agency or editorial team. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What do you charge and how do you charge for the Zumobi Platform?

John SanGiovanni: On the publishing side we have two different business models. One is what I call co-publishing, where we do a revenue share with the publisher. This is great, because we have aligned incentives and objectives around getting high-quality and high-dollar advertising into these campaigns. The second model is that we will put the ZBi technology into any app, whether we built it or not, and will do that in exchange for a standard “per CPM rich media” fee – which is a common model for ad technology. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Facebook and LinkedIn are doing the same. They switched away from banner ads to pushing content in-stream. What works really well is if you can do content marketing in-stream.

John SanGiovanni: That is exactly right. Many of the publishers that are doing in-stream native advertising are doing it in a site-specific way. The challenge with some of those approaches is that they are difficult to scale. What we have innovated with the ZBi platform is that it allows us to do the same type of native and in-stream mobile advertising, but at scale across a series of different high-volume app publishers, which is the Holy Grail. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi (Part 1)

John SanGiovanni is co-founder and vice president of product design at Zumobi, a company specialized in creating innovative apps and in-app advertising for the mobile industry through its platform called ZBi (Zumobi Brand integration). John has more than 13 years of experience in mobile interface design. Prior to Zumobi he worked at Microsoft Research. In this interview he talks about Zumobi applies native advertising methods to drive brand content and awareness in the mobile space and talks about the exciting future of mobile advertising.

Sramana Mitra: John, let’s start with some of your background as well as background about Zumobi. What do you do? What kinds of customers do you cater to? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Calvin Carter, Founder and President, Bottle Rocket (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Can you identify open problems for our readers? What is missing out there? What would you like to do if you had certain other resources available to you?

Calvin Carter: There are a lot of opportunities in the mobile space since it is a phenomenal space to be in. It is growing, it is sticking, and we are not going to come back from this – it will keep going further, and it is going to find more ways to either replace different or outdated technologies. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Calvin Carter, Founder and President, Bottle Rocket (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Are you familiar with a company called Trion Worlds?

Calvin Carter: No.

SM: Trion is a really hot gaming company. They work in collaboration with HBO and they released a TV series and a game together. The program is called Defiance. >>>