I watched a couple of hours of presentations from iPhoneDevCamp on August 2 over my home office broadband connection. One of the presentations I heard (because the video wasn't working for me at the time) was from PinchMedia, a company I didn't know about before.
PinchMedia is offering a iPhone developers two drop-in components for their native apps:
I know that more than a few people who heard the presentation dismissed Pinch Advertising as "just another ad network." I don't think that's the case at all. I think PinchMedia is offering developers the opportunity to quickly integrate ads like the ones found in the free version of Twitterific.
This is potentially a great addition to the iPhone ecosystem. If I were building a native app that was going to be released for free, I'd seriously consider incorporating ads. If Pinch Advertising's API works well, it's one less feature I would have to develop myself.
Of course, a lot still rides on PinchMedia's ability to bring in advertisers that are appropriate for the apps that adopt their code. One of the things that makes the free version of Twitterific acceptable to me is the appropriateness of many of the ads that are provided by The Deck. Hopefully the overall quality of the free iPhone native apps will make selling ads easy.
I never thought about analytics inside of iPhone native apps before today, but a friend of mine brought it up because he knows the founders of PinchMedia and wanted to know what I thought about the concept.
I'm an iPhone web app dabbler, and I would never want to give up my Google Analytics. But I could see that I'd have to do so if I converted my web app to an iPhone native app.
Pinch seems to be filling that gap in a way that makes it unnecessary for developers to roll their own analytic ping service. I wish them luck with this. I can see the value of the analytics concept, but I have no idea how well Pinch has executed.
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Dave, thanks for taking the time to write about us.
Anyone can check to see how well we've executed on analytics by signing up for an account at Pinch Media and downloading the SDK. We've been iterating based on the feedback of the developers, and are continuing to do so, so if there's a feature that you'd like that we haven't built yet, please get in touch with us - that's how we determine much of our future product development.
On the advertising side, we have a lot of experience in the industry and I think we understand it well, but we're not advertising salespeople, so we've partnered with a company called JumpTap to find advertisers. They've been doing an incredible job - we've seen interest from a large film studio, an automobile manufacturer, a major bank, and many other prominent brands.
I don't personally like being thought of as 'just another ad network', either. We build (and are building) tools everyone can use, whether they sell their applications or distribute them for free, and when we talk to developers we're very concerned about getting the economics right - advertising works best for some applications, but not all applications.
If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
Greg,
I would really like to know how you get the data back from the iPhone to your store?