Animated GIFs to spruce up mobile ads

Rating: Sony’s SDNA gives GoMo a sneak preview of its app

On our way to ad:tech London [2012], GoMobile News stopped off to meet with Masato Kuninori, a senior application producer for the business strategy division of Sony Digital Network Applications (SDNA) who is acting as something of a software evangelist for his company’s range of mobile apps. Actually SDNA has been quite prolific over the last two years and has released ten apps for the Android platform plus two for iOS users. However, it was the unannounced app which Kuninori gave GoMobile News a sneak preview of the app that has the most bearing on the mobile advertising sector.Kuninori couldn’t share with us the app’s name but he did show us what it is able to do. That is – creating animated GIF files from a video shot using an Android handset (or tablet).

This product should be officially announced in November [2012] but its implications for mobile advertising were obvious.

Whilst it is extremely difficult to embed video into a mobile ad, any decent mobile phone browser would be able to display an animated GIF.

You end up with a moving image buried inside a picture file. Just the thing to spice up an otherwise dull mobile ad! We’ll let you know when it’s finally released.

GoMobile News was intrigued by SDNA’s business model. Basically, it’s leveraging technology Sony developed for its digital cameras inside mobile apps.

The hook is that an app entitled “million moments’ available from Google Play here is actually free.

The app has proved very popular in Asia reaching somewhere in the region of 0.5 million downloads.

This app can share content with any other of SDNA’s apps such as a photo editor, for example. Those other apps aren’t free, of course.

However, SDNA’s main focus isn’t B2C, it is B2B. So it has successfully licensed some of these apps to Japanese operators.

We strongly suspect that other mobile operators in the USA and Europe will soon follow suite. Given that Sony makes its own mobile phones, we don’t expect rival handset manufacturers to bee too ken on licensing these apps.

That’s a shame because SDNA has an app which enables an Android handset to take 12 simultaneous pictures giving the user the chance to pick and save the best one(s).

That’s extremely close to a facility which Motorola heavily promoted with its latest RAZR i smartphone where the facility is allied to hardware not software.

GoMobile News has a sneaking feeling that SDNA is going to replicate its Asian successes in Western markets.