Author: Denny

One of the more established providers of smartphone and tablet advertising solutions now has a premium offering.

Voltari Corporation, an established mobile media solutions provider, has now unveiled some of the future of its offerings, including a premium mobile marketing channel that is meant to open up a range of new opportunities for its current and prospective customers.

The name of this new channel is “Emporia”, which is being called a first of its kind within this marketplace.

The company has called its new mobile marketing channel the “first independent and transparent mobile channel for the purchase and sale of premium publisher inventory by a select group of advertisers.” Participants in Emporia will also include some of the leaders in the industry when it comes to data providers, as well as leading video and rich media ad unit hosts.

This mobile marketing channel was created in order to respond to an unmet need for practical and effective options.

The reason that Voltari developed Emporia in the first place is that the current offerings within this industry are greatly lacking when it comes to cost and effectiveness from both technology and service providers. This has led publishers to experience a considerable reduction in the advertising spend and has held back the value that is provided to advertisers by agencies.

Emporia has been designed to use the proprietary technology at Voltari, which pinpoints the engagement tendencies of each user in real time, across industry verticals. According to the acting CEO of the company, Richard Sadowsky, in a statement that he prepared, “Emporia will be an environment in which all the participants emerge as winners.”

Sadowsky also explained that the users of this mobile marketing channel will obtain engaging and high-impact ad units in the ideal moment. Publishers will be the primary recipients of the CPM, and advertisers will be able to tell that their mobile ads are being connected with premium content. These advertisements will be delivered to users through a method that will use the nature of mobile to its fullest. “We will be rolling out industry verticals in partnership with marquee specialty data providers and will be announcing our first data provider partnership in the next few weeks.”

Chinese mobile game app published private user videos online.

It should come as no surprise that mobile gaming apps are popular in China, but one Chinese mobile app in particular called “FengKuang LaiWang” has recently received a lot of media attention after it was discovered that the mobile game leaked more than 35,000 user videos online, including video clips of users who were in their underwear or in the nude.

The videos were posted without player’s consent on Youku.

FengKuang LaiWang essentially translates to “Crazy Dealings”, and is a popular charade-style game available for download via Alibaba’s Laiwang chat service. The game is not unlike the mobile game “Heads Up!” that can be downloaded from Apple’s App Store. Basically, in this game, players take turns trying to guess the word that appears on the screen while other players act it out. Players video themselves acting out a charade and share the video privately with friends.

According to “Beijing News”, thousands of these videos wound up on the game’s Youku account, which is a Chinese video platform similar to YouTube, unbeknownst to the players. Some of the videos revealed players, who took the game to another level, wearing very little or nothing at all. Many players did not realize that their videos were being recorded and published to Youku.

Concerns regarding mobile gaming regulation resulted after the incident.

As soon as the privacy blunder was reported by local media, the video-sharing feature of the game was disabled and the games account on China’s leading online video site was closed. Zhejiang Zhile Network, the game’s publisher, released a statement that said as soon as it realized the game was uploading video content without player consent it shut down the video-sharing function. The company apologized in a public statement saying that the game failed to inform users that their activities would be streamed online.

The company said that “Per this mistake, we, as the developer and operator of the game, apologize sincerely to affected users.” However, despite what happened, after news about the leak broke, downloads of FengKuang LaiWang have increased.

Nonetheless, as was noted by the “South China Morning Post”, the leak has resulted in people within the Chinese game industry questioning the safety and security of the mobile gaming regulations.