When we started AdMob (my day job, to be quite clear) three years ago, there really was a dearth of information about the mobile web and it was generally agreed that "people won't download apps" - and there was very little known about the ones that people did download. At the same time, as our company began to take off we recongnised that we were generating a significant amount of data ourselves, so we decided to share it with the community to shed some light into the more obscure corners of the mobile industry.

And so our Metrics offering was born. Metrics is a free monthly report that you can download or subscribe to here and consists of 20 or so pages of information from around the world. This includes top markets for the mobile web, the type of handsets people are using in these markets and key trends like the growth of Smartphones generally and iPhone and Android, in particular. Since it's based on around 9.6 Billion ads served every month, it's certainly a statistically accurate sample and is used by analysts, journalists and marketers alike to help to understand the mobile landscape.

This month, the Metrics report includes some Primary Research AdMob undertook into iPhone Apps. Unlike the main report, this was based on a small survey of users responding to an ad announcing the survey, so there will be some bias due to the methodology. However, it does make interesting reading and I think it's reasonable to draw some sound conclusions based on this and ongoing market feedback.

Currently, there's a major trend among marketers to commission Apps for their brand and we've seen successful Apps from the likes of Reebok, Capital Radio and Pepsi recently, with plenty more in the planning and build stages. With over 3 million Apple devices (iPhone and iPod Touch) in the UK alone, this is already a large addressable market and one that's continuing to grow.

Here's a few highlights from the research if you're thinking about Apps and need some supporting data:

- People claim to spend over an hour a day engaging with their Apps.

- iPhone users download 11 new Apps per month (8 free) and iPod Touch 18 per month (16 free).

- Most discovery and downloading happens on the mobile device (as opposed to on a PC). Therefore advertising within other Apps is a really important way of promoting new ones.

The case for creating branded Apps is really quite compelling at this stage, with an engaged, large potential audience and a market that is currently not too crowded to attract attention. It's a great way to create and maintain a dialogue with your consumer.

Round 1: The Blogger. 

Paul McRudden is a man who knows his own value. Fed up with waiting around for brands to get back to him, and often dismayed with their responses when they do, he has decided to bill brands for the amount of his time they have wasted.

On his blog, he details the time he has spent queuing in shops, sitting in restaurants and waiting in general over a 6 week period. As he states in his letter, his time on the earth is valuable....

How Valuable? Well, he reckons he's owed more than £6,000 and has sent out invoices to 50 different companies. As a true blogger he is logging all the brands' responses on his twitter feed . Some have made payments. Pret a manger was the first - probably feeling £62 was pretty cheap for the PR they got in return.

You can get the whole caboodle here 

It made me wonder whether the soon to be release film Art & Copy (http://www.artandcopyfilm.com/) will either be:

1. an opportunity for the giant egos of Madison Avenue to acknowledge their wealth and privilege and start applying their creativity to solving problems that actually mean something significant to most people (rather than making endless pharmaceutical ads which keeps America on medication)

2. OR, a hugely frustrating exercise in watching wealthy and privileged giant egos of Madison Avenue try to convince the public that advertising makes the world a better place. 

(I am aware of my own hypocrisy here, I ultimately work in the same business. I don't mean to sound self righteous, I'm not. I'm very aware of Bill Hick's famous rant. I would like to think that when any of us get an audience with the outside world that we admit some of our wrongs and commit to give some of our talent, inspiration and resource to doing some of the good valuable stuff too).

Either way its going to be an interesting film, not least because its being released at a similar time to Lemonade (http://www.lemonademovie.com/). Who will win out?

Last night, I was sitting in my hotel room in San Francisco, mindlessly watch TV and wondering if I could overcome jetlag tendancies and get some sleep, when we had an "we interrupt this broadcast..." announcing the death of Ted Kennedy.

Obviously, being only human, my first reaction was to Twitter the news to my thousand or so followers (@russellbuckley if you'd like to join them). And so, for many people around the globe Twitter broke the news of Mr Kennedy's death. This isn't the first celebrity death in a news landscape increasingly dominated by Twitter, but it's certainly the first time I was involved in breaking a news story to people I know.

Out of interest, my next step was to check Wikipedia and already his Biog facts had been updated - this was within seconds of the news hitting the wires.

The BBC was much much slower and I got bored with checking their site after about 20 minutes or so.

If you'd gone into a coma even 5 years ago and woken up today to resume your part in an active 21st century life, this would be almost impossible to conceive. And yet, it's really only taken that time for the Citizen to become the major engine of news propagation and curator of the historical fact.

When you sit back and think in these basic terms, it's all a little mindbuggering - at least for me, still fuzzy from jetlag and blogging at 5.30 am.

Does Twitter make sense to anyone who doesn't work in new media? I am constantly asked by friends: "What is the point of Twitter?" and, to be honest, my description is usually something along the lines of:

Imagine if Facebook was purely the status updates, links and photos...

But what if you don't know about Facebook? Ben Stiller tries to explain Twitter to screen legent Mickey Rooney. See how he fares here:

Via Nickburcher.com

In order to promote the UK scrappage scheme which gives you £2000 off a new car, Vauxhaul covered a car in around two grands worth of coins.

The car was then driven to London's Liverpool Street Station, where passers by could pick the coins off the car.

What a wonderfully bourgeois concept - you like the idea of having a vegetable patch but can't be bothered to do any gardening, so you pay for an allotment and get to choose from 40 different vegetables using a DIY interface. A farmer then plants the veg you have selected in a patch on their farm in Italy and then as the food grows it is picked and delivered to your door within 24 hours.

You can't beat the concept for helping people really understand where their food comes from. But for EUR850, it might be a stretch too far. For anyone wondering whether they might just be nipping to Il Tesco and then rubbing a bit of mud on the wares, there is an option to receive a photo album of the garden in progress.

Duracell keeps ahead of the game with MyGrid - a mat that can charge up to four devices at the same time.

All you need is some clip attachments for your Blackberry, iPhone, mobile etc and then you simply place them on the mat to charge, dispensing with the need for a tangled mess of 4 chargers and their respective cables.