Playing games to surfing the internet on the Smart Phones is common now and the advertisers are finding ways and means to target your smart phones also. As the technology advances with GPRS ,GPS 3G and  4 G on their way to your phone advertisements do not seem to leave your lives soon!

The millions of people who use their cellphones daily to play games, download applications and browse the internet may not realise that they havean unseen companion: advertisers that can track their interests, their habits and even their location.

Smartphones, like the iPhone and BlackBerry Curve, are the latest and potentially most extensive way for advertisers to aim ads at certain consumers. Advertisers already tailor ads for small groups of consumers on the web based on personal information. But cellphones have a much higher potential for personalised advertising, especially when they use applications like Yelp or Urbanspoon with GPS to identify a person’s location, right down to the street corner where they are standing.
Advertisers will pay high rates for the ability to show, for example, ads for a nearby restaurant to someone leaving a Broadway show, especially when coupled with information about the gender, age, finances and interests of the consumer.

Eswar Priyadarshan, the chief technology officer of Quattro Wireless, which places advertising for clients like Sony on mobile sites, says he typically has 20 pieces of information about a customer who has visited a site or played with an application in his network. “The basic idea is, you go through all these channels, and you get as much data as possible,” he said.
The capability for collecting information has alarmed privacy advocates.

“It’s potentially a portable, personal spy,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who will appear before Federal Trade Commission staff members this month to brief them on privacy and mobile marketing. He is particularly concerned about data breaches, advertisers’ access to sensitive health or financial information, and a lack of transparency about how advertisers are collecting data. “Users are going to be inclined to say, sure, what’s harmful about a click, not realising that they’ve consented to give up their information.”

For now, advertisers are using a wide lens to survey people’s behaviour on phones, aiming at people by city rather than by specific neighbourhood or street.

And while they collect specifics about how someone behaves on the mobile website — for instance, that someone bought a “Hot N Cold” ring tone after seeing an ad for it, then watched a Miley Cyrus video on TMZ.com — they use that information to categorise that person as a pop-culture fan, and then show a movie ad.

Advertisers are eager to use the information for much more specific targeting, however. An advertising system could know, for instance, that someone is 27 years old, male, a New England Patriots fan (which NFL.com can track), plays Blackjack, travels frequently between Boston and New York on weekdays (which applications using GPS can track) and uses a 3G iPhone. That would make him attractive to a host of advertisers, like the Delta Shuttle or a Las Vegas hotel, whose ads would appear while the consumer was browsing on his phone.

“Everyone’s in an arms race to find out more and more about their users,” said Eric Bader, the managing partner of the mobile advertising firm Brand in Hand. Even application developers are handing over information about their customers to marketers. Dockers San Francisco, a brand of Levi Strauss, for instance, is beginning a campaign this week that will run on applications like iBasketball and iGolf. It will show a model wearing khakis, and the iPhone customer can shake the phone to see the model dance.

Dockers will start by tracking how long people shake the ad, and then “if it does make sense to do follow-up with these consumers, we’ll do that,” said Jonathan Haber, the United States director of Ignition Factory at OMD, the media agency directing the campaign. “We dig in, specifically, with these application developers and owners to get information about usage behaviour.”

It’s not just behaviour, but also data on income, or even whether you have children, that advertisers consider. A company called Acuity Mobile, whose clients include the MGM Mirage and Harrah’s Entertainment, lets clients use consumer data, including, potentially, income, to determine what kind of offers clients should see.

Way to go Advertisers!!!

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has banned his family from using Apple’s iPhone and iPod gadgets.

In an interview to Vogue magazine, Melinda Gates has revealed that Bill has barred in three kids, Jennifer, 13, Rory, 10 and Phoebe, 7 from using any of the Apple products.

“There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don’t get for our kids,” the Telegraph quoted her as saying.

However, Melinda herself is swayed by Apple’s iPhone device, which combines a touch-screen music player and web browser with a fully featured mobile phone.

“Every now and then I look at my friends and say ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t mind having that iPhone’,” she added.

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News has been about how laptops will be manufactured is what BRICK is all about. Some sources suggests Apple will build the notebook out of a single piece of carved-out aluminum—a brick.

If you’re working with one single unit of metal, you’re reducing a lot of the materials costs and also a lot of labor time on assembly,

Keller, an Analyst at market research firm iSuppli

• Using a single piece of metal would also provide the opportunity for the kind of design flourishes that distinguish Apple and its chief executive, Steve Jobs.

• Screws might be minimized or eliminated entirely. Seams joining different pieces of metal would disappear. In short, these notebooks would be unlike anything else on the market in appearance and design.

But coring out a block of aluminum, while fairly common in some products, such as types of wireless telecom gear. It is a slow process. The issue for Apple, which would presumably be doing it millions of times, would be speed. It’s very time-intensive. Presumably, Apple could bring innovation aimed at streamlining the manufacturing process.

Keller

In May 2007, it filed for a patent on a design for “enclosure parts that are structurally bonded together to form a singular composite structure…. That is particularly useful in portable computing devices such as laptop computers.”

So, if all the points are to be taken into consideration laptops MacBooks could be cheap. But I won’t expect Apple to be selling them at a the same price they would be selling in other countries (iPhone was launched in India priced thrice the price of iPhone in US).