The company hopes Marketplace will stand out because it is offering app publishers and developers a way to sell their ad inventory while also giving them accurate data about their audience. Flurry’s audience data is the big draw: the company said it has access to information about 300,000 apps used on over 1 billion devices. Flurry claims to have access to the user habits of 90 percent of all active smartphones and tablets in the world.

The idea is that if publishers understand more about who is using their apps — like parents or college students, for example — and why, they can make better decisions about where to place their ads in real time.

There are other real-time exchanges for mobile app publishers — like MoPub and Nexage, for example – but those still need outside user data to know how to target your ads.

Marketplace is the latest in Flurry’s effort to expand its capabilities to be a one-stop shop for serving app developers and publishers. Late last year it raised a $25 million dollar funding round, and already this year it launched one new product, a free crash reporting tool for app makers.

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For instance, Flurry Analytics pointed out Wednesday in a new release that in the U.S., smartphone users spend 18 percent of their time spent on smartphones on Facebook. And what’s more important, Facebook tends to keep the Facebook Mobile users inside the app, instead of sending them out to other apps or browsers. As Flurry noted:

…it appears that mobile, once perceived as Facebook’s Achilles’ heel, has become Facebook’s biggest opportunity. Consumers are spending an average of nearly 30 minutes per day on Facebook. Add to that Facebook’s massive reach, as well as their roughly billion mobile users per month and you have a sizable mobile black hole sucking up peoples’ time. The 30 minutes a day is a worldwide average which means a large group spends even more time on Facebook (possibly hours) watching and participating in what has become the ultimate reality show in which the actors are you and your friends.

Well, that does translate into big dollars for the company. According to market research firm eMarketer, Facebook is likely to bring in about $965 million in mobile advertising in 2013 and will see that number grow to $1.51 billion in 2014.

Facebook, the No. 2 mobile ad publisher in the country, accounted for 9.5% of mobile ad revenues in 2012 and is expected to take 13.2% this year. In the mobile display market, however, Facebook is on top, projected to grab nearly three in 10 dollars this year. eMarketer revised Facebook’s share of US mobile display advertising ad revenue upward by several percentage points after fourth quarter results came in higher than previously expected.

Now here is the problem: if folks are spending so much time on mobile already and all they can make is a billion dollars, how does the company start to goose up the overall revenues and justify its massive market capitalization? Any thoughts?

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Both iOS and Android developers can use the Flurry SDK and will have access to new User Acquisition analytics and Crash Reporting analytics. The User Acquisition feature is available starting Friday, the crash reporting tool will be available for Android developers on Friday (in beta form) and for iOS users sometime later this month. Currently there are 95,000 SDK users.

Measuring the effectiveness of in-app ad campaigns will be useful for developers who want to understand user behavior. The crash reporting tool was added because developers want and need it: It was the No. 1 most requested feature when Flurry polled its users at the end of 2012.

By giving away this feature, Flurry can hope to attract more developers away from other services, like Bugsense (which also works with Windows Phone 7 and HTML5 apps) and Crittercism (which also does HTML 5 apps) which offer basic free service, but charge for premium services. Another potential competitor, Crashlytics, was just scooped up in an acquisition by Twitter this week, to help that service work on improving Twitter’s mobile app performance.

Flurry has been slowly building out its SDK offering. In June the company bought mobile backend provider Trestle and turn it into its AppCloud service.

Thumbnail image courtesy Chris Harvey via Shutterstock. Below image courtesy Flurry.

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But the figure is still impressive and shows just how fast the app market is growing. Last year, over the same period, Dec. 25 – 31, Flurry estimated there were 1.2 billion apps downloaded. By December 2012, the average one-week download tally had already risen to 1.07 billion. So app downloads over the holiday week grew by 65 percent over the weekly December baseline, which itself was close to eclipsing last week’s record for most downloads in a week.

Flurry also estimated there were 50 million iOS and Android devices activated over the last week of 2012. As we wrote earlier, the big growth in Christmas device activations was in tablets, which for the first time eclipsed daily smartphone activations. I suspect that the holiday week download numbers also reflected a rise in tablet app downloads as well, which is good news for developers who are targeting those devices.

Flurry, which pulls its data from 260,000 iOS and Android apps that run its analytics and advertising software, said the U.S. led the way with 604 million downloads, or 34.3 percent, followed by China, the U.K. and Germany. For 2013, Flurry expects the 1 billion weekly download mark to be the norm. And at this pace, we should also easily get to 2 billion weekly downloads at some point soon.

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Device activations on Flurry’s network hit 17.4 million units, up 332 percent over the first 20 days in December, which represented a baseline of activity. That blew away last year’s mark of 6.8 million new device activations on a single day, said Flurry.

Tablets were apparently the hot gift item, grabbing 51 percent of mobile device activations. This was the first Christmas that tablets edged out smartphones for activations. During the first 20 days of December, smartphones were activated four times more often than tablets.

Flurry noted that the most popular devices were iPads, Apple iPad Minis and Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7-inch tablets, and that Amazon in particular had a good Christmas, increasing its tablet activations by several thousand percent over its baseline during the first half of December. The big increase in Christmas tablet sales may reflect the falling price points of tablets, which are becoming more affordable with smaller 7-inch models.

With all those new devices, it’s no surprise that app downloads soared on Christmas Day. Flurry said there were 328 million app downloads that day, up 112 percent over the baseline. That flew by last year’s record of 242 million app downloads. The download parade was steady all day long, hitting about 20 million downloads an hour at 11 a.m. local time and remaining steady all the way through 8 p.m.

Flurry, which said it detects 90 percent of iOS and Android devices activated each day, expects app download activity to remain high through New Year with a shot at hitting 2 billion downloads over this week for the first time ever.

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In a world of mobile apps and cloud resources, it’s easier than ever to start a business around a simple application. Even in large companies, developers fighting for resources might need to prove an application’s popularity or find a way to boost its monetization. Sometimes, that might even mean injecting some data-processing right into an application.

But whatever the case, if your job revolves around writing code rather than data flows, you might need a little help. Here are 12 tools (listed alphabetically) that aim to help. As usual with this type of list, it’s very possible I left out some good options, so please note any omissions in the comments.

1. BitDeli

BitDeli, a startup that launched in November, lets programmers measure pretty much whatever application metrics they want using Python scripts. Co-founder and CEO Ville Tuulos told me at the time that scripts can be as simple or complex as necessary — even going so far as to incorporate machine learning. Compared with the heavyweight Hadoop, BitDeli thinks of itself as the lightweight Ruby on Rails for analytics.

2. Continuuity

The brainchild of former Yahoo Chief Cloud Architect Todd Papaioannou and Facebook HBase engineer Jonathan Gray, Continuuity wants to help all companies operate like its founders’ former employers. The team created a big data fabric that abstracts the complexities of connecting to Hadoop and HBase clusters and includes a full suite of developer tools. The goal is to make it easy to write big data applications serving either internal or external audiences.

3. Flurry

Flurry is like a one-stop mobile-app shop, and it’s generating nearly $100 million a year in revenue because it’s good at what it does. Not only does the company help developers build mobile apps, but helps them analyze all the data those apps are generating in order to make them even better. The data also underpins the company’s ad network that helps developers monetize their apps by putting the right advertisers in front of the right users.

4. Google Prediction API

Of all the tools in Google’s developer toolbox, the Google Prediction API might be the coolest. If you have good data to train a model, the Prediction API can bring machine learning to work on it in order to discern any number of pattern types and feed the answers into your application. Among the examples Google gives are spam detection, recommendation engines and sentiment analysis — and it gives step-by-step instructions for building those models.

“Mucho bueno” is probably Spanish.

5. Infochimps

Although Infochimps is trying hard to make itself an enterprise IT company (hey, that’s where the money is), the company’s eponymous platform also provides a real value for developers. Sitting atop its technologies for configuring and managing big data environments is Wukong, a framework for creating Hadoop jobs or streaming data flows using Ruby scripts. Infochimps also maintains a data marketplace full of API-accessible or downloadable datasets.

6. Keen IO

Keen IO won our Structure 2012 Launchpad competition with a message of delivering powerful analytics to mobile developers. With just a single line of code inserted that dictates what to track, the company claims developers can track pretty much whatever they want within their applications. At that point, it’s just a matter of creating a dashboard or query process in order to turn all that data into usable information.

7. Kontagent

Kontagent‘s bread-and-butter business is its analytics platform for mobile, social and web applications, but it’s all built atop a Hadoop infrastructure designed to handle really big data. Earlier this year, the company turned that infrastructure loose with a new product that lets users mine their application data using the SQL-like Hive query language for Hadoop. Instead of tracking predetermined variables, they can dig in however they choose.

8. Mortar Data

Mortar Data is Hadoop for developers, plain and simple. The company has offered its cloud service — which replaces MapReduce with a combination Pig and Python — for almost a year. In November, it released the open source Mortar framework in order to build a community around sharing datasets and making it easier to write Hadoop pipelines. Mortar Data runs atop Amazon Web Services and currently supports Amazon S3 and MongoDB (hosted on Amazon EC2) as data sources.

9. Placed Analytics

Placed does away with scripts, APIs and any other developer legwork and just delivers the results. In the case of Placed, those results are detailed information about where and when consumers are actually using mobile apps and web sites — right down to the name of the business. This type of info can be useful for attracting advertisers as well as informing app design (e.g., implementing voice controls if people are using an app while driving).

10. Precog

Precog might look like any other proprietary business intelligence service, but underneath its covers there’s a twist. The company offers a service called Labcoat, which is an interactive development environment for writing analytics jobs based on the open source Quirrel query language. The IDE includes a tutorial for learning the language, as well as some complex functions, and Precog COO Jeff Carr told me even non-technical people can learn it in hours.

11. Spring for Apache Hadoop

Hadoop is written in Java, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for Java developers to learn or use. That’s why, in early 2012, SpringSource announced the Spring for Apache Hadoop project, which brings the ease of building Java applications with the Spring framework to Hadoop jobs. That means integration with other Spring apps, scripting using JVM-based languages and a generally easier way to develop applications that utilize Hadoop or related technologies such as Hive or HBase.

12. StatsMix

In the same vein as BitDeli and Keen IO, StatsMix wants to let developers start collecting and analyzing application data using the languages they already know. The service automatically tracks certain metrics, but developers can add their own using the StatsMix API and predefined code libraries. The results are delivered via a collection of dashboards that users can customize, share and use to mashup multiple data sources into a single view.

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Mobile analytics firm Flurry released its 2012 update on mobile app usage on Wednesday, with data gathered from the more than 250,000 applications it monitors every day, as well as information from ComScore and Alexa. It shows that between December 2011 and December 2012, while we watch TV for 168 minutes per day (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics latest stat, which is from 2011), the firm’s own data shows that we spend 127 minutes per day using mobile apps — either playing games, shopping, checking social media feeds, etc. The 127 minutes is a significant step up from the data measured between December 2010 and December 2011, when we were averaging just 94 minutes per day in smartphone or tablet applications. That’s an increase of 35 percent. At the same time, we are spending a diminishing amount of time browsing the web: Flurry found an average use of 70 minutes per day on the web over the last year, versus 72 minutes per day from the year before.

As the chart shows, the amount that mobile app usage increased is far greater than the decrease in average web use. So while some of our time is shifting from the web to apps, Flurry says the shift is also due to how many more apps are out there today that we’re using more than ever. Plus those apps are doing things we turned to television for:

In fact, we ultimately expect apps on tablets and smartphones to challenge broadcast television as the dominant channel for media consumption. Compared to the 60-year-old television industry, apps are just over 4 years old.  In particular, tablets will drive growth in app consumption in 2013 as TV-style content and major programming moves to the tablet. Most TV Networks have already adjusted to a dual screen world and are synchronizing their TV content with their tablet app content.

This also explains why companies like Netflix, professional sports leagues, and companies built around entertainment content are focusing one “second screen” apps. They know you are, more than ever, probably using apps anyway while you’re watching TV — or even instead of.

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That’s why the San Francisco firm is now raising a hefty $25 million Series D round led by new investor Crosslink Capital, a crossover fund that has helped companies like Pandora and Ancestry.com go public. Crosslink mixes venture investing and hedge investing after a company goes public.

The new round, which brings Flurry’s total to $51.6 million, includes participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Draper Richards.

Simon Khalaf, Flurry’s president and CEO, told me the money will help the company expand internationally into markets like South Korea, Japan and Latin America next year. And it will help the company boost its newest products including Flurry AppSpot, an advertising platform for publishers, and Flurry Ad Analytics, which helps advertisers measure the effectiveness of their ads. Flurry has also gotten into the business of helping developer build apps with its purchase of Trestle in July. And if all goes well, Flurry could be looking at a public offering by the second half of 2013, he said.

Khalaf said Flurry, which still has $9 million from its previous round, is now on an annual revenue run rate of $80-100 million a year and became cash-flow positive in March. The company now tracks 32 billion data points a day on 250 million devices and boast 80,000 customers.

Khalaf said, unlike social, mobile is proving to be a real market. And Flurry is 100 percent mobile, unlike companies such as Zynga or Facebook, which have struggled since going public.

“Social is a feature but mobile is a market,” said Khalaf. “Mobile is growing so fast, disrupting industries. You have computing, content and broadband revolutions meeting and the total addressable market is in the hundreds of millions to billions.”

While mobile continues to experience a monetization gap compared to online advertising, Khalaf expects that will narrow over time as advertisers chase users to mobile devices, just like they did with the desktop internet. Flurry, he believes, can help with the monetization push by developers and publishers with its AppCircle ad network, which has grown by 300 percent this year compared to last year. With Flurry’s vault of big data, the company could also be sitting on even more lucrative businesses in the future, said Khalaf.

If Flurry goes the IPO route, it will follow in the footsteps of Millennial Media, which went public at $13 a share in March and doubled before settling back down around its original price. And it may show that investors are ready to start valuing mobile companies and are optimistic about the opportunities in mobile advertising and monetization. But mobile advertising continues to ramp up slowly and if the monetization gap persists, it could slow down Flurry’s prospects.

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Some of this has already been reported, but it’s interesting to see how the differences remain, even as tablets sales accelerate and smartphone adoption has passed the 50 percent mark in the U.S. The data, which was pulled from 500 million smart devices in use during September, show how tablets and smartphones serve different use cases and needs.

I found it interesting that tablet usage is pretty evenly balanced among men and women. We’ve reported last year that women have gravitated more to e-readers while men have adopted tablets, but it seems like tablets are now common ground for both genders. It’s also interesting to note just how much game-playing happens on tablets, which makes sense because as we’ve noted mobile games are most often played at home, where the tablet is most often used. 

Take a look at some of the charts:

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The AppCircle Clips appear as rich videos that start after a user clicks on a prompt. The videos allow traditional advertisers to reach consumers at a fraction of the cost of TV commercials. And it gives app developers who advertise through AppCircle Clips an effective way drive downloads of their apps.

Simon Khalaf, Flurry’s president and CEO said in a statement that consumers are accepting mobile video ads in a similar manner to TV commercials. That’s turning video ads into a very effective and popular advertising and monetization tool. It also may reflect not only the more engaging nature of video but also the rise of tablet use, which lends itself to more video viewing. We’ll be talking about mobile monetization strategies our GigaOM’s Mobilize conference on Sept. 20-21.

The rise of video ads is important for the entire mobile ecosystem, which needs to be able to monetize at a better rate. Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, pointed out earlier this year that mobile ads are five times less valuable than desktop Internet ads. Video may prove to be one effective way to close that gap. Flurry said that by using AppSpot to place video ads in their apps, developers can consistently earn eCPMs of $10 or more.

The ads are also effective in driving downloads for app developers and acquiring engaged users. Gaia Interactive, for example, said that consumers acquired through AppCircle Clips used the application 43 percent more often and played 23 percent longer per session than normal users acquired through traditional banner ads.

Closing the mobile monetization gap will take more than just video ads. But there’s a lot of promising tools emerging such as location-based ads and new formats like Pontiflex’s mobile sign-up ads and Kiip’s (see disclosure below) mobile rewards. 

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in Kiip and the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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