Congratulations to our new members on the Executive Board!

Marketing Director: Erika Aguilar

Historians: Michaela Poole and Josh Rotz

Let’s get this right: mobile ads suck.

And if you’re planning to have that as your revenue model, you are throwing your app into a gorge unless it’s a really kickass application that people can’t do without. Chances of the latter being very thin in a very competitive world, today, it would be prudent to think of other revenue streams than mobile ads.

The Not-so-curious Case of Facebook Mobile

You’ve probably heard this a million times already but here’s it again: Facebook’s mobile monetization model was decreed “not-so-convincing enough” to encourage investors to turn the IPO into a massive success. Instead, it turned out to be a flawed scenario resulting in valuable lessons about mobile ads.

Facebook is one of the few popular companies that haven’t yet solved the puzzle of mobile revenue models. There are plenty of small-time developers and companies who are still struggling to figure out how their mobile apps can generate acceptably decent revenues.

Why Do Mobile Ads Suck?

1. Real Estate

First off, there’s this huge difference between a mobile screen and the desktop screen. There’s so much less real-estate on the mobile that the content itself is shrunk. Now, if you’re going to put some ads in between, on top, at the bottom or anywhere else, that’s going to steal under broad daylight very valuable space on the small screen. It drives people mad. We, as users, don’t like that at all.

2. Banner Blindness

People are getting used to banner ads. This is a generation that has seen a lot of banners in online advertising and we’ve grown immune to these. Mobile ads that aren’t disguised within the content – and that don’t provide relevant and intensive value – are easily filtered out and completely ignored. This is why there isn’t much to be made out of mobile ads as a revenue model (lower eCPMs)

Users are looking for a high level of value on the mobile platform than on desktop. The mobile being a very personal gadget, users have this subconscious feeling that their experience with any content (in the form of an app) shouldn’t be diluted, disturbed or contorted by ads.

Valuable content holds the key to connecting with your users and anything that mars this experience even by a tiny bit kills the chances of establishing a connection with your users.

With so many paid apps doing great, it’s clear that people prefer paying once to remove ads than to experience a free app filled with ugly ads.

There Are Many Alternatives

Sure, mobile ads do suck and mobile eCPMs are pretty weak compared to their desktop counterparts. But there are various other alternatives that you can think of. Some of these are being successfully implemented.

• if you can provide a truly amazing app and then top it up with an essential feature that people can’t do without, you can try the freemium model. It takes time and experience to crack the freemium model but it’s worth it.
• like Flipboard, you can promote a service/product through specifically targeted ads that are clearly demarcated from the content in a “usable” way.
• Alternatively, you can use your app to promote a related product/service in your industry. Think of teaming up with other service providers.

From the users’ point of view, mobile ads are definitely not the way forward and if users aren’t going to be interested in it, you won’t find publishers either. Thinking of mobile ads as a revenue model? Time to rethink your strategy.

Image © TechCrunch

The books may sit quietly on their shelves, but the rest of The Ivy Bookshop buzzes with the activity of book selling.

In the back of the Baltimore shop on this particular early evening, employees race to load Bill Clinton biographies onto a cart in time to sell at a symposium downtown later that night. And near the reading nook, UMBC professor Robert Provine prepares for a reading and Q&A in the bookshop about his new book on the psychology of hiccups.

At the center of the commotion in his favorite leather reading chair sits Eduard Berlin ’70, political science – cool as a cucumber despite the frenetic activity spinning around him.

Berlin and his wife, Ann, took over The Ivy Bookshop a little more than a year ago from its previous owner, Baltimore arts philanthropist Darielle Linehan. They’ve thought long and hard about what the future of independent bookstores could – and must – become to survive a changing reading landscape, and have already taken big steps to do so: upgrading the bookstore’s web presence, forming selling partnerships with a bevy of big-time area organizations and schools, and organizing events at the shop.

“It’s not just about selling a book anymore,” says Berlin, a member of UMBC’s first graduating class who now has a 30-year career in corporate and financial tech behind him. “People can buy a book anywhere. What we’re doing is making an experience that’s unique for this community.”

Knowing a bit about Berlin’s former career – one in which he repeatedly surfed ahead of the curve, taking chances on web solutions that didn’t exist until he conceived and built them – makes his choice to start a second career at an independent bookstore seem a little less, well, crazy. After graduating from UMBC, Berlin got his law degree and practiced corporate law for the FCC before moving on in the 1980s to help companies including Citibank, Deutsche Bank and Reuters implement global reporting systems when the Internet was still a novelty. Talk about pioneering.

Berlin also credits his alma mater with helping to develop his business sense. “The real pioneers of UMBC were experimenting on so many different levels that I think maybe subliminally I took this concept of being out-of-the-box, being willing to try different things, not needing as much structure,” he said. “My entire career, I was always the first person to do a particular job, or open up new territory, or build new product, or explore things that maybe on the surface at least seemed to be cutting edge. And the fact that I went to a new school like UMBC maybe had a lot to do with that.”

That drive to innovate (and succeed at it) – along with a genuine love of reading – made The Ivy the perfect match for Berlin. It helps, too, that his wife spent a career in publishing.

“We’ve always been a book family,” said Berlin, whose son Sam – the spitting image of his parents – helps direct traffic from behind the front counter.

“I thought it was less crazy than his original plan, which was to have an art gallery,” Sam quips. “This seems slightly less volatile by comparison.”

Keeping the place busy is a key to the plan. On any given night, visitors might stumble upon a reading by an interesting author, or a book club talking animatedly in a corner nook. Berlin’s staff is quick to help browsers, and the owner prides himself on choosing every book that lines these shelves.

“There are things that simply cannot be replaced on a tablet or online,” he says. “People like being with other people. They like to discuss things together. There will always be people who value that.”

Mid-interview, a customer taps Berlin on the shoulder. Has he seen the book she’s looking for? Why yes, he says, pinpointing the spot on the shelf behind him. She smiles and wanders to the counter, book in hand.

He returns to his seat and apologizes for the interruption.

“The customer comes first, of course.”

— Jenny O’Grady

Getting healthy is an American obsession. And Matthew Sherman ’08, interdisciplinary studies, is at the forefront of a growing movement that may help make that arduous task easier and more efficient.

It’s all in the juice. But not just any juice. Cold-pressed juices with exotic names like Vamos Green, Goji Lemonade and Coco Verde.

At JugoFresh, Sherman’s burgeoning Miamiarea business, these juices are created with fresh fruits and vegetables in an extraction process that emphasizes quality and care over speed and pasteurization. The process is time-intensive, but the result is a dizzying array of healthy and flavorful drinks that fly off the shelves at the company’s flagship store in Miami’s South Beach – along with an array of smoothies and raw and vegan foods.

The JugoFresh juices are also the building blocks for comprehensive body cleansing regimens that Sherman has devised for athletes and ordinary folks alike.

“The vision of JugoFresh is really simple,” Sherman observes. “Make healthy eating fun.”

Sherman squeezed into the juice business almost as gradually as he makes his products. He began first as a basketball coach, and then as a trainer working with individual athletes. But exercise alone, he says, wasn’t getting the job done for his clients – especially those who had unhealthy diets.

“It was just way too narrow a way of helping them,” observes Sherman, who eventually dove into holistic health training, got certified, and started concocting juice cleanses for clients. Eventually, his juice cleansing business got much bigger than his personal training business. Clients even clamored for the juice all by itself, and JugoFresh was born.

“It really took off as a business,” says Sherman, who now employs 34 people and is looking to expand JugoFresh with a larger dedicated production facility and at least two new locations in Miami in 2013. JugoFresh has also been a hit with media outlets in South Florida, who have raved not just about Sherman’s product, but the positive energy and popularity that he and his colleagues bring to the task of healthier living.

“It’s 20 minutes until closing time at JugoFresh,” wrote Miami-based website Ocean Drive shortly after the opening, “a gleaming new juice bar just off West Avenue, and the line is nearly out the door.”

Sherman says that the cold pressing process – using only fresh ingredients – is the essential element in his approach to juice. Because the fruits and vegetables are pressed, rather than merely chopped, the process keeps the maximum number of nutrients in the juice.

The JugoFresh founder first encountered cold pressed juice during time he spent at the Holistic Natural Health Institute in Hawaii, where Sherman observed the Gerson cancer treatment (which relies heavily on a fresh juice diet) being administered to patients and concluded that its potential benefits might be more widely applied.

“I saw the difference it made in people’s lives,” Sherman says. “And the difference that it made in mine. That’s why I got into juicing. I thought, ‘Why would people wait until they have cancer to do this for themselves?’”

Sherman says that a foundation for his success as an entrepreneur was laid in the shared qualities of his education at Friends School of Baltimore and at UMBC.

“I graduated with a degree in interdisciplinary studies,” says Sherman. “And something that was preached in that program, and in a lot of my classes at UMBC, and also during my experience before that being part of a Quaker community, was to constantly challenge the status quo, and look at things through multiple lenses.”

Sherman adds that another element of his education at UMBC and at Friends School was “a strong commitment not just to an end goal, but a process.”

So how do you create a drink that’s good for you and tastes good? Know that the cucumber, romaine, pear, kale, chard, ginger, lime and Himalayan sea salt that make up the “Green Montaña” will work together on the taste buds? That same willingness to innovate and challenge oneself from a firm base of knowledge also applies to concocting the flavors of JugoFresh.

“As far as flavors, I get pretty inventive,” Sherman says. “But I have a really strong idea of what things are going to taste like before the product is even put together. I can feel it, taste it, know how it’s going to react… But a lot of our flavor profiles are classic flavor profiles that have never been applied to juice. ”

— Richard Byrne ’86

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, takes your questions.

Q. With the many tools needed for success as president of a university, what’s that one thing you wish you’d known before you became UMBC’s leader?

— Israel Cross ’04, biological sciences, and Ph.D. ’10, gerontology

A. In the early years, I didn’t know as much about how to work effectively with public officials and the Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland to get support for the university.

In the early 1990s, we were still at a disadvantage when we were talking to the state legislature, partly because we didn’t have a large number of graduates in the state legislature. Now we do. We have several very well-positioned alumni in the legislature – and many more good friends of the university.

At that time, we were respected, but we did not have the benefits of older institutions. It took time to build relationships with people in positions of power – both in the legislature and in the corporate community. We were so young. We did not have large numbers of graduates who were CEOs. I didn’t realize when I started how important it was to have those relationships as a new president. For older institutions, when a new president comes in, those powerful people can open doors quickly. I had not thought through what challenges our situation would present. I knew that [former UMBC President Michael Hooker] had started building those relationships. And I knew what could be done to build those relationships. But we had a long way to go.

It simply took time for people to understand that UMBC’s success didn’t start in the late 1980s. Since the university’s founding in the 1960s, the institution has been transforming lives – and there were very many successful alumni from that era who were beginning to build their careers. We simply didn’t have a powerful enough mechanism to shed light on that initial success.

And bad news travels fast. The easiest thing to do is spread bad news. It’s like fire. In those early days, you were more likely to hear about someone who started at UMBC and then things didn’t go well than hear about someone who had excelled. Or you would hear about someone who started here and then transferred. It takes real initiative to spread good news. So getting over all the old stories, such as people thinking that UMBC was going to be an industrial park, was important.

The best part of my job in those early years was coming to appreciate the strength of UMBC’s academic program and the high quality of the faculty and staff that had come here to build the institution in the first 20 years. The early challenge for me was helping colleagues find ways to highlight that strength in different settings and have people believe that it was truly real and not just hype. That takes time. Reputations are not built in a few years. It takes a long time – either to go up or to go down. I had become president of a university that already had impressive substance. We simply needed to highlight that substance and build on it by attracting more resources.

You know, there is a level of greatness we’ve achieved at UMBC that people rarely appreciate, and it has to do with the spirit of this community. It’s a spirit in students, faculty, staff and alumni that focuses on serving. And we see it in so many different ways. The way people celebrate each others’ successes and don’t worry about getting credit. The idea of service, not only to our students, and to our colleagues, but service to the larger community. People at UMBC may have different points of view and disagree, but there is a belief in the importance of the common good. A belief in the importance of what makes us a great university and a great community.

To send a question to President Hrabowski, click here.

UMBC boasts an amazing faculty, and one of the great pleasures of editing this magazine is getting to know many of them and bring the work they do to a much wider audience of alumni and other university stakeholders.

In the Winter 2013 issue of UMBC Magazine, the rich diversity of our faculty’s activities in the arts, social sciences, humanities, mathematics and sciences is on full display.

In our “Discovery” section, you can read how UMBC faculty members are working to attract students to the field of psychology, make our lawns cleaner and greener, create new opportunities for composers to publish their work, and examine the dust particles that surround us and affect our weather and our health.

Two of our main features in this issue provide an even deeper look into how the work of UMBC faculty members is enriching not only the university community, but the larger world as well.

Professor of mathematics Manil Suri is a contemporary Renaissance man: pursuing research in his discipline and also gaining critical acclaim (not to mention excellent sales) for his novels about modern India. (A new novel by Suri, The City of Devi, is being published later this spring.) So how exactly does Suri pull off this double act? Mark Athitakis dove into the head of Manil Suri and found a restless intellect that’s not only focused on formulas and fiction, but also pursuing classroom collaborations that bridge the sometimes fearsome conceptual gaps between math and the humanities.

“‘I feel like I’ve got a platform in some sense,” Suri tells Athitakis about the common ground he had found between his dual passions. “Afforded by whatever success I’ve had as an author—people might say, ‘I’ve read a book by him, let me try this.’” Read more…

If Suri is exploring the connections between mathematics and fiction, UMBC professor of history Kate Brown is boldly exploring the historical no man’s land of the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union – and finding more common ground than anyone might imagine.

David Glenn talks to the award-winning historian about her latest book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press). It is a tale of two cities: the Soviet nuclear city of Ozersk, and Richland, a city in Washington state that abuts the first major U.S. plutonium facility at Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

One of Brown’s strengths as a historian is a willingness to not only delve into archives, but to get as close as she possibly can to the sites of the history about which she writes. She takes a journalist’s delight in interviewing witnesses and blending in with the landscape she’s describing. Conveying a sense of place in history is essential to combine political, social, and scientific history in powerful ways, she tells Glenn. Read more…

“You can do all of that when you start from a place,” Brown says. “By circumscribing the territory you’re looking at, you can transcend these boundaries that we’ve created in these subfields of history.”

— Richard Byrne ’86