Leading online real estate database Zillow.com has a thriving mobile strategy: People use its apps 6.5 million times each month “with more than 23 million visits to home detail pages; that’s 32,000 home views every hour or nearly 9 home views every single second,” says CEO Spencer Rascoff.

To hit these impressive numbers, Zillow has worked hard to re-imagine its business model for a mobile audience, for both consumers and advertisers.

Spencer will give a keynote (Redefining Zillow in a Mobile Era: When a dot com is No Longer a .com) this March at Web 2.0 Expo in which he’ll discuss how his company transformed.

We recently interviewed Spencer about Zillow’s success and how companies can develop their own location-based mobile technology strategies. Read on for the full interview:

Kaitlin: Your talk focuses in part on the impact of location-based mobile technologies has had on your company. Can you give me an overview of what changed and why you felt this was necessary?

Spencer: We live in a mobile society.  People expect tools that can interact with their digital lives and that respond in fundamentally new ways.

We see real estate as a perfect location-based application for mobile – people want this information as they are walking and driving around neighborhoods.  We saw this immediately in our mobile usage the first day we launched our first mobile app on iPhone two years ago. Continue Reading »

Maybe you’ve heard of this so-called “mobile trend” in the Web 2.0 space. If you’re only vaguely familiar with what’s going on, let me (actually, Mary Meeker) blow your mind with these slides.

KPCB Top 10 Mobile Trends

Or if you just want a few interesting details on why you should care

• Global mobile traffic should grow 26x current rates over the next 5 years
• 40% of all tweets come from mobile devices
• 50% of all Pandora users subscribe on mobile
• Spotify’s introduction of a mobile product drove 2x conversion ratio from free to paying subscribers
• Pricing on devices and data plans are falling, creating more customers

Long story short, your company should focus more effort on the mobile space if you haven’t already. Luckily, Web 2.0 Expo speaker Melissa Clark (Siteworx, Inc.) is here to help you move your company along. In her session How Mobile-Friendly Is Your Organization’s Website?, Melissa will focus on how you can create a great mobile site, how to improve UX, and how to maintain brand consistency in the mobile space all while giving the audience great case studies on how it’s done right.

We recently spoke with Melissa about her upcoming session and what her audience can expect to learn. Read the full interview below for more. Continue Reading »