The home screen is the next frontier in mobile marketing, offering incredible opportunities for app developers, publishers, even OEM and O/S providers. In Android devices, the home screen is flexible enough to deliver rich, relevant experiences to users, and its potential for marketing success led Bessemer Venture Partners to that $1 Billion per ¼ valuation.

Not surprisingly, the race for home screen ownership is on, and our recent “The Ultimate Guide to the Next Big Wave in Mobile: The Home Screen and the Race for the Homescreen Infographic illustrate not only a timeline of home screen efforts, but also the frequency with which those efforts are occurring. You can see how tremendously the cadence has picked up over the last two years.

The most recent home screen news is that Yahoo! acquired Aviate, and while the specifics of the deal are private, TechCrunch estimated that they paid $80M to acquire that home screen solution.

From “The Ultimate Guide to the Next Big Wave in Mobile: The Home Screen”:

OEMs have the option to customize the interface of the Android phone pre-market, and in 2009, HTC was the first to take advantage of that with HTC Sense. Sense, with its signature oversized clock and weather widget, allowed users to customize their home screens to some extent, but was often criticized for interface and performance issues.

Microsoft, with Windows Phone 7 and its Live Tiles, followed suit in 2010. Live Tiles, as the name implies, brings live information directly to the mobile home screen.

2011 was a fairly quiet year for the home screen. Mobile Posse signed several new carrier partners to our home screen platform, but there were no other major announcements.

In 2012, Microsoft rolled out a new version of Live Tiles powering Windows Mobile 8, and right about that time, Google also began to get some buzz around Google Now, whose “cards” would bring just the right information a consumer might need, right to the home screen of their device. Mobile Posse, through its carrier partners, reached an active monthly user base of ten million customers.

2013 was an incredible year within the home screen economy. In February, HTC introduced BlinkFeed as the home screen for the latest version of Sense. BlinkFeed proved to be the first real win for Sense. The mobile home screen reader allows users to curate their own content from a broad selection of publishers, and creates dynamically updated home screen tiles for each publisher selected.

In early spring, Facebook introduced Home to a great deal less praise. Home allowed a user’s Facebook content to take over both home and lock screens, creating a virtual Facebook phone.

Home obscured all Android features, and placed apps – even essential apps like email and the phone dialer – multiple swipes behind Facebook content. Overwhelmingly, Play Store reviewers call the app “invasive.” As one review stated, “It’s a home screen that invades your phone. There is no way at all to access your widgets…can’t see weather, time, nothing…what a big dud!” (If you download the Ultimate Guide, you’ll see that clearly there is a right way to leverage the home screen, and a wrong way.)

In May, the venture capitalist Bessemer Venture Partners, used the market value of companies that currently dominate mobile device home screens to estimate that owning a piece of that key beach front real estate is worth a cool one billion per one quarter inch of home screen space.

Motorola jumped into the fray with its Moto X Active Display. In Motorola’s own words:

“Knowledge is power, and Moto X gives you just that – at a glance. It always displays what you need to know, when you need to know it. Information quietly appears on the screen, so you don’t have to wake it up to look at the time or see your messages. Before you know it, that itch to check your phone will be gone forever.”

In the third quarter, Samsung sang about its new entry My Magazine, an offering powered by FlipBoard, and we saw the beta release of Andreessen Horowitz-backed Aviate. Aviate attempts to reconfigure an Android home screen based on the user’s current context, such as current location, movement and activity.

And finally, Mobile Posse has delivered 40 billion messages with our home screen solution.

2014 is off to an amazing start for the home screen with new players rushing to claim the space. Yahoo!’s acquisition of Aviate confirms what we already know – the race is on!

Want to learn more about the home screen and its endless potential? Download our free report, “The Ultimate Guide to the Next Big Wave in Mobile: The Home Screen.”