In brief:

After months of researching my chapter contribution to an upcoming book on marketing to Digital Natives, it’s increasingly clear that mobile advertising companies – and their view of “consumers” needs — must evolve.

Mobile is a fiercely personal device and people – particularly empowered Digital Natives – want content and advertising on their terms. (I purposely mix content and advertising here because they are becoming one and the same thing.)

Another shift in the marketplace: our requirement to have a say in the content/advertising we are willing to receive. This came through loud and clear in the research/interviews I conducted for Mobile Advertising Research U.K. 2009 project, a research project endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) to expertly document the state of the mobile advertising industry in the U.K.

Among the findings (based on 1,000+ consumer online responses and 20+ interviews with operators, enablers, agencies, and brands): only 32 percent of the 1,000+ consumers surveyed had a positive attitude toward receiving advertising messages on their mobile phone. However, that number rose to 64 percent, provided people were properly “incentivized,” and 70 percent if they were incentivized and “in control” of their mobile advertising experience.

Connect the dots, as an increasing number of mobile advertising companies and ecosystem companies have begun to do, and it’s clear that the capability to provide permission-based mobile advertising (with an easy opt-in/opt-out option) could become table stakes.

MOBILE PIONEERS

Companies such as BuzzCity’s myGamma and gofresh’s itsmy.com, mobile social networks turned mobile social ad networks, need little convincing. They made the strategic decision in 2007-08 to allow their verified members to choose the channel of advertising they would accept. Of course, this wasn’t just out of respect for the individual member. Opt-in also allows advertisers to better target their key demographic (example: sports enthusiasts with sports ads) and ensure members who receive a marketing message actually listen.

In my own mobile advertising road test/white paper (PDF) on behalf road test on behalf of Bango, a provider of mobile analytics solutions and MSG supporter, showed that this was indeed a plus for my own campaigns. In fact, I gave BuzzCity the highest marks overall because its opt-in allowed me to deliver effective mobile advertising. (Happy coincidence — I have an interview with BuzzCity CEO KF Lai next week and gofresh’s Vince Staybl has also just reached out to me from his NY trip to offer me a pre-briefing on some significant news, so watch this space.)

JUMPTAP CONSUMER INTELLIGENCE

Jumptap, a provider of mobile advertising solutions that also operates a major mobile ad network, aims to tackle these shortcomings. The company announced this week that is will implement a new feature in mid-year (translated: by end-June) that “enables mobile consumers to manage their own profiles for a more personalized brand experience.”

The focus is on permission-based advertising and on putting the consumer (individual) at the center of their advertising experience. In a nutshell, the feature will enable visitors to participating websites in Jumptap’s ad network to chose the mobile advertising content that interest them – and the choice to opt-out of the process altogether. (Specifically, all publishers in the network will be able to participate. Participating publishers will need to include a link to Jumptap’s profile manager.)

What’s the user experience?

People can choose from a variety of some 29 advertising content categories, including automotive, careers, chat & email, entertainment, finance, fitness, food & drink and games, as the slide below illustrates.

What’s at work (and how) in the background? And how does Jumptap avoid potentially presenting the same people with the same ads?

JumpTap operates a premium mobile advertising network with a penetration of approx. 50 million unique visits a month in the U.S. alone.

Predictably, Jumptap’s IP, which includes patented technology, mobile search algorithms and proprietary know-how around targeting and relevancy (which I have analyzed in this post), plays a huge role in delivering people mobile advertising they will likely find relevant and useful. The company counts unique visitors based on “distinct IDs we get from carriers, cookies, request headers and device IDs.” This can vary across network. “In instances where we don’t have a unique ID, we estimate the number of unique visitors based on page views/unique user that we see elsewhere in the network.”

INTERVIEW WITH PARAN JOHAR

Armed with this background I caught up with Jumptap CMO to learn still more about the nuts & bolts of this ambitious solution and what is says about the company’s wider mobile advertising strategy.

Q: Jumptap is one of a growing group of companies sharply focused on putting the consumer at the center of the mobile advertising ecosystem? Why is this important and what do you offer people?

A: What we’re now seeing is a new wave of mobile advertising right, with the focus on customer intelligence and really putting the customer at the forefront of the mobile advertising ecosystem. Many companies got lost and focused on other constituents: operators, publishers and advertisers. They are all important people, but we are putting the customer at the forefront of the mobile advertising ecosystem, and the way we’re doing that is allowing them to manage their own profiles in a really simple format. This also drives the relevancy of ads.

The concept of is revolutionary but because everyone else has been trying to satisfy other constituents. By driving customer intelligence you’re going to see a higher engagement rate. If you see a higher engagement rate, you’re going to see advertisers who are getting better ROI. If they’re getting a better ROI, you’re going to be able to charge them more. If you can charge them more, by default, you get a better publishing yield so you’re really taking care of all these other constituents by focusing on your core audience, which is the customer, and driving the customer intelligence.

Q: Other companies have a similar approach. And just last week Alcatel-Lucent broke on the scene with a mobile advertising solution that is the subject of a larger report I am currently writing. In it I argue that permission-based advertising is a good fit with messaging because you build a conversation that – in turn – can improve the customer data. But your focus is display….

A: Yes, it’s only about display and it’s not about behavioural targeting. What this is about is empowering consumers to choose their category of interest. That’s one component of the data that will drive the delivery of relevant advertising. It goes into the user profile. And then there might be a component related to context, a component related to carrier data, a component related to publishers’ data – or a keyword from a search. All these are components and the ultimate goal is to drive consumer relevancy through this focus on consumer intelligence– and the better we can understand our mobile ad network, the better we can serve relevant ads to consumers.

Throughout this process three things are critical. One is full-transparency. Two is respecting their privacy and making sure all this data is completely anonymous. And third is preference. We’re allowing them to tell advertisers ‘these are my categories of preference.’

Q: What’s the roll out and what are plans beyond the iPhone?

A: That’s a great question. We’re rolling this out at the end of Q2, and you’re going to get a link to a Beta site where you can go in on your iPhone – or any device – and just scroll through and change categories of interest to suit you. It’s incredibly simple. The idea was to keep it as simple as possible.

Q: It it’s for all handsets from the get-go?

A: It is for all handsets and all advertisers. It’s on iPhone and on mobile Internet, so it’s going to be limited at first. But, as it rolls out, it’s going to obviously develop [momentum]. The goal is ultimately to drive more relevant advertising to everyone on all handsets.

Q: I mentioned that other companies have placed some form of permission-based advertising at the core of what they do. Take BuzzCity. BuzzCity even surveys its members and shares this anonymized information with advertisers to help them target their audience. From an initial look at Jumptap is different because it offers the data to third-party publishers. This would perhaps be the differentiating factor. At the other end of the spectrum there is Alcatel-Lucent’s Optism solution, [a solution that harnesses permission-based advertising – specifically, text messaging – to improve targeting.] So, there are other flavors out there…

A: No one else is doing this the way we are. It is absolutely one of our key differentiators. We also have 80 percent of the carrier business in the U.S. AT&T works with two sales partners, right? One is Jumptap and the other is Yahoo. Needless to say, we’re in good company.

We also have the broadest IP portfolio of any mobile ad network. And we have our pay-per-lick performance marketplace that allows users to bid at a keyword level, category, handset or carrier. We’re the only ones who have all of that.

You bring up the mobile social networks such as BuzzCity. I think it’s a little bit different within a social media construct. That is one component that can be added to the user profile, certainly. But remember we are not taking a siloed approach. It’s not just contextual, not just consumer category information, not just behavioural, not just carrier information. It is all of these components aggregated across multiple forms of data to drive relevancy. That’s our consumer intelligence.

Q: Another part of this might be that you are a neutral network. You belong to a group of ad networks – including the likes of Millennial Media and inMobi – that is not in the Google or Apple camp…

A: I think that’s a great way to break out the marketplace now and there are three groups, so to speak. There’s a lot coming from Apple that I agree with — and there’s a lot that I don’t. On the one hand, Steve Jobs came out publicly and said that mobile advertising sucks and that he has this goal of driving relevancy right to his network. That’s something we applaud. It’s very much in line with our strategy of customer intelligence, so that I think is dead-on.

The piece I don’t think is dead-on is his approach. He’s almost creating a walled garden for himself, almost an AOL of the mobile Internet. Advertisers really don’t care where their ad runs. They care about reaching their audience, not the device. iPhone happens to be the sexy thing right now, but Android will be the next sexy thing – and it [Android] is already is starting to catch a lot of that limelight.

Imagine you were a TV buyer and you had to buy a 30 second TV spot and you had to be cognisant of whether your audience is watching television on a Samsung, Sony or Pioneer TV set. And then you had to worry about whether they were watching it over cable, satellite or a dish network. And then you had to customize your creative accordingly. And so on. It doesn’t make for an efficient marketplace and that’s where I think Apple is missing the boat a little bit. They’re becoming a walled garden in advertising, which I think is not good for the mobile advertising ecosystem in the long term.

Q: Finally, where is the excitement?

A: We’re doing a lot in rich media. Our Unified Rich Media Platform [which I detail further down] delivers the industry’s broadest set of rich media units – for both mobile Web and in apps – all from one network. And our rich media platform is completely open. So, if you’re a rich media buyer for you plug right into our system. We work with iPhone, Android, Palm, and Blackberry. We’re an open system and we help advertisers reach their target audience.

***

MY TAKE: Permission-based advertising sits at the core of a variety of approaches and solutions I analyze in my upcoming report for GigaOM PRO, a project that has evolved from a SWOT analysis of mobile advertising solutions (including Alcatel-Lucent’s Optism and JumpTap’s solution powered by “consumer intelligence”) into a wider discussion of the business value of permission-based (opt-in).

We have ample evidence that permission-based messaging delivers positive results and response rates. A messaging approach also allows brands and other companies in the ecosystem to build on this personal profiling data (with the individual’s permission) by adding questions to refine the profile. This way, an individual who has signed up for car ads (a broad topic) might divulge that they are more into Audi than BMW and even say why they prefer one over the other. All voluntary information an advertiser would no doubt value.

Display is a different. It’s more one-way than two-way, and there is a danger of “spamming” people with repeat advertising because there aren’t enough ads in a category – or because the ad networks can’t identify unique users (and therefore gauge whether an individual user has seen the same ad already, or not). Jumptap claims to have addressed the latter with its IP, technology and techniques that allow the ad network to identify 50 million uniques per month in the U.S. alone.

This week’s announcement builds on that foundation. The focus is to increase the value and relevancy of mobile display ads. (Thus, Jumptap does not compete with companies that focus on mobile messaging and direct marketing.) To achieve this Jumptap inputs the advertising categories chosen by the individual into a much larger, more sophisticated equation that includes data from carriers, searches and some context. This covers the bases to provide people a better user experience (provided there is a good supply of ads in each category), and that should certainly lead to high advertiser ROI and publisher yields. Of course, the proof is in the numbers. We’ll have to wait a while for those. In the meantime, Jumptap’s move can be read as an important confirmation that all advertising – not just messaging – is correctly evolving to provide people more of a say in what they get.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter with a branded thought leadership presence on this website; Jumptap has been an MSG supporter and sponsored a series of podcasts.

What do developers really want/need in order to make apps and (ultimately) make money?

Why is this question key? Put simply, the companies that get this right will have insights to build the correct mix of capabilities to forge and support a tight-knit developer community, creating relationships that will allow them to take a central spot in the emerging apps value web (not chain – it’s not that kind of a game).

There are no easy answers, but the panels and discussions during the dev day confirm that developers — creative people who are interested in cash AND community – are likely to gravitate to platforms and app stores that help them cultivate and connect with their fans.

LITMUS LEARNINGS

I first started thinking this through during Mobile World Congress (MWC) and the no-holds barred session I moderated on OneAPI. The panel – made up of the architects behind this milestone move: Nauby Jacob, VP, Users Experience, Bell Canada; Larry Baziw, Director Next Generation Services Strategy, Rogers Wireless; SandipMuckerjee, VP of Business Strategy and Marketing, Alcatel Lucent; Shane Logan, Director, Services and Collaboration, Telus; and Al Snyder CEO, Aepona – examined what developers require and how/why operators and enablers can/must work together to deliver. The positive feedback has been overwhelming and I have reached out to each of the participants to participate in a follow-up roundtable podcast on MSG, so watch this space.

(By way of background, the GSMA launched the commercial pilot in Canada as part of its OneAPI initiative, working with Canada’s leading operators to demonstrate the viability and benefits of providing developers standardized APIs for mobile networks. The pilot in Canada – the topic of my MWC panel – represents the first time developers are able to gain commercial access to the network assets of multiple operators from a single gateway. )

But it was the opening presentation by Paul Golding – pioneer, long-time thought leader in the mobile applications space and, more recently, a consultant to O2 Telefonica — that challenged everything we (think) we know about developers.

When Paul took the podium and showed the opening slide – where he had purposely crossed out the title of the planned presentation and replaced the words “Supporting Developers” with “EmPOWERING Developers” — it was clear that this was no marketing-speak. His message to us: Developers need feature-rich APIs and much, much more. (Indeed, Paul’s thinking on this topic left a deep and lasting impression, and I am pleased to report that Paul has agreed to join MSG’s roster of authors and contribute a guest column that builds on his simple, elegant and path-breaking ideas.)

In his presentation (here on SlideShare) Paul introduces three kinds of “power” that interest/attract developers most.

CONNECTED POWER is all about the APIs and platforms that allow developers to reach customers; CASH POWER is all about the APIs and platforms that allow developers to earn money (directly or indirectly); and COOL POWER is all about the APIs and platforms that allow developers to do something cool and interesting (translated: innovate).

Sure, it’s about technology (CASH POWER). But it’s also about harnessing everything we know from the business books about encouraging and channeling creative energy to cultivate developer communities that make great apps to delight the customer (CONNECTED POWER).

And – with a nod to Eric von Hippel, my favorite interview, author of Democratizing Innovation and THE authority on innovation – it’s about connecting developers with their lead users — the users who have a high incentive to solve a problem and the ability to innovate (COOL POWER). Combine all that (translated: enable all that) and it can yield a developer community and a selection of apps that can truly set the bar.

As Paul pointed out: O2 Litmus has recruited 7,000+ O2 UK customers and then helped developer connect with them to gain insights and – interestingly – lay the groundwork for a kind of app developer fan club that provides developers important feedback and critical buzz. (After all, fans will share their picks of favorite apps and cool developers with others – creating the same kind of virtuous cycle than can catapult local bands to rock heroes.)

Paul has an even better idea: Operators can help the process by simply putting fans in touch with developers. “Add some other cool brands to the mix and then let things happen.”

At this juncture, I am also reminded of Mob4Hire and the traction it has gained for its awesome concept which combines crowd sourcing with app testing. It’s a super-sharp business model that Paul Poutanen, Mob4Hire President and Founder, tells me he is expanding to allow people testing the apps to rank/share the ones they like most with everyone else. A great grassroots way to help apps get discovered and gain mindshare. More about this in an exclusive interview with Paul later this month.

The takeaway here: helping developers connect with people (fans) is emerging as key requirement of app stores and platforms.

NOKIA DEV DAY

When Mobile Monday Austria reached out to me to speak at its event over the weekend, one that also allowed me access to developers and other people who love mobile, I was thrilled. It offered me an important opportunity to sanity-check some of Paul’s key messages and test a few of my own ideas about the future of app marketing.

Cool Power: Yes, it matters – a lot! An informal poll of developers yielded a welcome confirmation of the qualities platforms/app store providers must have beyond awesome, rich-feature APIs. Put simply, developers require “partners” that help them create apps and generate revenues. And they will align themselves (eagerly) with those companies that make a conscious effort to help them connect with customers, cultivate fans and allow them to feel that they have made a contribution that matters in the scheme of things. For some developers, a functioning feedback loop tops the list. For others, being able to believe that the platform provider really listens, absorbs, respects and internalizes constructive criticism is paramount.

This came across loud and clear when naxxatoe, a developer in the audience, took the microphone to tell Nokia execs what should be at the top of their Ovi agenda. “It’s about connecting people,” he said, unaware of the play on Nokia’s own motto (Connecting People).

Kudos to naxxatoe for saying what had to be said and my respect goes to Jure Sustersic, Forum Nokia Biz Dev Manager EMEA, for seeking out naxxatoe and other developers between sessions to hear them out on what they loved – and hated – about Ovi. (Inspired by this exchange I have decided to produce an informal series of podcasts to give these developers a voice. My sincere thanks to naxxatoe for challenging me to think and see things very differently. I look forward to showcasing his ideas in the first in the series later this month.)

SUPERMARKETS VS FARMERS MARKETS

Regular readers will know that I am a great believer in the individual. We will accept the content we want on our terms – and we are most likely to accept content (and mobile marketing/advertising can be considered a form of content) if it is in tune with our interests, passions and context. Mobile (an intensely personal device) allows us to communicate all of the above, allowing (with our permission!) content and services companies a way to connect the dots and provide us with stuff (content, services, apps, advertising and all things digital) we are likely to appreciate.

Obviously, there is little room in the scheme of things for one-site-fits all. In fact, our requirement (even demand) for stuff we want the way we want it sits at the core of the Long Tail. While Chris Anderson didn’t explore mobile in his milestone book, we have nonetheless witnessed the impact in mobile. It began with an avalanche of content and then a plethora of portals where we could find it. (Well – content discovery and search is another issue altogether…)

Fast forward and we are witnessing the emergence of a Long Tail of app stores.

My Mobile Monday presentation (which included the findings of the recent Netsize Mobile Trends Survey) explored the evidence for this mega-trend and why this could be good news for developers. For one it means more choice for us (a key requirement for a successful app store, according to the Netsize survey). But it also means more choice for the developers, many of whom told me they are actively seeking alternatives to the Apple app store where they have to beg for shelf space (so that their app might be accepted/included) and then pray for promotion (so that their app might be featured where people can find and buy it).

With 25+ app stores and counting we can’t say we have a Long Tail. But there are more options then ever before. Want an enterprise app? A good chance you might find it at Ondeego. How about a porn app? MiKandi is a good bet. And the list goes on…

With these observations (and in preparation for my talk) I reached out to Mike Lurye, Director, Product Marketing Amdocs Interactive. After an invigorating brainstorm session we agreed that there will be many kinds of app stores, managed in many different ways.

There will be Supermarkets (app stores such as the Apple app store) where the provider gives suppliers shelf space, sets the prices and is pretty much focused on moving merchandise and making money. And there will be Farmers Markets (niche app stores and operator app stores – and combinations of the two) where the relationship between the supplier (a farmer with fresh produce) and the customer (people who really appreciate the opportunity to buy organic) is what clinches the deal.

Surprisingly, it was this observation and the suggestion that there will be marketplaces that fit their needs that got the buzz. Developers took the microphone and told me they  would indeed want to sell their apps via a farmers market – if they could. Several even asked me how they could get into contact with a Long Tail app store.

And – thanks to Mike – I can point to a little known example that shows this approach is not only an ideal – it is also an ideal business model making money – now. (BTW, I am also pleased to report that Mike has also agreed to a podcast to explore the supermarket/farmers market analogy and much more! I’m scheduling the appointment as we speak, so check back regularly or follow us on Twitter.

MALAYSIA SHOWS THE WAY?

Malaysian mobile operator Maxis has an app store and a mission: “to nurture and foster interesting developer applications for our community.” (An excerpt from this must-see video interview with Nava Wathan, Director 1Maxis, Maxis Communications.)

In Nava’s view, the operator app store is not impacted by handset app stores because consumers “will go both ways.” They will go to the Supermarkets (my wording) and they will also visit the Farmers Market. In the case of Maxis, the farmers market approach revolves around its sharp focus on local Malaysian apps “more relevant to the Malaysian consumer.” Thus, Maxis is the place to go for “something that is Malaysian.”

But it’s not just about enabling choice; the operator benefits from enabling payment. Maxis has opened up billing APIs for micropayments in apps and is looking to do the same for location, P2P sharing and advertising (allowing the developer to pull an add from Maxis instead of talking to ad agencies around Malaysia).Finally Nava sees that his company can also play a key role in connecting its developers with markets outside Malaysia. Put another way, Maxis can expand the reach of local developers by “surfacing our apps from our local developer community” on app stores run by the handset makers.

My take: As my upcoming series of podcasts will show, developers want to make money but they also demand a feedback channel that will allow them to consistently create better apps for their fans/customers. (After all, recurring revenues are the key to real and sustainable business). They also want some more say in how their apps are marketed and assurances that the app store/platform provider that they – like a farmers market – will do what they can to help developers build and nurture the relationships they need to innovate and – ultimately – succeed. One-off sales or fan following? Developers appear to want the latter. It’s now up to the providers to decide what they want to be (supermarkets or farmers markets) and execute. I know that Nokia has taken careful note of developer’s gripes and suggestions during the event and I will reach out to Nokia soon for their thoughts.

***

My personal thanks to the organizers of this excellent event — Aleksandra Schmid and Philipp Nagele (Mobile Monday Austria) and Mark A.M. Kramer. It was a great idea to link a mobile developer event with a Mobile Monday. It has exposed me to new ideas and allowed me to make some new friends. Warmest regards to naxxatoe and to the other developers who connected with me to share their platform likes/dislikes, and to Dave Dempsey from Radio FM4, who moderated the event and brought some valuable views into the discussion. If ever someone has the interest and empathy to bridge the divide between developers and everyone one else it’s Dave. I hope someone reaches out to him to do just that…I’m sure the results would rock!

Overall, Smaato’s metrics show that the average worldwide ad network fill rates remain constant at 29 percent in February 2010. The fill rate is measured as the percentage of ads delivered per ad request and varies by different factors, like country, device, content type.

Smaato’s Index also provides a breakdown of CTR data, segmented according to operating system, showing that Symbian continues to lead the pack, with Android a distant second. However, there are some significant shifts that indicate the gap between operating system CTRs could be closing fast. For example, BlackBerry comes in at 51, up from 30 in December 2009, while Symbian – still the dominant operating system – has dropped slightly. It comes in at 147, compared with 173 in December 2009.

However, the biggest surprise is the lead Windows Mobile has over Apple. Specifically, the iPhone and iPod Touch show a declining CTR, coming in with a rate of 89. This is the first time Apple devices have dipped below the average Index of 100, and the first time that Windows Mobile has edged ahead of its rival. In December 2009 the iPhone posted a CTR Index of 119, sliding to 104 in January 2010.

PERFORMANCE

Overall, the best performing mobile ad network in the Smaato Worldwide Index had a fill rate of 72 percent February 2010, down 17 from January. Despite this decrease, the average for worldwide ad network fill rate performance remained steady at 29 percent. What’s more, Smaato found that six of the top ten ad networks performed above this average. This re-enforces the pivotal importance and potential advantages of the network aggregation business model. Smaato embraces the model (aggregating 35 ad networks worldwide) to deliver partners a high fill rate.

By way of background, the first metrics report, which Smaato released in January, identified the mobile networks in the U.S. that delivered the best performance by name. This month’s metrics don’t divulge the identities of the best-performing ad networks in the U.S. – but I can imagine Millennial Media is in the winner’s circle (again).

Speaking of the U.S., the average fill rate of mobile ad networks in the U.S. hovers at 35 percent, a decrease compared to January 2010 (fill rate – 47 percent) and December 2009 (fill rate – 55 percent). However, closer examination shows that the U.S. fill rate is still significantly higher than the worldwide average fill rate of only 29 percent.

Smaato metrics further show that the two top-performing ad networks in the U.S. also improved their fill rate. One network came in at 78 percent (up from 68 percent in January) and the other reached 64 percent (up from 61 percent in January).

SPOTLIGHT SOUTH-EAST-ASIA:

For the first time Smaato metrics examine fill rates in South-East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines), markets where mobile marketing and advertising are buoyant. Overall, the fill rates reveal that two ad networks are performing head and shoulders above the others, coming in with 90 percent and 87 percent fill rates in this region. Overall, the fill rates show a similar spread to those recorded in the U.S.

South-East Asia’s average fill rate of 32 percent is considerably higher compared to that of India’s, which came in at a mere 8 percent in the January Smaato metrics report. As Smaato CEO & Founder Ragnar Kruse sees it: This demonstrates the large differences across the Asian market and the need for developers to search for different partners or a mobile aggregation and optimization service.

The breakdown of the CTRs by operating system in this region provides an interesting and insightful picture of what devices users have and how they interact with mobile advertising.

Interestingly, the iPhone and iPodTouch dominate the region with a CTR Index of 164 followed by Symbian (127) and Android (124), while Windows Mobile comes in at the bottom of the table with 56.

PODCAST SERIES BACK BY DEMAND

In addition to providing us the inside track on what Smaato sees across its network of partner ad networks, the company is also sharply focused on cultivating a robust mobile advertising business ecosystem in which in can play a leadership role. To this end Smaato also dedicates significant resources to identify and encourage mobile advertising pioneers and innovators.

A prime example of this is the Smaato Mobile Advertising Award, which recognizes excellence in the mobile advertising and developers harnessing mobile apps and the mobile Web that can also be tapped to deliver compelling messages and campaigns to consumers worldwide.

Among the top three winners – chosen by a world-class jury of leading influencers of the mobile community including MSearchGroove – were: Aloqa, a U.S.-based mobile service that proactively notifies people of interesting places, events, music, movies and other activities nearby; Waze, an Israeli startup that taps the wisdom of crowds to provide real-time maps, traffic information and turn-by-turn directions; and Yoose, a provider of mobile coupon and loyalty programs based in Germany.

To showcase these high-flyer companies and their views on industry hot topics including engagement, location services, mobile couponing and crowd-sourcing Smaato has collaborated with MSearchGroove to produce a special podcast series showcasing the three company CEOs. In the interviews, which originally aired in time for the Mobile World Congress in February, the executives also comment on the meetings with eight top-notch VCs – high-level introductions that are part of the Smaato Award.

***

Listen to the Waze podcast with CEO Noam Bardin here. [4:38]

Listen to Yoose podcast with CEO Christian Geissendoerfer here. [4:44]

Listen to the Aloqa podcast with CEO Sangeev Agrawal here. [4:43]

My take on the winners and the trends: Mobile advertising is content, and its value to us is inextricably linked with its ability to entertain us, inform us or simplify our lives. Waze harnesses our personal mobility and our position as nodes in a larger network to tap the wisdom of invisible crowds to deliver tangible benefits combined with a super-cool user experience.

Location isn’t the killer app we thought. But an app that combines location awareness with technology that can read the clues we leave behind – to passively personalize our experiences and present us with precisely what we are likely to appreciate based on our likes and dislikes — AND offer brands and nearby establishments a chance to monetize that fit – covers all the bases to be a crowd-pleaser.

Another trend that impacts mobile advertising is the avalanche of software applications (apps) that have transformed what we do with our devices. As our focus shifts from novelty to utility we will vote with our feet, visiting those websites that allow us to do what we want, quickly, easily and intuitively. Therefore, Aloqa, which ties together location, social media and a push-approach to local search, is well-positioned to benefit from our increasing focus on finding what’s important to us nearby. The clever decision to open APIs to third-party publishers ensures that Aloqa will cover the long tail, which is where the money really is in local in the first place.

And finally, a comment on Yoose. We know from looking at Japan and Korea that mobile coupons and mobile commerce can be part of our daily mobile experiences – provided the experience is seamless and simple. Yoose has developed more than a website; it has perfected a work flow that could move couponing out of the chasm and into the bowling alley.

Moving forward, Smaato will join MSearchGroove’s growing roster of contributors and collaborators.

Disclaimer: Smaato is not an MSG friend – but not a partner/supporter.

Last year was one company milestone after another: Nimbuzz updated the app on iPhone, released a version for Blackberry, introduced VoIP for Android and launched Twitter for Symbian handsets. It also sealed deals to be pre-installed on the T-mobile Tap Phone in the U.S. and on the Toshiba TG01 handset offered by O2 in Germany.

To connect the dots in last year’s accomplishments and get the inside track on Nimbuzz’ next moves I caught up with Tobias Kemper, VP of Nimbuzz Inc. USA. Many thanks to Tobias for a straightforward interview and unexpected insights into the product roadmap.By way of background, Nimbuzz – winners of the Techcrunch, Webby and Red Herring awards – counts over 14 million users in 200 countries, a number growing at around 40,000 new users per day (that’s 1 every 2 seconds). It counts over one million voice calls per day (over 300 million per year).

Other podcast highlights:

PLATFORM STATS: Nimbuzz supports all the usual suspects: Symbian, J2ME, Android, iPhone, iPod touch, Windows Mobile and RIM. So what flies? “Symbian is definitely our number one, directly followed by Java and the iPhone.  We’ve only just launched a native RIM client with massive uptake….The iPhone has definitely done a tremendous amount and continues to, but Symbian is the most dominant player.”

USAGE & BEHAVIOR: There are distinct and interesting differences depending on the geography. “In the Middle East, for example, people use our products like nothing else to meet people [and] enter the chat rooms. They treat those like mini-social networks, so it’s really going beyond the technology of just making a free call….In the developed countries — Western Europe and North America — it’s all about being able to monitor your friends, having everyone in the same place, reading everyone’s status messages and being able to tap in and say ‘OK I want to get in contact with this person right now.’”

BUSINESS MODELS: Mobile marketing and advertising are candidates, but mobile CRM is highest on the radar. Even better if it involves brands. As Tobias put it: “A mobile social messaging application like ours is perfectly positioned to foster brand engagement.  It is something that we’re looking at because it’s an always on product, it’s a very intimate device that the product is based on and it is something that we are going to be exploring more in the next year.  It definitely makes sense, it has to be done right and it has to be with the user focus.”

NEW FEATURES IN THE PIPELINE: Look for some surprises and more mobile operator partnerships. Again, Tobias is understandably reserved. What we know: “There’ll be a whole bunch of features that are going to be built on top of location-based services that are being built out and become more contextually relevant.”

My take: Hmmmm… contextual relevancy is an element of a range of exciting – and potentially lucrative –services.

So, will Nimbuzz join the group of hot mobile location-sharing services that includes Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Loopt – to name a few?

It’s a tough one to call, but Nimbuzz could make the move.

What does Nimbuzz think? Tobias is understandably tight-lipped but his admiration for companies like Foursquare and plans to add “similar features” comes through loud and clear. As he puts it: “It’s about moving beyond the technology and doing that face-to-face meeting. [It's about] what we can do to make that easier and aid users in using that feature and making real-life interactions happen through our application.”

Communication and community are baked into the app, and a whopping 98 percent of people who use it recommend it to a friend. That keeps Nimbuzz’ marketing budget down and boosts its viral appeal. Surely those metrics lay the groundwork for a more ambitious strategy and a new ecosystem around personal recommendations of real-life places and establishments…

Listen to podcast here [15:50]

The bottom line: For quite some time, there’s been a lot of hype about operators being able to aggregate and utilize subscriber information to allow for better personalization of services – but also to generate better targeted advertisements and offers. Perhaps it’s now actually on the horizon, though tying it to IMS seems odd when some solutions (such as from ad tech provider MADS, or any number of recommendation vendors) already exist.

—–

THIS MOBILE INTERNET THING IS GOING TO BE BIG, says the latest piece of research from famed internet stock analyst Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley. She and her team have released a 424-page report along with a 659-slide deck, coming to the conclusion that the mobile internet will be twice as big as the desktop internet. Perhaps a bit more interesting is the prediction that smartphones will outship notebook and netbook computers in 2010, and will outship the entire PC market in 2012. Source

The bottom line: Welcome to the party, Mary.

—–

THE ANDROID MARKET NOW FEATURES 20,000 APPLICATIONS, according to AndroLib.com, with about two thirds of them free for users to download. Keep in mind that the iPhone App Store offers about 100,000 applications, but the Android Market’s growth is impressive, having doubled in size since June. November was its biggest month for new apps, with over 3500 added. Source

The bottom line: Another reminder that all the app action isn’t on the iPhone.

—–

FIVE BILLION MOBILE APPS WILL BE DOWNLOADED IN 2014, says ABI, up from 2.3 billion in 2009. But it’s not all good news: the firm says that app sales revenue will decline by 2013, as competition pushes prices down. It also says that the iPhone App Store’s market share will peak in 2010 as more competitors enter the scene, with the Android Market in particular expected to grow its market share from the current 11 percent to 23 percent in 2014. Source

The bottom line: That’s nearly one app per every human being on the planet. Or, in other words, a lot.

—–

MOBILE DATA REVENUES WILL DOUBLE OVER THE NEXT FOUR YEARS TO 100 BILLION EUROS, according to Screen Digest. Revenues from rich media content like mobile TV, video, games and music will generate 8.6 billion euros of this, with the balance coming from operator data fees. The company also says that the iPhone will generate more than 7 billion downloads in 2013, a much more optimistic prediction than the one from ABI above. Source

The bottom line: Full speed ahead for the mobile data business.

—–

THE NUMBER OF TEXTS SENT IN THE US MORE THAN DOUBLED BETWEEN 2007 AND 2008, according to figures from the US Census Bureau, jumping from 48 billion to 110 billion. At the end of 2008, the US had over 270 million mobile subscribers, spending an average of $50 per month on their mobile bill. Source

The bottom line: US subscribers aren’t all thumbs when it comes to texting.

Kudos to Mark Hawkins and the team over at the Mobile Data Association

On the face of it, the partnership between BBC Radio 1 and all the major U.K. mobile operators is aimed at allowing listeners in the U.K. to send the radio station picture messages (MMS) from their mobile phones for the first-time ever all day today (December 11) free of charge. But dig a bit deeper and the event has been set up as a springboard to encourage people to use their phones to do more.

To this end the MDA has also launched an educational website with the long-term aim of helping people to send picture messages: http://www.getsettings.org. The idea is to provide people a “single, unified hub of settings information” and address configuration issues around older handsets in circulation and SIM-only contracts.”

Of course, this problem isn’t limited to the U.K. and I hope this educational effort sets a precedent other professional organizations and mobile companies follow.

NIGHTMARE AHEAD

In fact, the job of solving the myriad of issues around customer education to make using our phones and accessing the mobile Internet a no-brainer is widely considered to be the chief business imperative of the coming year.

This is the view that came across loud and clear at MIDAS: Managing Innovative Devices and Services, an industry event I attended and spoke at last year (organized by my esteemed colleague Abraham Joseph, Founder, Device Management Forum).

During the event we discussed the advance of the mobile Internet and what the impact would be on stakeholders (device makers, mobile operators and software vendors, distributors and retailers) when we all need assistance to surf the Web, send email and download/install apps. The scenario, we agreed, was a nightmare.

Fast forward, and the problem is no longer a discussion point for passionate technologists; it’s a business issue for companies across the ecosystems banking on us all to use our phones to do more.

Yes, people need assistance to understand and configure their devices. The MDA recognizes this, which is why it has launched an educational web site for precisely this purpose. However, people also need fast track training to get on the mobile Internet and the industry is under pressure to have to come up with some solutions – sooner than later.

PEOPLE ARE BAFFLED

Indeed, a raft of studies shows that we are baffled by our new phones and features. One that stands out comes from independent research firm Coleman Parkes, which asked 4,000 people in the U.K. and U.S. about their pet mobile peeves. (The study was commissioned by Mformation, a provider of mobile device management (MDM) technology. But vendor spin aside it sheds some important light on this real problem.)

Among the key data points, the survey found that a whopping 85 percent of people said they were frustrated by the difficulty of getting a new phone up and working. Additionally, 95 percent said they would try more new services if phones were easier to set up and 61 percent said they stopped using an application if they could not get it working straight away.

So, we know people would like to do tasks as browsing the Web, reading email or sending picture messages, but the complexity of mobile phones (really handheld-computers at this point) is too much for them.

TOP TEN HEADACHES

During the MIDAS event that impressed me with the scope of this problem, I met with Wouter Deelman, CEO of Qelp, who blew me away with his presentation and an eye-opening list of the Top 10 device management challenges. (By way of background, Qelp is a Dutch software-as-a-service company sharply focused on solutions that increase revenues and reduce customer support costs.)

Wouter co-presented with Blyk, a Qelp customer and ad-funded MVNO model (this was before Blyk shifted its focus to becoming a media company). Blyk revealed that it had achieved a 60 percent success rate getting users to accept Over-the-air (OTA) settings (critical since much of Blyk’s ad-funded model was built on users’ ability to receive and respond to MMS mobile advertising messages). In effect, Blyk admitted a 40-percent failure rate – a problem Blyk said it solved by working with Qelp.

Indeed, OTA settings top Wouter’s list of Top 10 device management headaches.

1. Over-the-air (OTA) settings require user acceptance.

2. Some devices do not support OTA and require manual configuration.

3. New handsets are coming to the market through different channels (not just via mobile    operators), so the problem and the responsibility to solve it is fragmented.

4. Remote access to a device requires access to the mobile Internet (which is what most users are trying to set up in the first place).

5. Users are confused when settings arrive, and often don’t know what they are for or where to store them on the device.

6. Each handset has a different UI (user interface).

7. Call center support is an option – but costly for the operators and frustrating for the users.

8. Second-hand devices are preconfigured incorrectly.

9. Network operator settings get preference over MVNO settings.

10. New IMEI ranges and handsets not yet recognized by the operators systems.

It may seem that Apple’s iPhone and the slew of new touch screen interface devices/ smartphones solve this problem (because they come preconfigured by the iPhone exclusive channel on the market and most available services are displayed via icons on the screen and not buried in a sub-menu).

But the range of new devices and multitude of UIs only exacerbate the problems. And let’s not forget the many people unlocking their

iPhones because they want to have the devices and the operators they want (!) and therefore need to configure the device themselves, manually.

NEED HELP? GOOGLE IT

Can the device management issue impede the growth of mobile Internet usage? The jury is out on this one – but it’s common sense that we would use it a lot more if we could. (We cannot use what we cannot use.)

Ironically, the mobile operator – the player you would expect would want to educate us to use mobile data (and generate additional data revenues in the process) – appears to have missed the plot – and the opportunity.

In a recent must-read guest post for VisionMobile, Wouter road tested six U.K. mobile operator websites to look for support and set up email on a Nokia N96. The result: a mix of irrelevant results and no results at all. Wouter’s conclusion: for an end-user seeking help to get a service up and running on their mobile phone, the answer is not just a few clicks away.”

Wouter then looked for the same information using Google. The answers are marginally better – but the search results do include sites such as Know Your Mobile, that do the job just fine.

Understanding that Google is destined to play an increasing role in customer care (becoming the first place people look for help to configure their phones) KPN (also a Qelp customer) has applied search engine optimization techniques to ensure it’s website (and brand) at least show up in the top Google search results. (Daily statistics now show that 50 percent of KPN’s subscribers go to Google first for answers.)

The takeaway: The MDA has literally done us a service in the U.K., but there is a lot more work to be done. The advance of the mobile Internet has encouraged us to check out the wealth of apps and content available. However, many of us need help setting up our phones before we can explore this brave new world. Providers have a choice: improve customer education and support, or deal with customer frustration (and lost revenues) when people quite literally turn off.

I suspect his thought-provoking blog will do more than set the tone for my book; it will impact the app store debate that will likely dominate 2010. Just look at the recent raft of app announcements: Analyst firm IDC predicts there will be more than 300,000 iPhone apps by the end of next year, compared to 75,000 Android apps; Samsung takes the wraps off its Bada app platform; and (just today) Orange officially opens its app store to users in the U.K. and France, offering more than 5,000 apps for Java, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Connect the dots, and the avalanche of apps turns up the pressure on providers and mobile operators to be good retailers and put stuff we’re likely to appreciate where we can find and buy it. Common sense really.

Or is it? Not is we consider the statement from Nenad Marovac, Managing Partner, DN Capital, who was speaking at Heroes of the Mobile Screen earlier this week, In his view, “Operators should be pipes and shut up.” Hmmm… not much room in that model for mobile operators to wield the stockpile of analytics they collect (such as our browsing patterns and past purchases) to present us with a selection of apps we’re likely to appreciate.

In preparation for my own industry report on personalization and recommendation I have spent the last weeks interviewing a who’s who of industry players and their customers (mobile operators/service providers) who are convinced  the company with the most (and best) data wins. It’s a battle between operators (really smart pipes) and aggregators (Google & Co.) – and personalization and recommendation could just be the capabilities that distinguishes the leaders from the also-rans.

With that in mind, we continue MSG’s special podcast series on the top players in personalization, and conclude with Part 2 of my interview with Stephen Oman, Amdocs ChangingWorlds Worldwide Director Sales Engineering. Changing Worlds is an Irish provider of personalization technology that was recently acquired by Amdocs and is now part of Amdocs Interactive.

In Part 1 we dissected the content discovery dilemma, looked at on-portal challenges and examined the results of the company’s recent study that underlined the importance of personalization in determining and delivering mobile advertising.

In part 2 we explore personalization off-portal and across app stores.

ROLE OF THE MOBILE OPERATOR: As Stephen sees it: the operator has a spot at the “center of the Internet.” Their job: “helping the subscriber to go on to the Internet, helping them find the right content, helping them with additional suggestions which they might be interested in, and so on.  In doing that, they’re becoming if you like a partner to the subscriber when they are browsing the internet.” So, there’s an opportunity here for the operator to “set themselves up in essence as the home page for the mobile Internet for their subscribers.”

APP STORES: In many ways, it’s a repeat of the content discovery problems we know from on-portal. But it’s also an issue that independent developers will also face as they try to engage people and compete with similar, rival apps across the store. As Stephen puts it: Making an effort to personalize the content will “help people find more niche types of applications that may exist, and that would never appear in the what’s hot today or what’s in the top 10 for today.”

LONG-TAIL VERTICAL APP SCHEMES: Reports show that many apps downloaded are actually productivity apps. Additionally, apps are being downloaded by professionals in line with their professions. So, will we see a plethora of app stores split across lines such as task (apps to do “x”) or jobs (apps for doctors, for example)? Stephen was intrigued by the idea and agrees that we will likely see the launch of vertical app stores (similar to the vertical content portals that offered only ringtones or wallpapers). “It’s pretty much the same as you see in retail, you do have retail stores that sell pretty much everything, but you also have niche retail stores that cater for particular audiences.”

THE GROWTH OPPORTUNITY: In a word: convergence. “Increasingly the mobile operators’ customers are expecting and demanding that if you like connected lifestyle….Crucially, they’re looking to be able to access services across many different devices: their mobile phone, online, through their TV, through digital TV, and that convergence of access is essentially going to improve and drive growth in the mobile digital economy.”

Editor’s note: This special focus on personalization and recommendation continues in the New Year with a look at a cool new recommendation company coming out of stealth mode and an analysis of Novarra. I had to reschedule this one a few times, but this time it is timed to some important news. Not one to miss!

Disclaimer: ChangingWorlds is not an MSG supporter.  However, MSG has published a by-lined thought leadership column authored by a ChangingWorlds senior executive. MSG has also participated in an invitation-only  thought leadership event organized by Amdocs.

Listen to the podcast here. [15:12]

Related posts:

PODCAST: ChangingWorlds Reveals Real Impact Of Personalization On Mobile Advertising CTRs; Google Shows Mobile Advertising Is Hot (Again), But Will Personalization Make The Market Sizzle?

SPECIAL REPORT: GETTING PERSONAL Openwave Adds Mobile Analytics; Are Gateway Providers The Ones To Watch? PLUS New Report/Project With GigaOM Pro

PODCAST: Bytemobile CMO Adrian Hall: Operators’ Can Win On Personalization; Does A Widget Bar Do One Better Than An App Store?

MSG DEBUT VIDEO: Xiam Talks Targeting & Filtering; Make Way For The Personalized Web!

GUEST COLUMN:Using Personalization To Pump Up The Volume & Increase The Value Of The Mobile Internet

Mobile Groove — the monthly podcast I produce with Inma Martinez, leading digital media strategist, “free radical” and advisor to venture capitalists — zeroes in on Google, dissecting its mobile strategy and asking some uncomfortable questions.

ANDROID SHIPMENTS

There’s no denying the phenomenal popularity of Android apps. But how many Android devices have shipped and how big is the Android market – really? Great questions and we wish we had the answers. For some reason, it’s radio silence at Dell and across the 10+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance. Inma will continue to dig for facts and figures, but right now your guess is as good as ours. Listen in and let us know.

GOOGLE’S GAIN

Google snaps up AdMob for $750 million in stock. Is Google banking on a boom in mobile advertising? Or does this latest spree (AdMob and Gizmo5) lay the groundwork for a much larger (and much smarter) scheme to dominate mobile? Inma’s take: Google is doing more than acquiring capabilities to take on rivals (Gizmo5 allows Google to take on Skye, for example). “The Web giant is buying up distribution relationships with mobile publishers – even if it has to buy it at a loss.” (By way of background, AdMob served ads for more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications worldwide with a sharp focus on iPhone apps.)

RIVAL AD NETWORKS

AdMob’s price tag sends a clear message to the market: no one (!) can offer a cheaper price for a mobile ad network that has created similar value. What does this mean for Millennial Media, JumpTap and other ad networks making their mark? And while we’re at it: what is the impact on mobile valuations – period? Inma is looking forward to huge deals that show mobile is a serious and solid industry.

GOBLET OF ROCK

This time we salute Europe’s media superstars for harnessing mobile to produce fantastic results. From great apps to sharp monetization strategies European publishers are showing they “get” mobile. Inma’s pick: The Daily Telegraph and an awesome iPhone app she encourages us all to take out for a spin. Since I’m still reeling from an excellent presentation I recall from the last Mobile Marketing Forum in Berlin, I raise mine to The BBC – specifically, BBC World and Tom Bowman, VP Strategy and Operations, BBC Advertising Sales. In addition to developing a cross-platform strategy that has placed mobile in the middle from the get-go – it has also monetized it through mobile advertising with fantastic results. This approach has allowed the BBC to become a Broadcaster 2.0. (More details on the BBC World mobile advertising strategy and the results it has delivered to date in my bi-monthly column for my favorite trade publication, EContent magazine. You can read all the columns here.)

On the occasion of so much excitement in the mobile space Inma also raises a second goblet of Rock to ACCEL Partners, for taking the dive and staying dedicated to mobile. By way of background, ACCEL recently sold two of its portfolio start-ups for a total of $1.5 billion. (AdMob went to Google for $750 million in stock and Playfish went to games publisher Electronic Arts for about $300 million.)

Until next time – keep it fun!

Listen to the podcast here, [17:27]

While the iPhone OS was the leading smartphone platform on Millenial’s network, with 33 percent of smartphone share (ahead of BlackBerry’s 31 percent), Samsung was the top device maker, thanks to the predominance of featurephones. The company also said the US mobile web audience grew to 64.8 million users, and that its ad network reached nearly 80 percent of them.

The report also features a section on mobile app analytics, provided by Mobclix, which says that the iPhone App Store is the biggest on the block, with 115,000 apps, and also leads in downloads, with 100 million per month. Android Market is a distant second, with 20 million per month, and BlackBerry App World even further back in third, delivering 300,000 downloads per month.

Millienial adds that traffic to advertisers’ sites represented almost half of the mobile campaign destinations on its network in October, while app downloads accounted for about 30 percent. Source

The bottom line: Mobile web use – and the market for mobile ads – continues to grow. But don’t overlook smartphones, which still account for a huge chunk of the mobile web market.

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THE MOTOROLA DROID SOLD 250,000 UNITS IN ITS FIRST WEEK, according to GigaOM and based on a report from mobile analytics company Flurry. The new Android device, available only on Verizon Wireless in the US, has been well received by commentators, and now, apparently, by the market as well. Flurry says that the sales are more than four times those of T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3G in its first week of sales in August, but of course pale in comparison to the 1.6 million iPhone 3GS devices sold in its first week. Source

The bottom line: Is Motorola clawing its way back from the precipice? Could be – since software has long been its Achilles heel, turning to Android could turn out to be a smart choice, and one that saves the company.

—–

MORE THAN 3 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE UK HAVE REDEEMED A MOBILE COUPON, says Juniper Research in a new report. The analyst firm says that mobile coupons enjoy a redemption rate six times higher than traditional paper coupons, again highlighting the viability of mobile marketing to deliver results for advertisers and brands. Source

The bottom line: Mobile coupons seem like a no-brainer, if only because people are less likely to forget to bring their phone to a shop than a paper coupon! But combined with opt-in campaigns and any number of targeting techniques, they represent a valuable resource for retailers.

—–

THE NUMBER OF MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING USERS IN LATIN AMERICA AND AFRICA WILL INCREASE TENFOLD BY 2015, says a new report from analyst firm Frost & Sullivan and mobile social networking provider Colibria. F&S says the market will amount to 527 million users and be worth $2.4 billion in six years, reflecting the increased popularity of the services, but also the prevalence of mobile as an Internet channel in emerging markets. Source

The bottom line: It’s easy to predict the growth of mobile social networks, but anybody eyeing the space has to keep in mind how people in emerging markets use their mobiles and access the internet primarily through them.

Perhaps Patrick Moorhead, Director of Emerging Media at Razorfish, put it best. He was quoted saying: “(T)his is a wake-up call to clients who say mobile is not a real opportunity, because it is. Google doesn’t get involved in anything it doesn’t think has scale.”

But mobile advertising is more than big business. The fact that Google had to buy AdMob is a clear confirmation that mobile is also different.

MOBILE IS MOBILE

Mobile is a new medium (the 7^th Mass Media, actually) and squeezing online ads onto a small screen – even if that screen is a smartphone/touchscreen device – short changes advertisers and the people they hope to reach with their marketing message. SMS and display banners have their place in the marketing mix. But my own research and a recent mobile marketing survey conducted by Netsize underline the growing interest in richer advertising formats, as well as in-application advertising (in-app ads).

Connect the dots, and brands/advertisers are exploring and executing strategies that make the most of the mobile device and the range of exciting formats available.

Paul Palmieri, Millennial Media CEO, picked up on this key aspect. His take (from an email statement): “Google validated what many companies including Millennial Media has known for years – that mobile is a different market with a huge potential for advertising, possibly a bigger opportunity than online media.”

Google, which introduced AdSense for Mobile in June, has also had to acknowledge that online and mobile are different. The program, a way to land display ads (from online advertisers) on mobile phones, ended up dumping ads on mobile devices, a modus operandi that doesn’t work if the ad landing pages are not optimized for mobile.

But don’t assume content adaptation alone solves the problem. As Rachel Pasqua, Director, Mobile Marketing, iCrossing, pointed out during a panel I moderated on SEO and mobile search: It’s not enough to optimize ads; advertisers also have to think through what people do after the click. In her view, mobile campaigns that drive results have mobile at their core.

ADMOB’S ADVANTAGE

AdMob, a company that has focused on innovative made-for-mobile advertising formats (and analytics) from the start, “gets it.”

From early 2007 (the company was founded in 2006) executives including founder Omar Hamoui caught up regularly with me to brief me on cool new ad formats and innovation coming out of the “Ad Lab” it had with Apple. This sharp focus on richer advertising formats plus the technology platform to monetize mobile inventory and the analytics capabilities to optimize the delivery, tracking and reporting of mobile ad campaigns (which I personally road tested in my mobile advertising how-to white paper) has clearly paid off.

A few other aces in AdMob’s hand:

A huge footprint in CPC (cost-per-click) performance marketing. We read in the September AdMob Mobile Metrics Report that AdMob serves ads for more than 15,000 Web sites and applications around the world. The number of monthly ad requests in the AdMob network hit 10.2 billion in September 2009 (up from 1.6 billion in 2007).  BTW: The premium space is wide open to players such as Millennial Media, the next company I profile in MSG’s Meet The Mobile Ad Networks series.

A deep understanding of the in-app advertising space. AdMob is the largest ad network for in-app ad inventory on the iPhone. AdMob kicked off 2009 with the launch of Download Tracking for iPhone applications (allowing advertisers to accurately monitor App Store conversion rates and measure their return from advertising on AdMob’s network). If quickly followed with an iPhone Advertising Exchange, a concept similar to the banner and link exchange services we know from the Internet. As Russell Buckley, AdMob VP Global Alliances, put in this MSG interview at the time: “The new-launch iPhone Download Exchange is about allowing developers with apps and ad space to serve ads that promote other apps within the Download exchange, and get traction for their own apps in the process by placing ads for free on other applications.” An excellent way to build relationships and good will in the developer community in my book.

A drive to innovate new ad formats. It’s beyond the scope of my analysis to list all the new interactive ad formats AdMob quietly and cleverly brought online in 2009. The highlights: the capability to blend graphical display (banners) with iPhone-specific actions, including maps, calls (initiating a voice call from an ad), iTunes (opening the iTunes store to purchase music or video content from the store), audio (listening to recorded or streaming audio content) and – most important – integration with the App Store to download apps. And let’s not forget the cool new iPhone ad units that went live in July.

I caught up with Thomas Schulz, Vice President & Managing Director, EMEA, at the time of the launch to talk through the nuts & bolts of these new formats, which include mobile social networking (as he put it: turning a brand message into a conversation by letting people click on the banner to access the advertiser’s content/updates on Twitter, Facebook etc…); mobile search (allowing people to search in a company’s mobile site by typing a keyword query directly into the banner); and a multi-panel banner (allowing people to answer multiple calls to action in a single rich media ad).

And the list goes on….

WAS THAT THE PRIZE?

As a loyal BlackBerry user, I am the first to side with executives such as Boris Fridman, Crisp Wireless CEO, who correctly remind us that iPhone is not the only game in town. (More in this post.)

So, did Google snap up AdMob for its impressive reach, its innovation, its grasp of iPhone/in-app ads or its mobile analytics?

Or was it — as Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, an interactive marketing agency suggests – AdMob’s stockpile of data that clinched the deal.

As he put it in this must-read post:

“With the acquisition of AdMob, Google now has access to usage data of many of the most popular mobile apps — especially the apps in the iTunes App Store. For iPhones. If Google is taking on Apple for mobile OS market share, they just scored a huge competitive advantage. Google will know more details than ever about how people are using iPhone apps, how they are engaging with advertising within those apps, and users loyalty to those apps.”

I am intrigued by Ian’s take – so much so that I have scheduled a straight-talk podcast with him next week to discuss this in more depth.

So, is it all about giving Google a leg up on understanding and segmenting app users based on how they interact with in-app ads?

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, sure leaves that impression. As he put it in this interview with Bloomberg: “One the key success points for the iPhone was this enormous development of apps, and particularly free apps, which are advertising supported. Now that we have our Android platform coming out, and really with some serious partners behind it, it will also be important to have that be true for Android as well as the others.”

The takeaway: As I have pointed out in many posts on MSG and throughout my ongoing research into content discovery, mobile search and personalization: context matters. Contextual information (what mobile operators have, by the way) is what Google lacks. The AdMob purchase covers all the bases to close this gap, paving the way for the delivery of mobile advertising everywhere – particularly on the Android platform.

TOUCH WEB RULES (?)

But what we should be asking ourselves is how this new realization that mobile is indeed different will likely impact the wider mobile Web. The advance of touchscreen devices, app stores and new advertising approaches/formats are all coming together in a new kind of interactive mobile Internet, a brave new place where new content, new experiences and even new mobile search services will set the bar.

In a September blog post AdMob referred to this Internet (the one we experience on iPhones and other touchscreen devices) as the “Middle Web.” This “space that lies between the full Web experience you find on a PC and the ad-less Web experience you remember from the first Web-enabled mobile phones.”

This new Web throws up as many issues as it does opportunities.

• What does it do to usability?
• What does it mean for mobile advertising and how do we make it easy and inviting for people to interact with company sites and ads?
• And one AdMob didn’t ask: What is the impact on mobile search?

Tough questions, but Taptu, a mobile search provider, has some of the answers in its series of white papers. Like AdMob and Google, Taptu shares the view that the advance of touchscreen devices, app stores and new advertising approaches/formats changes all the rules.

In this new Web – which Taptu calls the Touch Web – people demand optimized sites (for touchscreen devices) and specialized mobile advertising that makes the most of device functionality and all the features that make the Touch Web more interactive and potentially more exciting than the mobile Web. During my last trip to London, I caught up with Taptu CEO Steve Ives and Bob Last, Taptu SVP Business Development, to talk about the impact of everything in the middle of the Web on the future of the Internet.

This is serious business.

Taptu has crawled, indexed and graded websites (assessing factors such as their suitability for touch devices and their page weights –key since it impacts the speed of browsing on mobile network and the end-user experience) to create an index of Touch Web-friendly sites.  (Taptu counts 120,000 to date.)

To make sure Touch Web-friendly sites also figure highly in mobile search results Taptu has also fine-tuned its algorithms to “decide whether to return results from the Touch Web, the mobile Web or the wider Web” depending on factors such as the searcher’s device and what thy would likely appreciate.

To round out the experience Taptu is exploring innovative new ad formats for touch devices. In an MSG exclusive with Andreas Bernstrom, Taptu COO, treated me to a glimpse of how people might interact with ads on a touch device, a fascinating briefing I captured in this detailed post.

A highlight: Search results are displayed in a card format optimized for presentation on a touch device. I watched as Andreas not only breezed through the card results (depicting images and information in an easy-to-browse format); he could actually flip the cards over to see more details (say, the discography of a particular band or the tour dates of a group). And if you like what you see, then share it (!)  – Twitter it, post it to your personal site or just send it via email to your friends.

The bottom line: if mobile is different, then the Touch Web is a brave new world. Google (with AdMob) is well-prepared for the challenges and opportunities this new Web brings. At the other end of the spectrum, Taptu will most certainly be out of the gates first with a mobile search service (and advertising approach) that makes the most out of the Touch Web. Now the pressure is on companies across the ecosystem to do more than develop a strategy for mobile; they should also brainstorm on tactics to address/harness the unique characteristics of the Touch Web.

Look for more news from Taptu soon- Steve and Bob assure me there are some amazing things in the pipeline.

Disclaimer: MSG has contributed comments to the Taptu Touch Web white paper.

Comscore says that the iPhone represents a third of those touchscreen devices, while the top ten list is filled with a number of touchscreen featurephones. Source

The bottom line: These numbers shouldn’t be too surprising, as smartphones continue to grow in popularity, and touchscreens make their way into the featurephone segment. Peggy adds: The touch web is here and will likely require content, experiences and mobile search tools to make the most out of it. Watch MSG for more on the touch paradigm and the potential business opportunities for companies that get it right.

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THE NUMBER OF NEW APPLICATIONS STARTED FOR THE ANDROID PLATFORM NEARLY DOUBLED IN OCTOBER, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry. The company, which tracks application and developer activity in app stores and across multiple platforms, says it’s seeing a lot of iPhone developers beginning to work on Android apps.

Android is gaining a lot of momentum as more devices hit the market – particularly in the US, where Verizon Wireless has made quite a splash with its marketing campaign for the Motorola Droid, and is also introducing the HTC Droid Eris. Meanwhile, T-Mobile USA recently announced it would introduce carrier billing and some other measures to try and increase its Android customers’ downloads. Source

The bottom line: Mobile developers will go to where the users are – if the developer and distribution experience is easy and rewarding. Apple and Android are leading the way, while others (notably Nokia’s Ovi and Symbian) still trail behind.

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THE VALUE OF COUPONS REDEEMED VIA MOBILE WILL HIT $6 BILLION WORLDWIDE BY 2014, says Juniper Research. In a new report about mobile coupons and NFC-enabled “smart posters”, the firm says that ARPU from offers from NFC coupons and smart posters will exceed ARPU generated by NFC payments in 5 years.

Juniper says, though, there are some potential stumbling blocks: consumer apathy, lack of willingness to change and consumers having to learn a new payment method. Source

The bottom line: Another confirmation that the mobile device is destined to be a payment device we use at the point of impulse – once we overcome the hurdles, of course. Peggy adds: Look for an in-depth look at this topic and more in the Netsize Guide 2010, a must-read mobile industry almanac available for free download beginning February 2010.

The company also found that featurephones still drive 60 percent of its ad requests from the US. It accounts this to the pervasiveness of unlimited data plans there, in contrast to other regions around the world, where such plans aren’t in such wide use, or are mainly limited to smartphones. Source

The bottom line: First, some kudos to AdMob on the second anniversary of its useful analytics reports. When they launched in September 2007, the company had 1.6 billion ads served. Last month, it served 10.2 billion. That’s some hefty growth. Second, the high use of featurephones serves as a reminder to content providers and web developers that there’s still a market beyond iPhones, Pres and Android devices.

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THREE-FOURTHS OF EUROPEAN CONSUMERS WANT A SINGLE ADDRESS BOOK FOR ALL THEIR SOCIAL NETWORKS, according to a new survey from Critical Path, which has a single-address book solution for sale to operators. The company’s survey found that 75 percent of those surveyed “found the task of updating their contacts across their social networks frustrating”, and a slightly higher percentage wanted a solution that would sync them. Source

The bottom line: Address book fragmentation is a real issue for users who navigate multiple social networking services, and want them all to come together seamlessly on their mobile device. And operators like Vodafone, which recently took the wraps off its 360 service that does exactly this, realize this – and so too do device manufacturers (see Motorola’s BLUR service on its new Android devices).

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USERS’ SATISFACTION WITH THEIR SMARTPHONES IS VERY SEPARATE FROM THEIR SATISFACTION WITH THEIR SERVICE PROVIDER, according to a new survey of American mobile users from the CFI Group. The study found that the iPhone platform received the highest user satisfaction ratings (83 out of 100, 8 points higher than Android and Pre – presumably they meant WebOS), while AT&T had the lowest level of satisfaction among the top four US operators. AT&T scored a 73 among its non-iPhone users, but the score dropped to 69 among iPhone users. Source

The bottom line: Given the widespread complaints about AT&T from iPhone users, this report shouldn’t be too surprising. But it also shows how device exclusivity and operator branding can be a double-edged sword. While certainly the iPhone has driven users to AT&T, it may have not a lot of damage to its reputation by not being able to deliver a good experience to them. Consumers have become increasingly savvy to the multiple brands that live on their mobile device, and when they encounter a service issue, they point fingers at the operator, not the device maker.

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THE AUGMENTED REALITY MARKET WILL BE WORTH $350 MILLION IN 2014,  says ABI Research, up from just $6 million in 2008, thanks to the increasing capabilities of smartphone platforms. This $350 million will be divvied up among mobile apps ($190 million) and AR-based ad revenues ($160 million), the company says, as developers and marketers seek to capitalize on the technology. Source

The bottom line: AR still faces a lot of issues before it’s a huge commercial success – and many of them are the same as other location-based ad models which still haven’t come to fruition. There’s no doubt that there are some useful and cool potential applications of augmented reality, but as usual, there’s still a big leap to turning them into commercial revenues.

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ANDROID DEVICES WILL OUTSELL THE IPHONE BY 2012, according to recent predictions from Gartner. The firm says Android will be the second most-popular smartphone OS at that point, after Symbian, making up 18 percent of the market. Blackberry will come in third with about 14 percent, and iPhone in fourth at 13.6 million. Source

The bottom line: As long as Apple pursues what is, essentially, a single-device strategy, it won’t be the market leader when it’s up against other platforms found in a variety of form factors from multiple providers. At some point, if Apple wants to lead the market – at least in number of devices shipped – it will need to change course and increase the number of models in the marketplace.

Following on from the phenomenally popular future-focused chapter that wrapped up last year’s Netsize guide (a chapter I was proud to co-create with Stan Chesnais, Netsize CEO), this year’s publication will continue to explore the personal experiences and business opportunities emerging as our virtual and physical worlds converge. Another highlight: 25+ interviews with C-Level executives and influencers.

I’m particularly interested in connecting with companies and pioneers taking mobility to a new level with the help of technology that links digital information with real-world places as we pass by.

The buzzword here is augmented reality, and I am pleased to report I already have an interview scheduled with John Ellenby, GeoVector CEO. GeoVector, a developer of mobile technology that recently launched its directional search and pointing application for mobile phones and released World Surfer for download from the Apple iTunes App Store and Android Market.

I’m also looking forward to a Q&A with Ogilvy’s mobile advertising mastermind Scott Seaborn, who is quite bullish about augmented reality and the central role it is likely to play in a wide variety of mobile marketing and promotion campaigns moving forward.

However, the Netsize Guide isn’t just about cool stuff on the horizon.

It also looks at the impact of app stores on the mobile business ecosystem that (at least traditionally) has the mobile operator at its center; the evolution of social media and the excitement over the social address book (more specifically, who owns it?); the trends that matter in mobile communitainment (games, music, social networking); and pivotal importance of personal engagement in mobile marketing and advertising.

I’m pleased to report that key players including Google, Sony Ericsson, Nokia Interactive Advertising, the Mobile Marketing Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, are already on board – a line-up sure to make the Netsize Guide 2010 a runaway success. (Another boost: Netsize’s decision to promote the guide via a destination within the new Thought Leadership section of MSearchGroove. This commercial offer, one of MSearchGroove’s growing portfolio of media solutions, allows a select group of companies to launch a branded microsite on MSearchGroove, thus presenting their commentary, case studies and subject matter expertise to a wide audience of executives and influencers.

This year’s guide also has a strong emphasis on mobile CRM, mobile commerce and case studies that illustrate how industry verticals (Education, Finance, Healthcare, Retail, Enterprise) are using mobile to fundamentally change/improve how they do business.

The bottom line: It’s not about mobile; it’s about mobilizing. We fully understand that mobile is personal, portable and part of our daily routine. Now the mobile industry has to stop talking to the mobile industry and reach out to verticals just beginning to explore what mobility means for them.

Against this backdrop, I am particularly open to hear how you (or your customer) has implemented (or is planning to implement) mobile. From mobile education case studies in emerging markets to cool new ways companies use mobile to super-charge customer service and CRM – I want to hear your story. All the better if the service harnesses a unique characteristic of mobile (context, location data, personal preferences and browsing patterns) to get the job done.

Ironically, this was also the topic of my recent article for EContent aptly titled the Immersive Enterprise.

I enjoyed connecting with companies including EMC, Liquid Machines, SecondLife and ThinkBalm, a super-cool company offering independent IT industry analysis and strategic advisory services to technology marketers and immersive Internet advocates. I was extremely impressed by Erica Driver, co-founder and principal at ThinkBalm, who invited me to join her ThinkBalm Innovation Community, a collaborative community in SecondLife dedicated to propelling the enterprise use of the Internet forward.

In addition to some surprising observations (which I recount in my article) Erica also shared the findings of a recent ThinkBalm survey of 66 immersive Internet practitioners. More than 40 percent of those surveyed saw a positive economic benefit from investments in immersive technologies in 2008 and 1Q2009, and more than half expect to obtain a positive total economic benefit in 2009. Looking to the future, over one third (36 percent) said their organizations will definitely expand their investments in 2009 an 2010, and another 38 percent indicated they might even expand their investment.

In my article I interpret this as proof that the next round of innovation will have to enable us to work in multiple locations, multiple dimensions (!) and across multiple devices.

But it was Martin Frid-Nielsen, CEO of Soonr, a company offering mobile cloud services, that put it best.

As Martin sees it: it’s not about enterprises embracing mobility, it’s about them absorbing mobility into every aspect of what they do. “The concept of mobility will be a given going forward for every company everywhere.”

If you have similar opinions/insights or if you want to be considered for inclusion in the Netsize Guide 2010, contact me directly (peggy@msearchgroove.com)

Deadline: October 30.

Disclaimer: Netsize is an MSG supporter.

The bottom line: Mobile data revenues continue to grow, and are a bright spot for mobile operators among sinking voice spending. It’s also notable that given the U.S. recession, mobile data spending grew so strongly.

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NOKIA’S OVI STORE IS SEEING STRONG GROWTH, the company says, citing a 50 percent increase in downloads in August over July, with user registrations up 250 percent in the month. Nokia says it’s approving about 500 pieces of content per week for the store, including apps, games and content like ringtones. 27 operators in 8 countries currently support direct billing for the Ovi store, but Nokia says that the feature will be available in more than 20 countries by the end of Q1. Source

The bottom line: It’s nice to see the download figures rise, but without a breakdown of what kind of content users are grabbing – or how much they’re paying for it – it’s difficult to assess this market from an operator or content provider perspective. What are users downloading? And who’s making money in the Ovi Store?

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PRINT PUBLISHERS SEE MOBILE PLAYING AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT ROLE IN THEIR ONLINE PLANS, says a new survey from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the group that audits U.S. publishers’ subscriber figures. A third of those surveyed see mobile having a significant impact on their revenues within three years, and 70 percent say they’re paying more attention to mobile this year than last. 33 percent think they’ve got a good plan in place for the mobile market as well.

Also, 17 percent of those surveyed said they already had a smartphone app for their publication, and a further 56 percent plan to develop one in the next 24 months. Source

The bottom line: Print publishers are struggling, and it certainly looks like they are approaching mobile with much more determination than they initially did the web. They’re looking for new sources of revenue, and have big hopes for new platforms. But mobile in and of itself is not a business model for them, they’ve still got to figure out how to create value and generate revenues from it.

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NEWS AND REFERENCE APPS GET THE MOST WEEKLY USE AND STAY ON IPHONE USERS’ DEVICES THE LONGEST, says a report from mobile apps analytics provider Flurry. The company looked at the weekly usage rates and retention rates for several different types of apps, in an attempt to assess the level of user loyalty. It explains that the news and reference apps feature the most regularly updated content, hence their high usage and continued attraction.

It also found that “entertainment” apps, which it also calls gimmick apps (think iFart, the Zippo lighter app), have the lowest retention rate, highlighting how users download them, use them a few times, then delete them. It also broke out a couple of other sectors of usage patterns: one including apps like e-books, which get used intensely over a short period of time, and another holding navigation and productivity apps, which don’t get used as often, but are retained on devices for a long time. Source

The bottom line: These are some interesting figures that deliver some insight into how users – subconsciously, perhaps – view and utilize apps.

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THE NUMBER OF U.S. SMARTPHONE USERS ON SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES HAS TRIPLED in the past year, says new research from Nielsen. The company says there were 18.3 million unique users of mobile social networking sites on smartphones in July, up from 6.4 million in 2008. Facebook was the most popular site, getting twice as many users as the nearest rival, MySpace. Source

The bottom line: This follows last week’s data points that told a similar story and predicted even more growth for mobile social networking in the coming years. The mobile is an inherently social device, so expect to see ever-higher numbers.

The bottom line: If anything, these figures are conservative, since in some sense, all mobile users are part of a mobile social network: the one represented by their handset’s phonebook. This list of contacts is arguably users’ most important social network, and will increasingly meld with those of online social networking services, blurring the line between users and non-users.

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THE VALUE OF THE EUROPEAN CONNECTED VEHICLE MARKET WILL DOUBLE TO 6.2 BILLION EUROS BY 2013, says Telematics Update. The growth will be driven by the mandatory installation of eCall black-box devices in cars, as well as consumer interest in connected vehicle services. Additionally, the group expects insurance companies to take advantage of telematics in their consumer offerings. Source

The bottom line: Cars are increasingly getting connected to mobile data networks, generally for navigation and traffic services. Some content networks are emerging, particularly in the US, but the growth in telematics and connected cars could represent a significant opportunity for mobile developers and content providers.

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ANDROID IS GAINING MOBILE WEB MARKET SHARE,  say the latest metrics from the AdMob ad network, but iPhone remains on top, accounting for 40 percent of all the ad requests on its network worldwide. The company says Android is growing strongly in North America and Europe, and accounts for 13 percent of US ad requests from smartphones. The Palm Pre is also showing strong growth, accounting for 9 percent of US smartphone usage. Source

The bottom line: These stats show just how hungry the market is for devices that make browsing the web a breeze. The strong figures from the Pre, a device that’s not sustained its early buzz in the US, underlines this. Also, expect the Android share to keep growing as more and more devices running the platform hit the market.

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WORKING MOMS ARE A GOOD TARGET FOR MOBILE MARKETING, says a new report from Scarborough Research, based on their mobile usage and spending. It found that they spend $94 per month on average on their mobile bill each month, compared to the overall average of $78. In addition, the firm found that working moms are 42 percent more likely than the average mobile user to download content to their phone. It’s a decent market segment, too, accounting for 9 percent of the user adult population, or 11 percent of mobile users – 21.6 million. Source

The bottom line: Males aged 18-34 are often touted as one of the most desirable segments for marketers, but this research says they should take a look at working moms as well, particularly for mobile content. This makes some intuitive sense, as working moms generally have their hands full with work and their families, making the prime mobile users.

In absolute terms, though, it’s an average of 1 paid app per month on Android, 2.6 paid apps on iPhone and 2.0 on iPod Touch. Broken down into those who “regularly” download paid apps, they tend to download 5 paid apps per month, spending $9.

Another interesting observation from the report is that iPod Touch users download an average total of 18 apps per month – whereas iPhone users grab 10 each month. Source

The bottom line: Apple’s App Store remains the gold standard, demonstrating that consumers will download – and pay for — apps when it’s easy to browse and simple to install. At this point, most of the other app stores out there are poor imitators that don’t pay enough attention to the usability aspects of their offerings and how they integrate into the installation process of compatible devices. Meanwhile, iPhone users are dropping some decent money on paid apps, and creating advertising opportunities with free ones.

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MOBILE NET ADSPEND TO QUADRUPLE TO $2 BILLION BY 2014, according to Juniper Research. The firm says that mobile internet ad spending worldwide will approach $500 million this year, and almost reach $2 billion by 2014.

This doesn’t even include SMS advertising, which Juniper says will be overtaken by mobile Internet ad spending this year. Overall, total mobile ad spending will hit $1.4 billion this year, and $6 billion in 2014. Source

The bottom line: Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen a lot of predictions like this, highlighting the expected growth in the mobile advertising market. Perhaps the most important thing to takeaway is that these predictions signal the high interest in mobile advertising – but to hit these lofty targets, the entire ecosystem will have to work to deliver the right solutions for brands and consumers.

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THE U.S. AD MARKET WILL FALL BY $1.6 BILLION THIS YEAR, says the Yankee Group in a new report. Spending on TV advertising will fall by $2 billion alone, the firm says, as budgets shrink and consumers shift to the I nternet on both PC and mobile. Another key factor the report cites is the booming amount of inventory available on these platforms, which it says put constant downward pressure on prices. Source

The bottom line: Like the previous point, there have been several of these reports lately, showing a significant drop in ad spending, but they typically show mobile as one bright spot. Again, the opportunity is there for mobile advertising to grow and take dollars away from other platforms – but only if the ecosystem can deliver the right opportunities.

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HARDLY ANYBODY’S WATCHING MOBILE TV, according to a new report from In-Stat (that shouldn’t really surprise anybody in mobile). Despite mobile TV’s failure to live up to the hype that’s surrounded it for several years, the firm says that 54 million people will watch analog free-to-air TV on their mobile this year, reaching 300 million in 2013. That’s an important distinction: in many developed markets, analog TV isn’t available on mobiles, or it’s somewhere in the process of being switched off in favor of digital terrestrial broadcasts. This means that growth will come largely in developing markets.

The report, it should be mentioned, was conducted on behalf of a mobile TV chip company and contains many of the type of stats that other reports about mobile TV have mentioned: those who use it tend to use it several times a week, and spend a decent amount of time watching. But the issue remains that there simply aren’t very many people at all using mobile TV. Source

The bottom line: The report’s author says that free-to-air programming supported by advertising would boost the mobile TV market. That might be true, but the lack of uptake seems to be largely built on a real lack of interest for mobile TV among consumers. Furthermore, if mobile TV accesses freely available signals, cutting the operators out of the picture, they’re unlikely to want to subsidize handsets that would support it.

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M-COMMERCE IS MOVING SLOWLY, at least in the U.S., says a new report from eMarketer. One survey it cites says retailers say budget constraints are the biggest factor keeping them from expanding their efforts, with consumer apathy apparently not even included in the survey. Another poll in the report says that more than half of U.S. consumers would be willing to buy pizza or movie/event tickets by mobile, with just 34 percent saying they’d buy games and just 24 percent saying they’d purchase mobile video/TV content.

The report talks about one more survey, which says that the most popular form of purchase via mobile among US m-commerce users is, as you’d expect, mobile content. Next, is consumer electronics, which it says has been bought by half the people who have used m-commerce. A small sample size (just 137) could help explain that figure. Source

The bottom line: Perhaps the biggest factor holding back m-commerce is a lack of real demand. For many types of goods, shopping on mobile isn’t a great experience. But for other kinds of products – in particular, services that are consumed on the go like events or travel – some market may emerge.

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OPERA MINI SEES 25 MILLION DOWNLOADS on GetJar alone, the site says. GetJar says Opera Mini is the most downloaded mobile app of all time, and that it alone has served up 7.5 million downloads of the latest version of the app since the beginning of the year. Source

The bottom line: Two main takeaways here: Opera Mini, as most readers probably already know, is a hugely popular app across multiple platforms and app stores. Second, the smartphone app stores aren’t the only places sending mobile users lots of downloads.

In brief: MSearchGroove proudly steps up to the plate and hosts the Carnival of the Mobilists for the first time.

The last weekend in August and I spent much of it at a two-day summer festival in Siegburg, Germany, where I’m based. I’ve been on a natural high with good friends, great food and a wonderful line-up of home-grown entertainment. But not all the excitement was at the local fairgrounds. The Mobilists have also come up with a mix of thought leadership and must-read posts that give us new perspectives on mobile and start our adrenalin flowing.

Andy Favell and the team at mobiThinking.com do us all a great service and compile a comprehensive list of mobile industry facts and figures. The first in this series focuses on the size of the mobile Web and the implications for marketers. What do the numbers tell us? Should investors/companies take advantage of the economic slowdown and move ahead while others are standing still? Read on, find out and tell us what you think.

Another round of important mobile stats comes from Jose Colucci at Mobile Strategy, who continues the countdown of the 12 Reasons Why Canadian Banks Should Really Offer Mobile Services. Jose expertly brings together figures that show significant growth and penetration (despite strict government regulation, a lack of competition and a sky-high mobile data plans and pricing).  The bottom line: over 70 percent of Canadians have wireless access. Is Canada an untapped market for banking services? Is there a first-mover advantage for financial institutions that get involved? Read on, find out and tell us what you think.

With all the buzz around app stores and the proliferation of mobile devices (beyond just phones), the timing couldn’t be better for this post from Antoine RJ Wright. In it he recounts Nokia’s size, scope and industry influence, and wonders if the Finnish giant has the resources and marketing muscle to sustain three brands/strategies: Ovi, Symbian and Maemo. Could Maemo be the “wild card” in Nokia’s hand? Read on, find out and tell us what you think.

Tsahi Levent-Levi at VoIP Survivor, a blog in RADVISION’s blogs network providing insights into the VoIP industry, connects the dots in recent analysis/commentary and examines the outlook for mobile VoIP. Will current interest among carriers create the conditions for a viable market? Or will it simply advance the shift to IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) – a technology that defines how to set up advanced services for 3G cellular networks – and put operators back in the driver’s seat? Hmmm…should Fring and Truphone watch their backs? Read on, find out and tell us what you think.

A refreshing new idea comes from Judy Breck at Golden Swamp. She uses the debut of  Half the Sky, a new book documenting the plight and progress of the world’s women, to start a long overdue discussion about the impact of mobile on women in the emerging markets. Must women such as Saima Muhammad, a Pakistani woman who routinely beaten by her husband until she started a successful embroidery business, continue to endure their terrible fates in silence? Or does personal mobility offer the promise of liberation and freedom from oppression? What is the outcome when the world’s women have access to the Internet in their pockets? Read on, find out and join in the conversation at Golden Swamp.

Meanwhile, Dennis Bournique at WAP Review uncovers disturbing inequities in the price of mobile data in the developed world. He successfully argues the case for a rethink based on his shocking observation that (currently) all prepaid data is “wildly overpriced.” So, what is fair price for mobile data on prepaid plans? Dennis does the math and provides us a reasonable model that makes money and sense for everyone. Read on, find out and give us your take.

Some eight operating systems are battling for market supremacy. Will there be only one? Digital evangelist Ian Wood (thankfully) moves us past the academic discussion and back to basics in a post that draws from his vast personal experience and road tests. His conclusion: look for consolidation that will see three OS providers emerge. Who will make the winner’s circle? Read on, find out and let us know what you think.

Kudos to C. Enrique Ortiz at About Mobility for asking the question: is Apple a control freak? He connects the dots in recent developments – such as the decision by Apple to reject both Google Voice and Riverturn’s VoiceCentral application – to communicate an uncomfortable truth. But it’s not about whether Apple is morphing into a monopolist; it’s about the larger impact on the ecosystem and the third-party developers that have made iPhone the success it is. What are the arguments (pro and com)? What’s at stake? Read on, find out and speak out!

Finally, MSearchGroove uses COM #189 to showcase Mobile Groove, its new, no-holds-barred podcast series. I join with series co-host Inma Martinez, a leading digital media strategist and advisor to venture capitalists who has been referred to as a “free radical” by Red Herring and Fast Company. Together we raise our goblet of rock and speak out on the rise and demise of Blyk, what went wrong at Spinvox and what we can expect from Microsoft moving forward. Read on, have fun and contact us with your ideas/input! (mobilegroove AT msearchgroove DOTcom)

Post of the week goes to Judy Breck at Golden Swamp for prompting us to see mobile as a tool (for change) rather than a technology. Access to the mobile Internet gives everyone – particularly women suffering in isolation – a voice, allowing them to connect with people and peers who can amplify their message and fight their cause. Thanks, Judy, for reminding us why mobile is amazing and why we must strive to bridge the digital divide.

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If you’re like me, then use the last days of August to catch up on your reading and check out the Carnival posts we unfortunately missed on MSearchGroove.

COM #186 at allaboutiphone.net (Topics include: what brands want from targeting; U.S. wireless data stats from Chetan Sharma; and a look at whether Europe risks losing its competitive edge in mobile. A highlight: an answer to the question – does Steve Jobs hate the App Store?)

COM #187 hosted by Jamie Wells at mobilestance.com (Topics include: five iPhone apps that could make publishers money; a discussion around the future of paid content; an in-depth look at what a mobile Web OS experience could offer; and an exclusive interview with Blyk.)

COM #188 at Golden Swamp (Topics include: how location adds context to content; a look at the cool new Layar Reality Browser2.0; an analysis of Nokia; and a new take on mobile education.)

Thanks to COM contributors and readers.

Look for the Carnival next week at WIPJam - and be sure to catch up with Caroline Lewko and the great WIPJam team at the next Jam Session on the World Tour: WIPJam@OSiM (Open Source in Mobile), September 16, in Amsterdam.

When I first met Inma Martinez at Mobile 2.0 Europe I was struck by the depth of her knowledge and the strength of her determination to speak her mind. I made the decision to work with her at some level. A few in-person meetings in London (where she is based) and many Skype chats later we are proud to take the wraps off Mobile Groove, a monthly podcast series here at MSearchGroove that will provide short, digestible and insightful commentary on what’s hot in news, investments and developments impacting the mobile space at all levels.

Mobile Groove will air on the last Friday of every month and consist of three thought-provoking segments: The Big Picture, a wrap of the month’s news and views; Street Groove, an informed discussion of the companies and technologies sure to rock the mobile space; and The Radar, a roundup of talk on the street and what is highest on investors’ radars.

OUTRAGEOUS & INSIGHTFUL

The first in the series kicks of with a look at the the rise and fall of ad-funded MVNO Blyk, the controversy surrounding voice-to-text provider Spinvox and an in-depth look at the key platform players (Apple, Google and Microsoft) – specifically the news via Taiwan handset makers that Microsoft plans to adopt a dual platform strategy to promote its Windows Mobile OS (operating system) and, thus, take aim at both Android- and iPhone-based platforms.

Inma, who stands out as an über-connected advisor to venture capital firms, also gives us the inside track a new fund by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs that may spell relief for European startups and smart people with brilliant ideas.

We joined forces to provide industry commentary and insights on the top market news in the mobile industry. But it doesn’t mean you can’t get involved. We welcome your ideas, suggestions and elevator pitches. DM us on Twitter(@mobilegroove)or email us at mobilegroove@msearchgroove.com.

Listen to the podcast here. [22:25]

A ROUND OF THANKS

And finally, thanks (again!) to Inma, for the energy and excellent ideas. Thanks to Annette Kramer, a Stradbroke Partner and presentation coach, for her kind offer to do the intro and outro to our podcast series; and to Alfred DeRose, Brian Avery and the team of professionals at Tego Interactive, a company helping to build businesses – including mine – through converged Web and mobile solutions. The company has been instrumental in creating some new features and functionality (including a mobile site) for MSearchGroove, with more soon to come, so please check back regularly.

And a special thanks to RealWire, an MSG partner and supporter whose global news release distribution service (specializing in the online media and mobile) consistently delivers reach, audience and exceptional analytics. MSG uses RealWire for all press releases, and I recommend you do the same.

For now our podcast will be accessible via the MSearchGroove web site home page. In September Mobile Groove will also be available for download via a dedicated iTunes channel.

Regular readers will know that I work with a variety of organizations and publications, evaluating companies and candidates for awards ranging from the Meffys (awarded by the Mobile Entertainment Forum to recognize excellence and innovation in mobile entertainment and services) to the Smaato Mobile Advertising Awards (recognizing the best in mobile Web and in-app advertising) to the EContent 100 (a list of the 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry).

I am proud that EContent named me to its panel of judges to evaluate the 100+ candidates across the categories: classification & taxonomy; collaboration; content commerce; content creation, production, & digital publishing; content delivery; content management; content security; fee-based info services; intranets & portals; mobile content; search engines & technologies; and social media. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the many mobile and Internet companies that have contacted me to be considered for inclusion in the list, and issue a final call for candidates.

Round 1 of the judging wraps up on September 1, so please reach out to me this week. (Please note that your contacting me does not compel me to put any company name on the final list of contenders and, of course, in no way guarantees that any company will be named to the list.)

This year my participation in the judging team has not only introduced me to a number of new mobile industry innovators (companies you’ll see profiled on MSearchGroove in the coming weeks). It has also exposed me to new thinking about digital content creation and distribution.

The industry is at a critical crossroads. A milestone that speaks volumes: the storm brewing the media and digital industries after Rupert Murdoch’s very public announcement (after posting record losses of $203 million last quarter) that his News Corporation intends to charge for online newspaper content.

WILL WE PAY FOR CONTENT?

Artesian Solutions, a company specialized Web-based market intelligence and surveillance software (automating the process of search through machine-based surveillance), has an interesting take. Artesian CEO Andrew Yates issued a statement today arguing that Murdoch’s brave strategy may just (literally) literally pay dividends.

As Andrew puts it: Murdoch’s play is “based around ‘quality’ and this is tough call for a commodity that people are not currently prepared to pay for…. However he argues that one positive consequence of charging for content is that through targeted information and the learned behaviors of the subscribers, newspapers will be able to build a 24 hour, 7 days a week relationship (rather than once in the morning) with the subscriber and therefore tailor content to the demands of those paying for the service. The subscriber will get what they want, when they want it on whatever device they chose. Surely, this will be good for the consumer.”

Intrigued by this view I caught up with Andrew to ask why he can be so sure that we – people that have grown up accustomed to free content, search and social networking services – will change our habits and pay for news, for example. A few minutes into the call we were passionately debating the pivotal importance of personalization, relevancy and context – and the value they bring to our content experiences across platforms and devices.

CONTEXT & RELEVANCE

Artesian, for example, has built a B2B business model on providing its clients content in tune with their profiles, preferences and strategic focus. Using a variety of tools and techniques (advanced algorithms, natural language search the order and frequency of keywords, for example) Artesian effectively filters out information that we don’t want and gives us what we do.

In this scenario, the value of content is its quality – which is a function of context and relevance. Put another way, customers pay for genuinely useful content and they pay a premium for the choice of having what they need where and when they need it. With this in mind, the next deliverable on the Artesian roadmap is a service that delivers a daily dose of information to customers on their portable devices (PDA, smartphone, iPhone etc…).

My take: Artesian is one of a new breed of cool companies that makes its money by making choices for us to provide us choice content we appreciate. By spidering the indexes relevant to our interests and objectives (and not attempting to index or deliver the entire Web), companies such as Artesian are defining paid-content models that hold a great deal of promise for publishers everywhere (particularly in mobile). I would certainly pay for a daily dose of exactly what I want (gleaned from the sources I know and trust, as well the social media spaces, such as Twitter) delivered to my BlackBerry. All the more valuable if the technology employs explicit and implicit personalization (as Artesian does). Will we, as my close colleague Alan Moore suggested, pay for quality content? I vote ‘yes.’ As they say in Cologne, where I am based: What costs nothing, is nothing.

KOOABA MAKES MEDIA INTERACTIVE

Another value to focus on (because it can pave the way to effective/engaing advertising and increased revenues for publishers) is interactivity.

The merging of the digital and physical worlds is a hot topic at MSearchGroove and a big part of the Netsize Guide 2010. (Netsize has commissioned me to write it for the third year running and we just kicked off this exciting project at a meeting at Netsize HQ in Paris last week). But it’s more than a good read; it’s a great business model for the companies that can bridge those worlds.

Kooaba, a visual search and image recognition company and I have had high on my radar from the start (and that goes back almost two years), has an approach that spells good news for old media (specifically, print) anxious to get more mileage out of their content assets.

It’s hot off the presses (no pun intended!) and I caught up with Herbert Bay, Kooaba CEO and founder, to get the inside track on this new Kooaba and where it’s heading.

By way of background, Kooaba, which offers the Kooaba App for the iPhone and other devices, is strong in image recognition. It’s one of a number of companies providing the technology that allows people to interact with content and advertising using their cameraphones, paving the way for the all-important transaction.

(Little wonder why Amazon acquired visual search company Snaptell last month and this month released Amazon App for Android, an app that includes the experimental Amazon Remembers feature. With it people have two ways they can use their device camera to find and remember items available for sale on Amazon.com: they can either snap a photo of an item or scan a barcode.)

Kooaba’s new-look website is chock-full with information about the Kooaba App and case studies from clients ranging from BMW and EMI to Heineken – all a testament to the power of this technology to enable advertising and encourage commerce.

But the real news for me is Interactive print, Kooaba’s solution that effectively gives old print media a new lease on life.

In practice, people capture the content with their cameraphones and Kooaba makes the connection between the printed content and the cool interactive stuff it links to (videos, interviews, and special offers/discounts – the works). Additional functionality in the back-end lets people search, archive and even share this content. Read a job offer in the classifieds, save it for yourself in your personal library or share it on Facebook. Read an interview, get one-click access to the video and then pass it around.

Will people pay for that interactivity? Perhaps… But it’s likely the real money will come from advertisers willing to pay a premium to deliver a more interactive advertising experience and – more importantly – measure the results. (Kooaba’s solution has analytics/tracking baked in.)
Herbert is bullish about the power shift that can happen when publishers are back in charge of their content and their advertising revenues (as opposed to aggregators and search engine companies.).

But I am even more excited about the potential for interactive learning. This technology can literally make books come alive! (A wonderful boost to the quality of education in the developing world.)

The bottom line: Relevancy rules! Whether it’s built into the algorithms that allow companies such as Artesian charge for relevant content or architected into Kooaba’s solution that makes print content contextually-aware (because it can morph to match the context of the people who activate it with their cameraphones), we want what we want and will gravitate to those companies that can give it to us.

App store frenzy? That’s what comes across when you connect the dots in the raft of recent announcements. Mobile operators ranging from U.S. mobile operator Verizon Wireless (which has borrowed a page from parent company Vodafone to launch a carrier-wide app store based on Java ME that can target more than one device) to China Mobile (which tells TelecomAsia.net that it’s moving full-steam ahead on its Mobile Market app store where it plans to take 50 percent cut of app sales revenues) are jockeying for position and a piece of the action.

Interestingly, much of the operator excitement centers on the new mobile advertising opportunity app stores represent. As Jonathan Kelly, who heads up Vodafone UK Marketing, recently told me in a briefing: “I see some quite interesting opportunities in apps and widgets. A likely scenario could involve a sponsored widget, where the brand actually works with us to create a widget or application that we then prominently place in our app store.”

Beyond that, Jonathan sees other opportunities around actually embedding advertising within a widget. “You could have some sort of utility widget that’s providing weather, and there’s no reason why certain relevant companies may not wish to have some advertising embedded within that.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Apple’s App Store, RIM’s BlackBerry App World and Android’s Marketplace may have been the first to the party, but they have company. The recent JavaOne conference kicked off its annual convention by opening the doors of the Java App Store, a global marketplace for Java apps headed by Sun Microsystems. It comes on the heels of other app store news elsewhere in the industry including Nokia’s launch of the Ovi app store, a storefront offering available in Australia, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Ireland and the U.K, offering 20,000 titles (a fraction of which are apps) to an estimated 50 million Nokia devices globally.

Not to be outdone, Sony Ericsson takes the wraps off its new PlayNow Arena, the only player that opts to outsource much of the work to GetJar. The Lithuania-based company is billed as the world’s largest independent app store, with over 450 million mobile application downloads to date in more than 200 countries, will take on the mammoth task of managing and stocking the app store’s virtual shelves. The takeaway: make way for more companies and models.

An interesting newcomer that merits a closer look is WeFi.

This community-based WiFi network provider that has a new twist on the app storefront strategy that covers the bases to place it (and companies like it) firmly in the emerging app store ecosystem. Its blog outlines the quiet but clever launch of a combination “Wi-Fi powered launch-pad” and applications portal called WeFiApps, an app store offering a range of apps (communication services, entertainment, and information) in partnership with companies/providers including Fring, joiku, Nimbuzz, IM+ from Shape Services, VuFone from NewAct and Hollywood Star from HOVR. These apps (a combination of free and paid) are currently accessible on any WiFi-enabled Symbian S60 mobile phone.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

Is the flurry of excitement and activity around app stores a sign that we are entering into a new era of innovation and market opportunity?

Or should we worry that it’s the walled garden scenario all over again? This well-written opinion piece from Knowledge @ Wharton suggests the tight integration between mobile networks, device manufacturers and operating systems vendors limits our choices. It asks us to think through a case in which the new Palm Pre has a must-have app. In this scenario iPhone users in the U.S. who want it would have to switch devices (from iPhone to Pre) and mobile operators (from AT&T, Apple’s only provider to Palm’s partner Sprint).

The role of the operator amid this fragmentation and confusion remains unclear. However, it is clear that the majority of mobile operators want to stake their turf in this new services creation environment, a position they will cement by offering an app store-like offering or simply by opening up their APIs to enrich or enhance services offered by third-party developers.

How big could the market be? The jury is out on that one, but a recent survey from Airwide Solutions, a provider of mobile messaging and wireless Internet infrastructure, applications and solutions, found mobile operators expect significant growth in apps downloads within the next two years. The methodology was a bit fuzzy and percentages were diverse, but on average, operators said they expected 18.3 percent of the customers to be downloading apps within an average timeframe of 2.9 years. Overall some 43 percent of operators expect 20 percent of their customer base to download apps by 2011.

USER EXPERIENCE & SERIOUS SHORTCOMINGS

App stores schemes from handset manufacturers and mobile operators alike increase our demand for centralized solutions, one-stop-shops where we can find and buy the apps we want.

But how do these virtual shops really stack up? Alfred DeRose, Co-founder & Managing Director of Tego Interactive, a Web and mobile product and services company providing development and integrated solutions for the needs of major brands, content publishers and mobile network operators, recently conducted an informal road test of Ovi and documented his experience in his blog.

The process users follow to purchase an app from Ovi (excerpted from Alfred’s blog):

1. Select the item you want to purchase.
2. Select Buy .
3. Enter your Nokia account user name and password. If you do not have an account, select Create a Nokia account, and enter the required information.
4. Select to pay using your credit card or through your phone bill. If you already have your credit card information stored in your Nokia account, and you want to use another credit card, select Edit payment settings, and enter the required information. To save your credit card information to your Nokia account, select the Save this card to my Nokia account check box.
5. Select the e-mail address to which you want to receive a receipt of your purchase.
6. Select Purchase

While Nokia made a wise choice not to duplicate the one-click payment model from Apple that has effectively disintermediated operators from the app value chain, the process is tedious and complicated, hardly the user experience that encourages the all-important impulse buy. As Alfred puts it: “The best content will sit on the virtual shelves unless the buying process is clean and simple.”

Another prerequisite he highlights is the critical need for quality content discovery tools.

With an abundance of mobile apps at their finger tips, people certainly can’t claim they offer a lack of choice. But they can complain about the tedious navigation process and confusing hierarchical menus they must endure to find and buy content they like. If operators, providers, developers and handset makers want to sell more mobile content, then they are going to have to harness technologies and techniques to help users discover the content they want.

Put another way, it’s Retail 101 all over again, and the advance of app store schemes turns up the pressure on the emerging business ecosystem to remove the pain from the content discovery process and provide users with what they want – and perhaps even before those users know they need it in the first place.

The takeaway: Amid the activity and excitement that marks the emergence of a plethora of app store offers and schemes, many companies have lost the plot. It’s not about how many there are or who operates them. It’s about making finding and buying apps a no-brainer. The players in a position to give people the apps they want (allowing developers to rise above the noise and make money in the process) will be among the leaders not the also-rans.

(NOTE: I am proud to announce that Alfred DeRose has joined our roster of authors and influencers contributing news, analysis and thought leadership to MSG. He will focus on issues and solutions related to design, usability, mobile advertising and content discovery. You can reach him at alfred.derose@tegointeractive.com .)

Disclaimer: Tego Interactive is an MSG supporter.

ALMOST HALF OF MOBILE DOWNLOADERS GRAB APPS MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK, according to some research from GetJar.com, a cross-platform app store. GetJar’s users are an active bunch: 15 percent download once a week, and another 10 percent do it several times a month. About a third of the 5,000 respondents in the survey say they download because they always have their phone with them, while 28 percent do it to pass the time.

A third of those surveyed say they use apps while they’re commuting or on public transport, and perhaps a little surprisingly, 27 percent say they use them at home – though this follows earlier research on mobile TV usage, which found that many subscribers also used it quite often at home as a second or personal screen. Source

The Bottom Line: GetJar has been around for several years, and is the largest independent source of mobile app downloads in the world, so its data can be quite useful to get an idea of what users of devices other than the usual smartphone suspects are doing. These figures show that it’s not just iPhone users who have a voracious appetite for apps – a point that’s often missed by many.

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ONE OF EVERY 7 MINUTES OF US MEDIA CONSUMPTION NOW COMES FROM MOBILE, according to new research from ad agency Universal McCann and AOL. They also report that 80 percent of US smartphone users are satisfied with the quality of the internet service on their mobile device. Almost 40 percent said they’d taken action based on mobile ads, and 22 percent said a mobile ad had influenced a purchase decision they made. Still, reach remains something of an issue: the survey says there are 63 million mobile web users in the US, with 19 million of them accessing the mobile web on a weekly basis. Source

The Bottom Line: More evidence that mobile is already an established part of the media landscape, and one to which marketers need to be paying attention. Furthermore, the survey highlights the viability of mobile ads and their ability to influence viewers.

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MOBILE DISPLAY ADS INCREASE BRAND AWARENESS AND RECOGNITION, says the IAB UK, based on research by Brand Driver using banner ads for Kit Kat candy. The group says that being exposed to mobile banner ads significantly raised spontaneous and first-mention awareness of Kit Kat, and was particularly effective at doing so among 18- to 34-year-olds. It also says that incentives are important to mobile ad viewers, with 51 percent in the survey saying they were more likely to interact with a mobile ad that offers something to them in return. Meanwhile, creative is also important, as 41 percent says they clicked through just because they were interested in a particular ad. Source

The Bottom Line: Taken in concert with the above data from the US, once again this research reinforces the utility and ability of mobile advertising to effectively engage audiences. The ability to incentivize advertising also gives mobile a leg up, by making it easier for marketers to offer something in return, such as free downloads or the chance to enter a competition, as Kit Kat did here.

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SALES OF LOW-COST HANDSETS AND OPEN-SOURCE OS SMARTPHONES ON THE RISE, says Juniper Research. The company predicts that annual sales of low-cost handsets will rise 22% through 2014, to over 700 million, as growth in emerging markets continues for mobile operators. Meanwhile, it separately predicts that the number of smartphones running open-source operating systems (such as Symbian and Android) will grow from 106 million this year, to 223 million in 2014. Source

The Bottom Line: Emerging markets continue to be a strong growth area for the mobile industry, and content providers should keep them on their radar. Meanwhile, the diversity of smartphone operating systems isn’t going away, meaning developers will still need to deal with the hassle of fragmentation to hit their target markets.

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MOBILE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PCS FOR YOUNG AMERICAN WOMEN, according to research from SRG. Its recent Women and Digital Life Study found that women under 25 spend twice as much time – 2.8 hours per day – on their phones, compared to the 1.2 hours per day for women over 40. The young women spend slightly more time on their PCs (2.9 hours) than their mobiles, whereas older women spend significantly more, 3.5 hours per day. Unsurprisingly, the study found that younger women also used more features of their mobile more often than older women. Source

The Bottom Line: It shouldn’t be too surprising to discover young people using their mobiles more frequently and for more activities than older users, but perhaps the biggest takeaway here is the length of use figures for PC vs. Mobile. They’re essentially equal for young women, showing that mobile can be just as viable a way to reach young women as the web via PC.

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MOBILE M&A ACTIVITY STANDS OUT, while much of the rest of the market is quiet, says The Jordan, Edmiston Group. The company tracks merger and acquisition activity in the media, information, marketing services and technology sectors, and says 171 deals worth a collective $4.1 billion were done in Q2. While activity is still down significantly over previous years, the company says it has seen an uptick in recent weeks, and that mobile remains something of a bright spot. Activity in the Mobile Media & Technology sector was up 46 percent in the first half of 2009 over the previous year. Source (PDF)

The Bottom Line: Like many other corporate transactions, M&A activity remains low given economic factors. But mobile is still a hot area, and one that’s widely tipped to outpace many other technology sectors in the short to medium term. Still, it’s a buyer’s market, at least for those with access to capital, particularly as many startups and smaller players struggle to find the funding they need to keep going, and keep growing.

IS THE APP INDUSTRY WORTH NEARLY $7 BILLION? Will Apple do nearly a billion dollars in revenue in its first year of the App Store? While the exact numbers are debatable, you can’t ignore the monster success Apple has had with its store (which also drives device sales, by the way). How much money has Apple made? This post, titled Apple has made no more than $20 – 45m in revenue from the app store, gives us a figure. One I might add is not too shabby for a product yet to see its first birthday. What makes this more remarkable is that Apple has captured between 1-2 percent total market share worldwide (including feature phones), and only 10.8 percent share worldwide in the smartphone segment. Few (save Juniper) have taken a stab at valuing the total app industry.

StatCounter’s recent announcement that Opera Mini surpasses the iPhone’s Safari as the most popular web browser for mobile phones is testament to the potential of the greater industry. Opera Mini is the most downloaded Java application of all time. So, while I am excited about the enthusiasm for the iPhone, I find the conversation is missing a big-picture perspective. The question we should be asking is: What is the total app market worldwide really worth? After all, Opera Mini’s success story underlines the potential of the app market beyond just the iPhone.

So, allow me to take a shot at valuing the total app industry, worldwide, for pay-apps (apps you pay to own on your phone).  This is the total value excluding Of course, we have to exclude free apps like Opera Mini.

In a nutshell: If Apple can do nearly $1 billion in sales its first year and has 10.8 percent smartphone market share worldwide, how much is the total smartphone app market worth?

This post from AppleInsider tells us that Apple could do $777 million in App Store downloads in 2009.

A 10.8 percent worldwide smartphone market share implies that the total mobile app market is $7.2 billion, if all smartphone users spend as much on apps as iPhone users do. We know that this won’t be the case. A much more likely scenario is one in which smartphone users will spend far less.

So, let’s assume users with these handsets (other than the iPhone) spend half (50 percent) of what iPhone users on App downloads. Now let’s do the math.

$7.2 billion is the extrapolated industry valuation of direct revenue from apps if consumers spent as much on apps for other platforms as they do the iPhone. Let’s take $7.2 billion minus $777 million (iPhone app share), and multiply that by 50 percent. That gives us a valuation of $3.2 billion for the non-iPhone app market, or $4 billion total, including the iPhone.

($7.2 billion – $777 million) * 0.5 = $3.2 billion non-iPhone app market.)

Given these assumptions, the total addressable market for non-iPhone smartphone users is approximately $3.2 billion in 2009 alone. This, of course is direct app revenue, and does not include advertising, in-app sales, carrier data revenues, feature phone app sales, and other yet-to-be-developed revenue models.

What does this figure represent? Is this pent-up demand in search of a marketplace? It sure looks like it. In any case, the number is staggering, and why this fact hasn’t gotten more attention is surprising.

But I can tell you from my experience at Opera, the success of the iPhone app store is great for the industry. Apple’s app store (although benefiting from massive multimedia marketing campaigns) is the proof-point our industry needed to see its own much greater potential. Apple gets high ranks for making the job of marketing or selling an app that much easier. Mainstream consumers now realize it’s not rocket science to load an app on their phone. Now it’s part of an every-day routine for many mobile users.

Apple has created a market, but does it dominate it?

AdMob’s Mobile Metrics Report recently released compares mobile Web usage to market share of mobile devices. As this chart from AdMob shows, the iPhone literally tops the charts for mobile Web usage – and that despite the fact the device only accounts for 10.8 percent market share of devices (according to Gartner’s latest estimate).

Symbian is next, followed by RIM and Windows. With the launch of the Palm Pre, greater penetration of Android devices soon to come, and Microsoft opening its Windows Skymarket app marketplace, it’s a safe bet that consumer spending on apps on other platforms might total half of what iPhone users spend on apps (If you disagree, please make your case for lower estimates in the comments below, or email me – ben@mobspot.com .)

Let’s put a growth-figure in here. If we accept the figures from Ovum, which predict 15 percent per year growth for smartphones, then you end up with an app industry worth nearly $7 billion.

Not bad. We are excited about the App Store concept, which has taken much of the pain out of discovering and buying apps. Now is the time to get equally excited about the opportunity for apps on all platforms.

And why shouldn’t we be excited? Apple’s App store has caused a shift in consumer behavior. It has captured our interest (even passion), encouraged us to explore the mobile Web, and put downloading and purchasing apps central to our daily mobile routine.

Where does this leave Apple?

It may be riding the cool factor now, but where is it written that cool apps will only be created for the iPhone? I’m confident developers are already working on more great apps for other platforms.

Apple also doesn’t have a monopoly on delivering a great consumer experience. I’m sure developers are hard at work coming up with new approaches that likewise set the bar.

My take: Apple has created a market. But it has also paved the way for some fast followers to follow suit – and even go one better. I’m excited about the avalanche of apps we’re sure to see available across all platforms, and the impact on mobile industry and consumer behavior at all levels. What do YOU expect?

About the author:

Prior to founding Mobspot, Ben was Director of Global Marketing at Opera Software, where he led multiple record-setting product launches of Opera Mini. Opera Mini is the most downloaded mobile application in the world. He has a BA from the University of Washington and an MBA from Copenhagen Business School.

But there’s a twist. This exchange is built from the ground up to maximize the effectiveness of exchange ads by ensuring they only run on devices that do not already have the same application installed. What’s more, it allows targeting according to Operating System (OS) version, geography, and device (iPhone vs. iPod touch).

Shortly after the announcement, I caught up with Russell Buckley, AdMob VP Global Alliances, to learn how the new service enables the ecosystem (advertisers and developers) to get consumers’ attention, promote apps, and drive results.

By way of background, advertisers already use Download Tracking, a service AdMob launched in January (and discussed in this podcast interview) that allows advertisers to monitor App Store conversion rates and cost-per-download. Specifically, advertisers can use Download Tracking to view and track multiple applications and drill down to look at conversion rates by specific ad and for specific dates.

Russell tells me AdMob’s advertisers are already using this information (gleaned from using Download Tracking) to write better ads, calculate their return on ad spend, tune their App Info pages, and develop better pricing strategies. The new-launch iPhone Download Exchange is about allowing developers with apps and ad space to serve ads that promote other apps within the Download exchange, and get traction for their own apps in the process by placing ads for free on other applications.

Put simply, it’s a what-goes-around-comes-around concept that helps applications increase downloads by advertising within other iPhone applications – AdMob already has over 1,000 apps in its network. It’s a good starting point, particularly since “the top 33 of the top 100 iPhone applications” also figure in this group. How will this build AdMob’s business? What is the volume really? And how does AdMob maintain relevancy across sessions? These are just a few of the topics Russell and I explored in the following Q&A.

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Q: You’ve had your eye on the prize since the start, building a mobile ad network for the iPhone and now launching this ad exchange. What are the numbers?

A: It (ads on the iPhone) is pumping through quite a lot of volume at the moment in terms of helping us grow our business. We don’t actually break down the page use between applications and the web browsing through the iPhone. But what I could tell you is that we’re serving ads in about 1 in 3 iPhones every month. That means that we’re serving on 7.2 million iPhones and 3.9 million iPod Touch’s worldwide. So it’s about 1 in 3 total.

Q: Why launch an ad exchange?

A: We’re very close to the mobile development community and one of the things that they keep telling us is that they want more creative ways, better ways, to tell people about the applications and get them to download them. With something like 25,000 applications in the app store, it’s quite difficult to stand out now. But at the same time, not everyone wants to spend money. And so, listening to what developers wanted, we came up with the idea of an exchange. This way, publishers who sign up to the AdMob network, who we’re serving ads to already, can donate a portion of traffic to other people to serve free ads in their applications, and in return they get similar amounts of advertising on other peoples traffic.

Q: So it’s basically bartering?

Exactly- It’s helping our publishers or the application developers grow their businesses. And obviously, indirectly, we benefit because the more inventory, the more people have downloaded it, the bigger our network gets. But the primary reason is because we were asked to come up with a way of being able to promote ads. And we’ve got quite sophisticated targeting, so that if you’ve already got an application downloaded on your iPhone, we won’t serve you an ad for that application again. So there’s no wastage and it’s an efficient way of doing it.

Q: Apple is the one to watch now. What about Android?

A: The iPhone is a hugely significant device. That’s certainly obvious. But in the future more phones will be like the iPhone; and one coming up is Android. We already serve ads on the Android and they [Android] already have an application store, so we’ve already got an ad unit focused on that. From what we’ve seen, the iPhone type of experience – and I’ve included Android in there – does tend to drive a lot more traffic for publishers than normal phones. The iPhone has always had very high metrics in terms of consumption of Web pages, and now it’s got high metrics in terms of consumption of applications, and, therefore, ads within applications.

Q: The numbers are significant for iPhone, but it’s not the only game in town. What about the other devices and the other app store schemes coming online?

A: Obviously our business is serving everybody and serving ads to the less common denominator. So we’re going to continue to be in that business without question. The iPhone has allowed us to create some new ad units, which are more interesting than perhaps what you can achieve on today’s smartphones. And, because of the explosive growth in advertising consumption and the great volumes we’re seeing in terms of browsing and application downloads, we’ll continue our efforts in the iPhone.

Q: It’s not just about advertising; it’s about relevancy. How does AdMob enable content discovery through relevant advertising?

A: In practice, when you download an application, we already know something about you: We know that you download applications on an iPhone and we also know what [apps] you don’t have on your phone. For example, if you’ve got the Facebook application already installed on your iPhone, we won’t promote Facebook to you. We’ll promote something else you haven’t got, which makes you more likely to buy it.

Q: You keep that relevancy going across sessions…?

A: No, it’s not about a session. We can tell from the phone itself, from what’s installed on it.

Q: That’s quite sophisticated.  I would imagine with some tweaks to the algorithms AdMob could figure out what content is similar to other content and recommend it.

A: Yes. That’s in there and we might be exploring more. However, at the moment it’s pretty basic. Right now, if we serve an ad through the exchange, we check first to see what applications the user has on the iPhone to be sure we serve an ad for a different, but related app.

Q:  I see from checking out the self-service at the backend that developers can do quite a lot themselves. Take the ads. AdMob automatically creates exchange ads for the developer’s app based on the description in the Apple App Store.  However, there is a mechanism that allows developers to edit the ads or create their own.  Targeting is based on the app description in the Apple App Store, and the developer can also apply ad filters.  Can you explain some of the nuts and bolts?

A: It’s a self-serve platform. You simply go there, check the box that says ‘yes, I want to participate in the exchange,’ and then we start serving a few ads in your apps and your ads get served elsewhere. If you want to stop, you just uncheck the box. It’s something you can switch on and off at will really.

Q: No money changes hands here. But what about moving forward?

This is more about enabling discovery of our own products. So it’s barter more than anything else. Obviously, the more eyeballs they get, the more money they make through serving ads. So yes, it’s in their interest to get more and more in-store apps because they make more and more money from the paid-for ads. Let’s just be clear on this. When you sign up at the application exchange, it’s not about saying ‘I want only to serve free ads in there’. It’s about ‘I want to give a small portion of my traffic at my site while continuing to make money through serving normal ads.’ So you don’t give all of your pages away. You just give a portion of them to promote other people who will then in turn promote you. But all of that time, your traffic’s growing and we’re all making more money from the paid-for ads which we’re serving.

Q: You just launched and I see you are organizing events for iPhone developers. I’m think here of the Developer Meetup in San Mateo, where developers talk about their strategies. What is the feedback on the exchange?

A: As I said, we work with about 33 of the top 100 already. So we’ll be reaching out to more people in the next few weeks to tell them about the exchange. The idea is going to be popular because, at the end of the day, it’s a way of growing your business for free – which we’re enabling our publishers to benefit from. I think it’s going to have good up-take actually. I think we’ll certainly see within a couple of weeks, hundreds of developers giving it a try.

Disclaimer: AdMob has been an MSG supporter.

But today I can say the response to my post (and the observation that key stakeholders such as advertisers should be consulted at this stage) is finally complete. Scanbuy CEO, Jonathan Bulkeley – who has so far respectfully declined opportunities to formally respond to the CTIA white paper – has reached out to MSG to set the record straight and provide his side of the story.

My personal thanks to Jonathan for pro-actively contacting me and granting me two interviews.  One is a detailed Q&A (below) addressing talk that the white paper – because it mandates that a code reader application (the application that scans the 2D barcode and actually decodes the alphanumeric data string that is encoded into a 2D barcode) includes support for EZcode – has effectively called Scanbuy’s solution a winner before the race is run. The second is a podcast interview to discuss Scanbuy’s strategy, roadmap, and larger view of market trends. (Jonathan agreed to an exclusive podcast interview a few weeks back, but important developments, including the news that Scanbuy now offers a Google Android version of its ScanLife multi-barcode reader, require us to update the material.)

Q: Let’s begin with the controversial white paper. What’s the real issue here?

A: I think the whole issue revolves around whether Scanbuy is a proprietary solution, and what proprietary means in the barcode industry. We’re labeled – or rather positioned – as a proprietary solution and that’s not entirely accurate. Let me turn the question around: Are short codes an open or closed system?

Q: They are a mechanism that allows everyone to get involved in selling and collecting payment for mobile content…

A: Right, but not anybody can create a short code. You have to register it and pay for it. So, it’s in many ways a closed system. In barcodes it gets more complicated. The codes are split and some codes are called open source, like Data Matrix, and some are seen as proprietary, like our EZcode.  But both of those codes are just a series of numbers that are indexed.  I think the barcode market will evolve so that all the systems and the geographies will be closed proprietary systems, like common short codes, and which code is used is therefore somewhat irrelevant. I’m glossing over one key issue, which is the direct versus indirect discussion.

Q: We’ll get to that. But let’s get back to open and closed. What is the white paper proposing in your view?

A: The CTIA white paper proposes a closed system. It has different components to it, but you begin by having to register a code. Let’s say you’re Coke. You’ve got to register a code, which means you have to buy it from somebody. You can’t create a code and put it out there. It has to work within the proposed CTIA infrastructure and system – and that’s a closed architecture.  There may be various vendors and competitors that work within that system over time, but it’s controlled by the U.S. carriers, so there’s nothing open about that.

So, we then have the whole question about direct versus indirect codes. Direct codes as they exist in Asia today are open, because anyone can create one and it’s free. You don’t have to register it anywhere because the content is typically a URL embedded inside the code. The model in Japan worked because carriers were generating data revenue from consumers who were being charged for data rates to scan codes. That was the business model: Codes are free, but we’re charging consumers to scan.

Q: But that’s not the model going forward, right?

A: The whole world is going flat rate, so consumers aren’t going to pay to scan. So, the model going forward is about charging advertisers to be scanned, and to do that you need a system that, like a short code system, allows you to register and bill for that transaction.

Q: And a new model requires a new approach – even a proprietary approach to work?

A: Closed may not be the right word, and proprietary may not be the right word – but there is a need for controlled and managed infrastructures that will allow this to happen in a coordinated way that works across carriers and across handset manufacturers. It’s not free and I don’t think it should be free.

Q: So you are saying it’s about ubiquity and results. Open may not be the best route to achieving these objectives…

A: We provide infrastructure to our carriers and handset manufacturers to build this business to a specific geography. Our handset software allows you to read codes and it reads our codes. It reads [open source] Data Matrix and QR, and it also reads our EZcodes. We don’t really care what the code is – the software reads all major formats. It’s up to the carrier in that market as to which codes they want to support, but we’re not choosing or forcing anybody to pick any specific code symbologies.

Q: It sounds a little like semantics. But let’s get past that. Let’s accept that we need a managed infrastructure that gives carriers more of a say, and let’s accept that Scanbuy is therefore not proprietary. Now let’s get to the concerns of companies worried there’s not really a clear path on how to interact with you, because you are more closed than open.

A: I understand the question, but there are a number of vendors selling codes in the U.S. and none of them is open. These companies – whether it’s a NeoMedia or someone else – are part of a closed system because of the model here. The carriers are deciding on what the structure is going to be, and they’ll pick vendors which will fit into that structure. Effectively, all of those vendors will be working within that closed system.

Q: What about the brands and advertisers? In my post, companies voiced a concern that their customers would be doing campaigns on your system allowing your company too much visibility into their client base and their results.

A: Coke comes to us and creates a code, the code exists in our database, and whenever a scan happens, it comes and hits our database and we will forward that information to Coke.

The way the CTIA white paper is set out, you can see that they expect to have multiple campaign managers at some point in time, maybe within the next year.  So Coke, or their agency or whoever is running the campaign for them, has to go to one of those campaign managers. It might be us, it might be somebody else. The point is, that campaign manager will provide the data to the agency or to Coke, so I don’t see how Scanbuy is any different from other campaign managers.

Q: But you are effectively mandated by the white paper, so that does make a difference.

A: Right now, we’re the only one that’s authorized to be out there. But there will be more. Maybe not 50, but there will likely be another two or three companies, and we’re not going to have an advantage over them. Each will collect data and provide it to whoever created the barcode.

Q: Let’s get back to the direct versus indirect discussion.

A: Most of the markets that are developing around the world right now are going to be indirect.  Direct codes don’t provide the ecosystem with a revenue model that justifies bundling software and pushing this in a major way.  It did in Japan, because they were charging consumers to scan, but that is not what’s going to be the model going forward. Now it’s ‘advertisers pay’, and they will pay because they want to pay to reach consumers.

Q: What about the hybrid model that I suggested in my post?

A: Well, it’s quite close to the model the CTIA white paper outlines. In it there’s a registry and there’s a clearing house function. Both the registry and the clearing house are separate entities, and there are campaign managers.  So, there is no one company or one entity that controls everything.  It just so happens we’re the first one picked.

Q: To be clear: You are saying there is room for more and you just happen to be first. You disagree with charges that the paper calls the outcome of the race before it has been won. In other words, we have to start somewhere and you just happen to be among the first.

A: Exactly. How did this happen? We drove the market in the U.S. We had all the carriers together for a pilot, we implemented the pilot, we got lots of advertisers to use codes, and we gave them a system that supported that pilot. We were the first ones to act, but there will be four, five or six companies that work actively in the space and support this ecosystem. We won’t be the only one and that’s OK. You don’t really want 20 companies trampling all over each other doing the same thing. It’s early days so you want to keep it fairly simple to start and make sure it all works – figure out pricing and get that right with advertisers and marketers and media, and then build it over time.

Q: Where’s the market and where’s the money?

A: I think it will be slow over the next couple of years but it will be huge long-term. A recent [Pew] study tells us the mobile device will be the primary way we access the Internet by 2020. So, the question arises: How do you get to content quickly, particularly if that content is hyperlinked to what’s around you? You’re not going to want to either type in a URL or navigate to it from the Web. You will want to point, click, and go.  That’s a huge market and opportunity for barcodes.

Q: What about fragmentation. You talk about the U.S. carriers calling the shots, but their objectives may not line up with how operators elsewhere are approaching this.

A: Actually, we’re seeing markets deploying a system that is consistent geographically. Take our commercial launches in Spain and Mexico. Carriers in those markets are deploying an infrastructure that’s going to work – one code symbology typically embedded handset software that will work with the registry and clearing house function within the market, and also work for advertisers. These geographies are deploying their own solutions and they will – at some point – interoperate. But right now that’s not the focus, so each market is developing its own structure. As it happens, most of the structures look fairly similar and will allow those to interoperate with other geographies as they grow.

NOTE: I have provided both sides of the argument, and now it’s your turn. I welcome your comments, and I invite you to submit questions for my upcoming podcast interview Jonathan. I can’t guarantee that I can cover them all-  but I will do my best!

The good news: Recent stats from mobile Web champions such as dotMobi confirm the full-force arrival of the mobile Web. (It is indeed great news and I have the green light to post my earlier Q&A with Paul Nerger, dotMobi VP of Advanced Services and Applications.) The bad news: We need more than numbers to drive uptake and make the mobile Web an indispensable part of our daily routine. (And it must become that if we are indeed going to crawl out of the chasm and blaze into Mobile Web 2.0.)

How do we get there from here? Before we develop a roadmap, we must understand the issues. We must connect with the thought leaders, trail-blazers and futurists at an event keenly focused on the mobile Web megatrends that matter.

Fortunately, Ajit Jaokar -  CEO of the publishing company futuretext – perhaps best known as the co-author of Mobile Web 2.0, the milestone book that started it all – has organized a one-day conference to accomplish all of the above.

Aptly titled Mobile Web Megatrends, this one-day event (Monday, September 8^th @ University of California, Berkeley) features C-level speakers from companies including AdMob, Cellfire, iLoop Mobile, Nokia, Opera – to name a few.

From APIs to widgets, and from Android to QR codes, this unique event is sure to push the boundaries. (As it should. Open sits at the core of all Ajit does and is also the focus of his upcoming book Open Mobile.) Some sessions that caught my attention: The Obamamobile – Media and mobile convergence; Trends Driving the Mobile Web & Related Business Opportunities for Startups; and iPhone – The iStore and the future of mobile applications. (You can check out the agenda here.)

MSG is proud to be a media and blogging partner for the conference. Unfortunately, I won’t make it to the inaugural event in California (I’m in a plane on my way to CTIA on that day), but I will connect with Ajit soon to plan and provide pre-event coverage and podcasts with the speakers.

In the meantime, indications are good that this won’t be my last chance to be involved with the conference. Ajit tells me organizers have requested to repeat his path-breaking event in several countries – including Germany, where I am based. I’m honored that Ajit has asked me to speak at that event as well – so more on the program once the date and venue are set.

My take: Mobile Web Megatrends is going on tour (!) It clearly has its finger on the pulse, so expect to see this conference make some waves.

www.mobilewebmegatrends.com