On the heels of the extremely popular posts on Blyk and MSG’s exclusive interview with Pekka Ala-Pietila, CEO and Co-founder of Blyk, the timing is perfect to deep-dive into Orange UK’s mobile advertising aspirations now that it has formally folded Blyk’s MVNO activities into its wider strategy.

The first service that draws from Blyk’s mobile advertising model – an approach built from the ground up to encourage a dialogue between brands and people that want to her their message by delivering people relevant advertising in tune with their preferences and profiles – is Orange Monkey.

The first Pay As You Go (PAYG) package for the U.K. market offers free music to customers when they top up their mobile. (Although PaidContent suggests the service is not about free music since the tunes you get to listen to (not own) when you top up add up to about 600 minutes each month. This translates into GBP2.14 ($3.53) for customers regularly paying GBP30 ($49.23) in phone credits. But that may just be picking nits since people are getting music at no extra cost.)

More about Monkey: it provides exclusive music, pre-release tracks and other content from Universal Music’s catalogue and relies on British broadcaster Channel 4 to get the word out to the target demographic (16-34 year-olds with mass market phones) via the Channel 4 portfolio including 4Music, billed the most watched music channel in the U.K. A clever twist and nod to the power of multi-channel promotion: The 4Music team will be the editorial voice of the official Monkey website which will carry news, artist features, playlists, exclusive content and competitions. (Check out the Orange site for more details and a video demo of the service.)

The promotion is about building buzz, loyalty and community. So, where does/will Blyk’s mobile advertising approach come in?

The focus on engagement and social networks is baked into the offer. As well as free music, Monkey offers customers free texts, allows for playlists to be shared on social networks, and it “delivers great offers from relevant brands direct to their mobile.”

Prior to the Monkey launch I was pre-briefed by Marc Overton, Orange VP of Wholesale, Business Development & Partnerships, who walked me through the concept and – more importantly – where brands and Blyk fit in the scheme of things.

AN EXCERPT OF OUR Q&A

Q: To backtrack for a moment, Orange essentially owns Blyk and the capabilities it has built to deliver targeted information and ads. What is the plan here?

A: We have been keen to get this [Blyk's end-to-end capability] as a core part of the Orange organization. We already have mobile advertising and cross-platform capability, and for us, this allows us to have fundamentally different relationship with our customers. It’s not about ad hoc adverts or repurposing display adverts; this is about targeting and tailored information delivered in a timely fashion as part of a broader proposition that has great benefits.

Q: Blyk has run over 2,500 campaigns. What sets the stage for what we might see from Orange?

A: The Lucozade campaign stands out. It gave out vouchers and consumers could redeem them for a free bottle of Lucozade. The response rates were overpowering just based on a [Blyk] subscriber base of 200,000. If we can start delivering that to our subscriber base of 16 million, then we can generate results and create something quite special. (By way of background, the Lucozade Energy campaign, documented in this case study, delivered vouchers via a bespoke WAP site Blyk members could visit to read about the promotion. A click on a link on the site sent an SMS voucher sent to their handset. Voucher requests from the Blyk activity accounted for 35 percent of total requests for 1 percent of the media spend.)

To do this you need the ability to design an end-to end creative campaign that delivers campaign and targeted to consumers. It’s something that isn’t easy to do. To do it ourselves means we would be sitting here in a year to 18 months having a similar conversation. It [the partnership with Blyk] gets us to market ahead of the rest of the competition in the U.K., and gives us the experts [Blyk support] that have been doing it and establishing the category so we can have these conversations [with brands] and off the back of it we can do develop some unique and unrivaled propositions.

Q: Such as?

A: Keep in mind that we have also signed a strategic partnership with Barclays in the U.K. to develop mobile payments and that will come online in the next year to 8 months. Linking mobile payments with mobile messaging – being able to tell people about relevant offers and where to redeem those offers – is going to be an exciting proposition, particularly combined with location services.

At a larger level, it’s about us as an operator having a deeper relationship with our customers and giving them assistance beyond telling them what their bill looks like. We are the place they can come to for great offers and benefits that they wouldn’t know existed if we didn’t have this [advertising] ability.

From an awareness level – telling customers about new products coming to market and get that community, dialogue and click-through going on between customers and brands – we are looking to target different segments with different types of messaging and campaigns. It’s a bit of a journey, but we’re confident we’ll get the right mix.

Q: What does this push look like on a practical level? Who is in charge of what and what is my relationship – as a brand or advertiser – with Orange?

A: Orange will do the ad sales, supported in this by Blyk. I see this as a team effort and the way we work together and reward each other is based on that team working. It is without a doubt a different skills set that Blyk has built, and there is a credibility and value to having Blyk support our ad sales force.

Q: You mention other segments and I left us hanging in our last post with the observation that operators can use the Blyk approach to target more than youth. What are your plans in this direction? Will we see a Blyk-like offer for customers over the age of 24?

A: Absolutely. We’re keen to offer this capability to all our customer segments. The model will likely change depending on the segment and type of customer, so it is our intent to have this as a core capability for our media business. We’re not restricting it just to the youth market and not just to consumers; it will be business professionals as well. In our view, Blyk has created a highly intimate way for a mobile operator to communicate with its customers, and it shouldn’t just be restricted to young people.

Q: Would it be a messaging option you offer to brands? Or would you use this to promote your own offers and perhaps also do your part to solve the content discovery dilemma: surfacing all the apps and content people can’t find and buy because mobile search doesn’t cut it yet?

A: It’s a conversation and we could us it to draw customers’ attention to a variety of offers, including our own [two-for-one price movie deal] Orange Wednesdays. We could also use it to launch propositions for [content/app] partners, or simply package it up for advertisers. Filling up the pipeline won’t be a problem.

Q: Earlier you referred to Orange as a ‘media company.’ That’s very different thinking for a mobile operator. Can you elaborate on this strategy and how it ties back in with the group and what I imagine would be your big-picture goal to offer brands a cross-media approach?

A: You’re right about the cross-media possibilities. That’s the group ambition and one that brings together other [group] capabilities such as our heritage as an Internet provider and portal provider with Wanadoo, our content production facilities in Spain and our mobile ad sales force in the U.K. We have capabilities – from a media perspective – that other operators don’t have. It’s a core part of our strategy to leverage these assets and capabilities and relationships into the media world. We’re doing a launch in a couple of weeks and talking to the media agencies about our ambitions in this space. We can brief you on this, if you like. This is a serious part of our business and the upcoming announcements demonstrate this.

Q: Sure thing –let’s connect then!

MONKEY BUSINESS

Since Marc couldn’t go into the specifics of the Monkey launch, I checked back in with Mat Sears, Orange Head Corporate & Consumer Communications, to fill in the gaps around the service and find out how it’s done to date.

Predictably, Mat couldn’t provide stats on a service that only launched July 30th. However, he did say the offer is “flying off the shelves.” Will advertising follow? Orange is getting in gear, and MMS and SMS ads (again, following the Blyk blueprint) are next on the agenda. The focus is on lifestyle companies around music (clothes, cosmetics, soft drinks), rather than other music labels or individual artists (extending their message to the community through a dialogue), although we may also see some campaigns to promote music and related events.

WHAT WORKS?

My take: Orange ranks high in my book as a mobile operator making the inevitable shift from access company (telco) to audience company (media player). It was one of the first operators out of the gates with a comprehensive mobile advertising offer, opening its Orange World portal to advertisers back in August 2006. Incorporating Blyk’s operations is a logical step in the strategy and choosing to focus on segments beyond youth makes hard business sense. I wonder if Orange will crack the code and grab the attention of the prosumers or any of the other potentially lucrative segments Novarra outlined it is path-breaking report. (Look for more on Novarra, next in the series Getting Personal, a special MSG report on personalization technologies.)

While it’s a smart move for Orange to target other segments, it begs the question: how should Orange tweak the Blyk blueprint to achieve its business objectives?

Free content/services works with cash-strapped youth. But how do you get the attention of affluent mobile professionals or life-stressed muli-taskers? (And let’s not forget the same dilemma faces Blyk copy-cat service providers such as Croatia’s ad-funded MVNO Tomato Plus and Gigafone, a mobile marketing services group that borrowed more than a page from Blyk’s founding concept.)

Happy coincidence that I was thinking this through when I bumped and connected with Alan Moore, an esteemed colleague and renowned social media/engagement marketing  pundit you’ll see a lot more of on MSG. (In fact you can get in the mood for our regular laid-back, hands-on look at what YOU need to know about social media marketing by checking out my two-part interview with him on behalf of bnetTV here.)

So, what are the do’s and don’ts for Orange (and really any company serious about advertising) moving forward?

1)   Think beyond offers that are about content and apps. Youth may like them, but the real value may lie in the mashups that bring it all together (with calendars, contact books, communities, you name it!) to simplify/enhance our lives on mobile.

2)    Don’t get hung up on free. As Alan pointed out in an invigorating rant on Skype, and again in his must-read post, Spotify is a case book example of how functionality (allowing people to do something with the content they get for free and share the end-results with the people who matter to them most) beats out freebee. As Alan puts it: “Last.FM or Spotify have understood that “FREE” is not the kicker, it’s the quality of the service that ‘enables’ its users in a rich variety of ways. Playlists, recommendations, personalization, discovery, contextualization, location, sharing are again part of this new vocabulary.”

3)    Think big – and think networked. Enabling people to interact with content on their terms is they way things are. Get it right and reach will follow.

Read between the lines, and GyPSii goes one huge step beyond the slew of location-aware, mobile social networking services we’ve see up to this point. Sure, it allows people to instantly capture and share what they are actually doing, building a multi-media virtual diary on their world – the places they have been and the things that they have done.  But it also allows people to search (and find) these places/people/experiences with their mobile phones.

I am immediately reminded of the key theme of the Netsize Guide 2009, a milestone mobile almanac that represents an exciting (and on-going) collaboration with Stan Chesnais, Netsize CEO, who steered me in the direction of the next mega-trend in mobile: The blurring of the barriers between the virtual and physical worlds.

But it’s more than an adrenalin-driven vision of the future. As we described in the book (which I urge you to download via the MSG sidebar), it’s happening now, and examples range from Ford’s super-cool use of augmented reality in a mobile marketing campaign, to visual search/advertising schemes supported by SnapNow, to GyPSii’s little known business model, which is all about indexing the world around us for the delivery of relevant advertising and services we can’t yet imagine. (I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting with GyPSii at the time I wrote the book, but you can bet it has a top-notch spot in the 2010 Guide!)

Shortly before GyPSii launched its iPhone app, Vanessa Vigar, Head of Corporate Communications, invited me to company HQ in Amsterdam to connect with Dan Harple, GyPSii CEO. The interview was a meeting of the minds, which I have produced as a two-part podcast here on MSG. (Thanks again for reaching out, Vanessa!)

In Part 1, Dan gives me the high-level view of what GyPSii is (and isn’t), presents his no-holds-barred view of the real market for location services, and walks me through the value propositions (for people and GyPSii partners) that are intertwined with the company mission to make sure all of us are out on our bikes searching the planet, instead of on our PCs searching the Internet.

Listen to the podcast. [17:00]

For background on  GyPSii and a review of some of the recent announcements (deals with handset manufacturers, impressive traction in China, and the newly-released Open Experience API), check out my bnetTV interview with Shane Lennon, Senior Vice President, Marketing & Product Development at GyPSii, in the MSG video jukebox (located in the right-hand sidebar).

Audio interview excerpts:

MOBILITY: Despite the fact we have mobile services, we still tend to experience life and everything around us in a sit-down, do-nothing mode. “Everyone’s connected now, but our lives are developing a kind of virtual feel to them that I think is thin.” Dan and his team (mostly ex-Netscape) developed GyPSii to “record your life in a digital way, so wherever you are you can record what you’re doing and you can share that with communities, your friends, your family.” The newly-released module, called GyPSii Connect, automatically connects people with their other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

LOCATION: Is LBS the next big thing? Maybe – but our definition of it is limiting our ability to break new ground. A problem is our outmoded paradigm. “To create innovation you don’t look in the rear view mirror.” GyPSii does location, “but it’s not all we do.”

SEARCH: A primary function of GyPSii is PlaceMe. From the website: “PlaceMe – allows you to create a point of interest (POI) and associate a current or previous image, video, audio and text, URL and reference the POI to your current or last geo-location, categorize, tag and describe the point of interest and submit to the server in real time to a personal or publicly designated folder in your MyPlaces (your record of points of interest).” Put simply, every time you do [perform] a PlaceMe, you create a searchable place on the Internet. GyPSii has put this function at the center of a new search paradigm. It’s all about “a much deeper level of relevancy which isn’t about a virtual world, it’s about a real world.  So, when I search, I don’t want to really search what other websites people clicked on, I want to search other places and experiences that people had.”

PEOPLE-POWERED SEARCH: Google search is about PageRank, an algorithm that, like a popularity contest, pushes what the mass market says is cool. But there’s more to life than following the crowd. GyPSii relies on people to make results relevant and potentially more valuable to us. It’s all about “building an alternative global Internet search index.” As Dan puts it: “I think the only way you build that index is if you empower millions of people to build it.  So, that’s natural, it’s organic, it came from real people, I just think that’s a cooler index to have.” After all, it’s people and their opinions that matter most. “When I search, I don’t really care how many people clicked on a restaurant’s website, it doesn’t matter to me.  What matters is did my friends go there, did people in my community go there, who goes there and what do they think of it.”

MOBILE ADVERTISING: Part 2 focuses on this topic – but we do get a view into the business models Dan imagines can emerge when you combine people-powered search and real world experience. “I think the future of advertising is about a much deeper level of relevance and context and location.”

iPHONE: It’s game-changing – but the barrier to entry for that coolness may not be so high after all. “As a developer, you can make much cooler apps on the iPhone right now, but I would suggest that other companies who build browsers, [such as] Opera and Microsoft, will create a much better mobile browser. But I think the barrier to [an] enhanced user experience is more at an operating system level. (Translated: Symbian is clunky and needs to get better, for example.) As far as advertising goes, Dan isn’t jumping on the iPhone bandwagon. “I’d say the amount of ads served in the mobile market right now isn’t yet quite material.  It’s material when it’s at scale, and, for all the love of Apple and the coolness of the iPhone, it’s not a product that’s had scale.”

GYPSII iPHONE APP: (Note: This interview was conducted prior to launch, so no deep details.) What could Dan say at the time: It does more and looks cooler (because it’s an iPhone, of course!). But look under the hood and the iconography of GyPSii (the visual vocabulary), which is core to what GyPSsii is, will stay the same. “Practically, what this means is when GyPSii rolls out on the iPhone, it will reflect the next-gen – and we don’t call it UI any more, we call it UX – user experience.  So, our next-gen UX will be on the iPhone and then that’s already in build processes on all of our other device families.

OPENEXPERIENCE API (OEx):  Just call it the “window into the management of your social fabric and your interaction with people, not just on GyPSii but on other social networks.  It’s the management of all your social media, how you record it, how you share it, and how you search for it.” What does it mean for partners? In a word: Speed. “If you think what Facebook Connect has done for Facebook, it’s a similar thing for GyPSii; it allows us to get integration with other partners fast.” As Dan puts it: “The way to think about this is if we had to go and do a custom build of GyPSii on every device, no company could afford to do that, there are too many devices coming and they’re coming too quickly….So, we essentially built a core platform and an API around that platform which drives all the experiences you see in GyPSii, so then all those key functions can be called out of that API.” The OEx is at the heart of a recent deal with Samsung. “They’re launching their own social media location-based portal, and essentially it’s GyPSii, it’s using the GyPSii back-end and using our open experience API to make all that happen.”

In Part 2 – Dan and I take a look at mobile advertising, which is live in countries such as China. We also deep dive into the details of the Gypsii business model, one Dan calls the waterfall model, and we dissect the GyPSii mobile search paradigm, one based on a new concept Dan calls PlaceRank.

Special thanks to GyPSii for hosting my podcast until I can work out the details to upload my content to the cloud and make it avaiable to MSG readers via iTunes. It’s work in progress and coming soon!

Today marks the debut of these new segments on the MSG video jukebox (located in the right-hand sidebar). This week’s focus, and feature video in the player, is my interview with Shane Lennon, Senior Vice President, Marketing & Product Development at GyPSii, a must-watch company leading in the race to deliver connected and cool experiences combining information, entertainment, social networks,  and location/navigation. In our interview we connect the dots in the recent string of announcements and discuss the significance for brands and advertisers.

By way of background, I have followed the company – which is a business unit of GeoCentric, a company that provides a geo-integration platform for mobile phones, personal navigation devices, web browsers, and Internet-connected devices, including PCs and set-top boxes – since it broke on the scene last year. Unlike many companies that focus on social networking or enable location-relevant mobile marketing, GyPSii stands out as a company that connects people to people, places, and stuff across all platforms, devices and networks.

Indeed, it’s the raft of announcements over the last weeks — including a partnership to embed GyPSii’s app on a range of LG mobile phones; the tie-up with Nokia and RIM (blackberry) to make the app available on a wide variety of their devices; and a wise decision launch an open API (allowing partners to call the shots on how they integrate GyPSii into their mobile strategy and devices) – that speaks volumes about the company’s new and stronger focus. My take: GyPSii has both the ideas and the impetus to impact our mobile lifestyles.

In addition to the interview and my analysis (below), I also encourage you to read more about GyPSii in my regular column for the bnetTV newsletter, which counts some 10,000 readers. For all my coverage and columns in one place, check out this page on the bnetTV site dedicated to MSG news and views. Thanks again to bnetTV’s Michelle and Tony Sklar for promoting MSG to their growing audience of  industry executives and professionals, and to Nicole Scott for bringing it all together in some great brainstorming sessions!

An excerpt from my weekly column:

Web 2.0 was all about the tools and technologies allowing users to freely create, share, and connect around content with members of a larger mobile community; Web 3.0 places location at the core of this exchange, empowering users to make their experiences personal, relevant, and much more compelling.

The jury is out on whether location – on its own – is a service consumers will pay for. But there is no question that location brings value to a variety of everyday mobile experiences, ranging from social networking to mobile search/shopping services,  to more relevant and engaging mobile marketing campaigns. Indeed, the race is on to offer connected and cool experiences combining information, entertainment, social networks and location/navigation. And companies that deliver products and services that connect people to places and networks, from work to play to home,  across all platforms, devices and networks, will likely lead the pack.

GyPSii stands out as a company that covers all the bases with a suite of applications that seamlessly combine location, social networking, search, and Web 2.0 technologies. I caught up with Shane Lennon, GyPSii Senior Vice President, Marketing & Product Development, during Mobile World Congress to connect the dots in the recent string of announcements and discuss the significance for brands and advertisers. We covered all the key questions, and then some. A special highlight: An explanation of GyPSii’s Open Experience API (called OEx).

Unlike other mobile social networking platforms such as Facebook, which offer a subset of desktop functionality, GyPSii has effectively given its partners the last word in how GyPSii is integrated into their devices and apps – and how much of the functionality they want in the first place. Put another way, GyPSii allows its partners to do more than location-enable/community-enable their apps and devices; it gives them control of the UI and with it the user experience they deliver to their customer base. Partners can integrate anything from a single app (create a piece of geo-tagged content) to a feature (find a friend) to full-blown social network.

By way of background, features/services include: User-Gen Content (create and share geo-tagged content); Friends (create and manage relationships with GyPSii members); Explore (find places, people and stuff nearby); Communication (keep in touch using messages, email and more); Profile (tell the community who you are and what you’re doing/feeling); and Advertising (integrating GyPSii’s location-based and contextually-tuned advertising service). To round out the offer, partners leverage GyPSii’s infrastructure to get streamline delivery of services to their customers.

As Shane put it: “We decided to have a next-generation approach to [mobile phone] client development….As we looked beyond smartphones it became clear to us that taking our user interface and jamming down into a Java enabled platform or WAP-like [platform] wasn’t going to work.” The way for this to succeed is to take a more embedded client approach, which is why GyPSii’s strategy is focused on embedding GyPSii on as many devices as possible, where the actual user experience (via the UI) is owned by the customer/partner company. (GyPSii’s platform is device and network agnostic, and works across iPhone, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Web-based operating systems.)

A big part of GyPSii plans going forward is focused on mobile advertising. And with good reason since the disconnect between mobile advertising efforts and results is a growing cause for concern. Predictably, the lack of real mobile marketing success stories reduces the enthusiasm of major brands to invest in mobile advertising in the first place. And around we go. But it’s more than a catch-22 for advertisers and carriers. It’s a vicious cycle that threatens the health of the global mobile business ecosystem if we consider that the vast majority of content companies, app store developers, and mobile carriers have already bet the farm on the uptake of mobile services increasingly subsidized by mobile advertising.

Against this backdrop, GyPSii has purposely made Advertising a central focus of its OEx API, beefing up the offer with a location-specific targeting capability and the ability to deliver an integrated advertising experience/message across devices and platforms – even  gaming consoles in the future. (Makes good sense given the perfect fit between games, location, and community…)

We wrapped up the interview with an interesting look at the future of content types and what might evolve from experiences that bring together information, entertainment, social networks, location/navigation, advertising, and search on all devices everywhere. It’s early days, but GyPSii is beginning to break down the content and comments it sees into its smallest components, allowing it to recognize the associations and relationships between the content and the context. “When someone looks for something or wants it [relevant information] in a mini-feed, we want to make sure it is relevant and [fits] in the context of their world.”

The right content to the right person at the right time and in-tune with their lifestyle/life stage? It’s a challenge. However, GyPSii has the capabilities (information, entertainment, social networks, location/navigation, advertising, and search) and mindset (open APIs and a sharp focus on the user experience) that may get us there.

MSG is also proud to partner with bnetTV to conduct studio interviews with an exciting line-up of companies including AdMob, BuddyMob, BuzzCity,Gigafone, Gracenote, GyPSii, JumpTap, MCN, Mob4Hire, Movius, and VISTO. The finished segments will showcase on MSG (in the customized video player in the right-hand corner), so please check back regularly. You can also look for event coverage – as well as my regular columns – on this special Events page bnetTV created exclusively for MSG.

Which brings me to this week’s column and focus on Motricity, a provider of mobile data solutions and services, ranging from mobile portals and storefronts, to messaging aggregation, to a slew of mobile operators and content providers, including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Alltel, TracFone Wireless, PlayPhone, CNN, FOX News, A&E, and Condé Nast. The company had a banner year in 2008. It achieved over $100 million in revenue, exceeded acquisition integration targets, expanded customer relationships, and delivered over 11.5 billion pageviews across all deployments of its mCore Platform. (Over the past year, Motricity reports mobile Internet access has grown 45 percent, a sure sign that mobile data services are gaining serious traction.)

But the real news is mobile marketing, a sector Ryan Wuerch, Motricity Chairman and CEO, tells me is poised for impressive growth.

During a recent interview with bnetTV, Ryan identified three key drivers behind this trend: The advance of the mobile Web, the arrival of handsets such as the Apple iPhone that deliver a satisfactory end-user experience, and the increasing recognition among mobile operators, agencies, brands, and content companies that advertising is content, and should therefore be customized (translated: targeted) to individual consumers based on factors such as profile, preference, and permission.

Put simply, plain-vanilla mobile content tailored to mass-market tastes doesn’t cut it. It’s about delivering personalized, compelling experiences to consumers in order to increase data usage, ARPU, and brand recognition. As Ryan put it: “Content providers and brands are looking to leverage the data, intelligence and connectivity of the carriers in order to offer a personalized, relevant solution to consumers.”

Another shift transforming the mobile marketplace: The emergence of the open mobile Web and truly open models that blur the boundaries between on-portal and off-portal (on-deck and off-deck). In Ryan’s view, its “one multi-channel content marketplace” with the mobile phone – a device with features and functionality including a personal navigation system, a barcode scanner, a camera, a radio, a walkie-talkie, a TV, an electronic programming guide, a remote control, a digital music player, a photo album, and an archive – at its center. Operators and brands are more closely aligned in their strategies to encourage mobile advertising and Motricity is more sharply focused on “being in the center of the mobile ecosystem for the movement of content and data” between all the parties involved.

My take: There can be only one business model. OPEN. Ryan believes players up and down the value chain will ultimately embrace the open strategy. Why? Because inclusive is better than exclusive, particularly when the end-game is about forging partnerships that will grow the pie for everyone.

Ironically, this is also the message of my own white paper, sponsored by Motricity and slated for release in the next weeks. Aptly titled ‘There Can Be Only One,’ the white paper demonstrates the business benefits of a comprehensive, all-inclusive federated mobile search strategy that meets user demand for choice by combining results from storefronts, the Internet and the mobile Web. I argue that such a strategy creates a new and robust ecosystem and firmly places mobile operators at its center. More may be better, but open is always best.

Look for the white paper available for free download via MSearchGroove.

Disclaimer: Motricity is an MSG supporter.

I kick off this year with more opportunities than ever to deliver good ideas to a great audience. I’m pleased that MSG has a central place in the exchange, and I invite you to reach out to me directly or arrange a briefing with my PA Andrea Henninge – andrea@msearchgroove.com . MSG has also partnered with bnetTV to conduct in-depth interviews with CEOs from a who’s who of companies in the mobile space.  If you’re planning to be at Mobile World Congress and would like to do a video interview with me, then contact me or Andrea soonest. Slots are going fast – but I am always open to good ideas and getting to know cool companies. Last year I did 25+ interviews with companies including Infogin, JumpTap, Millennial Media, Snaptell, Seeqpod, Nuance, Spinvox, BuzzCity, The Hyperfactory, DeviceAnywhere, Bytemobile, Motricity, Medio Systems, Novarra, Movial, SinglePoint, and JYGY. (Not in any special order.)

UPDATE: My guest column for RCR Wireless will appear in February following Mobile World Congress (MWC). A mobile search and advertising company has already reached out to me (in response to my post here) with a scoop to add some unexpected value to my analysis of the changing moble search landscape, so it should be a good read.

But the real news is the traction MCN has built up outside Japan, where the company has quietly launched mobile search and “search merchandizing” with eight major off-portal sites and picked up another 50+ content providers for its allwords offer.

By way of background, MCN’s approach to what it calls “search merchandizing” combines MCN’s federated search (delivered via MobileSearch.net, MCN’s white-label search platform) and vertical paid search (delivered through allwords, MCN’s own PPC mobile content promotion program). The aim is to make it easy for users to find content from any source by providing a vertical paid search program that effectively connects users directly with the content item.

Avea is MCN’s first official search+allwords launch outside Japan, soon to be followed by a string of deals that will peg the needle. In fact, MCN CEO Marc Bookman, whom I interviewed during CTIA Wireless, has since revealed to me that the company has several Tier-1 operator deals under its belt (signed but not yet announced), including an impressive win in Europe.

Fortunately, the Avea announcement dovetails well with my meet-up with Marc at Mobile Content in London next week. He and Stephen Burke, MCN SVP Marketing, have agreed to walk me through the company’s recent deals and their future roadmap.

Connect the dots, as I have, and 2008 was the year MCN tripled (!) the number of distribution partnerships outside Japan, adding operators and service providers including Tele2 in Sweden, Smart Communications in the Philippines and BuzzCity, a global mobile social network that implemented MCN in Thailand. I look forward to getting the inside track on this and more during our meeting Wednesday and will circle back with what the company is prepared to reveal on-the-record.

Today’s announcement from MCN comes in just as MSG is launching its video jukebox feature together with bnetTV, the leading destination for news, analysis and buzz around must-attend trade shows and events including Mobile Internet World, Mobile Marketing Forum, Mobile World Congress and CTIA.

It was at CTIA that I joined the team to conduct interviews and produce a string of videos focusing on mobile search, mobile advertising, content adaptation and mobile social networking. The team is professional (and great fun to work with!), and I am 100-percent on board to conduct interviews at MWC and all other events we attend together. Special thanks to Michelle Sklar, Tony Sklar, Nicole Scott for arranging the streaming video jukebox and to Curtis Schmigelsky for designing the widget.

I invite you to listen into the MCN video and explore the other interviews in the jukebox. During CTIA I connected with 25+ companies including Infogin, JumpTap, Millennial Media, Snaptell, Seeqpod, Nuance, Spinvox, BuzzCity, The Hyperfactory, DeviceAnywhere, Bytemobile, Motricity, Medio Systems, Novarra, Movial, SinglePoint, and JYGY. (Not in any special order.) Explore and enjoy!

Disclaimer: JumpTap and MCN are MSG supporters.