• Who Is Driving The Growth Bus?
    The predictions of mobile marketing growth often lack a clear rationale from analysts. Even as soothsayers I have seen anticipate 10x spending increases over the next few years, many are grounded in the same vague promises of "shifting ad budgets" that fueled the silly Web ad projections of 1999.
  • Carriers Are Finally Getting WAPPED
    In yet another sign that media, not carriers, are driving the bus now when it comes to mobile content and marketing, Fox Interactive Media yesterday launched its MySpace Mobile Web service. Also available about now or soon are mobilizations of IGN, FoxSports.com, AskMen and a run of local Fox TV station sites.
  • Testing, One, Two, Google - Testing, One, Two Google
    Digital news outlets were awash in headlines and warmed-over press releases regarding Google extending its AdWords and AdSense programs further into mobile properties. Sure, it is a big deal. We'll have to see what kind of volume the content partners see and how well the text links can remain relevant in a mobile context. But generally, this only helps legitimate mobile marketing both for marketers and for publishers contemplating a WAP site. This is what gets me, though. In all of the reporting on this story, I didn't come upon a single instance where the reporter or blogger bothered to …
  • G-Phone, Hell! Where Is My Mario Phone?
    As the clock ticked past 1:30 am the other night and I was still playing Nintendo's wonderful "Picross" puzzle game on my DS, a couple of things dawned on me. First, what the hell was I doing playing a handheld game at 1:30 when I had to be up in four hours? Second, why doesn't Nintendo just come in and take over mobile gaming?
  • Shopping: The Mobile Game
    I confess that there are many times when I do not feel of this earth. There is a new conceit in TV ads that involves people using their cell phones to scope out bargains and available inventory at multiple stores. Generally, the husband is at one big box store dickering with the salesman while talking by cell to the wife, who is harassing another salesman at a competing store. I can't tell if this scenario actually happens anywhere or if it's just another ad-fueled fantasy about how consumer capitalism should work. Is acquiring objects now a quasi-military operation requiring walkie-talkies, …
  • That Midget Bastard Is Pretty Smart
    Video search is not an easy trick. Every time I dip into the topic the quality of results I get from the major search engines remains marginal at best. I don't know what spidering techniques are going on in the background of vTap.com, which launched Monday for the iPhone and Windows Mobile platforms (Java to follow), but it does an impressive job of delivering video clips that are closer to my desires than the big two Web engines.
  • An Open Question...
    hat the hell is mobile search anyway? I ask this after spending time exploring a partnership between Yahoo oneSearch and HFMUS's ELLE magazine. During New York Fashion Week, searching "fashion" at m.yahoo.com will return a prominent helping from its promotional partner ELLE's coverage of the event. There are blog entries, an image of the magazine cover, a direct link to subscribe, and sign-ups for ELLE text alerts. This is not to say that there aren't "natural" search results down there somewhere, but on my Samsung phone they were a good ten screens down.
  • This Conversations Is Brought To You By...
    According to some recent stats, there are over 20 billion SMS messages passing across the ether each month in the U.S. market alone. As the father of an adolescent, I am not surprised. I think my daughter's teen suitors alone account for a good chunk of that figure. But if you are a resourceful media innovator rather than the father of a teen girl, all of those SMS alerts sound more like ad inventory being wasted. It was only a matter of time before someone came along to knit this flow of messages into networked ad inventory.
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