f I had some way to automate my text messages to my daughter, I could create a macro that sent my initial message and followed it up with "Answer me, please" about an hour later. SMS used to be the most direct route to my seventeen-year-old. She will never return a call, and email apparently is for old people.

As the platform lurches forward, the unevenness of the mobile ad experience often comes in the all-important landing page. It seems to me that a brand would want to ensure that a prospective customer gets something more than a three word call to action and then, "plunk," a hard landing on a forms page with no real explanation of what you are getting.

I don't usually jump to the defense of publishers when they make the argument for online subscription walls and try to demonize users as "freeloaders" who don't appreciate the high cost of content. Blaming the consumer generally is not a good marketing tactic. Just ask the recording industry.

My home screen runneth over. My iPhone deck is starting to look like the merit badge sash of an overzealous Eagle Boy Scout. As I download app after app in order to keep track of all the brands I plan to critique, the famously navigable iPhone home screen is feeling like my old RAZR. Instead of clicking five times to get to an app, I have to swipe five times. Is there a difference there? Just like the old days, I find many apps just become invisible over time.

I know that others in Asia and Europe have tried to create "SMS novels" out of a series of short messages over time, but why aren't media companies jumping at the chance to craft daily stories or character sidelines? I know we have seen reality shows put some of their "characters" on separate SMS feeds to work as parallel commentary on a show, and this is promising. But the best example we have of this short-short form personality theater working effectively are the fictional character feeds now popping up on Twitter.

For the benefit of those consumer brands that weren't listening the first few hundred times this has been said, consumers do not wake up in the morning thanking the lord they live in a country where they get to worship your brand and see life through its narrow self-serving lens. That only happens in the retro-fantasies of Don Draper and the households of top executives at many of these major brands. The only people who really should or would "love" a brand the way many brand managers think we do (or could) are the vested upper-level managers whose stock in …

The human-powered SMS search engine ChaCha had its own Michael Jackson moment last month, when there was still uncertainty about the entertainer's death. During those few hours of doubt, "we were bombarded by 100,000 questions like 'did Michael Jackson die?,'" says Susan Marshall, VP of marketing. "No one really knew." Suddenly, a simple text search service that usually trades in minor trivia or local movie times was thrust into the role of being a trusted source of news. " Let that be a lesson to mobile media. We're not playing around anymore. People are expecting answers, the right answers, from …

I don't think anyone doubts that the intersection of mobile phones, GPS positioning and the real estate/rental markets will be a big winner for somebody. As I peruse some of the available options in downloadable iPhone apps, the possibilities seem endless to me.

When longtime Web design guru Jakob Nielsen released a report yesterday pronouncing the mobile Web experience "miserable," even a persistent critic like me got a little defensive when the phrase started making the rounds. Is the mobile Web really that bad? I thought most of us were embracing the platform at long last in the past year? The metrics I have seen lately peg monthly mobile Web use in the U.S. at 50 million to 60 million people. How bad could an experience be if so many of us repeat it on an ongoing basis?

Before I even cracked the box of the Palm Pre, I admit that this latest iPhone wannabe started out at a disadvantage. Sorry, but those TV ads have got to go.