To illustrate the rapid evolution of cell phone technology that is driving the adoption of the consumer marketplace, Evan Neufeld, vice president-consulting and senior analyst, M:Metrics flashed two then-and-now images to illustrate his point. The first was a picture of Gordon Gecko, the greedy antagonist portrayed by actor Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.” Gecko was holding a then state-of-the-art cell phone (he was a billion dollar corporate raider, after all) that was about the size of a box of Fig Newtons. That was juxtaposed alongside an image of Steve Jobs holding his nifty iPhone. Aside …

Six months after his opening remarks at the last OMMA Mobile conference, programming chair Steve Smith said a lot of progress has been made in the business, but he also reminded the audience gathered here this morning of how nascent the business still is. “We’re in the Prodigy and CompuServe era of mobile,” Smith said, referring to two of the early access services that dominated the version 1.0 of the online marketplace. “Prodigy who?,” I heard someone quip behind me, making me wonder if 20 years from now, in a forum contemplating some …

AOL used to be known as an acronym that stood for America Online. How quaint. Soon it could change its initials to AOM for Anywhere On Mobile. In a deal announced this morning, the Time Warner interactive media unit said it would begin working with mobile entertainment and community developer Zed to introduce mobile services in the U.S. and Europe. The applications will be promoted on both companies’ Internet sites, with AOL’s WAP portal in the U.S. and via AOL’s desktop applications in Europe. The deal is part of a broader distributed content play for AOL, which began …

It may not make headlines in the U.S. trade press, but WPP's GroupM unit has struck a mobile advertising deal that may make it the idol of others on Madison Avenue. The deal gives it a lock on some precious mobile advertising real estate: idle time.

What’s true about real estate, apparently is also true about mobile advertising. At least that’s what Cyriac Roeding, executive vice president of CBS Mobile believes. On Wednesday, Roeding announced plans to begin offering CBS’ mobile advertisers the ability to target their ads based on specific locations. The application will utilize a new GPS-based social mapping technology developed by Loopt that can target consumers based on their proximity to specific business locations. The ads are not sent via SMS to consumers' mobile devices, but instead appear non-intrusively on mobile Web sites that consumers can access from their cell phones. The …

A year after launching a direct-to-consumer mobile Web site, Discovery Communications is rolling out new mobile portals designed for each of its major programming channels: Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Discovery Health and Planet Green. Users can access the networks’ TV content via the mobile Web, and can also download specific mobile applications such as TV listings, ring tones, and SMS message alerts. So what’s so unique about this? Well, consider the relevance of one application for animal planet: A state-by-state dog park locator. Or, how about keyword searchable recipes from TLC's "Take Home Chef" fan …

Ad Infuse offers full flexibility through a choice of video, browsing, or integrated multi-format campaigns. Utilizing progressive downloading for video, the solution delivers the same user experience as streaming but with a much higher image quality, ensuring the best presentation of an advertiser’s creative assets. Video ads and content are able to stretch and rotate with the phone without any interruption, delivering a seamless user experience. In addition, dynamic ad insertion allows real-time targeting, and advertisers can rotate multiple ads throughout a campaign to keep it fresh and interesting for consumers.

Online social networking may be the hottest thing on the Web, and soon it may turn out to be the hottest thing on the phone. According to new research released by Informa Telecoms & Media, as many as 60 million mobile phone subscribers currently access social media services ranging from simple chat rooms to sophisticated multimedia environments, and the numbers is growing fast. So fast, that Informa projects it could rise sevenfold by 2012.