"The phone is all about simplifying your life," according to Greg Grunberg, founder of Yowza, who, by the way, also plays Matt Parkman on the TV show "Heroes." Yowza plans to run a golden ticket promotion where consumers think they are getting 15% off, but instead Yowza and the sponsor will take care of the bill, he says. The coupon application is location based and can return discounts to your phone in a specific mile radius.

Greg Grunberg, the co-founder of Yowza! (a mobile coupon service) fits right in on an OMMA panel -- he's got that combination of geeky enthusiasm and laid-back expertise -- but he has a special advantage in promoting Yowza!: he's also the highly-recognizable actor who plays the hapless mind-reading cop in the TV show "Heroes." Listing his company's promotional partnerships, he enthused: "Yowza is a [prize] wedge on 'Wheel of Fortune.' That's huge."

"Retailers are traditionally very risk-averse" in their media strategies, observes Eric Holmen, the president of Smartreply, but the dual trends of media fragmentation and the broader recession are forcing them to innovate. Once again, offering customers greater convenience through mobile can give retailers a key competitive edge.

Making retail transactions easier with mobile technology leads to an increase in the frequency of customer purchases, according to Noah Glass of Gomobo, which allows users to avoid standing in line at restaurants by calling ahead to place their oders. Specifically, Glass says the Gomobo service resulted in a 42% increase in frequency of customer purchases.

Mobile channel being embraced by retailers, to impact that last mile to the sale. The panel sought to go the last ten yards to the sale. How do you get that last ten yards? Going hyper local. Geo-fences! Proximity targeting! Alistair Goodman, CEO, 1020 Placecast, describes retailers using geofences to target ads to drive direct response (get an ad a bout a burger on your phone when you near the burger stand) but more interesting, those that set up geofences at places besides their retail locations, but places where the user might be open to the brand.

Just an interesting observation on how people are so dependent on mobile phones (for whatever it's worth). Hey, I'm the first to admit I open my eyes first thing in the morning, reach over to the nightstand and grab my mobile phone to check email. Elise Neel, VP, marketing solutions at comScore, explains she does the same thing. So, she wonders why advertisers and marketers don't take advantage of that time of day to target consumers? Aside from checking the phone first thing in the morning, she says more consumers are using their mobile phone to access Twitter and …

...is mobile in your cup, according to Elise Neel, VP, Marketing Solutions, comScore. In her presentation at OMMA Mobile she outlined what she calls the Mobile Morning, which may be one of the prime day-parts for mobile. According to comScore research 2 percent of mobile web minutes are browsed between 7 am and 10 pm. So mobile reach flips prime-time on its head.

Brian morel, strategic account director for mobile at Yahoo, led the lunch time keynote, telling attendees at OMMA Mobile that Yahoo collects about 10 terrabytes of consumer information daily from registration information and clickstream data. Yahoo collects the information to give consumers what they want, he says. So, what do consumers want on mobile?: 1) Discover 2) Stay connected 3) Keep informed

Kevin Ryan goes one further: "We could have a whole conversation about real data versus b*llsh*t data," acknowledging the big ironic elephant in the room: new media have taken business from traditional media, partly because of their greater measurability and the traditional media metrics are dismissed "B.S." -- but the new media suffer many of the same problems (no great insight here, I realize -- I just think it's sort of funny).

Josh Lovison from IPG emerging media lab pointed out that mobile ad networks are the drivers behind tech innovations in mobile. Publishers aren't tech companies, so where will the innovations come from. With so much competition between ad nets, its only innovation that will differentiate them. Both of the publishers agreed that they weren't tech companies, but then seemed to say that they had partners or could innovate in house. So, still a valid question. Maybe this is why the Jumptaps of the world do not seem so threatened by online publishers taking more sales inhouse.