"Mobile is a personal experience, and people are using it in a way that reflects the way they want to use content," says John Zehr, SVP and GM, ESPN Mobile in his keynote this morning. Consumers are beginning to spend more for mobile access than they do for home Internet access, Zehr says. Whereas the PC was a work productivity tool in the beginning that was transformed by the Internet into an entertainment device. Mobile started off as a communications device that is morphing into an entertainment device that everyone has. "You have people who are using this tool …

MediaPost's Steve Smith said in his introduction that the term "Year of Mobile" has been so oft used that when it arrives we'll all be embarrassed to say it. But maybe it's here. One quarter of Facebook traffic comes from handsets, and Twitter has said that mobile is key to its business plan in the future. Smartphone penetration at 20-25 percent and growing rapidly. But mobile is not just an extension of the Web. It's a one-to-one medium that takes place in real time. So this may not be the year of mobile -- oh, but it is, isn't …

Microsoft and Google are seeing more CPG, auto and retail companies join travel in mobile advertising. I have heard in the past few months from many sources the search engines are seeing a major uptick in mobile advertising. (Though a little lift from nothing can be considered major.) As we look at search on the desktop and identifying intent to match relevancy in the search, will the phone's core search functions reside in applications rather than the engine? Well, if you ask Google's Marc Freed-Finnegan and Bing's Doug McMillen, who sat next to each other by the way, surprise, said …

Welcome to OMMA Mobile in Los Angeles. It appears that post-click activity coming from mobile search is much higher compared with that on the PC. A great way to start the morning. When asked what are the correct metrics, a panel member said the industry don't need to reinvent the wheel, but rather use the established guidelines for branding and performance that is used on the PC. It needs to be easy for agencies to manage or risk lengthening the road to adoption. If you're starting to invest dollars the measurement is still return on investment. The metric also should …

I'd like to extend a special thanks to Sarah Fay for delivering an inspiring and heartfelt keynote to open OMMA magazine's 2009 Online All Star Awards. Fay, an alum, and former CEO of Aegis Media North America, schlepped down from Boston just to make the appearance, and had planned to kick off her talk with a brief video introduction courtesy of YouTube. Unfortunately, the MediaPost team bungled it, and were not able to integrate the video, but here's the link to it -- the "Social Media Revolution" video -- for those of you who haven't seen it, or didn't …

Near field communications technology--have you heard of it? NFC is a short range radio frequency (RF) technology that some companies are using to develop mobile coupon applications, according to Phuc Truong, managing director, U.S. mobile marketing, Mobext, during a mobile coupons session at OMMA Global New York. And while he says the technology should make integration easier, it will present new challenges for companies trying to install the platform.

It's the last session at OMMA Global New York and I'm sitting listening to a panel of intelligent marketers talking about mobile coupons. The session: "Flip 'N Save: What Is Keeping Brands From Mobile Coupons." If you want to save money on products at the market, you clip coupons. It's that easy. But how many times have you clipped coupons from the newspaper and forgot them on the kitchen table when you walked out the door? Consumers want to save money. But are they ready to do it through mobile coupons? Panelist say they are ready. It's the marketers who …

After Danny Sullivan and John Battelle mentioned Google on stage, the discussion inevitably turned to privacy. An audience member wanted to know if Google wasn’t especially vulnerable to criticism because of the vast amount of data about consumers -- search queries, email addresses, etc. -- the company had amassed. Sullivan and Battelle basically responded that it wasn’t fair to single Google out when other players -- like Internet service providers -- had far more data about people’s online activity. The speakers appeared to agree that they didn’t recall “people picking up the torches” about ISPs and privacy. In …

OMMA Global is winding down just as things are starting to heat up! Justin Siegel, co-founder and CEO of mobile social network MocoSpace, is waxing skeptical on foursquare, a mobile social networking application that's presently generating some serious buzz. Foursquare was started by Dennis Crowley -- the same guys who co-founded Dodgeball, a similar service that let users share their location with friends via text messages. Google bought Dodgeball in mid-2005, then discontinued it at the beginning of this year. "Dodgeball to dust ball," says Siegel, who speculates that foursquare will follow a similar trajectory. "They both had a lot …

Well, sort of. Actually, Ovation TV, the performing arts oriented cable and satellite TV network, just announced a deal giving Google TV Ads access to its TV advertising inventory. Google TV Ads, which already has local TV advertising deals via EchoStar's DISH Network, also has ad inventory deals with a few national cable networks, including some of NBC Universal's digital tier channels, and Hallmark. The major networks, so far, have been loath to work with Google's online advertising sales model.