Apple is set to announce that it has acquired Quattro Wireless for $275 million, several sources confirmed.

With their 100 000 apps and the rising importance of mobile business revenue this makes obvious sense. It follows closely Google’s recent acquisition of AdMob the prize of the fledgling mobile advertising industry a Quattro competitor, which Apple had also made a bid to acquire.

Both ad networks were aimed at the fast-growing market to advertise on smartphones, such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android devices and the plethora of other and new platforms (read Bada).

Waltham, Mass.-based Quattro has raised close to $30 million from two main venture investors–Highland Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners. Founded several years ago, its clients include Ford, Disney and the National Football League.

Competitor mobile networks in the space are still numerous, despite these big acquisitions, such as Millennial Media and Jumptap, both of which are now clearly in play for acquisition.

by Mark Jaffe   www.mobilemandala.com

There was a lot of passionate response to the post a few weeks ago “Will Mobile Phones Replace In-Store Retail Salespeople”. Even more reason that these three announcements this week caught my eye:

■  The Aberdeen Group published a report that stated in 2008, the total of digital signage market revenue stood at $766 million and is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2014, growing at a healthy CAGR of 20%.
■  The London Daily Mirror reported according to unnamed sources that Nokia is planning to begin rolling out embedded NFC (near field communications) kits into its entire line of Symbian phones beginning Q3, 2010. The Finnish giant already has NFC in selected handsets, such as the 6216 Classic.
■  Malaysian manufacturer Fonelabs will produce two million low cost (under $100) NFC enabled phones in 2010
What do these three items have to do with retail? First, just as a refresher, Near Field Communication (NFC) is “a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance.” In other words, if you have an NFC enabled phone and opt-in, your mobile phone will be able to communicate with another proximate electronic device automatically.

by Mark Jaffe

Mobile phones have to be one of the best on the spot, at the moment, information retrieval resources of all time.  How many times have you seen disagreements settled immediately, courtesy of a quick iPhone web research query?  Well, it looks like some companies are ready to capitalize upon our penchant for instant research about things that interest us.

Let’s flash back to a recent industry panel where a senior Best Buy executive said “The right information at the point of impulse increases desired consumer’s behavior, sales, profits and customer satisfaction.” That sure sounds like a description of one of Best Buy’s best in-store salespeople helping out customers standing next to the latest electronic gizmo in one of their stores. 

BeMob’s and Tekora, ground breaking start ups in the mobile internet sector have decided to sell their social networking activities so as to concentrate on their main activities. They decided to regroup their social networks as a bundle but can be sold seperately if need be

Overview of the the social networks for sale :
The leading social network in France and growing world wide :

• 2 Mobile micro blogging services including : text, photos, videos, podcast…
• Dating service, largest mobile site directory in the world and customizable personal start page
• Optimized as a webapp on all types of mobile devices
• 10 millions de pages views per month (50% in France)
• 5 K euros of ad revenue monthly (non optimized)
• White label platform optimized for brands who wish to create a mobile social networking tool
• Growth obtained purely via viral means

Included in sale :

• Source code properly documented
• Tech hand over
• Chandover of contracts and ad revenue

Documentation:
If you are interested please feel free to download the PDF document which goes more in depth.
Presentation : bundle_igloo-MobitypeSales-proposal.pdf
Portfolio : 20091130_bundle_portfolio

Contact : bundle@texom.com

www.asiamobileawards.com

InMobi is nominated for GSMA Asia Mobile Awards 2009, which will be presented at the forthcoming Mobile Asia Congress, Asia’s leading mobile communications event that is set to take place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong, November 18th & 19th. InMobi was nominated in the category of Best Mobile Advertising & Marketing.

The aim of the Best Mobile Advertising or Marketing award is to recognize Asian leadership, and showcase ‘hot’ campaigns that are driving the emergence of this new sector.

Nominees for the Asia Mobile Awards are

http://www.admob.com/google

Yes finally it has happened… we have speculated for years exactly when would Google munch AdMob. I guess that they held out till the right time… the $750 million time.

I am personally very excited to see this finally happening. Having worked with AdMob for several years it is great to see a good idea and great execution paying off in the mobile arena. AdMob have really set up a great business and are pleasant to work with. So for me it is a great news to see them joining with Google who has really made forays into the mobile sphere with Android over the past year or two.

The T-Mobile ad :

The T-Mobile inspired Facebook fueled impromptu event :

This was a very interesting event for us mobile internet fanatics because many of the people where notified by SMS. This type of mass movement is not new.. many similar type of events have happened in political happenings in Asia for example. But this one is unique in that it mimics an ad.. a mobile ad at that.

Brian Prows’ Interview of Mobile Discovery’s : David Miller

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Today’s marketers are searching for new, innovative methods to increase marketing campaign results, whether for lead generation, branding effectiveness, events and direct sales. By combining multiple media channels, including mobile, marketers and advertisers can boost their overall effectiveness substantially.

In our Web 2.0 age, advertisers are finding ways to generate impact through integration of traditional off-line media, such as print, broadcast, billboards and email, with social media, mobile and other technologies. This increases the possibility of marketing campaigns going viral.

David H. Miller, President and CEO of MobileDiscovery, an integrated multi-channel advertising company, shares his views in this podcast about multimedia advertising, product branding, FaceBook, MySpace and other social media channels, media tags and more.

David explains how to integrate mobile applications with advertising and discusses how the Mobile Discovery platform has been successfully used for QVC, U.S.A Today and other clients.

Moreover, he outlines Mobile Discovery’s applications and campaigns with FaceBook, MySpace and other social media sites, portals and RSS feeds.

Commenting on “channel shifting” (enabling consumers to move among PC’s, mobile phones and other communication channels), along with “time shifting” (consumers using media content at their own leisure), David outlines a vision of the future that’s compelling and fascinating, including the embedding of mobile devices in the human body!

Listen to this futuristic podcast with David Miller.

For further information, see the links below:

Implementing a Multi-Channel Mobile Advertising Platform (Mobile Advertising Alliance)

For further reading, click here.

For other articles and interviews by Brain Prows please visit MobileBeyond

Excellent article from our friend at :

If the big story in the mobile web in 2008 was the growth of CPC and CPM based mobile advertising through platforms like admob the NEXT BIG THING for 2009 is looking likely to be the emergence of critical mass in mobile internet affiliate marketing or CPA (cost per action) based advertising.

Affiliate marketing is well established on the PC web with a number of big networks like Xanox, Trade Doubler, Affiliate Window and Buy.at linking publishers to thousands of merchant programmes across sectors including Travel, Electronics, Finance and so on.

Believe it or not the mobile web has had affiliate programmes since the early days of wap and mobile internet. For example, there were several adult services and personalisation content providers who developed affiliate programmes in the early 2000’s.

However, with the growth in usage of the mobile internet, mobile affiliate marketing is now really beginning to develop. As the mobile payments and services company Bango have noted, mobile web is now becoming the key sales channel for mobile content and services, whereas previously a lot of transactions and customer acquisitions were driven off PC web-based channels.

Also the emergence of new types of mobile content and services such as mobile casino games is also driving new growth.

Here are some examples of mobile affiliate marketing programmes currently available.

Mobile affiliate platforms

A couple of companies have started to emerge to provide mobile focused affiliate aggregators similar to Trade Doubler and others on the PC web.

MobPartner is probably the most advanced mobile web affiliate platform out there with links into a range of merchants including Jamster, Wild Jack Mobile Casino and Nexva (mobile games). Mobpartner provide all the mobile web XHTML store-fronts and links and tracking and manage payment settlments with the various merchants. If you are looking to start off in mobile affiliate marketing then signing up to mobpartner is the first place you should start.

Belboon is a German affiliate platform that mainly serves the PC web but it is now moving into mobile web affiliate marketing services. At the moment they have a couple of mobile web services available including Jamster but unfortunately only in the German language and market at the moment.

Media Plazza

Casino

The emergence of mobile casino applications is a major driver of the current wave of growth in mobile affiliate marketing. The mobile marketing agency Welovemobile have written an excellent blog post about this which is worth a read. Here are some of the casino mobile affiliate services currently available:

Ladyluck’s is run by the mobile games specialist Probablity Plc and they have an affiliate programme which looks to be one of the best of the bunch as it is backed by a really solid company.

Others include:

Euro partners Casino Max – http://adv.europartners.com/index.php?Casinomax

Gold mobile casino – http://www.incomeaccess.com/registration.asp?mid=32

Wild Jack/ Brightshare – http://www.brightshare.com/index.php?bTag=bsaff3118_6

Gobetya – http://www.gobetya.com/

Adult

There are a number of adult affiliate programmes out there. It is worth noting that you need to be careful adding this sort of content to your mobile site even as a link as it risks getting caught in content filters. Also mobile ad networks like admob often state in the terms and conditions that you can’t run them alongside adult content or adult links. However, if you are interested in running this kind of affiliate service then here are a couple of examples of available programmes – warning some of these links are not worksafe:

Sex Goes Mobile – https://www.sexgoesmobile.com/

Xobile – Not Work Safe – http://www.xobile.com/pc/webmaster.cfm?

Sexobile – Not Work Safe – http://www.sexobile.com/web/?__redir=1

Ringtones, games and personalisation content

Playfon – http://www.playfon.com/ have a fantastic affiliate programme for ringtones, games, video and screensaver content – they pay out monthly via paypal – recommended

The major aggregators like Jamster, Celldorado and co. all run web based affiliate services through the likes of Xanox and there are no doubt a few of them moving to offer mobile web extensions of these. This is something we are currently investigating – if you know any that do offer mobile web affiliate services let us know in the comments!

So that’s the current state of play. What will really help to grow this market is when new sectors like retail, travel and finance start to open up on the mobile web. There are already some signs of this with companies like Digby emerging (provides mobile commerce stores on Blackberry).

If you know any other mobile web affiliate programmes please let us know in the comments – we will be updating this list on an ongoing basis.

Update 1: Arran from the mobility.mobi forum pinged me about his new forum Pocket Affiliates, which is dedicated to mobile affiliate marketing – a great resource and well worth checking out.

Dynamic Logic, a leading marketing research company with expertise in measuring advertising and marketing effectiveness, has released new research which indicates that mobile advertising can be “an effective medium for raising brand metrics throughout the purchase funnel.”

“”

Dynamic Logic completed over 30 AdIndex for Mobile studies. These are survey-based research that are conducted in a live, in-market environment, and ran simultaneously with specific mobile advertising campaigns. This approach is used in order to isolate the impact of the mobile ads on key brand metrics. (read more about AdIndex for Mobile).

When comparing people that have been exposed to a mobile ad with those who have not been exposed, the results indicate that mobile advertising can be very effective for brand building purposes. For example, an observed increase in ad awareness of over 29% indicates that these campaigns “generally cut through and grab the users attention”. An increase in Brand favorability of over 5% shows that mobile ads have the capability to influence people’s attitudes.

“”

The study was quite broad-based, and it included information from brands in many industries. These industries included Alcohol, Automotive, Consumer Electronics, CPG, Entertainment, Financial Services, Retail, Telecom, and Travel.

Read the full release on the Dynamic Logic site.