Fashion experts have glamorous catwalks in New York, Milan or Paris, worldwide jet set has many prestigious festivals cinema such as Cannes International Festival in France or Oscars ceremony in the US… and aficionados of mobile devices have the Mobile World Congress, also called 3GSM. Taking place in Barcelona, this is the biggest event for mobile fanatics from all around the world.

The 2010 Mobile World Congress has been held 15-18 February. For four days, we have experienced that this is the place for mobile leaders to collect, collaborate, coordinate business and experience the newest technologies. The event featured conferences, an exhibition with more than 1,300 companies displaying pioneering products and technology that will define the mobile future, an awards ceremony, industry seminars, and the world’s best venue for mobile industry networking.

The advent of Smartphones and the iPhone in particular, has incredibly changed the agencies’ and advertisers’ appetite for mobile advertising. But while everybody is unconditionally convinced that mobile phones supply a unique way of reaching the consumers, neither brands nor agencies seem truly happy with the performances offered by existing ad networks.

In that sense, and despite the gloomy situation of the market today, ADITIC made the difference in the mobile advertising jungle present at 3GSM: innovative, simple, we are able to offer services to developers, agencies and advertisers, and we enable clients to identify audiences and serve campaigns on the growing inventory of mobile operators and publishers.

Indeed ADITIC provides a wild range of simple and flexible tools to maximize revenues, just by registering and then integrating some lines of code; we offer innovative ad formats, as well as an easy integration and a high revenue share for Publishers and Developers. Thanks to our complete demographic data (classified by age, gender, city, phone brand, phone model, country, operator, etc…) we can supply a strong and performing device to all advertisers or agencies eager to develop mobile ad campaigns.

Our success during the exhibition has been unexpectedly huge and we would like to thank all the customers who visited us, whom trust leads us to expect a bright future for ADITIC. Therefore rendezvous is already taken for a new exciting experience in Barcelona next year!

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.