Mike at TechDirt writes about a great new service from Virgin in Australia. But like much of what Virgin does, it seems to have more than an eye on PR, than real practical uptake.

If you’ve ever drunk-dialed an ex-partner an 2.00 in the morning and tried to re-hash the break up or - worse - rekindle a flame, this is for you. You can tell Virgin mobile to blacklist certain numbers on your phone during night time hours only.

Of course, it doesn’t help with that lunchtime drink habit or if you stumble across one of the last few pay phones and still need to be heard….

Zed are launching an Advent Calender for mobile phones, which a pretty cool innovation. For £12 ($22.80) you get a different piece of content every day, including ringtones, logos, jokes or trivia every day.

You can order the content depending on your mobile - colour and poly tones at one end, to black and white and mono at the other.

However, if you fall into the latter category, you should save your money and put it towards a new handset.

Story source: Net Imperative

I spotted an announcement about UKís BTís Callwise on My Symbian, which seems to be a very soft launch of a very big idea. Why the low key approach I wonder?

Callwise allows you to download an application onto your Symbian mobile phone. Then, using your normal address book, call a number abroad from any network and save yourself up to 95% of the call charge. For instance, a 6 minute call on Vodafone to the US costs an iniquitous £7.74 ($14.72) and only 30p ($0.57) with Callwise. O2 on Australia costs £5.94 ($11.30) and similarly 30p with Callwise.

Also cool is that youíre not signing an open ended cheque to your operator when you make a call. Before the call is put through, youíre told the per minute tariff and get a total call charge at the end.

While cheap mobile calls abroad have been around for ages, this is far easier to use as the application does it for you. All you need do, is select the contact from your address book that you want to call. Thus, the application mimics standard mobile usage.

Also pretty cool is the facility to send the application by SMS or Bluetooth to colleagues and friends. A nice viral element.

I think that this is what my fellow collaborator on other projects, Nick Hancock, has been working on with BT and has been characteristically cagey about. Iíll see if he can speak about it next time we touch base for a little Q & A session.

But this little application could make a significant impact on one of the huge margin profit centres that the operators have ñ the rip off tariffs they charge for phoning abroad.

UPDATE: It was Nick. This is his website.

There’s an interesting article on Mobile Marketing by David Fuller at Commpiled.com. Despite the problems of the industry, he claims, 2005 is poised to be the year that Mobile Marketing finally takes off. This is backed by Gartner - but don’t forget they want to sell reports and saying it won’t take off, won’t sell any.

I agree with his analysis of why that it’s been slow to get traction within the marketing community; that suppliers focus on technology not marketing, that things always take longer than you think, and that it tends to be seen as a stand alone discipline.

I’d add a few more; that marketers, contrary to popular opinion tend to be risk averse and conservative. And that no bona fide discipline in the agency world (advertising, Interactive, Direct Marketing, Promotional Marketing) has claimed it as its own and given it that credibility. And that the advertising world especially is scared shitless about its accountability.

Mobile Marketing can only come into its own when a client can brief his agency and have mobile included as part of the response. Having specialist mobile marketing companies approach clients direct is simply confusing and muddying the water.

The disciple that should be taking this on is either Promotional Marketing, Direct Marketing or both. They have the understanding of how to create customer dialogue that is still lacking in so many ad agencies, who are wedded to one way lectures via dying media. And they live with accountability as a fact of life.

I certainly share David’s hope that 2005 will be the year. But I’ve been trying to believe that every year for the last 5 and I fear we’re far from mainstream yet.

Apart from a competition fulfilment channel for sales promotion - a commodity driven, price sensitive and ultimately rather boring sector to be involved with - Mobile Marketing has some time in the waiting room yet.

MX Telecom announced last week that they have launched a neat concept for the UK’s 3G phone networks (Vodafone, 3 and Orange).

Users can call a Premium Rate or non-premium short code number and access streaming video at the pre-determined charge, that can be pre-recorded or live. Streaming allegedly gets round DRM issues (I’m sure it’s not that hard to hack a way of recording it).

The presser release is here.

Now all they need is some content people actually want to view.

The “adult” industry is the obvious one - or steaming video. Viewing existing porn or chat partners.

I was musing the other day that the phone chat industry might have to have a significant shake up. The great thing about phones is that the person you’re paying to talk to can be ….err shall I say, not necessarily to your taste in the looks department. But in the punter’s mind, they’re gorgeous hunks/babes.

But with video, all is revealed.

It’s the reverse of the old silent movie issue when it transferred to talkies. Many silent stars had awful voices and never made the cross over. With telephone porn, it’ll be many of the phone stars have great voices, but but won’t make the crossover.

Russell Beattie adds his voice to the concept of an iPhone from Apple within the next 18 months. I guess he won’t be taking me up on my $100 dollar bet I issued on the same idea in August.

Even if Apple isn’t going down this track of their own handset (probably with Motorola) and launching a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), they should be.

And don’t forget; two Russells don’t make it right. But it don’t make us wrong, either.

Sorry about that, but it had to be written.

Gizmo reports on a group text application, called Text Mobs. Users sign up for groups of their choice (private, secret or public) and get SMS’d all messages sent to that group.

It’s currently offered as a free, web-based service by MIT’s Computing Culture Group, who developed it.

It’s a similar concept to the thriving Upoc, based in New York.

Examples of services using this might be, celebrity spotting, gossip, news or just three or four friends having a group chat.

Hugh “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards” Macleod writes a fine blog over at Gaping Void - a kind of post-modern riff on marketing and what comes next now that advertising is dead (hadn’t you heard?).

He just came up with this rather fascinating idea that I’ve been struggling to put coherently for a while:

Ask me to name what I think is the most brilliant piece of new advertising I’ve come across in the last 5 years.

And he’s probably doing it at less than 1% of the price the conventional agencies are used to charging.

He has a point you know. Scoble is probably responsible for more people changing their minds about how they see Microsoft than all their advertising this year. Or at least considering changing their minds

His blog communicates that Microsoft isn’t some faceless giant who doesn’t give a fuck about its customers. It’s a company full of people who are passionate about trying to make better products and cool services for customers they respect.

They pay Scoble less than $100,000 a year (he’s blogged about that) and he does a day job too. If you had a $100,000 total marketing budget, you couldn’t even get an advertising agency to buy you lunch, let alone work with you.

I know we’ve seen a lot of next BIG THINGS in the last few years. But I really think that blogging is a genuinely big thing. Not just because it empowers ordinary people to become journalists. But because it’s potentially a very powerful marketing tool, if used properly.

A final blogging thought from George Orwell - yes the Animal Farm/1984 chappie:

“For plugging the hole in history, the blog is the ideal form…especially at a time when organised lyings exists on a scale never before known.”

Well actually, he wrote “pamphleting” but blogs are the new pamphlets and I’m sure that the great man would approve the change.

Nokia and the retailer, Boots* have announced the launch of Pixology’s PhonePrint technology in the UK. This allows you send your photos taken on your camera phone to Boots, over the mobile network.

They then print them for you and SMS you when they’re ready to collect.

I’m not sure how they work out which branch you want to collect them from, but I’m sure there’s a way.

This is quite cool, but I’m not entirely sure people use camera phones like this. I think they tend to use the phone as a kind of digital photo album.

Personally, I take loads of photos which I then IR to my laptop and email to people or just put them on Flickr. It never occurs to me to print them - that’s old tech.

No info on cost either, which is always pretty important.

Story Source: DM Europe.

* Boots is a UK high street retailer of errr….lots of things really. Half the problems they are currently having is that you can’t really say what they do. They started out as a Chemist/pharmacy back in the mists of time. But expanded into all kinds of related and unrelated areas, including photography, eye surgery and even a new line of sex toys. That’ll attract the family trade then.

Finally….a mainstream, major advertising campaign using MMS. Don’t get too excited though - the advertiser is an operator. As reported on Adverblog, Italian mobile operator Tim is running the campaign

to discover new “movie talents”. The competition is divided in two parts: users can text a 20 seconds video with an interpretation of their favourite movie character, getting the chance to win the participation in a movie. The other option is to send a picture, in this case the best one will win a photographic book by Claudio Porcarelli.

Adverblog also reported earlier a major deal between Ericsson and marketing agency, Proximity to promote mobile marketing worldwide.

I hope that Mat Mildenhall, Chief Operating Officer of Proximity Worldwide has read my free White Paper on the subject. It could save them a lot of learning Drop me an email if you’d like a copy. russell at mobhappy dot com.