More than a year ago, PayPal Mobile launched to great fanfare. As I noted at the time, it seemed a bit odd that they’d focus on person-to-person and physical goods payments and ignore mobile content completely. Now, some 15 months later, PayPal Mobile remains pretty invisible — as does any PayPal offering geared towards mobile content.

Enter Google Checkout, that company’s attempt at a PayPal-alike. It garnered some small early success, but mostly by offering people $20 off a purchase, or other enticements, if they used it. However, Google Checkout now has a WAP interface, so it can be integrated into mobile sites. While the Checkout help pages say “Use Google Checkout for mobile to purchase items that will be delivered to your shipping address”, it would appear that it could just as easily support the sale and delivery of digital items.

Checkout is offering merchants free transaction processing through the end of the year, then its standard rates will be 20 cents plus 2% of the value of the transaction, which is sure to beat the revenue-sharing deals operators offer for premium SMS. Checkout still faces plenty of other hurdles to becoming widely accepted both in general and in mobile, but offering mobile content providers a new payment mechanism is a much smarter way to approach mobile than PayPal’s shown yet.

Well, answering my own question in my previous post of identifying an “honest-to-goodness nice LBS application” (the segue* only just occurred to me - honest!), this seems to be such a thing - a Spot the Bull competition for mobile operator, Orange in the UK.

Put together by bleeding edge new media agency, Poke, the promotion is really just a pretty cool way of giving away a bunch of tickets for the legendary Glasto. Or Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, as it likes to be known these days.

It works very simply:

Putting a GPS enabled cow in a field (it turned out to be a bull later so we could turn the name into a tabloid-friendly pun)

Showing its position live on the internet, along with webcams

Whoever guesses where the bull is going to be at a certain time of day will win tickets

You can enter here.

And if you’re still looking for a sinister twist - the promotion is run in consultation with The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Ahhhh.

*PS I learned in writing this that what I thought was written “segway” as in ”any smooth, uninterrupted transition from one thing to another” is actually written “segue”, though the pronunciation is still “seg-wey”. Much beloved by broadcasters (especially on the radio), it’s got nothing to do with that scooter thingy. Just thought you might be interested if you didn’t know.

I’m a long time fan of Location Based Services and it’s pretty hard to keep the faith - a bit like supporting a long struggling sports team, who despite occasional flashes of promise, consistently disappoint. And when an LBS service is launched, they’re often used for something dark and despicable like employee geofencing or services that I’m afraid just don’t deliver, like child tracking. (Before you write to me and say they do, please read the post I’ve linked to and respond with that in mind. A child tracking service tracks the phone, not the kid and it’s the phone that gets dumped if, horror of horrors, the child gets abducted.)

Here’s another story that displays mankind’s dark side and works in an LBS twist. Apparently, second hand car dealers and finance houses specialising in high risk loans are equipping cars with GPS. No, it’s not so their customers can find them to keep up with their loans. But to link them up with ignition killing devices, which are activated when the poor bozo falls behind with his payments. Then, the re-possessor can track them down using GPS, get the vehicle back and sell it to the next sucker.

Apparently, car repossessions in the US currently run at about 2% and if you factor out the middle market and above, it would suggest that it’s many times higher among the poorer community. And that’s a pretty large addressable market, so I guess we’ll see a lot more of these sorts of ideas.

A little depressing really, but it makes one appreciate the more wholesome LBS ideas like friend trackers, although even these have the potential to be abused, with jealous spouses tracking each other round the clock.

Anyone heard of a honest-to-goodness nice LBS application?

June 5th and 6th sees the annual MeM event hit Monte Carlo, with an excellent line up of 135 speakers and 100 or so exhibitors.

The highlight of the event is the annual Meffys Gala Awards, where a little outfit called AdMob has been nominated for the Most Innovative Business Model. Fingers crossed.

If you’re planning to be at the event or dinner, come and say hello or give me something to post about.

For the past several quarters, analysts have kept close watch on Nokia’s handset margins and their average selling prices, as they get squeezed by the huge amounts of low-cost devices the company sells in emerging markets. The company’s effectively managed these concerns thus far, thanks to its economies of scale and other factors. Still, higher margins is always a good thing — so how do you boost them?

Take a handset you’ve developed for emerging markets, swap out a few features, then release it as a “classic” voice-centric device for established, higher-income markets. Then watch A-list bloggers fawn all over it as the answer to their “yearning for a simple phone” (even though the US has been the dumping ground for plenty of simple Nokia devices for quite some time).

Pretty shrewd, really. Announced price of the Nokia 2630, a device for emerging markets that also happens to be Nokia’s thinnest: 90 euros. Cost of the 3109 classic, intended for higher-income markets (and which ditches the 2630’s camera, but adds USB connectivity and microSD memory): 140 euros. Perhaps in the excitement over such a simple, straightforward device, nobody will even notice that it offers two hours less talktime than the emerging-markets phone…

Martin Sauter’s got the 74th installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists over at his blog, so be sure and check it out.

Many of you have asked for my free White Paper on Location Based Marketing over the years and the feedback has been always very positive. It was primarily based on my experiences at ZagMe, running 1500 LBM campaigns to 85,000 opted-in users in the UK and it’s still the largest experiment (that I know about) into this whole area.

LBM is increasingly on the agenda, mainly as technology is catching up with marketers’ aspirations in this area, so it’s even more relevant today that when I wrote it three years ago.

I’ve recently revised and updated it, mainly by including some of my writings of the subject from MobHappy. So if you’d like a copy, drop me a line using the email address on the right of this page. If you’ve read it and pretty much everything else I’ve written here about LBM, there won’t be anything new for you. But if you haven’t seen it before, or only read the occasional post, or indeed have only just starting reading MobHappy, I think you’ll find it useful.

If you’re an entrepreneur with ambitions in LBM, please, please read it as it’ll save you very painful lessons and might just end up saving you an awful lot of money to boot.

The same applies for VCs considering an investment in this area. Seriously, don’t do it without at least considering what I have to say - you’ll thank me for it.

June 4th sees Demo Night come to Mobile Monday in Munich and we’ll be getting a big crowd if past events are anything to go by.

Drop me a line if your company would like to participate. You don’t need to be German or anything (it’s held in English anyway), but just have something capable of being demo’d (no vapourware), relevant to mobile and want exposure to some of the movers and shakers in mobile Germany.

We’ve also got a few slots for sponsorship, which (as a previous event sponsor) I can assure you provides a great ROI.