Those of you based in Germany, might want to head over to the Dusseldorf Mobile Monday on 18th June, where the theme is Mobile Developing.

There’s a great line up of speakers, including heavyweights from Nokia, Communology, Siemens, Vodafone and Sun Microsystems, followed by a round of furious networking, as usual.

Make sure you reserve your place at one of the world’s thriving MoMo networks.

I can’t make it, as I’ll be on a brief trip to The Bay Area. But I’m chairing Day 2 of VisionGain’s Mobile Content 2007 in London on 21st June - if you’re attending, come and say Hi. I might not be as bright eyed and bushy tailed as I’d like to be, following my quick trip to the States earlier in the week, but I’ll do my best.

There’s an article here about how new features on Japanese kids’ phones are causing worries in the airlines - as we all know the airlines are paranoid about how electronic stuff might interfere with planes’ navigation systems. And personally, I think a healthy level of paranoia is to be encouraged by airline management. I mean, the last thing we want is someone saying “Hell, it might cause us problems, but let’s just try it and see, shall we?”.

The issue is caused by a new generation of kids’ phones that are GPS equipped, so that they can be tracked and/or email their child’s location to parents. This itself isn’t a problem, but there’s a new safety feature built it, so that if you turn the phone off, it automatically turns back on, unless it’s disabled by the owner inputting a unique code.

The thinking is obviously that if the child gets abducted (every parents’ worst nightmare), the kidnapper will turn off the phone to avoid it being tracked. Then the phone will cunningly reactivate itself, enabling the phone to be tracked down and putting the baddie bang to rights.

Except that it’s not going to work that way, is it? The kidnapper will either ditch the phone altogether or simply remove the battery - which is what the airlines are doing if passengers have forgotten the disabling code in the original story.

So, the unfortunate fact is that, in the highly unusual and unfortunate case of a child being abducted, being in possession of a GPS mobile is sadly going to be pretty useless, unless the abductor is congenitally stupid and/or doesn’t consume any media at all. It’s the equivalent of a kidnapper in the old days using a landline to make a ransom demand and falling for the police request ”Won’t you just hang on for a little while [while we trace your location]…”

I’d love to be proved wrong on this, but I suspect that this isn’t an area where technology has any readily available solutions. Even if you were to insert a trackable RFID chip into very child itself, they’d be readily discoverable (and therefore removable) as the whole point of them is that they have to transmit a signal if they are to do their job.

My problem with this though, is that many parents are buying these devices and services in the mistaken belief that they’re somehow making their children safer. While the reality is that in the vast majority of cases, parents would be just as well advised as to make sure that their children carried a clean towel with them or something.

In the course of my varied career, much of it was spent in the world of Promotional Marketing, working in specialist agencies and for quite a while, as a supplier to them. One of the issues that’s consistently been a big problem is coupon malredemption and it’s being raised by the UK Institute of Sales Promotion again, in a fairly aggressive manner. Indeed, the Chairman is threatening to gatecrash the giant retailers’ shareholders’ meetings in an effort to bring the spotlight on the iniquity.

Malredemption is where a retailer takes a coupon issued by a manufacturer in part payment by a customer, but where that customer hasn’t actually purchased the correct product. So, a customer might present a coupon off Kelloggs Corn Flakes, yet stick to their normal preference of Weetabix.

Naturally, many customers are more than aware of this lack of policing of coupons and blatantly use it just to reduce their shopping bills.

The ISP reckons that this currently costs the UK industry £60 million ($118 million) every year. And the losses are compounded by the retailers’ collective refusal to try and solve the problem. While policing manually in the good old days may have been challenging, with contemporary technology, it ought to be a doddle - unless the applicable product is purchased, no deduction is made. The customer doesn’t even need to be advised and if they are cheeky enough to appeal, they’re clearly in the wrong and word will spread.

One of the competitive pressures that might also be applied soon is Shop, Scan, Save that I meant to write about when it was announced in April and assuming all is going to plan will launch in August in 17,000 independent and smaller shops throughout the UK. Customers sign up by texting ‘JOIN’ to 62111 and thereafter are sent a weekly text message with special offers.

One of the problems these sorts of ideas invariably run into is the operational nightmare of having every customer at the checkout frantically trying to find the right offers in the right sms and holding up the queue. However, with this concept, the customer is sent a membership barcode to their mobile and then every week an sms containing a list of special offers. The membership barcode is then scanned at the point of sale and any coupons that apply to their membership that week are deducted, provided the customer has purchased the applicable product. In other words, malredemption is suddenly impossible.

The Shop, Scan, Save platform is also a learning one. As it learns what your purchases are and what coupons you’re thus using, it can tailor future offers to your preferences.

Given the malredemption fix, the likes of Unilever, P&G, Nestle and Mars have all signed up for the launch. And here’s the rub. If the Shop, Scan, Save system actually works (and extensive successful trials have already happened), it’s not unlikely that these big brands will simply stop issuing coupons redeemable in the giant retailers’ stores. I mean if one channel works and another quite obviously doesn’t, brands might just vote with their feet.

All this means that the mobile phone might result in the ISP Chairman not having to picket shareholders’ meetings for very much longer.

One of the pieces of wisdom currently flowing around the industry is that it’s incredibly hard to get users to download mobile applications.

It’s a refrain I hear from everyone from seasoned investors to rueful executives of companies who have staked their all on a compelling mobile app - after all while most users don’t download apps, it’s going to be different with their app, right?

There’s exceptions to every rule obviously. Mobile games are downloadable applications and that’s surely a thriving business. But the Devil’s Advocate would argue that in the user’s mind, they’re actually downloading a “game”, not an “application”.

Many would argue that in this respect, the mobile is simply following the PC, where applications have been equally difficult. Exceptions are P2P and IM, but outside this relative niche, it’s hard to think of any runaway successes.

So I have a few questions for you, which I’ll cross post at the ForumOxford, to get some of the more vociferous folks chattering over the weekend:

1. Do you agree that mobile apps so far have been a bit a dud?

2. If you do agree, why? Is it because the apps themselves are simply not compelling enough? Are good ones just too hard to explain in marketing terms?

3. Are the functions being undertaken by apps going to migrate to the mobile web, as it becomes cheaper, faster and ever more usable?

Quite a wide-ranging subject, but I would be fascinated by the collective thoughts of MobHappy readers.

I’d written earlier about Vodafone UK’s new data tariffs, which appear to be a marginal improvement over their previous efforts, though they are a small step in the right direction. The new charges went into effect this week, as well as some other “improvements” to the mobile web experience for Vodafone users.

Those improvements entail breaking sites that use mobile browsers’ user agents to serve the proper pages by using a transcoder that appears like a PC browser to sites, and also apparently adding a Vodafone header and footer to each page, giving them some real estate to serve advertising.

The solution thus far appears to be whitelisting of certain sites — which isn’t just resource-intensive for Vodafone, but ridiculous from the perspective of web site owners, who now essentially need to register their work with Vodafone (or Bango) for it to work properly. While this event is probably best explained by some level of incompetence, rather than malice, it’s hard to swallow given the efforts Vodafone, or at least some people within it, make to be seen as supporters of the mobile web. This episode makes it look as if Vodafone’s support of the mobile web extends to supporting it only on its own terms, and removing control over the mobile web experience from users and content providers. Meanwhile, we’ll assume that sites within Vodafone’s live! portal still work just fine — making it even harder to view this as some sort of soft walled garden.

On a related note, according to The Guardian, Vodafone’s transcoder “tends to strip out adverts”, though an exec insists this is just part of the attempt to “present content from the internet as quickly as possible”. Haven’t we been through this before?

Also, it’s worth mentioning this isn’t the first time Vodafone’s had a problem with their interference in the mobile web, as their overzealous porn filtering blocked plenty of innocent sites a few years ago.

AdMob picked up the winner of The Innovative Business Model Award in the Meffys last night in Monte Carlo, fighting off tough competition from 3 UK, Amobee, Muzicall and MX Telecom.

My acceptance speech was intentionally short, consisting of “Thank you” mainly as a protest against a previous speaker (who shall remain nameless) who insisted on reading a prepared speech plugging the product that had just won an award. He doggedly continued despite the slow hand clapping, jeers and get-him-off’s that slowly erupted.

I mean, there’s a time and place for everything and this crowd wanted to finish and get partying.

Of course, the thank you applied to all the publishers, advertisers and AdMobians, without which all this wouldn’t have been possible, my Mum and …..

Seriously though, it was great to win an award and if you had anything to do with the voting, thanks very much indeed.

And, does anyone know where all the taxis of Monte Carlo are hiding? I haven’t seen one.

For our readers in the US, in about an hour at 8pm EST, the Travel Channel is going to broadcast “Most Haunted Live”, a “paranormal investigation” show from the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. It will be on for 7 straight hours, and will feature interactive mobile features, including a Ghost Detector users can download — created by our good friends at Future Platforms.

So Travel Channel, 8pm EST to 3am, tune in and download. Face it, if you catch this post in time, you didn’t have anything going on tonight anyway