The Strategy Institute has just released details of the Mobile Media Investor Conference, taking place on 9th and 10th December 2008 in San Francisco.

It has a great line up of people from the media, marketing and venture worlds, including quite a few people I know, as it happens. Helen Keegan will also be pleased to note quite a few women on the agenda - 20% by my count, which is a great move in the right direction.

AdMob’s, Cheryl Dalrymple, is among those sharing her words of wisdom. Other people I know and are certainly worth listening to (in no particular order) are Louis Gump of The Weather Channel, Gene Keenan of Isobar, Vijay Chattha of VSC Consulting (AdMob’s US PR agency), Rich Wong of Accel, Nihal Mehta of Buzzd, Michael Becker of iLoop Mobile, Dorrian Porter of Mozes and Lubna Dajani of Mobile Monday NY. And that’s just the ones I know - add people I’ve met or heard speak like Sharon Wienbar of Scale Venture Partners and Matt Marshall of VentureBeat and you have a really great line up.

To paraphrase the late Victor Kiam, I liked the line up so much that we agreed to become an official media partner, which is a first for us. [I also just noticed that AdMob is some kind of sponsor in the interests of transparency]. What this actually means is that you can use this special code 108028-PR995 until 5th September to register before the Early Bird pricing kicks in and save yourself $500 off the regular price.

Enjoy.

I was lucky enough to be elected Global Chairman of the MMA a few months back, on top of my role as Chairman of EMEA. This is an unpaid and part time role, in case you wondered, and has to be squeezed into my day job, blogging, my involvement in Mobile Monday and any kind of leisure time I might foolishly aspire to.

Having said that, I take my MMA role very seriously and am thoroughly enjoying it - even the challenges and controversies that inevitably come with this kind of job.

Speaking of which….you might have seen that the MMA has just published in draft form its “European Bluetooth Guidelines” for public review. This has been greeted in some quarters, like The Register with accusations that the MMA is encouraging spam and many people have written to ask me what my stance is on this.

This is a complex question in reality, especially as I need to balance my own opinions and that of my Chairman role. But I’m happy to be lay out some of the thinking here and am very fortunate that I have the platform to do it.

Firstly, let me make absolutely clear that these guidelines are not the final document that we’ll be going with. The process within the MMA for this kind of work is that members who have a special interest in a topic get together and form a committee. This committee then debates the issues, develops a position and drafts a paper - in this case, these Guidelines - and this can take many months of hard work, thought and negotiation.

After that, the guidelines are published for the public to provide feedback on. That feedback is consolidated, considered by the committee and may or may not be incorporated into the final guidelines that are then published. The guidelines may then be reviewed and changed on an ongoing basis, as opinions change and as technology develops.

To be completely transparent, I haven’t seen these guidelines either before now, as I wasn’t part of the committee. I can’t possibly oversee or even be involved all the work the MMA does and neither do I need to be.

So, my first request to all of you is to read the guidelines and comment as you see fit - read and comment here. And you don’t need to be a member of the MMA in order to do that.

As a brief background to the controversy here, there are broadly two types of Bluetooth campaign - just as there are two types of mobile marketing. Firstly, there is Pull. This is where (in the case of Bluetooth) the consumer sees the opportunity to interact in another medium and actively and consciously decides to initiate a contact. As an example, you might go to the cinema, see a poster and as a result download via Bluetooth a trailer for a forthcoming film, or a ringtone for the soundtrack of the movie you’ve just seen.

This is generally regarded, and I absolutely agree, as being totally acceptable. The consumer can choose to interact with the promoter or not.

The second type is Push campaigns and this is where the fun begins. With say, an SMS push campaign, we can stipulate that the consumer must opt in to receive messages from the promoter and of course, have the ability to subsequently opt out. This is actually a legal requirement in Europe and some other markets.

However, with Bluetooth, the modus operandi is to send a message to random phones that have Bluetooth switched on, are in discoverable mode and are in range of the transmitter, asking if they would like to receive a marketing message. If you take an SMS analogy, this is like sending an SMS to someone, asking them if they would like to opt in to a campaign. It might be polite and courteous, but it would still be unsolicited and still regarded as spam, in my opinion.

Proponents of Bluetooth Push campaigns argue that if people don’t wish to be contacted, they can either switch their Bluetooth off, or make it undiscoverable (so they can still use, for example, Bluetooth headsets). Opponents (and I’m one) say that that’s like saying if you don’t want to get email spam, don’t buy a PC or don’t use your email client.

There’s some even murkier aspects to this.

Firstly, it’s generally not covered by legislation, unlike say unsolicited email or sms. So no one is breaking the law in any way.

Secondly, there’s the closed community aspect. As an example, you go to a Madonna gig at the O2 Centre. The organiser decides that they’re going to send everyone (with Bluetooth switched on) a personal message from Madge, inviting them to download a free ringtone from her latest album. Technically, this is unsolicited, but then it’s hard to see who on earth would be offended by this and perhaps then it’s acceptable? In any event, it’s a far cry from the scenario of walking down a High Street or in a shopping mall and getting a “Can we send you something?” message from all the shops in the area.

Other areas of concern is that many people wouldn’t know how to change the Bluetooth settings on their mobile. And ultimately this would be a great way to distribute viruses to mobiles, but maybe this is getting just a bit too paranoid.

My position as a member of the MMA and a marketer is that the MMA should recommend against the use of unsolicited Bluetooth messaging campaigns, no matter how politely those messages are phrased. I would make an exception to promotion to closed groups, such as the Madonna scenario I outlined above.

But it’s more complicated than that. As Chairman of the MMA, I want to keep the members who promote these campaigns within the Association, as it means that we can continue to have a dialogue and discussion - and make them see that it’s not a good way for a marketer to behave. An outright ban would almost certainly encourage them to set up their own organisation and I think that this would be a bad thing for the industry.

Ultimately, I also believe that these techniques will die anyway, whether because of a massive consumer backlash at some future point or because legislation will ban it. It’s only remotely acceptable today because relatively few messages are sent to relatively few people.

The Bluetooth push proponents are almost all reasonable people and some privately admit that they would rather not run these types of campaigns. But if their competitors all do, they have to service clients who demand it, whether or not those clients and suppliers are MMA members. This is an argument which I have some sympathy with.

So what’s the answer here? I believe that the Guidelines at this stage should reflect that Bluetooth push campaigns while legal, are controversial, could reflect poorly on brands that choose to promote themselves in this way and don’t represent best practice.

The MMA is a democratic and consultative organisation, so while I have a definite opinion, we must be led by the majority. Which is why it’s so important that as many people comment on the Guidelines as they stand, whether or not they agree with them. So please make your voice heard while it’s fresh in your mind by heading over there now by clicking here.

US fast-food player, Arby’s has just announced that it’s starting to experiment with mobile couponing with Cellfire.

This is evidence that mobile couponing is slowly starting to go mainstream, although these things always seem to take longer than you think. However, the couponing industry is massive and certainly mobile seems to be an obvious way for it to develop in the future.

Consider that in a relatively small market like the UK, around 8.2 Billion coupons are processed and redeemed each year and perhaps as many as 800 Billion issued in the first place (I’m using an average redemption percentage from 1999, so this might not be totally accurate). This would be dwarfed by the US, home of the Free Standing Insert.

The mobile couponing market is such a huge opportunity though, because if it works, it’ll attract FMCG companies to digital marketing with spends that we can only dream about so far. This is because (with a few notable exceptions) FMCG marketers haven’t done much with the web, mainly restricting themselves to a pretty website and having ticked that box, move onto something else.

However, couponing is an area they understand, that is measurable and accountable and that they already invest billions of dollars in every year. So what’s stopping them trampling all over each other in the rush to start mobile couponing?

The main issues come down to retail redemption. Companies like Arby’s are in control of their own destiny as they own the redemption process and the retail environment (or at least it’s a franchise). Therefore, they can install the technology needed to process mobile coupons, which can range from a high-tech approach (say, a bar code reader) to low tech - a notebook at the till for staff to record redemptions in.

With FMCG players, other retailers control the redemption environment, which complicates the process considerably. Not only do these retailers need to be persuaded that mobile coupons make sense, won’t interrupt the checkout flow and install the right technology, but (and this is the big area everyone forgets about) their staff need to be trained. There’s nothing worse that presenting a coupon (mobile or otherwise) to be met with a blank stare from the store clerk.

I’m sure FMCG couponing will happen eventually and it’ll be incredibly disruptive for all the existing players, unless they get in first. Consider NCH Clearing in the UK, with 85% market share of the coupon processing business. If mobile couponing takes off, it’s going to wreck their current business model. But whoever does succeed in the new world will benefit from a chunk of a billion dollar business, which is a prize worth the game.

When our LBS marketing startup, ZagMe, went bust back in 2001, I spent quite a lot of time analysing why. The tendency in these circumstances is to move on to the next thing, without really learning the lessons. However, I know that one of the issues was that it was way ahead of its time and I didn’t wish to forget all the learning. I also didn’t want a bunch of entrepreneurs making the same mistakes all over again. Not that it hasn’t stopped quite a few in the last 7 years, as it’s hard to learn from others’ mistakes.

ZagMe (if you don’t know) sent special offers to consumers’ mobiles by sms when they were out shopping in a couple of UK malls. We recruited 85,000 people and send about 1500 campaigns, so it was neither trivial nor unsuccessful, in many ways. But there were some issues with the model, one of which was the necessity of recruiting consumers as well as retailers and merchants. For a startup, that’s a little like fighting a war on two fronts and one of the attractions of AdMob all these years later was that we partner with others to get the traffic and focus on the tech and adsales.

In the White Paper I subsequently wrote about the lessons of plucky, pioneering ZagMe (email me for a free copy, if you haven’t read it), one of the better models I identified for this type of activity was for credit card companies:

Credit and credit card providers (both generic and store specific) would be advised to look at the potential of this channel too. Again, they already have relationships with their merchants and a remit to increase spending in those merchants with their products.

The ability, for instance, to target a store card owner with a specific offer in that store, provided the purchase is made with their card, is highly attractive. In addition, a credit-based purchase is more of an impulse-based one and that means goods and services with higher transaction values can be offered.

Fast forward to today and it seems Visa are trialling exactly the same idea, with participating brands like with brands including Macy’s, Marriott, Old Navy, Papa John’s Pizza and Circle K.

I hope they’ve read my White Paper, because it’ll save them a whole bunch of teething problems.

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is back at MobHappy - actually where it all started back in October 2005. Since then, the Carnival has thrived as a place to showcase the best writing about mobile in the blogosphere. It’s great that it’s still going in the same format that we originally envisaged and many, many thanks to Judy Breck of Golden Swamp for her tireless work behind the scenes making sure everything runs smoothly.

Anyway, let’s get started.

First up, we have a post from Chetan Sharma about his new book “Enterprise Mobility: Applications, Technologies and Strategies”. Chetan is obviously not one to rest on his laurels, as this is his second book this year after his excellent “Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market” - a must-read book for those interested in mobile marketing.

Chetan’s new book is based on some work he undertook for SAP with colleague, Sami Muneer and it’s an interesting and unusual insight into a corporate consulting project that normally remains hidden for confidentiality reasons. You can also download a free chapter, so head of over and get enlightened.

Apparently, the guys at Apple launched a new phone recently, in case you’ve been off-planet recently or hiding under a rock. With all the hype around the iPhone (and yes, it’s a great phone, no doubt about that), there are other mobiles out there and ones that sell in much greater quantities too. Tarek Abu-Esber reminded us of that this week, as he dug out his Nokia Series 60 to see what he missed while using the iPhone - which turned out to be quite a lot actually. Go and find out if he’s going back to his shiny iPhone after the experiment.

Still on the subject of the iPhone, Symbian’s David Wood is another veteran of the mobile scene and is also obviously somewhat puzzled and frustrated about all the hype. In particular, he takes issue with Michael Arrington’s recent

“I believe that Nokia and Symbian are irrelevant companies at this point.”

Sometimes, I wish Mike would just get off the fence and tell us what he’s really thinking. Anyway,read David’s refutation here and why rumours of irrelevancy are premature at the very least.

Gábor Török at Mobile Thoughts also weighs in on the side of sanity with a step-by-step critique of the original Forbes article that set David off. He concludes that the article was great - apart from all the points it made.

In case you’ve missed it, Google’s declared mobile strategy is threefold; 1. The mobile web is the platform. 2. Fast search is pivotal and 3. Location, location, location. I’d certainly agree with the first concept, the second makes sense if you believe that the mobile web is all about search (which is moot) and that location is an important element some of the time, if it is all about search. But who am am to question the strategy of the mighty Goog? Anyway, the boys and girls from Mountain View have been running furiously in this direction and their location and mapping product is pretty damn cool.

Veteran location marketer, Andrew Grill, tells us all about over at London Calling, including a demo video of LastMinute’s and Rummble’s new service using Google Gears. Very nifty.

Meanwhile, Michael Mace, at Mobile Opportunity has been looking at the market share situation in the SmartPhone sector. Find out who seems to be a surprisingly beneficiary of the success of the iPhone.

Martin Sauter at Wireless Moves has been pondering the past, present and future of good old GSM. Only a few years back, many would have bet against it surviving much longer, yet today it seems to be remarkable healthy. How long will this hold true and what are the likely scenarios going forward?

Tsahi Levent-Levi writes this week about VoIP and mobile, which many consider a no-brainer in the future. I mean, who wouldn’t want free phone calls, right? But there might be a cost that proves to be insurmountable in today’s world - and it’s not about carrier objections either.

James Cooper wrote a post about Twitter’s recent decision to stop sending sms to subscribers in the UK and a few other places on the grounds that it just costs too much. What can be done? James has some ideas.

Over at SmartMobs this week, our very own Judy Breck has been pointing out just how savvy the Barack Obama campaign team has been in their ongoing use of digital media - and mobile in this example. Compare and contrast with the other guy, who quite openly fesses up to not using a computer. As Edwards’ supporter, Tracey Russo, so eloquently pointed out recently:

“Try explaining Facebook , Google, and Twitter to your grandmother — and ask her to apply them to governing, and see if that works for you.”

.

You can see the hapless McCain aide try to defend his boss in the video here, including the rather reassuring fact that John McCain is aware of the internet. My guess is that Mark Soohoo will shortly be joining a long line of ex-McCain aides pretty soon.

Finally, I come to MobHappy’s own entry, elegantly penned by the Mobilists’ favourite newly-wed, Mr Carlo Longino. Carlo also writes about location, pointing out that location-awareness isn’t actually the Holy Grail that we might think. If you know where someone is, it’s often not very useful without knowing the context of why they’re there too.

So that’s it from me this week, apart from choosing my favourite post - always the hardest part of hosting the Carnival. Perhaps it’s a little self-indulgent, but I’m going for Carlo’s post. Lots of companies are investing billions in location right now, but it’s far more complex than many of them think - a little like starting a game of checkers with a 10 year old and finding yourself actually playing three-dimentional chess with a Grand Master.

Watch out for the next Carnival at Mobscure and have a good week.

Russell

One of my theories, going back some time now, is that audio and mobile would make much more natural partners than the rather contrived experience of mobile and video. Here’s something I wrote back in 2004 about it and I think it’s stood the test of time very well. Not only did I point out that conventional broadcasting wasn’t going to work (although shorter clips might - don’t forget that this was even before the launch of YouTube), but that the mobile might in fact presage the coming of a new golden age for radio and audio.

Several pieces of news arrived this week that seems to indicate that this was along the right lines.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt writes in his own inimitable style that despite billions of dollars invested so far, conventional mobile TV has achieved very limited traction, even in Japan and Korea - markets which are often cited as pointing to the future.

In fairness to the executives making these investments, I think it was something they probably had to try. Explaining why you’ve decided to ignore what your competitors are hyping as the next big thing is never going to be easy, so the temptation is to go with the flow and follow the market. This is a common paradigm and one that’s responsible for bazillions of lost dollars over the years.

Having said that, most conventional broadcasters have tried to sell mobile TV as a subscription model, which was always going to be ambitious. Its only hope, in my view, is to offer it as a free bundle with the operator’s package and that means that it’ll have to be ad-funded.

eMarketer has been looking at exactly that, this week, with several analysts getting out their crystal balls and doing some future gazing. The current view seems to be that the lack of take up has more to do with a poor user experience, which has certainly played a part, but I would argue that the price issue above is much more relevant. But now that the technology has been cracked, the forecast is a $3.7 billion market by 2011.

Hmmm….I don’t think so. User experience might be considerably better (video on the iPhone is certainly very acceptable, without being “great”, even in comparison to a PS2). But even when this hurdle is jumped, we’re still left with a fundamental problem of what the format is going to be. There’s a lot of choice, ranging from running ads alongside content to pre- and post-roll ads within the video. The trouble is, they don’t seem to work very well to date, certainly on a consistent basis. The mother of video sites is obviously YouTube and Google confesses quite openly that they have no effective advertising business model yet, despite having significant costs to cover with all that bandwidth.

Indeed, some are saying that video is always going to be a service, as opposed to a profit centre, which doesn’t bode well for that sector. This might be wrong and new formats may emerge, but if you think that Google must have poured a lot of resource into this area, with very little to show to date, there must be some some worry about the future.

The final little bit of news I noticed is that Pandora, the internet radio service/music recommendation engine, now available as an app from iTunes, will shortly be installed on over 1,000,000 iPhones. And since it only works in the US (according to the message on their website when I tried to access it from Germany), this is even more impressive.

OK, Pandora is free to download and we don’t know how many of these people actually go on to use it. But it does suggest pretty serious interest in audio.

Clearly, we don’t live in a binary world and there may be success stories in both mobile video and audio. But if I had to place a bet to pay off in the next 5 years, my money is on audio any time.

I wear so many hats these days that I sometimes even confuse myself.

Anyway, with my Global Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association hat on, we’ve just made the new mobile advertising guidelines available for public comment. So if you’re in this space, head on over there and have your say, even if it’s just to congratulate the committee on doing an excellent job.

Comment is open to everyone, even if you’re not a member of the MMA. But you have to ask yourself why you’re not if your company operates in mobile marketing.

Comments are accepted before 5th September.

Our pal, Ajit Jaokar, is organising the first Mobile Web Megatrends conference in The Valley on September 8th 2008 at the Pacific Film Archive Theatre at the University of California Berkeley. Tickets cost a very reasonable $195, but if you’d like to get in free, the first to leave a comment below gets a ticket with MobHappy’s complements.

There’s a great line up of speakers (sadly I can’t make it), including Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity, my erstwhile AdMob colleague, Mike Rowehl, Jason Spero from AdMob and of course, Ajit himself.

The team will be talking about everything from Android (although it looks like that’s being delayed again) to browsers, from location based services to mobile web advertising - both subjects close to my heart. Also a smattering of startups will be presenting too.

If you’re not quick enough to get a free ticket, register here.

Back in 2006, I wrote a post called “The Death of Intel” as the chip maker announced the sell-off of its Marvell Technology Group (which made chips for mobiles) in order to focus on “chips for personal computers and servers amid stiffer competition”.

The reason for my dramatic headline was that if mobile is the future, Intel’s curious decision doomed them in the long term.

It seems that two short years later, they’re certainly back in the game and banging the mobile drum. Sense has apparently prevailed.

They are still hedging their bets on what exactly is a mobile device - they include notebooks - but it seems that Nokia, as an example, is certainly in their sites as a potential customer.

Also interesting is their investment alongside Yahoo!, HP and three universities in a cloud computing project. There was a time when doing something like that without Microsoft as a partner would have looked a little odd.

Not so anymore though.

Beijing’s 70,000 taxis have had equipment installed in the run up to the Olympics, that enable the authorities to bug them, track them via GPS and disable them remotely. Apparently this is all in the name of driver safety, but then, that is the official line.

This kind of technology is often compared to Orwell’s 1984, but the reality is that we have far better technology in place than Orwell ever dreamed up. In Orwell’s landscape, it was possible to find private places that were unobserved, even though many of these actually proved not to be private at all. Such places are now rapidly disappearing, especially in urban areas, with the rise and rise of CCTV and other forms of security and monitoring.

China is an interesting case study for this kind of invasive technology. In democracies, we often believe the line that people, who do no wrong, have nothing to fear. While it’s possible that regime change would happen, it seems a pretty remote concept, even though I’m sure most Germans felt the same thing in the early 1930s. But imagine what Hitler and later, Stalin and his successors in East Germany, could have done if they could track every move their citizens made and every word they spoke, along with the ability to monitor patterns of words analysed by the powerful computing technology of today.

China, of course, is not a democracy and we don’t have to imagine regime change to understand that this kind of technology is potentially the most oppressive tool ever devised.

The sad thing for democratic society is that it’s politicians who are making the decisions to monitor the people (and often unaccountable private businesses) and there’s not even public debate, let alone any form of protest. I hope we don’t live to regret this. It’s like we’re standing mutely and happily by, watching our leaders build us our prisons of the future.