It promises to be a day full of great discussions and illuminating information — and best of all, we’ve still got free tickets to give away, so head over to the WIP site and register!

Just wanted to write that I’m in London next week for 3 interesting speaking events – all different, but all very interesting.

Monday sees me chairing a very distinguished panel at MoMo London, which consists of Neil Johnson from Teletext,
Dave Gwozdz from Mojiva (one of the event sponsors), Jason DaPonte from the BBC, David Gibbs from BSkyB and Hugh Griffiths, who is pursuing a portfolio career these days, but found fame and fortune at O2 and Microsoft. Our topic is “Where Mobile Meets Media” and in the best crowd-sourcing tradition, let me know if you have any questions you’d like me to pose to the panel. MoMo is already over-subscribed, so if you haven’t got a ticket, you’ll need to try bribery or start a secondary market on eBay.

On Wednesday, I have a slot at ME Magazine’s “Monetising Mobile”, which consists of a lightening series of 10 minute presentations, so no room to waffle. I’ll be speaking about ‘Commercial break – The reality of ad-funded apps’ – basically talking about the engine room of App development, which is how you make money.

As an aside, ME Magazine does a brilliant job (no, I’m not being sycophantic!) of balancing humour with mobile news and comment. It sets standards that other trade magazines need to aspire too, providing they wish to entertain, as well as inform. And making content fun to read has to be a winning strategy over traditional dry reportage.

On Thursday, we move on to The Open Mobile Summit, which has a seriously good line-up of speakers, including many old pals. I’m doing a panel on “Mobile advertising in 2011″, chaired by comScore’s excellent Mark Donovan. Back in the day when they were M:Metrics, I wrote a post calling them “The Elvis of Analysts” after a briefing with Mark and I think that’s still true all these years later.

So – a busy week and I hope to see some MobHappy readers at one of these events. If you are attending, please come and say Hi and tell me what you’re up to. Both Carlo and I love to meet readers and followers, so don’t hold back.

Second, I’ve also joined the Wireless Industry Partnership as their new community manager! I’ve known Caroline Lewko from WIP for a long time and have a tremendous amount of respect for her, and I’m honored that she asked me to join her team. I’ll be working to build and support WIP’s community of developers and helping to carry out WIP’s mission of making developers as successful as they can be. I’m excited about the opportunity here, and I’m glad to be doing it as a part of WIP!

To that end, there are some events I want to tell you about — and if you’re in the neighborhood, stop in and say hi:
- On Wednesday June 9, I’ll be at the WIPJam in Berlin, that’s a part of the IT-Profits show. We’re currently working on the agenda, and we’re looking for some input on what developers want to hear about. If you submit your ideas to us by May 9, you could get a free pass to the event (a EUR99 value)!
- A few days later, on June 12, I’ll be in London for the Vodafone Betavine Mobile Technology for Social Entrepreneurs event. It’s part of the Betavine Social Exchange efforts, focused on using mobile technology to solve challenges in developing nations.
- I won’t be there, but the rest of the WIP team will be in Singapore for CommunicAsia, where they’ll be holding another WIPJam on June 16.

I’d also like to thank all of our lovely MH readers for your attention and support, your insights, emails, comments, conversations and connections have been a huge help to me!

If you’d like a whopping 40% off and a day at the Emirates Stadium, mixing with a great line up of speakers and attendees, use the booking code “mobh4pp3″.

If you’re going, please come and say Hi. Meeting MobHappy readers is something I love and if there’s anything you’d like to share here, feel free to talk to me about it.

It’s been a while. As many of you know, I started work on an MBA in the fall, and this semester has been pretty brutal on the work front. Combined with a job/internship search in this economy (coupled with Vegas’ 10%+ unemployment rate), and time has been pretty short. In any case, I’m back with a few posts today.

Before that, a couple of observations:

First, despite not having posted to the site in about two months, PR spammers don’t seem to have noticed one bit, making it abundantly clear (or perhaps just reinforcing) that they probably don’t bother reading the site. If you’ve engaged a PR firm, you might want to check up on what they’re doing and make sure they’re devoting their time to activities that are worthwhile. If they’re not, or if you’re looking for PR representation in mobile, drop me a line and I’d be happy to recommend some excellent PR folks to you.

Second, I’ve been thinking about customer service a lot lately, for various reasons. Our good friend Helen summed things up nicely when she said (at the Forum Oxford conference today, I gather) “good marketing begins and ends with good product and service.” The point’s rather obvious when you think about it, but that doesn’t stop it from being missed by plenty of people. Another thing to consider is just how broad your customer service function is, and how far it extends into marketing.

Case in point: As I said, I’ve been job hunting, and it’s been pretty interesting to see how different companies treat applicants. In a few cases, my impression of a company as a consumer have been impacted by my interaction with them as an applicant. Perhaps the best example was a rejection I got from a company here in town. What’s interesting is that I came away from the rejection actually feeling better about the company and thinking more positively of it, because of the way it was handled.

There’s a company here in Vegas that I’d really like to work for, and I recently saw an opening for the type of role I want. The only hitch was that it was for a senior position, asking for more experience than I’ve got. So I emailed the recruiter, asking about the team and if there were more junior positions on it. She wrote me back (which was a good start on its own), and said I should apply anyway, and she’d look at my resume and give me some feedback. A week or so later, I get a voicemail, saying that as I’d thought, they were looking for somebody with more experience. That was disappointing (though not surprising), but she then proceeded to leave a really nice message with some useful advice for me, making it clear she’d actually looked over my materials and given them some consideration.

I’ve never felt so good about being rejected for a job, simply because of the way she handled it. This company is one that’s built around customer service, and it shows, even in this scenario. I’ve come away from the situation thinking even more highly about the company, as a consumer as well as a wannabe employee. And I’ve mentioned the experience to several people to boot. Anyway, the point is that when you’re thinking about service, don’t stop at the people you’re trying to sell to; consider every interaction with your company a customer service — and a marketing — opportunity.

- I’ve been using a neat little application called Xobni recently, which is a free app that helps you manage email so much easier. It works as an extension to Outlook and really saves time. Essentially, when you highlight an email in your Inbox (Xobni spelt backwards, geddit?) you can see lots of relevant stuff about the sender, like contact details, email thread history, (clickable links to) files exchanged, people you share in your network and more.

It saves lots of time and that’s valuable for free. It’s currently in Beta, but I have 12 invites if anyone wants one.

I’m not sure whether Xobni’s existence isn’t a terrible indictment of Microsoft or very clever of the folks from Redmond. On the one hand, shouldn’t they have thought of this type of tool? I mean one of the frustrations of Outlook is trying to find people’s phone numbers if it’s not in their sig – you have to click on Contacts, then search for the name again – yeuh. A horrible user experience.

The other view is that maybe one company shouldn’t even try to do everything, but launch the basic product and let others use it as a platform to perfect and customise it. Certainly, this is very Googlesque or Facebookian, but I wonder if it’s a small piece of evidence that Ray Ozzie is beginning to make some impact.

Anyone have a view on what happened here?

- Tomi Ahonen asked me to write a foreword to his book of Pearls, that I wrote about recently. Very flattering.

Incidentally, Tomi’s new eBook project (does he ever sleep?) is his Almanac, also on sale for Euro 9.99 . In his own words:

So if you felt the need to know what is the mobile phone penetration rate of Colombia, or what percentage of mobile phones accept memory cards, or what regions does the Orange telecoms operator carrier group cover, or how many mobile subscribers are there in Malaysia or how many camera-phones are in use worldwide, or has Turkey launched 3G or how many consumers are active users of MMS picture messaging or what is the average price of SMS text messaging or do they have MVNOs in Belgium or how many unique mobile phone users, rather than total subscriptions, there are in Russia, etc, this is your Almanac.

Whenever I need a stat, Tomi seems to have it, so I’d highly recommend this for any aspiring mobile fact junkie. And, no I don’t get commission or anything grubby.

- AdMob got into Fast Company’s Fast 50 – the only advertising company that wasn’t a creative agency to do so. W00t.

- Finally, another useful service is BackType. This allows you to create alerts (like Google) except it only tracks comments in blogs and news sites. This allows you to follow what people are saying about you and your company – which not even the mighty Goog tracks, or at least reports on. It’s certainly not a replacement for Google alerts, but it’s a very useful complement and one I’ve already used to good effect.

That’s all for this week from me. See you all in Barcelona!

I’m in San Mateo from 20th – 23rd January, Orlando for mPlanet (which looks like it’ll be great) from 24th to 28th January and of course, dear old Barcelona for Mobile World Congress from 15th to 19th February. I’ll probably be squeezing in a trip to London too in the meantime.

A great place to meet up in Barcelona will be the Mobile Monday Peer Awards, taking place on the Monday (d’oh) and organised by my pal Rudy De Waele. I have the honour to be on the jury for the third year running and I’m looking forward to what is always a great afternoon hearing from the cream of the world’s startups.

This year we’re having a pre-judging session too, which will make things run a little quicker and leave more time for networking. Watch out for more details soon.

On the subject of travel, I’ve also been playing round with TripIt, also available as a plugin on LinkedIn too. TripIt allows you to input your travel itinerary and make it available to people in your network. It also alerts you when people are going to be in the same place and you can arrange hook up.

I’ve used other similar services in the past, but I found that keeping them up to date was a hassle. What’s clever about TripIt is that when you get a confirmation email from your airline or hotel, you just forward it by email to plans@tripit.com and it automatically completes the details. This is a very cool feature.

If you’d like to join my network at LinkedIn or TripIt, invite me or email me at russell AT mobhappy DOT com.

Here’s a photo from the big day:

But failing that, if you fancy ganging together and buying him a fancy gift for all his hard (and unpaid) work he’s put into MobHappy over the years, please feel free to do so. Just send some cash to me via PayPal russell AT thebuckleys.net and I’ll do the rest. It doesn’t need to be very much to buy something very nice if lots of you chip in, so do it now, before you forget.

And if you really can’t afford it, just leave a nice comment below. We love to hear from you. Really.

Best of luck to Carlo and Alex on their big day!