What You (may have) Missed - Part 28

Another Monday, another month, and time for our usual look back over the mobile marketing highlights of the past few weeks.
This being March, the main event of the past few weeks was, of course, Mobile World Congress (MWC)  in Barcelona, which saw the entire mobile marketing industry – or what seemed like it at least – descend on that beautiful Catalan city for four days of briefings, demos, parties and foot-slogging its way round thousands of square metres of exhibition halls. It’s virtually impossible to sum up the show in a piece like this, but if you want to see our coverage, just use the Calendar function in the right hand side bar to see what we had to say. Our reports from MWC began on 9 February.
So what else was new? Not content with putting MWC together, Informa Telecoms & Media produced a report that painted a bright future for mobile social networking. The report concluded that concluded mobile social networking is now a global phenomenon, with expansion in all directions.
As if to prove Informa’s point, 3BILL, the mobile division of Symbios Group, revealed that it had bought  Profile Heaven, a UK social networking platform aimed at 15-24 year olds.
Bango launched Bango Analytics, aiming to deliver the mobile-focused web stats that the company believes are essential to understanding how people interact with mobile websites and which marketing campaigns are most effective.
Music services provider Shazam launched a Facebook application that enables Shazam users to access recent songs they have identified using Shazam’s mobile service on their personal Facebook profile, and share their favourite tracks with friends.
Mobile content portal Mippin teamed up  with blueapple.mobi, a direct-to-consumer mobile search and transcoding video delivery company, in order to add video functionality for its global community of users, delivering the millions of clips referenced in RSS feeds to mobile data users worldwide. 
And local mobile search provider mobilePeople introduced its liquid Advertising Suite, which aims to improve monetisation opportunities through the presentation of contextually and geographically relevant mobile advertising to mobile users.
Mobile TV company ROK Entertainment Group revealed the names of the first advertisers on its FreeBe TV service, including Cadbury Creme Egg, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment’s ‘24’ and Codemasters
Mobile agency Incentivated teamed up with 20:20 London to create a location-based campaign for Virgin 1 to promote its upcoming series ‘Terminators’, claiming that this is the first time such a campaign has been devised.
Voice-to-screen messaging company SpinVox announced the launch of SpinVox for BlackBerry, which enables Blackberry to receive their voicemail messages converted to text and delivered as an email direct to their device, allowing them to see who called and what they said, and then reply with just one click.
And professional network LinkedIn launched a beta mobile Internet version of its site for its 19 million members, promising a full release later in the spring. The beta is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, with additional languages to follow.
It was triples all round at mobile interaction management company SNAPin Software, which announced a global deal with Vodafone Group to deploy its SelfService software as part of a global initiative to increase customer satisfaction, and grow customer loyalty.
And another company with reason to smile was ad-funded mobile games company Greystripe. It revealed the results of a two-month US ad campaign for Yahoo!’s oneSearch mobile web portal. The campaign generated an average clickthrough rate of 4.2%, which, the company noted, is considerably higher than the average rates for mobile WAP-based ads of 1-2%.
Just a few of the highlights from another non-stop month in the world of mobile marketing. If you want to stay abreast of all the latest moves, you know where to come.

David Murphy
Editor