At Media Week, I wrote about the amazing success of Pizza Hut’s relatively new iPhone App, that has already generated over $1 million in pizza sales. mCommerce has been a long time coming, but it’s arriving at last.

Also on the subject of iPhone Apps (is there a hotter subject in mobile or marketing right now?) I wrote about Virgin Atlantic’s new App that helps people overcome their fear of flying.

Other subjects that caught my eye recently were Revolution’s coverage of a new AdMob campaign for STA Travel. What’s interesting is that it’s click-to-call, which has been slow to take off in mobile and which ought to be a no-brainer. Anyone have any thoughts as to why it’s not used more often?

Finally, I also like the new Guinness ad, though it reminded me a lot of one of the scenes from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, when they’re creating Earth. The Guinness ad can be seen here and like most ads from the makers of the Black Stuff, it’s very classy indeed.

In remembrance of so many good times, I may pull out my N-Gage QD from the Carlo Longino Haul of Mobile Handset History and use it today. Or not. But in either case, I’d like to pay tribute to N-Gage with a reading from the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

So long, N-Gage, and thanks for all the laughs.

I was honored to be asked by MH pal Helen Keegan to give some input to an event she and her team are organizing in London on December 7, called Heroes of the Mobile Screen. We’re working on putting together a fantastic list of speakers and sessions and we’ve got a great venue — now comes the fun part: you get to turn up, enjoy and make lots of great connections.

Here’s the pitch:

The team behind Mobile Monday London, Swedish Beers Mobile Networking, Future of Mobile, Over The Air, Mobile 2.0 and Tech Media Invest, today announced the launch of a brand new event coming to London on 7 December, Heroes of the Mobile Screen http://mobileheroes.net/

The day-long event at BFI Southbank will differ from anything else around and get the stakeholders of mobile involved in discussing the issues affecting them and their customers. Uniquely the event also has secondary school pupils, college students and other members of the same generation, to tell the industry what they want from their mobile, what they expect from their network operators and what’s most important to them in terms of their mobile life..

Heroes of the Mobile Screen is already attracting a number of high caliber ‘heroes’ with speakers and panelists answering the call from around the world, to unite in London on December 7. Speakers, panelists and sponsors will all be announced shortly.

Heroes of the Mobile Screen has four core pillars supporting discussion throughout the day.

The money
What’s making money, who’s making money and what’s being invested in and where the money’s going to be in the future? The answers to all the questions we want to ask of successful mobile service providers and VCs.

The impact of social/location
What is the impact of social media and location technology? What do customers want, what are the business models, what are the solutions to privacy issues. Carriers are placing their bets in this area, but will they pay off?

Teenage heroes
Led by digital youth marketing expert Julia Shalet, this is a new format where we invite four companies to pitch their product, service or device live to six teenagers and they tell us what they really think.

Real customers, real applications, real marketing
A double session with the first half covering customers and what they really want on mobile with a focus on women in particular with a keynote from an expert in this area sharing some new research and insight into what women want. The second half will cover mobile marketing and advertising, what’s working, what’s not and what’s coming next.

You can buy tickets now and get more details on the event at the mobileheroes.net site. We’re also looking for sponsors, and if you’re interested in that, you can get in touch with Helen (helen at mobileheroes dot net) or myself for more details.

This one was about a marketing stunt that’s badly backfired in Latvia, causing Tele2 to lose its Government contracts. Not all publicity is good publicity – the proof.

I’ve also been writing at Media Week about the implications of the imminent take-off of Android for mobile advertisers. Exciting times.

ESPN has now set up a college football site dedicated to co-browsing during games called Section 140. ESPN bills Section 140 as:

# A new MOBILE destination to cheer, comment and maybe talk a little trash with other College Football fans from all across the country.
# A MOBILE sounding board where you can join the conversation from anywhere during the game.
# A real-time, MOBILE place to meet like-minded and not so like-minded fans while your teams are on the field.
# A place to interact with ESPN College Football writers in the Virtual Press Box.

They’ve set up a schedule for games they’re broadcasting and staffing the site with their online writers, who will be there to interact with fans (who can of course interact with each other as well) during the games. Interesting link between the real and online worlds, and something I think we’ll definitely see more of.

My own Twitter and Facebook feeds tend to take on a life of their own during Texas Longhorn games in a sort of ad-hoc dedicated social network. I think it’s cool to see ESPN try and capitalize on this with something of their own.

Any other good examples of co-browsing destinations out there?

If it would be useful, I’ll let you know via MobHappy when I post there and you’re welcome to follow me via RSS too. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, where I’m also reasonable prolific @russellbuckley.

For now I’ll just link to a series of posts I wrote about the future of mobile, based on a presentation I gave at the Mobile Marketing Forum in Berlin a few weeks back.

Brands and Mobile Advertising
Privacy
Location
Mobile advertising formats – more interesting than it sounds actually!
Mobile is Measurable
Future Devices

Hope you find them interesting.

It’s one of those presentations that you just want to tell everyone about and on a personal note, there’s a couple of references to AdMob.

Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009

[For those that don't know, the idea is to collect the best writing and blogging about mobile from the previous week at a different blogger's website. All contributors promote the Carnival and send the host traffic. In turn the host sends traffic to the individual contributors. It works pretty well, though I do say it myself.]

In recent years, Judy Breck has been running the administration of the Carnival, or has been “Keeper of the Tents” as she likes to say and a jolly fine job she’s been doing. Sadly, she has had to give up due to some personal issues, leaving us without someone to pull things together.

This means the end of the road for the Carnival, unless we find someone to step into her shoes. It’s not particularly onerous (a few hours a week, at most) and involves appointing hosts and keeping the website updated. In return, it puts the Keeper right at the heart of writing about mobile and is great for networking.

If anyone would like to step up and run things, please let me know. Or perhaps you know someone who might want to contribute like this? I guess I’m the nearest thing to the “owner” so if someone wants to take it over and re-invent it in some way, be my guest.

If not, Roll Up, Roll Up and get your entries in for the very last Carnival of the Mobilists, which is taking place here at MobHappy early next week. More info www.mobili.st and you enter by sending a link to your nominated post to mobilists@gmail.com

So it was with some interest I followed some of the tweets coming out of this week’s Mobile Monday London, which was about location. It was apparently inspired, in part, by an article from Mobile Entertainment dispelling that industry’s top 10 myths, which included this gem:

9. “Location-based technology is intrinsically exciting for consumers…”

No it’s not. The phrase “location-based technology” intrinsically puts most people who aren’t in the mobile industry to sleep. And they look equally unimpressed if you promise them their phone can guide them to the nearest cashpoint… The problem is that this is all still technology-led. The assumption that everyone wants to track their friends – and especially that they regularly go out in town with no specific plans in mind of who to meet or where to go – is unproven at best. As is the idea that people want to geotag all their photos and videos and share them with the world, all the time.

The next year or two will see some really smart, desirable mobile services launch that use location. But it’s the ones that are actually based on stuff people want to do that will succeed.

Kudos to Stuart Dredge for nailing it on the head. Put another way by @bookmeister: “IMO location is like messaging, billing or identity it will be a part of all good apps, it’s not a service on it’s own”.

Good stuff that pretty much sums up how I’m seeing things at the moment. One further point to make: based on some more tweets, it looks like somebody brought up the old Starbucks ad example again. You know — the “wow, it’ll be awesome for a Starbucks to be able to send ads to everybody that walks by.”

No, it won’t. Russell thoroughly debunked this scenario more than two years ago, and not a damn thing has changed, except the technology. But, like Stuart pointed out, that’s irrelevant. Just because we now have the ability to do something, doesn’t make it useful or desirable. And that seems to sum up much of the mobile location world at this point.

Your thoughts? Who’s got a great mobile service built around location right now? Or am I just totally off the map (ha ha) here?

If you want to take a screen shot of your iPhone, press down the Home button and then click the top button. The screen sort of flashes and then the shot is stored in the Camera Roll in the Photos menu.

Nice!

Courtesy of MacWorld