PayPal has made a lot of progress recently on the mobile front, including integrating its ubiquitous payment technology in numerous apps and mobile services.  The company was one of the first to dive into mobile payments in a big way.  Because of it, PayPal is on track to process more than $500 million in mobile payments in 2010.  This is following dramatic growth, increasing nearly six-fold from $25 million in 2008 to $141 million in 2009.

Zielke said more than 5 million members regularly use PayPal from a mobile device, with those numbers rising substantially as their respective mobile apps have matured overtime.  This is in line with estimates that peg consumer spending via mobile devices at $119 billion by 2015, accounting for roughly 8% of all e-commerce activity.

One such startup, PlacePunch, recently debuted a new platform that allows businesses both big and small to run their own location-based marketing campaigns that integrate with Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter, Gowalla and others — effectively providing a one-stop platform to leverage mobile location from all the major players.  The platform allows for a variety of campaigns, including loyalty and rewards programs that take advantage of checkins, proximity to certain venues and other location-oriented attributes.

PlacePunch provides all the infrastructure necessary, including branded sign-up pages, mobile coupon delivery and analytics, so for example, a coffee shop can create a loyalty program that counts customer check-ins towards certain rewards and coupons.  Marketers can also run personalized messaging programs through Twitter for customers that check into their venues, so if customers check-in to your coffee shop, you could set up a recurring Tweet welcoming them.

The platform provides the added benefit of a comprehensive dashboard for businesses to see various reports and analytics, providing insight about their customers such as demographics, time of check-ins, etc.  While a business could initiate the same campaigns with the various LBS apps and networks independently, doing so through PlacePunch provides a streamlined and centralized environment to leverage the location-craze.  We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on this one.

Bringing together LBS companies, Fortune 1,000 brands and advertising agencies, the event provides an inside look at the location-based marketing activities of major brands, provides a plethora of ideas related to the concept and provides a perfect platform to initiate partnerships.  Attendees receive focused and practical industry insight that can be immediately utilized in developing their own location-based strategy.

Major brands will be on hand to speak, including representatives from the likes of Marc Ecko Enterprises, ESPN, Google, Deep Focus, Verizon, Mashable, Microsoft, USATODAY.com, New Jersey Nets, Adweek, Tasti D-Lite, 360i, Advertising Age, Pillsbury, Bridge Worldwide, VaynerMedia, Booyah, Location Labs, SimpleGeo, and many more.  Some of the many topics covered will include:

• Trends and Numbers – where is it all going
• Platforms and Technologies
• Defining your Strategy, What does ROI mean to you?
• Consumer Behaviors and The Evolution of Social Networking
• A Location Based Marketing Road Map – What’s Next?
• Integrated Marketing – Merging LBM Activities with Real World Activities
• Retailers, Restaurants and Merchants
• Applications That Work

The event takes place September 29th-30th at the New Yorker Hotel in NYC, with much more information available on the event’s Website.  The event’s organizers have been generous enough to offer all Mobile Marketing Watch readers a $250 instant discount off the current published rate of $695 by using the promo code “MMWVIP” during registration.  This is a significant discount, so take advantage while you still can!

Deployed first by carrier Globe Telecom in the Philippines, the reply all ability makes it more convenient to organize meetings or events via SMS. Instead of relaying and forwarding messages from one person in the group to the other, everyone in a group can update everyone else at the same time. It’s a boon to promoters as well as to personal users.

It’s easy to imagine the possibilities. Event organizers at a big nightclub could deploy invitations for an instant, secret party and keep invitees apprised of developments. A college or university could send important reminders to students, such as when campus is opening or closing. Local governments could use it to notify denizens in case of emergency.

“Our vision at Globe has been to simplify communications and make it more relevant to our customers’ needs,” said Rina Azcuna-Siongco, Head of Value-Added Services at Globe Telecom.

This program will be especially interesting to watch. According to Portio Research, individuals in the Philippines send up to 788 text messages per month, 40 percent more than U.S. consumers. How fast users adopt the reply all feature could indicate how well it could be adopted in the rest of the world.

The company said it’s taken eight years to reach this milestone, but with the continued growth of SMS and mobile services, combined with the fact that the company is currently processing more than 1.5 billion messages per day, Sybase expects to hit the next trillion messages in 2012.

“No other communication medium has the ability to reach more people than SMS – truly unprecedented in its scope,” said Marty Beard, president, Sybase 365.  ”What started primarily as a consumer phenomenon has now moved squarely into the enterprise.  Financial Institutions, retailers, consumer packaged goods companies and many other enterprises are increasingly leveraging mobile messaging for marketing, customer relationship management, payments and mobile commerce.  This trend will only accelerate.”

Granted, Sybase has positioned itself as a leading provider of messaging services for over 900 mobile operators worldwide, but this milestone still speaks for the ubiquity and reach of SMS for a variety of uses.  It’s the one mobile technology that everyone has access to and is comfortable with, and its proliferation will only continue.

What’s the catch?

You must first turn over all the “evidence” required to prove that you can’t otherwise receive DirecTV at home.

Whether the reason is due to your location, living/renting arrangements, or other technical limitations, would-be DirecTV customers can “can sign up for a broadband-only version of Sunday Ticket–provided they first persuade DirecTV that they can’t get DirecTV.”

According to the Washington Post:

“Broadband-only access to Sunday Ticket–which lets subscribers watch every Sunday-afternoon game, excluding those aired by their local CBS or Fox stations and those subject to local blackouts when games don’t sell out–will cost $350. That’s $50 more than the fee to add Sunday Ticket to a compatible DirecTV package (before any promotions), and the same as the combined price of Sunday Ticket and a ‘To-Go’ option for computer and smartphone viewing.”

As more mobile users than ever turn to their portable devices to absorb their lion-share of entertainment, news, and sports content, DirecTV’s clever desktop/mobile approach will likely open up an entire new world of DirecTV customers… who aren’t really DirecTV customers.

The concept of mobile affiliate advertising, or “performance-based” advertising is still evolving, but OfferMobi hit the ground running as the sector blossomed.  The company’s platform is based on performance measures and not the traditional Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Thousand (CPM) model that has defined the mobile advertising industry for the past decade.  Instead, advertisers only pay OfferMobi for a completed action such as securing a subscription, a newsletter signup, an SMS list opt in. or any other type of action they want the end-user to take.

The company, which only launched in April of this year, already boasts 6,000 mobile publishers and 50 brand advertisers, and attributes much of its growth to the recent launch of a webniar training series and continued expansion into additional verticals.  The company already hosts leading brands in the finance, dating, entertainment and education industries on its roster.

“We are pleased to announce record-setting click rates and mobile advertiser expansion,” said Mark Roth, CEO of OfferMobi.  ”The recent momentum validates our performance-based model, which enables mobile publishers to achieve greater ROI on their mobile ad campaigns by producing more targeted and higher quality leads.”

According to recent figures, Twitter receives the highest amount of users via the Web, with 78% of all users, leaving a large margin between its mobile Web counterpart, m.twitter.com, which holds just 14% of users.  Interestingly, since mid-April, the company has seen a 62% rise in mobile users with 16% of all new users starting from a mobile application.  In total, 46% of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience.

The Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for BlackBerry apps are now two of the most popular ways to use Twitter, with SMS taking the number three spot after Twitter.com and its mobile Web counterpart.  Surprisingly, UberTwitter — which is my personal Twitter client of choice — is at the bottom of the list with only 2% of active users sporting the app.  Still, these are interesting numbers indeed, hopefully Twitter continues to share this data.

The survey, entitled the “June 2010 U.S. Mobile Consumer Briefing,” is the MMA’s monthly survey of U.S. adult consumers about their mobile marketing behaviors and opinions.  The results stem from a “demographically representative sample” of more than 1,000 U.S. adult consumers and was conducted June 28 through July 2.  The survey asked consumers questions about the usage of their mobile phone and some of its features, including the make of their device, their carrier, preferred mobile response mechanism and when they last noticed an that allowed a mobile response.

The results show that Apple iPhone owners and young adults ages 18-24 are the consumer groups most likely to have seen an ad with a mobile response option.  The survey also found that 70 percent of mobile users who noticed ads with a mobile response capability saw them on TV, with desktop and laptop PCs being the next most common media channel, followed by radio.

“The Consumer Briefing shows that the mobile channel is a highly effective way for brands and others to obtain responses from U.S. adults,” said Peter A. Johnson, vice president of market intelligence, MMA, and author of the study. “This effectiveness includes extensive reach across all adults and within certain demographic groups, such as young adults and Hispanics. But brands and agencies should pay close attention to which media outlets offer the best mobile response opportunities.”

Other finding of the survey include the following:

• Among those who noticed a mobile response ad on TV, one third responded. Asians, Hispanics and adults ages 35-44 were the most likely to use their mobile phone to respond to a TV ad.
• Response was highest in the media outlets with the lowest ad awareness. At least half of those who noticed mobile response ads in the cinema, in a print newspaper, in a print magazine or through direct mail had responded.
• Texting a keyword to a short code and calling a number were the top preferred methods of mobile response. Texting a keyword was most likely to be preferred by young adults ages 18-34, and adults ages 45 years and older significantly preferred calling a number.
• Asian mobile phone users were most likely to prefer sending an e-mail response, while Hispanic mobile users were most likely to prefer texting a keyword.

Magento identified the problem of many Online retailers not wanting to bother with creating their own mobile strategy, which most likely involves costly mobile application development for numerous platforms.  Since its customers are already familiar with the Magento platform for their Online store fronts, the white-label solution aims to fill a void and make it easier for retailers to enter the mobile realm.

Launching as Magento Mobile for the iPhone platform, the solution essentially translates an existing e-commerce site into a mobile app that fits each device, complete with a full catalog, product search, a shopping cart, ratings, and reviews.  Support for Android and iPad are in the works as well.  The retailer has full control over the appearance of the app and even includes full PayPal support for checkouts.

Down the road, Magento plans to add additional functionality such as barcode scanning, private sales, A/B testing, and analytics.  Magento charges an $800 set-up fee and then a $700 annual fee for the service, which many retailers will be glad to pay to avoid the headache associated with going it alone, especially when it would involve hooking in a comprehensive back-end like Magento already provides.