Open Mobile Solutions is offering a free Platinum Pass to CTIA at Las Vegas in March.  They’re also organizing several Developer Pitch Sesions including:

• Raising Money – a panel featuring Venture Capitalists specializing in mobile.
• Gaining Distribution – a  panel featuring various mobile distribution channels.
• Monetization – a panel of key decision makers in the mobile advertising space – agencies, brands and networks

The Open Mobile Solutions Marketplace is currently in stealth mode, but you can learn more here.  In the meantime, why not take advantage of the great panel sessions they’re organizing at CTIA and the opportunity for a free pass?

As day 2 of Mobile World Congress rounds to a close, and day 3 begins (ahem – it’s nearly 3am), I thought I’d point out a few highlights from Mobile World Congress so far:

Pre-MWC: I started the pre-MWC whirlwind with The NAVTEQ awards party, in which the EMEA winners of the Global LBS Challenge were announced.  It was a good event.  A handful of promising companies showcased their LBS-enhanced mobile products.  From there, I went to MobileSunday, which was, as usual packed with a great crowd of mobile enthusiasts bracing for the week ahead.  After that, I hit the town with the team from Skyhook Wireless (whose wi-fi location-based technology is embedded in the iPhone and millions of others worldwide) and a few of their 3rd party developer partners – all of whom are working on things that would set any mobile enthusiast’s heart racing… I’d tell you more, but that’d be like ruining a good surprise, and that’s no fun.

Day 1: I kicked off Monday by moderating a couple of panels in the “Mobile Applications – Innovation Vs Fragmentation” stream.  The first was “Attracting investment to the apps market – Identifying the key success factors,” and the panelists were fantastic: (more…)

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested in learning more of the “how to” behind social media and networking with marketers who have successfully leveraged social media channels, check out “Social Media Matters.” It is a new, monthly event that shows marketers, brand managers, and advertisers how to use social media successfully.  It’s being organized by Covered Co. (one of my former clients).

The first event will cover “Building Brands on Facebook,” and it’s being held at 6:30pm on December 3rd at Fenwick & West’s office in downtown San Francisco.  (more…)

There’s an interesting debate afoot… Could News Corporation (Newscorp) trump Google by preventing them from indexing their various sites including Wall Street Journal, or would this bring down Newscorp by making its content less discoverable?  What would happen if the world’s biggest publishers joined forces together against Google and sold the ability to index their content to the highest bidder?  What would this mean for the Internet and profitability of the web’s biggest publishers? (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook acquired Friendfeed today for for nearly $50 Million US.  Friendfeed is a useful real-time social media aggregation and commenting service, and it’s easy to see why it caught Facebook’s attention.  Over the past several hours there’s been plenty of speculation by tech bloggers about why the acquisition took place and what this means for Friendfeed and Facebook users… (more…)

Last night, I attended the Mobile Monday Silicon Valley event at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. There was a panel discussion on “Mobile Monetization,” which drew a large crowd, which seemed in direct proportion to the level of excitement around the topic of monetization.  The panel was moderated by Julie Ask, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, an the panelists were: (more…)

These days, for every inspiring story that I hear about a mobile independent software vendor (ISV) / developer that’s “raking in loads of cash” through Apples’ App store, I hear a handful of stories from mobile ISVs that are trying to dig themselves out of the red.  While the press is focused on the “iPhone Gold Rush,” I’m hearing of a disturbing number of mobile ISVs that are struggling…badly.  Over the last couple of months, I’ve had conversations with an increased number of mobile start-up execs who by day are attempting to dig their ISV out financial crisis and by night are pinging their social networks, quietly looking for a new job and complaining that the mobile industry is “broken”. (more…)

If you’re a Facebook user in the US with a pre-paid mobile phone, there’s a new app called “Embee Mobile Minute Wallet” that can help you earn, buy, redeem, share, and manage top-up minutes – all through Facebook.  (more…)

Last night, Honda was the first to air a live ad on Channel 4 in the UK.  The ad was nothing short of spectacular – a skydiving feat that no doubt left most of Britain and some of the rest of us talking: Honda Skydiving Video.

I woke up this morning to see links to the YouTube footage of the ad all over the Twitter feeds I follow and in email exchanges between my friends.  Honda’s agency, Widen + Kennedy (which is also an agency for Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, Nike, Nokia, Visa, Target, Heineken, and many other large brands) talks about how they executed this socially successful viral campaign on its blog and documented the process of creating the ad in the Difficult is Worth Doing blog.

Jen Grenz, who leads marketing for one of my clients, ShoZu, recently showed ShoZu’s re-vamped mobile application to the BBC.  Check out the video.

ShoZu 4.0, is much more robust than previous versions.  It allows you to update your status on various social networking sites from your phone, reply to comments (and read friend’s comments) from your phone, and download your friends’s Flickr feeds to your phone.  And, it’s easier to use than the last version, which itself is simple (and I’m not just saying that because they’re one of my clients).  It makes social networking from your phone simple and it aggregates social networking interactions so that you don’t have to jump from WAP site to WAP site or from on mobile application to the next. The newest version of the ShoZu app is even better from a useability perspective.

In this major new release, ShoZu started showing ads.  While ads normally annoy me, the ads ShoZu shows are (so far anyway) good.  Unlike ads on websites, I’m seeing ads from a small number of companies that are the type of companies people like me want to learn about… companies that have products/services that actually appeal to advanced mobile users and mobile social networkers.

From a useability perspective, what’s interesting and unique about the way ShoZu displays ads is that those ads are kept entirely within the ShoZu experience.  So, when you click on a banner ad, it doesn’t take you to a WAP site, it takes you to a splash page within the ShoZu application that gives you more information.  And, it’s much easier to navigate away from the splash screen on Shozu than it is to interact with some other mobile ad types like WAP.  With WAP ads, you’re navigated away from the task you’re participating in and loading is slow.  ShoZu’s ads are lightning fast and can be opened and closed in fractions of seconds.

You can download the new version of ShoZu by clicking here.