Quick Thursday linkage

A new blog worth having a look at is MSearchGroove from Peggy Anne Salz who I met recently at the Mobile Content Mixer at the Savoy Hotel (in the basement, where there was no mobile signal so you couldn't use your phones - not ideal for a MOD audience (mobile-obsessive-disorder).

Mobik looks to be doing interesting things in Australia and South East Asia around offering free SMS from your PC or a java application on your phone in return for receiving adverts. I still don't buy the fact that you have to bribe your audience into looking at adverts but if it means you build up a sizeable audience and that they are responsive *enough* then I guess the model can work and they claim to have 500,000 members already (I wonder how many are active though...?). If I were a brand, I don't think I'd like to force anyone to look at an advert though, but maybe that's just my personal preferences coming through.

I think the messaging part of this is interesting though as it uses the internet to distribute the SMS, but it looks like the other person receives the SMS as usual in their inbox. Of course, as time goes on, we'll be seeing more messaging applications and blends of email, SMS and instant messaging on our mobiles - Hotxt being a case in point.

Mobile ticketing being used at the 2000 Trees Festival courtesy of Tixmob. The logistics of this one are interesting. Typically, if I got to a festival, I buy my ticket and tickets for friends. Way before the event, I make sure they have their ticket so I don't have to be responsible for it. It's not very clear to me how you get the ticket from your phone to someone else's phone. And also what happens if you accidentally delete the ticket message or your phone gets nicked or the data is wiped for some other reason?

I like the idea in theory, but I'm wondering about the logistics of it all. O2 tried paperless ticketing for their VIP area at last year's Wireless Festival in Hyde Park. In the end, it was useless. The girls on the gate just let folks through by showing their ticket so there was no kind of monitoring. Of course the added benefit of getting your ticket on mobile should be that you get a link to the festival's wapsite where you can see all the latest line-up changes, weather reports and general news and gossip from your phone. But we're a year or two away from that happening. The BBC's wap effort for Glastonbury was more or less useless in the field as the information wasn't up to date :(

Samsung and Girls Aloud team up with a c0-marketing and promotions deal. I wonder what mobile content we'll see on the back of this? Maybe it's time I got a Samsung phone to check all this stuff out.. anyone at Samsung want to be kind enough to ping a phone over to me so I can review Samsung Fun Club stuff?!

And finally, Decktrade's "awesome" FAQs. I've never seen anything quite like it! Can anyone explain to me what a 'core of awesomeness' actually is please? If you're interested in mobile advertising as a publisher or advertiser, I recommend you head over and talk to the friendly folks at Admob instead, who are so [quietly] awesome, they don't need to put awesome in any of their marketing materials ;)