There were a few thems the I picked up. Mind you I went to CTIA with my mobile social networking, advertisig and multi-player poker glasses on. That was my mission to learn and sell. As you might know I am one of the founders of both Acemob and Souldate, and these ventures are what pay the bills these days. Here we go:

1. Business models

Everywhere I went, the theme was business models. On the panel I sat in on, on the show floor at the parties at night, business models where a common theme. What’s happening here then?

One big change is the on/off deck distinction is about to fade away. On-deck is not the only way to get distribution these days. Operators are realising this and are opening up for easier access to their portals. They can thereby also cut some staff costs as well.

The effect of this is that the content provider will have to carry more of the marketing cost and get the full responsibility for discovery. It also means the operators will have to stop milking their abuse of the billing monopoly they have. Stealing 30-40% for a transaction that Visa charge 5% for is not viable in the long run and is hampering innovation and growth. Please read this great post buy Steven Spencer on this subjet and app stores etc. 

2. Advertising

Advertising is cool, but in most cases will not be enough. Additional revenue streams with virtual goods or freemium is needed. There are probably some arbitrage possibilities or rather timing gains to make to go build a user base in a virgin market when CPCs are very low but rising. However you are then banking on that you keep the users long enough to make money on them when the advertising market is more valuable. A risk, but it might work. It’s about timing and guts I guess.

3. Role of Social networks

In our panel we had some interesting exhanges about social selling. Both Glu and iPlay see the social networks as a distribution channel. Nothing is more powerful than word of mouth, so they try to tap into social netoworks or use social networking infrastructure to give their fans the tools to sperad the word. One cool service I came across here was mpowerplayer. Baiscally it is a social seling tool. Web based play of java games with community features built in to facilitate spreading the word. iPlay use this for their recent launch of their Fast & Furious game. With links to the portals and decks where the game can be bought. This drives revenues and is one way to facilitate discovery, one of the main challenges in selling stuff in a small screen world.

4. Health

I also noted mHealth being a trend. This came from other reports (and here) and comments from people I talked to in Las Vegas. Unfortunately this was an area I missed to cover entirely personally, but hey you can only do so many things. The good thing is that it is now on the radar. My personal belief is that it is a huge area where mobile really can make the world a better place. The formation of the Wireless Health Institute in San Diego is one milestone.

With these words I will head for the ol’ egg hunts and whatnot. See you after the weekend!

Regarding CTIA, I will also write a full roundup here.

Big brands trying mobile marketing need to be aware of that they are about to invade the most private and intimate screen in the world of marketing. As MobileYouth point out the strongest position you can get is if you provide a social fabric and a lot of bang for the social currency buck for your customers.

Get out there, participate instead of pushing broadcast marketing messages. This will put marketing and communications departments in tailspin, since you need to be 100% transparent as well. The marcom departments have often taken the gatekeeper role here. Mobile internet offers the world’s largest and most powerful  direct response machine. Twitter, texts, Facebook mobile and Bambuser are only the tip of the ice berg in terms of tools the consumers have to talk with, about and to you.

As you can see I am warming up ahead of today’s panel at the mobile marketing seminar here at CTIA. It will be fun. You will read more here about it as it happens.

I like all honest trial-and-error efforts. I rather trust someone searching the next big thing rather than the person who says he already has. This is all about testing and listening. Test. Listen. Test. Listen What do the users think of it? What works? Are the users we care about saying this? The latter is the hard part of course. Anyway, I really hope Telia is on to something to spread mobile social networking to the masses.

Short and sweet this post. But hey, its Friday. Enjoy the weekend! I am heading out to Las Vegas and CTIA next week. Drop me a line if you want to catch up.

I am honoured and humbled to be asked to join the likes of Karen Webster from MPD, Ajay Madhok from Equals, Scott Derringer from GLU, Jeremy Wasser from Virgin Mobile (joining from the Helio team) and Mike Breslin from iPlay, part of the online casual gaming giant Oberon Media. And myself representing Acemob.

So the mix is really good. Karen will moderate this panel where we have the carrier, huge global publisher, the niche social networking player  and the the social network aggregator among other things. I hope to learn more as the days pass by. Hope to come back here with some interviews with my fellow panelists.

What we hope to cover are questions like:

• What is driving the increased use of social networking via the mobile?
• Does it vary by geography?
• Do we find the same user both on PC and on mobile or are there different segments?
• What does the mobile phone allow in terms of experience that the PC cannot do?
• What are the challenges?
• Who are doing great stuff?

I am really looking forward to this. Hoping we will get to the core of a few burning issues, and maybe kill a darling or two? Please feed comments, thoughts and questions to me here or on twitter @pfhagermark.