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Y Combinator – “30 Startup Ideas We Would Like To Fund”

I’m cross posting this from Jonathan Macdonald’s blog who in turn sourced this from Y Combinator. I’m with Jonathan about number 12 (or soon will be working on this full time – fix advertising and specifically mobile advertising). You can see the original post here and I have re-pasted the list below. 1. Two things are broken: [...]

always read the small print

I picked up the latest Carphone Warehouse brochure yesterday – always a good read for market research. I came across this full page O2 ad below.  I’m a loyal Vodafone customer so no need to switch – but I love reading mobile company small print for a laugh. Reading the small print, it says “When you [...]

London Calling makes the top 100 European media & marketing blogs

Tonight I was finishing an upgrade of the blog from wordpress version 2.5.1 to 2.6 and I saw that Nick Burcher had linked to London Calling so I took a closer look. He has compiled the top European media and marketing blogs from the Ad Age Power 150 list compiled by Ad Age. I’m delighted [...]

The Gruen transfer – brilliant Australian tv show about advertising

I came across a hidden gem today – the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC – an equivalent of the BBC) have a show called The Gruen Transfer.  While some of the London Calling readers know I am an Australian living in London, many of my readers are in the Northern hemisphere, and so would not have [...]

Why traditional advertising won’t work in social networks

Over at Faster Future, David Cushman has an excellent pitch for why traditional advertising won’t work in social networks.  He brilliantly uses the concept of a presenter “broadcasting” to an audience to show how traditional advertising works, then breaks this down into how social networks receive and digest information in groups. “They aren’t looking at [...]

Where have all the ethical Marketing Managers gone?

I was horrified to read a Financial Times article about a survey that mentioned that an alarming percentage of marketing managers would provide personal information held on customers to 3rd parties without their consent. The survey, commissioned by StrongMail Systems, an e-mail security company covered 900 data security and marketing professionals, found that 7 per [...]

Vodafone mobile internet campaign at Paddington station

I saw a very interesting outdoor campaign for Vodafone’s mobile internet at London’s Paddington station this week. You can see some more of the pictures here. Vodafone keep leading the way in promoting mobile internet with consumers – the other operators in the UK seem to be lagging in this regard.  The Vodafone campaign cleverly links various [...]

mesearchgroove.com guest post: Location-Based Social Network Apps Are The Crowd-Pleaser; Is Presence Ready For Prime Time?

Head over to msearchgroove for my next guest post on location – with a roundup of some emerging location based applications that have started to hit the market. A summary of the post – titled “Location-Based Social Network Apps Are The Crowd-Pleaser; Is Presence Ready For Prime Time?” is below. In-Brief: MSG’s favourite LBS pundit Andrew [...]

Andrew to moderate Location session at being-digital event June 10 in London

Andrew has been asked to moderate the LOCATION session at the Being Digital event on June 10th in London. This looks to be a very exciting event, as it packs in 7 digital themes (advertising, identity, content, location, social, retail and search) which cover the full range of “being digital”.  In addition, the event aims [...]

Carnival of the mobilists 124 at symbiano-tek.com

This week Carnival of the Mobilists is featured at symbiano-tek.com. Head over there to read the best mobile commentary, news and views. In particular this week, read about creating an educational environment through mobile games, mobile search company ABphone, Volantis Open Source, the Linux Platform on Mobile, and you will also read my post on location based [...]

London Calling: new name, new look, new location but still providing great commentary on mobile advertising, location and social networking

Welcome to London Calling, the new name of my blog with thoughts on mobile advertising, mobile location, local search and social networking. Why the name? As an Australian now based in London, I was used to many TV programs that used the line “london calling” when referring to long distance international calls to Australia.  When [...]

Mobile application of the week: Nokia Headlines – and a new mobile advertising channel for Nokia

My morning commute has been made a little more pleasant with the introduction of a new piece of Nokia software from their beta labs – Nokia Headlines. If you’re like me and your morning newspaper of choice is a broadsheet like the Financial Times, or the Daily Telegraph, then you will know how difficult these papers are to read on public transport due to their large format size. Thanks to a new release from Nokia labs, this is a thing of the past.

The Headlines team have secured deals with major brand publishers like the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, the Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney and the Sun in London.

mobile advertising – walking the talk

image credit: Michael Smetham Many people are writing about mobile advertising – who’s getting it right, who will win and what the forecasts for 20XX will be – but are these people also using mobile advertising? In this post, I want to highlight the difference in the mobile advertising industry between those who do and [...]

Flashback to the dotcom era circa 1999 – what has really changed?

    I found this scan of a full page magazine still in my website image files, and thought I would publish it to show while things have changed, in some cases they have stayed the same. This was a full page house ad that appeared in the “Business Review Weekly” in Australia in 1999. [...]

The geography of power – how communication has become a global currency and what it means for mobile advertising

I found a fascinating article in a recent edition of Newsweek called Emotional Connections. The article describes an installation at the New York Museum of Modern Art called New York Talk Exchange. Here, MIT have been provided with real time phone records from AT&T and they have a live map of the different connections happening [...]

Up close with Bena Roberts from GoMonews.com

It is always a pleasure to spend some time with Bena Roberts from GoMo news, and I was able to have lunch with her last week during the MMA Event in London.  I also caught up with Richard Saggers who is the current MMA Chair for EMEA and is also the head of Mobile Advertising [...]

Turning your brand into a destination – literally with naming rights for the Dubai Metro

Looking through this week’s Economist, my eye was drawn to a full page ad, promoting the naming rights for the Dubai Metro – to be completed in 2009.  The print ad directs you to the Road and Traffic Authority’s website for the Government of Dubai, which then points to a special website www.metronamingrights.com. Here, there [...]

What exactly is a “frenemy” – Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP thinks Google is one

Wikipedia describes a Frenemy as portmanteau of friend and enemy which can refer to either an enemy disguised as a friend or to a partner that is simultaneously a competitor. In an article in today’s Financial times by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson  titled “Advertisers welcome prospect of stronger rival to Google“, Sir Martin describes Google as a [...]

The rise and rise of the GPS mobile – but not for mobile advertising

I noticed a story (with accompanying video) on the BBC Click website titled Rise and rise of the GPS mobile. Like many stories at the moment about GPS, the author makes a few generalisations. In the closing paragraphs, the BBC reporter Marc Cieslak notes “This location based technology does throw up the potential for annoying [...]

Top advertisers have eight figure budgets allocated to mobile in 2008 says JumpTap CMO

I caught this interesting article over on Ewan MacLeod’s excellent SMSText News site a result of an online interview he conducted with JumpTap’s new CMO, Paran Johar during Mobile World Congress. “….The promise of what could be is enormous. At the perfect time when advertisers and agencies are begging for a new medium, mobile marketing [...]

The Davos Effect – Google CEO Eric Schmidt expects mobile to be big – is he right and what has to happen to prove him right?

Much has been written on the “Davos Effect”, where the musings at this annual event from senior executives of large companies such as Google and Sony actually become true, or at least offer a window into the current thinking or focus of a particular company or industry segment. By now, many of you will have read the [...]

Google’s Eric Schmidt bulish on location based advertising

I caught the release from Reuters Google CEO bullish on mobile Web advertising which quotes from Eric Schmidt’s speech at Davos. Of interest, and quoting directly from the Reuter’s release… The arrival of a truly mobile Web, offering a new generation of location-based advertising, is set to unleash a “huge revolution”, Google Inc Chief Executive Eric [...]

Carnival of the Mobilists #107 is up at www.mobhappy.com

Over at MobHappy which Carlo Longino describes as the “spiritual home” of Carnival of the Mobilists, there is again a wide range of commentary on a range of subjects including… Dennis at WAP Review takes a look at mobile email WAP sites, and wonders why they don’t offer many of the same features as their [...]

iPhone finds its Mojo – Google My Location is a major plus for iPhone users

As a non iPhone user, I almost missed the news from Steve Job’s Mac World address that the iPhone would be receiving new firmware.  Because I don’t own the device, I have no need to update the firmware, but reading this official Google blog post, something caught my eye. Then over the next few days others [...]

Mobile Monday Barcelona January 21, 2008 covers Mobile Advertising

While I’d love to be there to hear these interesting speakers, sadly I will be in London on this day, but I thought the event should get some publicity so if you are in Barcelona on Monday 21st January, read on… The first Mobile Monday Madrid of 2008 on January 21, 2008 covers Mobile Advertising. [...]

STOP PRESS: Customers with unlimited data plans use more data than those charged up to £4 per megabyte!

We all know that the time leading up to Christmas and New Year is a very slow news period, but many mobile commentators including myself had a quiet chuckle when they read the story on the front page of the UK’s Financial Times on Christmas Eve 2007 – iPhone users raise network hopes. Quoting the story [...]

Predictions for the mobile industry in 2008

As the year comes to a close, I thought I would offer my predictons for the mobile industry in 2008. • Two words – Mobile Internet – by the end of 2008, operators will be offering flat rate mobile internet.  The “trials” of £10/month for 3GB data etc will have proved extremely successful and everyone will [...]

First thoughts on Google My Location

I just had a look at the new Google My Location service launched this week. Being a Location expert, I have been looking closely to see how well it works.  On first pass, it is quite similar to the Psiloc Locatik service launched at the Symbian Smartphone show in London in October. The raw inputs to the [...]