Is it really 1 June? The first five months of the year have fairly rattled by, such has been the amount of activity in the mobile marketing space.

One of the highlights of the last month, judging by the number of people queuing round the block to get one, was the launch of the iPad in the UK and several other territories, following its launch in the US in April. And just as the month was drawing to a close, Apple revealed that it has sold 2m iPads since the US launch on 3 April.

But the biggest news of the past few weeks was the decision by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to give Google the green light to complete its acquisition of AdMob, with the regulator citing Apple’s entry into the market, through its purchase of Quattro Wireless, as a factor in its decision. Google also revealed that its partners are selling more than 100,000 new Android-based handsets every day, while the number of active Android developers is up to 180,000, and there are now more than 50,000 apps available in Android Market, a 32 per cent increase in the past month.

But there’s more to mobile than Google and Apple. Elsewhere, Yahoo! and Nokia announced a worldwide strategic alliance to extend the reach of their online services. The alliance sees Nokia becoming the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo!’s maps and navigation services, while Yahoo! becomes the exclusive, global provider of Nokia’s Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services.

Facebook took the wraps off 0.facebook.com, a mobile site that includes all of the key features of Facebook, but is optimised for speed. It’s initially available through more than 50 mobile operators in 45 countries, predominantly in emerging markets, with no data charges.

And in the UK, Orange and T-Mobile unveiled Everything Everywhere as the name of their joint venture company. The new company employs 16,500 employees, and has over 700 Orange and T-Mobile stores on the British high street.

Messaging application firm Dynmark International released a report valuing the UK market for business and non person-to-person messaging at £600m. The report explores messaging market segments, including Key Premium Aggregators, Messaging Solutions Aggregators, Mobile Marketing Agencies and Mobile Content Providers, for a bottom-up analysis. It concludes that while Key Premium Aggregators and traditional Mobile Content Providers enjoyed major growth during the last decade, significant potential remains.

Portland’s regional transit agency TriMet joined the Augmented Reality (AR) revolution, striking a partnership with AR firm junaio to integrate transit data, including station locations, bus routes and estimated arrival times, into a TriMet channel on the junaio 2.0 mobile AR platform. junaio is available on the iPhone now and coming to Android soon.

The Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) unveiled the finalists for the 2010 Meffys Awards. The winners of the awards, across 17 categories, ranging from App Store Blockbuster to Social Media, will be revealed on 21 June at a gala awards dinner on the eve of MEF’s official annual conference, Mobile Entertainment Market.

Also on the Awards front, independent app store GetJar announced the launch of The Gettie Awards 2010 for mobile application developers. The awards will honour the best in application development across all major platforms, with the awards ceremony taking place on the evening of the first day of VentureBeat’s annual MobileBeat conference, scheduled for 12 July, in San Francisco.

Marks & Spencer (M&S) became the first major UK retailer to launch a permanent mobile website, the first from a major UK high street retailer. The site offers over 24,000 products – including clothing, home and furniture, technology such as TVs and iPods, and gifts such as flowers and food hampers.

Online market research firm OnePoll.com unveiled what it claims is the first iPhone app that pays users to use it. OnePoll is a survey app for the iPhone that rewards users in the UK and the US with hard cash for answering simple surveys. Users can earn between 10p and £5 for each survey taken, and can take as many surveys as there are available at any given time.

Still on apps, handset maker LG released a report which estimated that mobile phone users in the UK spend £422.2m on mobile applications each year. Despite this, the report revealed that the most popular apps are those offering money off products and services.

And with the World Cup due to kick off next week in S. Africa, ROK Entertainment Group announced an agreement with pan-African value-added services aggregator Groupe Digital Afrique (GDA), to deliver World Cup soccer content – supplied by Goal.com – to 25 countries and up to 45 mobile operators across Africa, beginning today. The service includes goal alerts and news, delivered to subscribers via SMS, along with World Cup ringtones, wallpapers and interactive shirts.

And finally, staying with soccer, 1GOAL:Education for All, the FIFA-backed legacy project for the World Cup, launched what it claims is the world’s biggest ever mobile campaign. Mobile companies from across the globe have come together to offer more than 1.5bn people an opportunity to show their support for 1GOAL, with over 1bn text messages going out to people in the coming weeks.1GOAL seeks to get every child into school by 2015, rallying support from footballers and fans across the world.

That’s it for this month’s round-up. Like a lot of people, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the World Cup over the next few weeks, but well be keeping an even closer one on the mobile marketing business. If you want your daily fix of mobile marketing news, views and analysis, you know where to look.

David Murphy
Editor