And so the summer is, officially at least, over. Time for our usual round-up, then, of the last few weeks in mobile marketing. They might call it the silly season, but the mobile marketing industry seems to have forgotten to take any time off this year, because August was as busy as any other month.
Google’s Android platform was rarely out of the headlines. First, research firm Nielsen revealed that sales of Android handsets in the US had overtaken the iPhone for the first time. Next, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told delegates at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe that Android handsets were selling at the rate of 200,000 a day. Then, just to keep things in perspective, software giant Oracle announced that it was suing Google over alleged infringement of patents on its Java technology while developing the Android smartphone platform.
Several mobile marketing firms made the news for all the right reasons. Upstream opened an office in Singapore and secured its first deal with DiGi in Malaysia, but still found time to become the Headline Sponsor of our inaugural EMMAs – Effective Mobile Marketing Awards – programme.
Premium mobile ad agency 4th Screen Advertising launched in the US, with Shazam, the popular mobile music discovery service, as its foundation client. Amobee Media Systems revealed that it had been appointed by Gruner + Jahr Electronic Media Sales (G+J EMS) to represent 75 per cent of its premium mobile content in Germany. Amobee will become the publisher’s exclusive mobile advertising partner, serving billions of ad impressions per month.
Buongiorno entered into a partnership with Telefónica O2 Germany to launch O2’s new service ‘Prepaid Überraschung – Aufladen und Gewinnen” (‘Prepaid Surprise – Top-up and Win’) for prepaid mobile customers. And mobile advertising and optimization firm Smaato celebrated its fifth birthday with the news that it now serves over 16bn ad requests per month in its global network of more than 7,000 registered publishers.
A&N Media selected Velti to supply a mobile CRM platform for a number of its publications and websites. Velti’s platform will power mobile CRM activity for the Daily Mail, Metro, Evening Standard, Jobsite, Findaproperty, Teletext and Northcliffe Regional Newspapers. And mobile agency We Love Mobile was bought by integrated agency BD Network for an undisclosed sum. BD said the move reflected a growing demand for mobile marketing and services, prompted by the dramatic global rise in smartphone sales and consumer appetite for mobile web-browsing and applications. 
On the apps front, US start-up PlacePop unveiled an iPhone app and platform that enables companies to move card-based loyalty and affinity programs on to mobile phones. PlacePop lets consumers collect and store ‘virtual loyalty cards’ for every business they visit on their mobile phone.
Student Aid launched Student Aid Mobile, which it says is the first iPhone app tailored to the student market, offering downloadable discounted vouchers, available throughout the UK in September in time for Freshers’ Week. And the Landshare campaign, which aims to connect growers with people with land to share, rolled out a free iPhone app to help further its cause.
By far the wackiest launch of the month, however, was the opening of QRazystuff.com, an online store that enables consumers to design T-shirts and hoodies, emblazoned with their own QR Code. The code can be encrypted with a text message, email address, phone number or website, which could mean that anyone who scans your code is taken to your Facebook or Twitter page.
Could this be what QR Codes have been waiting for? Who knows. But whether it sinks or swims, you’ll hear about it here first, together with everything else that’s happening in the world of mobile marketing.
David Murphy
Editor
