For those of you who are or work with Flash designers, any hopes that Flash will appear on a future version of the iPhone have been all but dashed today. According to Network World, Adobe is halting development of a Flash-to-iPhone software tool, which was introduced with its Creative Suite 5 last week.

A few weeks ago, Adobe Systems was promoting its CS5 technology for building Flash applications that run on the iPhone.  But then Jobs struck back. He just doesn’t want Flash on the iPhone since it “performs too slow” and as always, Jobs will do whatever it takes to get his way.

Last week, Apple introduced an iPhone OS developer agreement, which prohibits developers to use third-party app compilers, including Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone tool. Lo-and-behold, Adobe comes out with an announcement that it will stop work on its efforts to bring Flash to the iPhone.

Flash isn’t lost in the mobile marketing space, though. Adobe is working closely with Google to bring Flash Player and Adobe Air to Android-based smartphones such as the Motorola Droid, Nexus One, HTC Incredible, and Sprint Evo and even upcoming non-Apple tablets.

Of course, with HTML5, you can do many of the same things that Flash can. Will the lack of Flash on the iPhone hinder your mobile marketing plans, or do you think Jobs is making the right move?

Old school e-mail marketing company e-Dialog, established in 1997, knows there’s even more money is in mobile marketing. Today, the company announced its acquisition of M3 Mobile Marketing, a Philadelphia-based company which offers a full-service mobile marketing model.

“The mobile arena holds so much promise and many marketers are excited but simply don’t know where to start,” said John Rizzi, president and CEO of e-Dialog, in a statement. “Nearly all mobile users are carrying a text-enabled phone right now,” he continued, “To ignore that reach would be missing a tremendous opportunity.”

M3 Mobile, founded in 2007, provides mobile strategists, best practices, reporting & tracking and data integration for its mobile marketing clients.

“We’re catering to an active audience,” said Jeff Hennion, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, e-commerce, of Dick’s Sporting Goods. “That means our marketing campaigns must be multifaceted to reach them with relevant messages wherever they may be. Mobile marketing ensures we can take full advantage of the reach the mobile channel offers and create a continuous relevant dialog with our customers.”

M3 will now operate as a subsidiary of e-Dialog. e-Dialog is a wholly owned subsidiary of GSI Commerce, a provider of services that enable e-commerce, multi-channel retailing and interactive marketing for large, business-to-consumer enterprises in the U.S. and internationally.

It’s only days before Apple’s iPad is scheduled to hit store shelves, and the excitement for the April 3 launch is mounting. Advertisers have cautiously tested out mobile marketing and ads over the past half decade, but the iPad, for one reason or another, has given many ad buyers the green light for mobile advertising.

According to a NY Times post earlier this week, big-name advertisers have already bought ad space on the iPad. Unilever, Toyota Motor, Korean Air and Fidelity have booked space on the New York Times’s iPad application, and Chase Sapphire already purchased all of their advertising units for two months starting at the iPad’s launch date. FedEx bought ad space from Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.

iPad advertisements on print publishers’ applications cost $75,000 to $300,000 for a few months with some exclusivity, Phuc Truong, managing director of Havas Digital’s Mobext US, told the NY Times. Early excitement is due, in a large part, to tapping into the Apple buzz, which includes having advertisements show up in all Apple in-store demos of the product. Time is charging $200,000 for a single spot in its first eight issues designed for the iPad. The Wall Street Journal has four-month deals with several companies that cost $400,000.

However, the pricing may come down as the buzz wears off. For advertisers, measurement of success will be necessary to determine how much these ads are actually worth over the long run. “We’ve got to figure out what the measurements are,” Mark Ford, president of the Time Inc. News Group, told the New York Times. “It’s not how you measure print, it’s not, certainly, how you measure digital. It’s going to be different.”

For all of us in mobile marketing, we’re always keeping an eye on which device and operating system is leading the pack nationally and internationally. While globally both the iPhone and Android phones, in terms of sales figures alone, are not as hot as they are in the US, the two are fighting each other for international market share. In February, for the first time, the Google Nexus One outsold the iPhone globally by 16%.

The Nexus One, which can be used on any carrier as opposed to the iPhone, seems to be catching on with its open source Android operating system. The report released today by 3G.uk notes that the trend in Nexus One growth is expected to continue, despite talk by many that claim the phone is a hardware flop.

Peter Chou, CEO of NexusOne designer HTC, says it was a success. And maybe the latest sales figures are proving his unlikely conclusion. Earlier the phone has been plagued by customer service troubles, delayed overseas launches, and even poor early sales compared to its competitors.

Chou spoke with Forbes’ Elizabeth Woyke this week at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas. He said that the Nexus One is a success because of its innovative design that will attract other design and manufacturing business for HTC. But beyond additional business, he’s pleased with the NexusOne sales. “Considering Google didn’t do [standard] retail or marketing for it, the Nexus One is doing pretty well,” he told Forbes.

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If you’ve ever used one of the Location-based apps like Foursquare, Gowalla or Brightkite, you’ve gone through the steps of checking in to a location to earn some sort of reward for being there.

Now that these early-stage start-ups have proven the interest in Location-based Services, Twitter and Facebook want in (joining Google, Apple and Nokia in trying to figure out how knowing a users’ location can lead to major mobile ad revenue.) In 2010, in the least, we’ll see both Twitter and Facebook’s take on LBS, a smart move for both companies which are experiencing massive mobile access growth.

Facebook, which according to a new comScore report saw access to its mobile browser grow by 112% in the past year, is expected to add location sharing in its users’ News Feeds, which may more than just intrude on the smaller companies’ courts. An article yesterday in the New York Times cited sources saying that Facebook would announce the news at its F8 developer conference in April.

Meanwhile, Twitter, which saw access to its mobile browser explode 347% in the past year, is already testing out a geolocation feature, which some users have seen in various beta forms as they go about their tweets. Foursquare, still a solid player in the game, will offer a free analytics tool and dashboard to give business owners information and stats about their visitors. These days, there isn’t a company in the consumer mobile space that isn’t interested in Location-based Services, and the market is ripe for innovation.
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As 2009 came to a close, I posed the question “Will 2010 be the year of the mobile coupon?” We saw a lot of national retailers test out mobile coupons in various US markets, but starting tomorrow, Target will become the first retailer to accept mobile coupons at all of its locations across the country. Customers will soon be able to redeem mobile barcode coupons with a quick scan at checkout at any of Target’s retail stores.

One of the biggest challenges for barcode-based mobile coupons systems is getting retailers to purchase (or rent) a point-of-sale kiosk which can scan specific coupon company’s mobile barcodes. It isn’t clear yet what technology Target will be using for their mobile coupons, but as soon as I find out I will let you know.

Last year, JCPenny began a mobile coupon trial with Cellfire on point-of-sale coupon scanning kiosks in 16 of its Houston-area locations, but a Cellfire contact confirmed that they are not behind Target’s mobile coupons. However, Dan Kihanya, VP of Consumer Marketing at Cellfire, has been getting a bit of press related to the Target news, and was quoted in the USA Today article providing stats that mobile coupons are redeemed at a 5% to 20% rate, compared with about 1% for print coupons. U.K.-based Juniper Research recently forecast that more than 1-in-10 mobile subscribers in developed regions around the world will use mobile coupons by 2014, generating nearly $6 billion in redemption value.

Shoppers interested in Target’s mobile coupons will need to opt in by registering at the company’s online or mobile websites, or by texting the word “COUPONS” to 827438. When a customer opts in, they will receive text messages on their phone with a link to a mobile Web page with different barcoded offers. Offers will expire once they’ve been used and on dates listed. If you use Target’s mobile coupons this week, let me know what you think about the experience using them in a comment.

Mobile coupons will dominate the mobile retail market in the early stages of its growth spurt, according to a new Mobile Marketing and Retail Strategies Report by Juniper Research. The report finds that one-to-one marketing allied with the rapid proliferation of smartphones will lead the growth of the entire mobile retail market to $12 billion by 2014.

The mobile retail sector — which includes mobile coupon redemption values, smart poster fees and advertising spending in Juniper’s definition — will, however, see mobile advertising exceed coupon redemption values by 2013. Overall, the growth will be fueled by the adoption of high speed mobile broadband networks and SMS messaging giving retailers new opportunities to communicate with customers.

Report co-author Howard Wilcox writes, “Retailers have recognized that, even ahead of their wallets, people will usually make sure they do not leave home without their mobile device. The mobile channel offers merchants the opportunity to differentiate from their competition and acquire customers that become loyal.”

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