The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) announced recently that its beginning to reposition itself within the mobile marketing industry to better “promote and enable the global mobile marketing opportunity” and provide stronger benefits to its growing list of members.

In a press release issued yesterday, the MMA said the move is aimed at enhancing the association’s effectiveness at the global, regional and national levels to keep up with the fast evolution of the mobile marketing industry.  The repositioning is based on feedback from a survey of members and non-member companies across four regions regarding a global market assessment, the MMA’s challenges and opportunities and the expanded MMA global presence.

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Health care reform may be a particularly American concern, but mobile technology may offer improvements to patients’ lives that everyone could appreciate. In a new Issue Brief, the firm Deloitte says mobile devices like smart phones can help consumers enhance their own, taking certain costs out of the health care system.

Using electronic health records, and collecting information therein via cell phones or other personal portable devices, it may become possible to “analyze aggregate data to activate mobile, patient-specific output such as medication reminders, healthy habit tips and medical bill reminders,” according to Deloitte.

“The personal health record embedded in mobile communication devices (which Deloitte dubs “mPHR”) is the ‘killer app’ that may change the game for providers, consumers and payers,” Paul Keckley, Ph.D., executive director, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, said in a release.  ”Considering that treating chronic disease accounts for more than 70 percent… of the total $2.4 trillion in health care spending in the United States, the business case for (health records in mobile phones) is solid for helping to reduce costs for managing chronic conditions, such as diabetes and obesity.”

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Numerous mobile content providers settled several class-action lawsuits today that stemmed from alleged unauthorized charges on users’ wireless bills.

Flycell, Glomobi, Mobilefunster, Thumbplay, WebAMG Holdings, Glispa and Motricity were all named in the lawsuits, and collectively put the cases to rest by agreeing to settlements in the amount of $9M and attorney’s fees of up to $1.85M.  In a press release on the subject, all companies were clear in saying that “each of the Defendants has denied any wrongful conduct, and the settlement is in no way a judgment or ruling by the Court that the Defendants did anything wrong.”

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A company called “StreetSpace” has filed a patent lawsuit naming Google, Apple, Nokia, Jumptap, Millennial Media and some 20 others as defendants over a mobile ad-serving technology.

StreetSpace, a maker of Internet kiosks and a subsidiary of wireless hardware company Embedded Wireless Labs, claims the aforementioned companies violated U.S. patent 6,847,969, which details a “Method and System for Providing Personalized Online Services and Advertisements in Public Places.”

StreetSpace operates a service that “allows network managers, businesses and retailers to monitor and analyze users’ locations, profiles, and network usage histories, thus enabling them to deliver personalized content (such as targeted advertising and/or location-based services) across the Web Station network,” the complaint explains.  ”Web Stations,” are public Internet terminals the company has been operating since 1999.

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If news of Visa and Bank of America, MasterCard’s mobile PayPass, Google and Paypal, or Apple possibly developing NFC technology hasn’t convinced you that mobile marketing technologies will soon become deeply intertwined in banking, take a look at the winner of the research firm Juniper Research’s 2010 Future Mobile Award: Wells Fargo & Company.

A press release today from Juniper proclaims, “Wells Fargo was chosen based on its multiple platform strategy and continued service innovation such as the recent near real-time warning of potentially fraudulent activity.”

Wells Fargo allows customers–whether their operating systems are iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or even Palm– to access their accounts in several mobile ways: By sending a text message to a short code; by going on the bank’s mobile website; and by using mobile apps.

The financial institution also offers an SMS alert program for its credit card customers. Those who sign up get a text message every time their Visa card is involved in a transaction, alerting customers to potential unauthorized use of their accounts.

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A Chinese mobile security solutions provider warned today that the proliferation of apps now available in the Android Market means that increasingly more malicious software–viruses, spyware, malware, and the like–now threaten Android phones.

NetQin Mobile said in July that it found the program  called “Carrot App,” a tip calculator, will read all of a phone’s SMS messages and send them hourly to a designated email address; another version of the app can also “overhear” voice conversations on the phone. Today the company noted the 11-fold growth in the number of apps made available in in July 2010: 18,600 as opposed to the 1,669 apps in July 2009. Considering that one in five apps are able to access personal information, that’s a lot of potential for attacks against Android phones, NetQin said.

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A while back we covered the creation of the Mobile Internet Content Coalition (MICC) created by companies with a business-focus on SMS and its subsequent ecosystem.  Companies like 4INFO, Myxer and mobileStorm all have a vested interest in helping make SMS and the mobile Web as open and free of carrier control as possible, and the MICC was organized to petition the FCC and further this cause.

Turns out companies doing business using SMS aren’t the only ones fed up with how carriers manipulate SMS and limit the industry with their outrageous regulation and over-barring control — nonprofits are too.  Washington-based public interest group Public Knowledge has filed a letter to the FCC on behalf of several nonprofits urging the government body to take action on the state of SMS communication and the fact that it’s severely hindered by “layers of obscure, interlocking bureaucracy” that make it hard to innovate, communicate and connect via SMS.

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