BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) announced plans late last week to dish out $19 million for the acquisition of Vancouver-based mobile application provider Chalk Media.

In a move to profit off the fast-growing mobile advertising market and remain afloat in the highly competitive smart phone market, RIM will add Chalk’s mobile content deployment system to its suite of mobile offerings.

Remember Mobile Chalkboard? It got everyone’s attention at the WES in 2007. It lets enterprise users create and deliver multimedia content to all BlackBerry devices, like the Storm, Bold, Curve and Pearl. The Content could be audio and/or video static slides, that could include voiceovers and animation. Chalk’s application is widely used in corporate training for telecommuters. However Mobile Chalkboard can also push any type of enterprise media to numerous devices. This could mean that mobile marketing messages will be served up in a whole new way. Eventually this technology might be used for commercial media, ads and all.

The acquisition allows BlackBerry to not only match Apple’s iPhone offerings, but potentially to leap frog the competitor. Chalk’s technology makes multi-media transfers larger than 50 MB possible over the air where iPhone currently needs chords to transfer the same files.

BlackBerry is fighting hard for a long-term match with Apple, with its recent release of the BlackBerry Storm. It’s first major counterattack at the iPhone: the BlackBerry Storm is a touch screen device that allows users to take pictures, play movies and music and visit social networks with ease.

Smartphones account for 12.6 per cent of handsets in use in the US market but 19 percent of recently acquired phones, according to Nielsen Mobile. According to the NPD Group, the Apple gadget was the top-selling phone in the third-quarter, followed by Motorola’s Razr and the Blackberry Curve.

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An article in Online Media Daily this morning discussed a new study that may surprise some of you out there. It discussed where venture capital funding has gone in the fist quarter of 2008 compared to last year. More specifically, where the money went in regards to Ad-Network, Social Media, and Mobile startups.

According to the latest M&A report lead by Petsky Prunier- social media and user-generated-content companies acquired nearly $1.5 billion in funding during the first quarter, which triples the amount received in the same quarter last year. Similarly, over $760 million was poured into ad network and exchange companies during the same time. When it comes to mobile-based companies and startups however, the numbers aren’t quite as motivating.

Holding companies and VC firms funneled just $80 million into mobile marketing firms during the first half of 2008. While substantial nonetheless, it’s down from $291 million last year at the same time when it was considered the number one technology-based investment sector of the year. As speculated by Scott Wiggins, managing director at Petsky Prunier;

“investors were perhaps hoping that ‘if you build it, they will come.’ But the infrastructure hasn’t facilitated its use.” Even the new 3G iPhone wouldn’t spark increased interest (or investments) from financiers in the short term.”

Read the rest

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ComScore, a leader in “digital measurement” on PCs and the likes has acquired M:Metrics, an emerging leader in “mobile measurement,” in a $44.3M deal.� With the need for better mobile metrics, and a wider range of products and services for it’s over 950 clients, it was only fitting for ComScore to add M:Metrics to become the clear leader in the strategically important mobile Internet market.

ComScore plans to expand it’s “metered panel” and will begin offering measurement of combined Internet usage across both PCs and mobile-based online access platforms to provide an all-in-one analytical solution.� With the increase in mobile-device internet usage, as well as increased speeds at which people can access the mobile web, it’s become even more important for providers to monitor usage and to leverage that new data to enhance their services.� ComScore aims to do just that with it’s new acquisition.� Dr. Magid Abraham, CEO of ComScore had this to say…

“…Our acquisition of M:Metrics makes comScore an immediate market leader in this space and positions comScore to deliver significant shareholder value as wireless carriers, telecom equipment providers, media companies, advertising agencies, online publishers, and marketers extend their reach into the mobile Internet world.� M:Metrics brings compelling products and an established, customer base of over 180 clients.� Adding comScore’s capabilities and scale to this mix will significantly enhance the company’s future growth and performance…”

When it comes to mobile marketing, analytics can be a very important tool in determining how and when to start your campaign.� M:Metrics has a service dubbed “M:Ad” that claims it provides “Mobile Advertising Intelligence” that will utilize it’s large proprietary data collection technologies and “measurement science expertise” to provide a glimpse into “who’s advertising what, where and when on mobile.”� This information, combined with the PC-based metrics of ComScore should prove to become an all-in-one solution for cross-platform marketing.� We’ll see…

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Qualcomm recently purchased Dublin-based Xiam technologies in an effort to strengthen it’s “internet services” division and to add another layer of mobile innovation to it’s portfolio.

Xiam offers a highly targeted ad-serving platform designed to combine a vast amount of information from a user’s online habits, with an inventory of third-party advertisers. Named “My Personal Offer System” or MPOS, the platform takes into account what the user is looking for, and then recognizes similar content on the page and in real-time serves a relevant offer. If a user is searching for a ring tone of a specific song, for example, the platform could return an advertisement to download that song in real-time. Xiam explains is as…

…a Targeting and Profiling solution that enables Mobile Operators to proactively promote discovery and usage of content and services through personalized offers to individual subscribers, and open their inventories to 3rd party Advertising. Advanced Profiling Techniques and a 360° understanding of all available assets work alongside a sophisticated Recommendations engine to target offers precisely for each individual user.

This purchase marks the second acquisition in less than a year by Qualcomm to boost it’s mobile commerce offerings and to break away from it’s core chip-making business. They’ve faced several patent infringement lawsuits recently, and are toying with the idea of spinning of it’s chip making division into a separate entity to better protect themselves from litigation. By boosting it’s other services, Qualcomm can diversify themselves to better protect against losses like these.

Qualcomm’s internet services division recently introduced BREW, which is a platform to enable gaming and other advanced features on cell phones, as well as purchased Firethorn Holdings, a company that offers mobile banking technology. The addition of Xiam only enhances their division further. They’ll continue to offer the “My Personal Offer System” as a standalone service, while incorporating the technology into other offerings.

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Over the past year, Yahoo has inked deals with mobile carriers all over the world to deliver mobile content and advertising to the masses, and they’ve just gained access to over 90 million more with a recent deal with T-Mobile Germany. T-Mobile switched from their alliance with Google to Yahoo to deliver their mobile web services. They’re already playing catch-up with Google snagging a deal with Nokia to deliver web search on their handsets. Nokia, by the way, sells almost 40% of the world’s handsets.

A new service dubbed oneConnect aims at bringing together social networking connections with mobile phone users.

“Today, most people have too many forms of communications,” said Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Connected Live division. “To keep in touch with all of them you have to go to all of these different Web sites.”

OneConnect scours the web to find contact details of your friends at different social networking sites like MySpace, AIM, Bebo, Xing, Friendster and Orkut and combines that information with your mobile phone’s address book. Users can then communicate via different methods without breaking the conversation. For example, user’s can communicate via text message, and then transfer to mobile instant messaging for a longer conversation seamlessly without incurring per-message charges. OneConnect can also fit snippets of other web-services such as Google and Facebook onto mobile devices in a nice organized fashion. The service aims at bringing together all of your on- and off-line contacts to make it easier for you to connect and communicate at anytime and anywhere via your mobile device. Yahoo plans on developing version of oneConnect that are specific to the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Once the service is well received and well established, Yahoo plans to incorporate small discreet advertising in parts of oneConnect and share some of the revenue with the mobile carriers that serve the technology. It’s another attempt to gain exposure in the vast and emerging mobile marketing arena, that Yahoo has fell so far behind Google in. The service will become available in the US in the second quarter of this year.

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Never heard of em? Danger manufacturers the software found in this little gadget called SideKick for T-Mobile USA. The WSJ covered it here and Danger posted this on their website.

Wanna know what else is interesting about this acquisition? The Danger platform sits on top of Java and Unix not Windows Mobile.

Looking over their open jobs it appears that they’re looking for c++/java talent for location based services and social networking applications.

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I think Robert Scoble has it right, Google is posturing for the sake of posturing and in the end they won’t care because they’re focused on Mobile. I’d be too, heck Google already owns search and that’s not going to change anytime soon just because Microsoft acquires Yahoo is it? Google has the better product and consumers know it. Microsoft would need to acquire Google to change that fact.

Oh and you gotta love Roberts analogies… put two turkeys together and you don’t get an eagle… beautiful!

So, why are they focused on mobile? Naturally, it’s to increase their advertising dominance. Mobile is without doubt going to evolve in 2008.

“It’s the recreation of the Internet, it’s the recreation of the PC (personal computer) story and it is before us — and it is very likely it will happen in the next year,”

That quote is from Eric Schmidt at the World Economic Forum. Google believes that mobile is gonna be huge. Those of us following mobile believe it to. I see the explosion coming when we’re all smartphone enabled. Sorta like the Windows 95 event. What about you?

Hat tip to i2sms for the Reuters article.

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