The BBC may be one of the oldest and most venerable broadcasting institutions known the world over, but even the British Broadcasting Corporation isn’t immune to the loss of market share to the mobile news business. With more people than ever turning off their television screen in favor of the mobile screen, the BBC is now investing time and resources into building up its mobile news presence.

This week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the BBC announced that a dedicated news app will be available and free to download this spring. The news app will be supplemented by the introduction of a BBC Sport app to launch shortly thereafter. In addition to the iPhone applications, the BBC is making arrangements to take their apps to BlackBerrys and Google Android-powered smartphones.

According to the formal announcement, the news app will “offer content from the BBC News website, including stories and blogs, as well as audio and visual content.”

Making the process an interactive one, users will be allowed to submit comments and even pictures directly to the BBC newsroom.

“[Audiences] want to access digital services that they have paid for at a time and place that suits them,” says Erik Huggers, the BBC’s director of future media and technology.

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This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain is illustrating like never before how sophisticated the goals have become for many mobile marketing firms and solutions providers.

A prime example of such is Airwide Solutions, an emerging provider of cutting edge mobile messaging infrastructure, applications and solutions. Today Airwide rolled out what they’re calling a “real-time loyalty & profiling solution.” The aim of the endeavor is to help mobile operators “drive incremental lifetime value” across the subscriber base. That, of course, includes evasive prepaid customers.

The announcement at MWC also revealed Airwide’s partnership with Business Logic Systems, a firm that knows a thing or two about real-time prepaid marketing campaign automation and customer loyalty solutions. For Airwide, BLS brings to the table a wealth of knowledge and experience with enabling mobile operators to “stimulate top-ups and usage, reward loyalty and reactivate dormant subscribers.”

As noted by Airwide executives during the announcement, prepaid customers have proven a difficult nut to crack in terms of mobile marketing. While the prepaid customer base continues to grow by leaps and bounds, mobile operators have lagged behind their potential in successfully marketing to these subscribers and, consequently, increasing their life time value. Read the rest

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Roll out the red carpet. A top executive from Google will be on hand for a mobile marketing related event in New York next week.

The occasion will provide an opportunity for the Google big kahuna to delineate his company’s mobile marketing plans and overall strategies for the year ahead.

Alex Barza, the Google exec alluded to, oversees Google mobile ad sales. Supplementing his presentation on February 10th will be relevant case studies and a Q&A session with the audience.

Other speakers presenting or contributing to panel discussions will include officials from Bango, HipCricket, Ping Mobile, Impact Mobile, The Lustigman Firm, Amobee, Neustar, Sumotext, and Netbiscuits, to name only a few.

Among the most eagerly anticipated speakers is Michael Becker iLoop Mobile, who will deliver a presentation on the essential tools of the trade for effective and efficient mobile marketing.

As 2010 continues to give rise to countless new businesses and industries ramping up mobile marketing efforts, the practice of mobile marketing is, itself, rapdily becoming a “teachable lesson plan” that continues to turn up in educational settings, seminars, and even marketing classes across the academic landscape.

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Adobe Systems is moving forward with Adobe Flash Platform Services for Distribution.

Essentially, Adobe is offering a new solution for advertisers and content publishers to utilize emergent tools in the digital sphere to more successfully promote and profit from applications for smart phones as well as those for social networks and desktops.

Created with distribution platform provider Gigya, Adobe is enabling the hosted online service to assist developers in both creating and sharing their applications across a variety of digital channels. For example, a web app constructed with Flash Platform tools can now be distributed across the Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems.

Adobe officially unveiled Adobe Flash Platform Services for Distribution this week the IAB MIXX Conference and Expo in New York.

In order to give developers a “comprehensive distribution solution” Adobe’s primary talking point with this new offering is how the solution includes a “unified management tool to effectively promote, measure and monetize Web applications and games.”

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Historically, September is a big month for Apple and the mobile community at large.

Hosting annual events in September for the last few years, the ninth calendar month usually means some significant news or announcement from Apple.

And a lot of people are wondering if any major surprises are in store for Apple’s scheduled September 9th media event. According to numerous published reports, the company plans “to introduce its 2009 iPod offerings.”

But others expect more.

Will Steve Jobs appear? Will new products be unveiled? How many upgrades will be promised? And what will it all mean (if anything)for mobile marketing?

It’s enough to make one’s head spin.

For months, some Apple watchers have remained confident that September will mean the Nano and Touch will be upgraded with cameras and, naturally, the increased storage one would would expect to accompany such an upgrade. More likely, however, is an update to
iTunes. Rumors have swirled for a while that iTunes 9 would sport new visual organization features as well as Facebook integration and other social-networking attributes with mobile components.

Just as September is traditionally a big month for Apple, August tends to be a month when Apple is quiet, enigmatic, and utterly aloof. Since Apple hasn’t disappointed expectations for August, hopefully it won’t disappoint expectations for September either.

The countdown to 09/09/09 is on.

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A new study sponsored by SMobile Systems, a provider of mobile security solutions, has found that Symbian-based smartphones have a high risk of being infected with spyware and malware- in fact, one out of every 63 smartphones are already infected.

The study of 1,958 smartphones revealed infections by Spyware, Viruses Worms and Trojans, as well as hundreds of unlicensed software programs installed on the handsets reviewed.  A comparison of these statistics to the worldwide smartphone population places the number of infected devices globally into the millions.  Because the vast majority of these infections are designed to be stealthy and the fact that few smartphones posses Anti-Malware applications, most infected users are completely unaware their devices have been compromised.

Similar to the problem computer users have faced for decades, mobile spyware and malware creates an even bigger problem given the fact that mobile devices often times carry much more sensitive and personal information than computers do.  In addition, the variety of ways mobile devices send and receive information leaves many doors wide open, so to speak, for hackers to spread their malware.  The attacks have taken the form of worms and Trojans that are transmitted via Bluetooth, SMS, MMS, or email, as well as Spyware that is unwantedly being downloaded from various online application and shareware websites.

This raises concerns for the mobile marketing community as it will make consumers much more weary about opening SMS messages, email, Bluetooth connections and other forms of communication from advertisers, even though most will be legitimate.  If the problem persists, and especially if other mobile operating systems are compromised, consumers will become very hesitant to interact with anyone other than people they know, making things even more difficult for brands and advertisers looking for personal and targeted ways to interact with consumers.

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Next week, the video game industry will arrive in full at the E3 Expo annual trade show in Los Angeles.

And already, there’s some controversy about what was said.

Or not said.

Implying in a discussion with reporters that “big surprises” were in store for its fans and supporters, the CEO of Nintendo was interpreted as meaning that Nintendo is poised to add some sort of mobile phone functionality to its handheld gaming devices.

The internet tonight is abuzz of talk about the new “Nintendo phone.” One blog I visited even has a “sneak peak” at the device, which is particularly amazing when you consider that the whole idea was blown out of proportion and there, in fact, will be no Nintendo phone.

“Telephony is not in our wheelhouse,” said the head-honcho at Nintendo. “It’s not something I anticipate us getting into.”

On the bright side, however, Nintendo, while not considering a foray into the mobile phone sector, is considering giving its handheld gadgets “always-on wireless connectivity.”

It’s certainly a step in the right direction for the video game giant. But as far as some sort of Super Mario hybrid cellular device, it’s game over.

At least for now.

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