It seems like a match made in mobile heaven.

Monitise has announced a “global strategic alliance agreement” with Visa International Service Association, a subsidiary of Visa Inc.

The reported five-year agreement combines “Visa’s unmatched reach, payments expertise and trusted brand with the Monitise Mobile Money platform and toolkit.”

Basically, Monitise will be an enormously helpful vehicle for Visa’s already teeming offering of mobile services (including payments, transaction alerts and special offers) by providing support and even greater reach to the millions of Visa customers with mobile phones.

Although not many details have yet emerged, the news of the partnership is considered significant and an incredibly beneficial arrangement for Visa, which in recent months, has found increased competition in the mobile marketing realm from both Mastercard and American Express.

According to the announcement by Monitise, the five year contract value amounts to $13 million dollars.

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The Mobile Marketing Association has released the latest version of its “U.S Consumer Best Practices Guidelines for Cross-Carrier Mobile Content Services.  More simply, its the latest iteration of guidelines in terms of cross-carrier mobile content services such as SMS, MMS, shortcode services, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and the mobile Web.

Dubbed version 4.0, the new guidelines represent the first time the individual mobile marketing guidelines and codes of conduct, known as “carrier playbooks,” of the four largest U.S. wireless service providers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile USA have been consolidated into one integrated “rule book” so to speak.

Read the rest

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mobileStorm Inc., the company that provides email, SMS, and other messaging solutions, has put out a new white paper that explains all the ins and outs of short codes. You know, those numbers to which you text a keyword if you want information about a brand, or to vote for your favorite TV show contestant.

Called “The Ultimate Guide To Common Short Codes,” the mobileStorm white paper explains why this type of marketing is so important, countering skepticism against mobile marketing that still persists. Basically, if you want to stay relevant, you need to implement text message campaigns–and short codes are an indispensable part of text message marketing.

The paper gives an in-depth heads-up as to the process of obtaining a short code, and also offers the pros and cons of shared and dedicated codes. (The latter is akin to a vanity license plate, often spelling out a word and used only by one company.)

It looks to be especially useful for mobile marketing newcomers, but veterans might also learn something new.

Download “The Ultimate Guide To Common Short Codes” here.

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Barnes & Noble has unveiled a new B&N Bookstore application for the Apple iPhone.

Providing access to millions of books now at the touch of your finger, Barnes & Noble worked with software partners Evryx Technologies and Spotlight Mobile to design, customize, and launch the new app, which is a red-hot download so far this week.

The app lets users take a photo of a book cover and, seconds later, the user gets all the information his or her heart could possibly desire about the title, author, publisher, etc.

More importantly from a business standpoint, however, consumers can use the app to purchase or reserve a copy of their desired title directly from the application.

The decision to plunge into the mobile realm isn’t new for the book giant. B&N recently bought digital book retailer Fictionwise for close to sixteen million dollars.

Given that Barnes & Noble operates nearly eight hundred bookstores in all 50 states, there is huge potential for this seemingly long-overdue app.

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Mobile marketing may have been proving its efficacy over the last few years. But for old-school marketers, the platform might seem a little too cutting-edge–more anime, less Disney cartoon. They don’t know where, or how, to enter the space and start deploying campaigns.

That’s where a new wiki, www.wikimobipedia.org, comes in. WikiMobiPedia aims to “provide a centralized, dynamic resource for buyers of mobile marketing, advertising and related products and services–so that they can easily access the information they need to begin the purchase process.”

WikiMobiPedia creator Jamie Wells tells us, “With our space moving so fast, I felt the industry would benefit from a place that “keeps up with mobile,so you don’t have to”… So far I’ve got most of the major mobile players involved–over 50 companies–in less than a month.”

As of this week, the site’s beta partners include AdMob, ComScore, HipCricket, the Mobile Marketing Association, Nokia, and Washington Post Digital. You see the entire list on WikiMobiPedia’s homepage.

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The death of Michael Jackson nearly stalled the world wide web.

Unlike anything seen in recent memory, entertainment and social networking websites experienced near crashes and exploding servers as a result of millions of hits that congested web traffic to an unprecedented extent.

The mobile web in particular was tested like never before and came through shining on the other side.

Even before Michael Jackson’s death was confirmed, celebrities took to Twitter to comment on a day of celebrity death (first Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson). Throughout the evening, other celebrities tweeted to similarly express their reactions to the King of Pop’s death at the age of 50.

Several pranksters then released false stories on Twitter about Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum also dying today in freak accidents. None were true. But all caused such a flurry of mobile web searches that the internet as a whole had to fire on all cylinders to keep up. Read the rest

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A major lawsuit is rocking the mobile world.

ASCAP, a performance rights organization abbreviated for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, isn’t happy with AT&T.

The organization claims that the ringtones supported by AT&T violates performance and copyright law when they are played in public.

As a result, ASCAP has filed suit against AT&T.

Although mobile carriers and content providers pay songwriters and music copyright owners a license fee to carry the downloadable ringtones, ASCAP contends it isn’t enough and that additional royalties are due.

Now.

The legal eagles are weighing in on both sides at this hour. And while it isn’t clear exactly what will happen, it’s unlikely that consumers will be deprived of their beloved ring tones as a result of the suit.

After all, if we want to listen to “Ice Ice Baby” when we’re in the middle of grocery shopping and our mom calls, that’s our prerogative entirely.

Not that I would know anything about that.

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