I spoke briefly yesterday in a post regarding the emphasis on location apps at SXSWi, and one in particular that has a lot of potential is Brightkite’s “Check.In” multi check-in app for services such as Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and others.  TechCrunch’s Jay Donovan had a chance to sit down with Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May to demo the yet-to-be-released app and talk a little bit more about its future plans.

Starting as a pet-project internally at Brightkite, based on frustration in checking-in via multiple services, Check.In was created to solve the growing problem that many face as more and more services integrate check-ins.  While basic in nature, the app allows you to log-in, choose your location or recognize via GPS and use it to check-in to all integrated services.

For the time-being, Gowalla, Foursquare and Brightkite are included, though some mention of Gowalla being removed at launch was made due to the fact that Gowalla has yet to release formal APIs to allow for such integration.  For testing purposes, Brightkite was able to get around the lack of APIs from Gowalla, but has been asked not to include such integration on launch for some reason.

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An interesting piece from MakeUseOf.com points to an often overlooked reality than few may have previously considered. In fact, any text-capable cell phone can now be just as reliable as a smartphone. How so? SMS-integrating services now make such a reality possible.

The article raises awareness of various options available to those with “regular cell phones.” These services “to which access is only a text message away” are designed to simplify on-the-go web activities for those who don’t have the latest, trendiest smartphones.

Posterous, for example, is a social network platform that enables the “cross-posting” of your updates across various social networking sites through a single email. Similarly, Hellotxt allows users to update better than fifty social networks from email as well.

Whether you’re sharing your status on Twitter or keeping in touch with friends via any of the gazillion social networks in existence, there are more opportunities for the low-tech cell phones in our midst than we may presently realize. To check out some of those you may have missed, visit MakeUseOf.com.

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Although Twitter is yet to find a revenue model on par with its popularity and influence on mass media today, Twitter has proven a veritable gold mine for marketers, entrepreneurs, and other businesses who have used Twitter’s platform as an effective means to promote their brands, products, services, or even just their mere existence.

Just how big has Twitter become? This week, the microblogging juggernaut reveals that users put out 50 million tweets per day.  And the numbers tell the story of growth. In 2007, people were tweeting 5,000 times a day. The following year it was 300,000. In 2009, 2.5 million tweets were put out per day. Today’s 50 million tweets per day amounts to roughly 600 tweets per second.

Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day — that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

While some questions remain about whether or not new user registration is actually in decline, the users who have already caught Twitter-fever show no signs of kicking the “disease” any time soon. It should be noted, however, that Twitter is still not the busiest social network around. Facebook and its 400 million-strong community update their pages/statuses approximately 60 million times per day.

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Geo-social networking from the likes of Gowalla, Foursquare and Loopt are gaining major momentum with users, and are trying to leverage the popularity to harness the power of location-based advertising through content deals.  The “holy grail” of sorts, however, is leveraging the community and location aspects to offer hyperlocal performance-based advertising- or a means to actually deliver a consumer to a store.

Loopt, on the heels of signing yet another content partnership with Tasting Table to inject relevant content, revealed that its true focus remains on offering a much more accountable approach to local advertising.  The company has a product launching soon that will help advertisers pay for the number of people they can actually deliver, utilizing a true performance-based model on a hyperlocal level.

Building on the “check-in” mindset of its users, Loopt could essentially allow a company to keep track of ads shown and whether people actually visited a location later using GPS or voluntary location-sharing.  The proliferation of GPS-enabled devices makes the concept much more viable, and allows for a cost-per-action pricing model in lieu of more traditional and outdated cost-per-impression or CPC models.

Read the rest

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has gone mobile.

With major award shows continuing to struggle in the ratings and failing to sustain interest among jaded viewers, the Academy is turning to the mobile realm to help push next month’s Oscars ceremony.

This week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences introduced the first ever Academy Awards application conveniently titled “The Oscars App.”

The application, which is free and now available for download on your iPhone or iPod Touch, was created by the app makers at Omelet.

The Oscar app serves up a complete list of nominees for all two dozen Academy Awards categories, in addition to trailers for the nominated films. Making the app interactive, you can also predict who will take home the gold and share your picks (and results) via social networks or email.

According to Janet Weiss, the Academy’s director of marketing: “We want to connect with movie lovers wherever they are.”

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will host the 82nd annual Academy Awards on Sunday, March 7th.

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Today, at day two of MWC in Barcelona, SEVEN announced the general availability of its unique “Ping” mobile push solution for messaging and applications.  Focused on mobile operators and device makers, the solution allows for “push enabled” messaging, social networking and mobile apps on any mobile device- from “super-phones” to feature phones.

Ping is centered in the cloud, keeping all content and data stored away from the device itself, offering significant efficiencies in wireless data synchronization, such as savings in precious battery life, reduction of the cost of service delivery, superior user experience and optimization of data traffic on the network- which in some instances represent the majority of an operator’s traffic.

Put simply, the Ping solution allows operators and their partners to efficiently provide push applications such as email, instant messaging, social networking, and any application that needs to be connected to or exchange data with the cloud, to mass market devices, including lower-end feature phones, smartphones and next-generation “super-phones.”  SEVEN is also opening its platform to partners and customers, enabling them to take full advantage of the SEVEN push and synchronization technology.

“From the get-go, we envisioned a mobile world beyond pure voice and messaging, and hence designed our System SEVEN platform to support all forms of data, not just email,” said Trevor Fiatal, CTO and co-founder of SEVEN.  ”Doing so has given us the scalability to meet global customer needs – whether for traditional messaging such as email or for newer trends such as today’s high-growth social networking applications.  We believe that this foresight and experience in building a push-enabled network that can easily grow as new mobile markets mature has been and will continue to be a key advantage for SEVEN over our competitors.”

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It should have come as no surprise to you if a Valentine’s Day greeting found its way to you over the weekend though the mobile channel instead of the mailbox.

Valentine’s Day 2010 brought with it a host of new mobile marketing opportunities for retailers, restaurateurs, florists, and even confectioners looking to promote their products, dining options, floral arrangements, chocolates and more.

But perhaps no other company realizes the power and potential of mobile marketing like Hallmark, the greeting card giant that delves deeper into mobile territory with each passing Valentine’s Day.

“From a brand perspective, it shows that we remain relevant,” said Deidra Mize, a representative for Hallmark, last summer when Hallmark Mobile Greetings was first introduced. “We consider ourselves a communications company, and we’re going to be wherever people are doing that.”

Hallmark Mobile Greetings are $0.99 each, with charges absorbed by the sender.

This year, Hallmark is experiencing record interest in all things mobile for the Valentine’s Day holiday. And according to Mike Adams, manager of Hallmark Mobile, “Hallmark Mobile Greetings help provide more frequent and meaningful instant communication. Mobile Greetings combine the immediacy of a text message with creative design and editorial, and also allow the sender to add their own personal message.”

Although no one is yet pronouncing the good old fashioned physical greeting card dead, Hallmark seems well aware that mobile greetings could very well represent the wave of the future for the sweetest of messages reserved for a special occasion like Valentines’ Day.

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